It's hard to explain, but essentially the idea is that none of us quite sees the same color. Our eyes are all different-- different shapes, different sizes, and so the light we intake is all going to be slightly different. There are of course scientific ways to determine what a color is, X number of nanometers corresponds to red, and so on. Perhaps this isn't so much of a comment on color, but a comment on the failures of language...
Nonetheless, the idea goes like this: perhaps the colors we all see aren't only slightly different, but drastically different.
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| As opposed to this... |
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| Something like this. |
What if we have all just agreed that some color is called "blue"? Maybe the color of "my blue" is on the complete opposite end of the color wheel from the "blue" that Kathryn is seeing.
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| Kathryn's "blue" |
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| My "blue" |
Is there anything less legitimate about Kathryn's blue than mine? There's no way of proving which one is the actual blue, because if we point to an object and agree "That's blue," then we're both right. We're each seeing our respective blues.
I think that this plays in a lot to what Billy Pilgrim means to us as a character. Just because he is telling us things that seem completely absurd, like UFOs and Tralfamadorian time travel, in his mind he is telling his reality. Just because the description of his blue doesn't perfectly match the blue that we see, it isn't any less real to him. He is telling it how he sees it, and just like with colors, there is no way of being certain that his perception of reality isn't the same reality that we are actually living in.
Oh, man. I used to have this conversation all the time. So how do we even know whether you and Kathryn are seeing "different" colors that you both call "blue"? How could we tell whether it's really your "pink" that's "in her mind when she sees it"?
ReplyDeleteYour overall point is a good one, I think--and it's relevant to McHale's idea of fiction as a "heterocosm." It makes no sense to try to rule whether Billy "really" experiences these things. Billy doesn't "really" experience *anything*--"he" is nothing but words on a page. But within the world of the novel, he *says* he experiences all this, and to read the novel, we pretty much have to go with him. And the structure forces us to occupy something like his way of experiencing the world.
But it also makes sense, within the world of the novel, to say that we can view all this as a psychological phenomenon, a fantasy that reflects Billy's deep desire to occupy a "safe" world on Tralfamadore, or to take comfort in the idea that a moment is "structured that way" and that he's merely the plaything of enormous forces. Both of these basic views are supported by the text, and the reader is asked to choose between them (or read with some combination of both in mind).