User:Grimm Ripper/catch22

This is a work-in-progress page for a Critical Anylasis of Joesph Heller's Catch-22.

Good Sources:

http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/heller.html -- Article

http://www.ipl.org.ar/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?ti=cat-860 -- Listing of articles

http://www.noodletools.com/noodlelinks/links/5z1c3xkd_f128cb257453c9c47003d4054bbb5d83.html -- Listing of academic sources (mostly hard-paper)

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?c=1&stab=512&ai=40619&ste=16&docNum=H1100001333&bConts=16303&tab=2&vrsn=3&ca=21&tbst=arp&ST=Heller&srchtp=athr&n=10&locID=maine&OP=contains

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?c=9&stab=512&ai=40619&ste=16&docNum=H1100001343&bConts=16303&tab=2&vrsn=3&ca=21&tbst=arp&ST=Heller&srchtp=athr&n=10&locID=maine&OP=contains

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?c=17&stab=512&ai=40619&ste=16&docNum=H1420014521&bConts=16303&tab=2&vrsn=3&ca=21&tbst=arp&ST=Heller&srchtp=athr&n=10&locID=maine&OP=contains

Possible Source:

http://www.geocities.com/209catch22/paper.htm (blocked by public computer's filter...curse thee CSEA)

BBC Interveiw of J. Heller http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/hellerj1.shtml

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Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties

Critic: Morris Dickstein Source: Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, 1977. Reprint by Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 91-127. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: Joseph Heller (1923-)

Nationality: American

To try to relate the social atmosphere of the early sixties to the key novels of the period would seem to be                 a thankless task. We all know that there is no easy correspondence between the arts and society, and that all due allowance must be made for individual genius working out its own salvation. Moreover, since books like The Sot-Weed Factor, Catch-22, and V. are long and complex, they were also long in                 gestating; it's difficult to say in what sense they belong to their moment of publication. But the cultural climate of the period was also ... long in gestating, and the solitary labors of these very writers were surely among the points of gestation. The new sensibility of the sixties was unusually pervasive; in retrospect we                 can see how it touched every corner of our culture, any one of which, examined closely, helps illuminate the general ferment, the movement of change. Without abridging the distinctive claims of individual genius we can't help but notice a similarity of purpose and form, a common breakthrough, in many of the new novels. This in turn was followed by a loss of verve and a diminution of force among several of the older writers, as the cultural center seemed to make one of its periodic (and rather cruel) shifts. (p. 96)

Fictional characters in the fifties can still subject life to a degree of personal control, can grow and change within the limits of their personality. But the zany, two-dimensional characters in Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, and Heller declare not simply their authors' departure from realism but also their brooding sense that life is increasingly controlled by impersonal forces. For the realist of the fifties character is destiny; for the comic-apocalyptic writer destiny turns character into a joke. For the fifties writer history is remote and irrelevant compared to private people and their minute concerns; for the sixties writer history is absurd but it can kill you. Books like Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 do not slowly gravitate toward death like straightforward novels with unhappy endings. Because of their peculiar structurein which everything is foreshadowed, everything happens at oncethey are drenched in death on all sides, like an epidemic that breaks out everywhere at the same time. Thanks to the time scheme of Heller's book, characters seem perpetually a-dying and reappearingquite a jokeso that we're shocked when they finally do disappear, one by one, each with his own mock individuality, each to his utterly depersonalizing fate. And the Army stands for fate or necessity itself; it's a machine not for fighting or killing but solely for devouring its own.

Contradicting this pessimism, however, which sees individual life as manipulated and controlled from without, is the high degree of artistic power and license that goes into accomplishing this effect. If the sense of impotence and fatality in these novels expresses one side of the sensibility of the sixties, their creative exuberance and originality points to another; something that's also crucial to the radicalism of the period, the belief that old molds can be broken and recast, a sense that reality can be reshaped by the creative will. In their inventiveness and plasticity these books are the fictional equivalent of utopian thinking. This is                 why we must distinguish between verbal black humorists, such as Terry Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman, and even Philip Roth, whose basic unit is the sick joke or the stand-up monologue, and what I would call structural black humorists, such as Heller, Pynchon, and Vonnegut. The former take apart the well-made novel and substitute nothing but the absurdist joke, the formless tirade, the cry in the dark; the latter tend toward over-articulated forms, insanely comprehensive plots (the paradox that is more than verbal, that                 seems inherent in the nature of things). Both kinds of black humorists are making an intense assertion of                 selfthe former directly, the latter in vast structures of self-projectionthat flies in the face of the prevailing depersonalization and external control. (pp. 99-100)

In the pages that follow I'd like to look more closely at three representative black humor novels of the early sixties, Mother Night, Catch-22, and The Crying of Lot 49. These books are neither antiquarian nor excessively literary; in a complex way they develop a striking and unusual sense of history that in the end tells us less about history than about the cultural tone of the period when they were written. Vonnegut and Heller return to World War II not for purposes of historical recreation, not simply because it was their own great formative experience, and certainly not to provide the vicarious thrills of the conventional war novel. Rather, it's because the unsolved moral enigma of that period and that experience most closely expresses the conundrum of contemporary life fifteen years later. Earlier writers had been able to approach World War II with a certain moral simplicity; here after all was a just war if there ever was one. But after fifteen more years of continuous cold war and the shadow of thermonuclear war, all war seemed morally ambiguous if not outright insane; in the prolonged state of siege the whole culture seemed edged with insanity. With that special prescience that novelists sometimes have, Catch-22, though published in                 1961, anticipates the moral nausea of the Vietnam war, even famously anticipates the flight of deserters to                  neutral Sweden. Similarly Vonnegut in Mother Night chooses a morally ambiguous double agent as his hero, just as he writes about the problematic Allied bombing of Dresden rather than a Nazi atrocity in                 Slaughterhouse-Five.

Like Pynchon, but in a different way, both Vonnegut and Heller are interested in international intrigue; they marvel at the zany and unpredictable personal element at work or play within the lumbering forces of                 history. Heller's Milo Minderbinder is a satire not simply on the American capitalist entrepreneur but also on the international wheeler-dealer, whose amoral machinations, so hilarious at first, become increasingly somber, ugly, and deadlylike so much else in the bookso that we readers become implicated in our own earlier laughter. Yet Milo is particularly close to the book's hero, Yossarian: the two understand each other. They share an ethic of self-interest that in Yossarian comes close to providing the book's moral: as                 in Celine, it's all a crock, look out for Number One. In the figure of Milo the book and its protagonist confront their seamy underside, a hideous caricature of their own values. (pp. 106-07)

I said earlier that characters in black humor novels tend to be cartoon-like and two-dimensional, without the capacity to grow or change. To this we must add the qualification that the protagonist is usually different: he doesn't completely belong to this mode of reality or system of representation. As Richard Poirier has suggested apropos of Pynchon, the central character of these novels often moves on a different plane: he shows at least the capacity to become a fuller, more sentient human being, a character in a                 realistic novel. In the first part of the book the hero is typically enmeshed in a system of comic repetition: tics of speech and behavior, entanglements of plot, all the routines of verbal black humor, life imitating vaudeville. Heller, for example, like Dickens, knows how to make his own comic technique approximate poignant human realities. And as the comedy in Catch-22 darkens, the system of dehumanization becomes clearer, and the central character becomes increasingly isolated in his impulse to challenge and step outside it.

In Yossarian Heller introduces a new figure into postwar American fiction, descended from the schlemiel of the Jewish novel but finally an inversion of that passive and unhappy figure. Heller tells us he's an                 Assyrian, but only because (as he said to an interviewer) I wanted to get an extinct culture.... [M]y purpose in doing so was to get an outsider, a man who was intrinsically an outsider. The typical schlemiel is certainly no hero, but like Yossarian has a real instinct for survival. In earlier days Yossarian had really tried to bomb the targets, as he was supposed to do. Now his only goal is to avoid flak, to keep alive. Yossarian was the best man in the group at evasive action. This Yossarian is concerned only with saving his skin, obsessed by the things that threaten his life. There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. And Heller gives us a wonderful catalogue of them, from Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo (they all                 wanted him dead) to all the insane and fanatical people in his own army (they wanted to kill him, too) to                  all the organs of his body, with their arsenal of fatal diseases:

There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There were even diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it                      took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did.

Yossarian seems perilously close to the Sterling Hayden character in Dr. Strangelove, the general who fears that women are sapping his vital bodily fluids. The insanity of the system, in this case the army, breeds a defensive counter-insanity, a mentality of organized survival that mirrors the whole system of rationalized human waste and devaluation. The self itself becomes an army, a totalitarian body politic, demanding total vigilance against the threat of betrayal and insurrection. Each individual organ, each cell, becomes an                 object of paranoid anxiety. I remember as a child being afraid I might forget to breathe, holding my breath as long as I could, to be reassured it would still happen without me. Yossarian too has the childish wish to assert the sort of outside control that he himself feels gripped by.

The pattern of Catch-22 is similar to that of Mother Night: a world gone mad, a protagonist caught up in                 the madness, who eventually steps outside it in a slightly mad way. The Sweden to which Yossarian flees at the end of the book is something of a pipe dream, a pure elsewhere. Yossarian's friend Orr has made it                 there (from the Mediterranean in a rowboat!), but Orr is Yossarian's opposite, utterly at home in the world, as idiotically free of anxiety as Yossarian is dominated by it. Orr is the unkillable imp, the irrepressible innocent, a likeable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep him in a low income group all his life. Orr is the gentile Crusoe to Yossarian's Jewish neurotic; along with the diabolical Milo they form a spectrum of the possibilities of survival in extreme situations, which include not only wartime but just about all of modern life, indeed the whole human condition, for which the war is                 ultimately a metaphor.

But Yossarian goes through a second change before the book ends: he becomes a troublemaker and, worse still, the unwilling keeper of the book's conscience, just as Nately's whore becomes the figure of                 Nemesis, the haunting, surreal spirit of female revenge for the callous inhumanity of a man-made world. The earlier Yossarian saw through the no-win bind of Catch-22 and set out monomaniacally to survive. But as each of the others goes separately, uncomplainingly, to his predictable fate, Yossarian becomes more and more the somber registrar of their deaths and exits:

Nately's whore was on his mind, as were Kraft and Orr and Nately and Dunbar, and Kid Sampson and McWatt, and all the poor and stupid and diseased people he had seen in Italy, Egypt and North Africa and knew about in other areas of the world, and Snowden and Nately's whore's kid sister were on his conscience, too.

Yossarian has come willy-nilly to brood about more than his own inner organs. Other people have become a desperate reality to him, and with it has come a sense of their common fate, their mutual essence. The secret of Snowden, who spills his guts in the tail of a plane, is revealed to Yossarian alone:

His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he staredliver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes....                      He wondered how in the world to begin to save him.

I'm cold, Snowden whispered. I'm cold.

There, there, Yossarian mumbled in a voice too low to be heard. There, there.

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in                      his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll                      fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

Impelled perhaps by the unconscious Jewish identification, Heller paraphrases the famous humanizing speech of Shylock (If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us,                 do we not die?). But the final allusion to Lear is breathtaking: an impertinence to do it, the height of                 chutzpah to bring it off. The scene must be read as a whole to see how well it worksit's the penultimate moment of the bookbut even the delicate texture of these pages of prose would be nothing had not the secret of Snowden been such an important leitmotif throughout the book. (Snowden's death had taken                 place before the book opened, but it's fully remembered and decoded as he lies in the hospital in the                  next-to-last chapter, as if its meaning, which underlies the whole book, had taken that long to be reduced                  to its terrifying simplicity and finality.) The somber tone of this passagedespite the necessary farcical touch of Yossarian's dislike of stewed tomatoesis something that's not available to verbal black humor, which aims for wild incongruities at every turn, which is more at home with disgust and humiliation and absurdity than with the simple terror of the world as it is; such a poignant effect requires a more fully human respondent, which Yossarian has by now become. Heller's structural use of the secret of Snowden makes it a time bomb of ineluctable tragic fact ticking away beneath the book's surface of farce and rollicking insanity; except that the secret unfolds its revelations gradually, alongside the story, until it finally becomes the story.

When I first read Catch-22 I felt strongly that except for the Snowden chapter the book's final shift in tone in the last seventy-five pages didn't work, that after doing an amazing comic adaptation of Kafka and Dostoevsky most of the way, Heller unaccountably switched to imitating them directly in the finale, a                 contest he couldn't win. Rereading the book I can see why I felt that waywe miss the sheer gratuitous pleasure of the comedybut I also see how much the somber and even ugly side was present from the beginning and how gradually the book modulates into it: for such laughter we have the devil to pay. The Mr. Roberts element won't carry us all the way through. I'm now sure the last section works and makes the whole book work; up against a wall, I'd have to call Catch-22 the best novel of the sixties.

But what can we learn about the sixties from Catch-22? I think the popular success of the book can be                 attributed to the widespread spiritual revulsion in the sixties against many of our most sacrosanct institutions, including the army; to which our leaders replied by heightening just those things that had caused the disgust in the first place, especially the quality of fraud, illusion, and manipulation in our public life. Just as the response to war-protest was escalation and the solution to the failures of the bombing was more bombing, so the push for more honesty in public debate was met by more public relations and bigger lies. The Johnson administration's unshakable insistence that black was white, that escalation was really the search for peace, and that the war was being won was a perfect realization of the structure of unreality and insanity that runs as a theme through both Mother Night and Catch-22. One typical and well-deserved victim is Doc Daneeka, who collaborates with the insanity of Catch-22 until it creates the general illusion that he himself is dead (which, morally speaking, he is). Daneeka's merely physical presence is inadequate to contradict his official demise; he is destroyed as much by his own demented survival ethic as by the structure of unreality that is the army. We're all in this business of illusion together, says another doctor when he asks Yossarian to substitute for a dead soldier whose parents are coming to see him die. As far as we're concerned, the doctor says, one dying boy is just as good as any other, or just as bad.

Giuseppe.

It's not Giuseppe, Ma. It's Yossarian.

What difference does it make? the mother answered in the same mourning tone, without looking up. He's dying.

When the whole family starts crying, Yossarian cries too. It's not a show anymore. Somehow they're right, the doctor's right, they are dying; in some sense it doesn't matter. A piece of ghoulish humor has turned into something exceptionally moving. The same point is made with the Soldier in White, a mummy in                 bandages whose only sign of life is an interchange of fluids. What is a man, anyway, when things have come to this extremity? The ground is being readied for revealing Snowden's secret. The Lear theme is at                 the heart of the book, no mere device for concluding it.

Unlike the realistic novelists of the fifties, the black humorists suggest that besides our personal dilemmas, which often loom so large in our imagination, we all share features of a common fate, enforced by society and the general human condition. Though the quest for identity must inevitably be personal, in some sense we are interchangeable. Furthermore, the quest will surely be thwarted if society becomes a vast structure of illusion and duplicity, and hence treats us as even more interchangeable and manipulable than we                 necessarily are. One effect of Vietnam and Watergate was that the official organs of our society lost much of the respect and credence they had commanded. Even middle Americans began to live with less of a                 mystified and paternalistic sense of Authority. The disillusionment and ruthless skepticismreally, spoiled idealismof Catch-22, outlived the sixties to become a pervasive national mood. (pp. 112-19)

Source: Morris Dickstein, Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties, in his Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, 1977. Reprint by Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 91-127. Reproduced by                 permission.

Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

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