Towards a postmodern absurd the fiction of Joseph Heller

Towards a Postmodern Absurd: The Fiction of Joseph Heller

Erik Grayson McGill University, Montreal June, 2003

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A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master's of Arts in English ©Erik Grayson 2003 ,' (

This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Linda and Vincent Grayson. Without their tremendous love and support, I would never have had the educational opportunities that have made th is project possible.

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Table of Contents Abstract

IV

Acknowledgements

VI

Preface

1

On the Absurd

i

Joseph Heller and the Absurd

7

The Pillars Crumble

14

Assessing the Damage

26

Emerging From the Rubble

34

On Structure

52

Critical Reception and the Question of Structure in Heller's Fiction

52

I See Everything Twice: Joseph Heller and the Method of Dejd vu

56

Dejd vu After Catch-22

62

On the Postmodern

75

Pastiche

76

They Really Are Trying to Kill Yossarian: Paranoia in Heller's Fiction

86

Afterword

93

Works Cited

97

in

Abstract This thesis examines the entirety of Joseph Heller's career as a novelist and explores the various existential themes uniting a seemingly diverse body of work. Considering Heller's relationship to the philosophy of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, "Towards a Postmodern Absurd: The Fiction of Joseph Heller" suggests that the novelist promotes the same existentially authentic lifestyle of revolt originally articulated by the French existentialists. Refuting the critical assessment of Heller's fiction as formless, this thesis argues that Heller deliberately structures his fiction around the concept of dejd vu in order to buttress the author's existential concerns with the absurdity of human existence. Finally, in response to the recent debates over Joseph Heller's place in the postmodern American canon, the thesis identifies the author's use of such postmodern concepts as pastiche and paranoia as a further reinforcement of the relevance of an absurdist worldview in contemporary America.

Cette these examine l'integralite de la carriere d'ecrivain de Joseph Heller et explore les themes existentiels unissant les romans apparemment divers. En identifiant le rapport de Heller avec la philosophic d'Albert Camus et de Jean-Paul Sartre, "Towards a Postmodern Absurd: The Fiction of Joseph Heller" suggere que 1'ecrivain est partisan d'une mode de vie s'y comprenant la revolte—une idee initialement exprimee par les existentialistes Francais. Refutant 1'evaluation provenant des lecteurs qui proposent que l'art de Heller manque de structure, cette these conclue que le concept du "deja vu" se presente dans tous les romans et met en vedette la preoccupation de l'auteur a propos de

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la condition humaine "absurde." Repondant aux discussions recentes, le these identifie les concepts comme le pastiche et la paranoia comme exemple de 1'appartenance de Joseph Heller aux rangs des ecrivains postmodernistes Americains.

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I must thank my family, Linda, Vincent, and Larissa Grayson and Carole and Jean Skwarek for their unparalleled financial, technical, and above all, emotional support throughout the course of this project. I would also like to thank Professor Peter Ohlin for his enthusiasm and support as my thesis supervisor. Without his encouragement, constructive criticism, and probing questions, this project would not have been possible. Vlada Finagin, more than any other person, has helped me progress from page one to the last page of this thesis. In addition to reassuring me of the value of my work by reading each day's output, Vlada's constructive criticism, proofreading, editorial suggestions, and regular questions have enabled me to write a better thesis. Additionally, when flooding and noise pollution rendered my building a poor work space, Vlada generously provided me with the quiet, contemplative atmosphere I needed. Her friendship and love kept my spirits up whenever I most needed a boost. She also assisted in the French translation of the abstract. I would like to acknowledge my debt to Susan Strehle's article "'A Permanent Game of Excuses': Determinism in Heller's Something Happened."" Professor Strehle's research has been integral to my reading of Something Happened and I encourage the reader to refer to her excellent article for a more detailed analysis of the issues I present. I am also grateful for Professor Strehle's continued interest in my thesis, which has been an important source of encouragement throughout the entire project.

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In addition to the McGill University library system, 1 have received materials from the libraries of Concordia University, the University of Regina, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to Professor Ohlin (McGill University) and Professor Strehle (State University of New York at Binghamton), I have received assistance from Professor Peter Gibian (McGill) and Dr. Bob Solotaroff (University of Minnesota). My brainstorming with Professor Gibian helped me to find a topic that interested me and Professor Solotaroff has sent me some writings on American postmodernism. Finally, I would like to thank my cockatiel, Pelle, for his spiritually uplifting chirping and Sogndal bibliotek in Sogndal, Norway for providing me with my first copy of Catch-22 way back in 1995.

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Preface In the most recent book-length study of Catch-22, Jon Woodson calls Joseph Heller "an example of a writer whose work has been subjected to inadequate critical frameworks" (36). Woodson argues that "thirty years of critical misinterpretation and misreading" necessitate the reassessment of Heller's fiction as part of the late twentiethcentury American canon (35). A year earlier, Harold Bloom, in a dismissive introduction to a collection of essays on Catch-22, insists that Heller's "time has passed" since his novels are nothing more than "sub-literary" Period Pieces (1-2). Completely discounting the value of Heller's "scarcely readable" subsequent novels, Bloom insists that Heller's first novel "will for perhaps another decade still find an audience" before fading away into literary oblivion (2). Interestingly, the author of The Western Canon seems to have ignored the fact that, in 1999, Daniel Boorstin, A. S. Byatt, Christopher Cere, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William Styron, and Gore Vidal ranked Catch-22 seventh on the Modem Library's famous Hundred Best Novels of the Twentieth Century list. Clearly, there is some disagreement over the literary value of Catch-22. Heller's subsequent novels, however, seem to elicit an almost universally negative critical assessment. In the conclusion to her study of Heller's career through the publication of Picture This, Judith Ruderman notes that "[m]ost critics regard [Catch-22] as Heller's crowning achievement, with all subsequent productions as a falling away from glory" (178). In fact, as Steven Potts observes in From Here to Absurdity, "it is unlikely that most readers of Catch-22, which remains a canonical standard in contemporary American literature

courses, are even aware of Something Happened, Good as Gold, God Knows, or Picture This"" (9). Thus, while Catch-22 has achieved "classic" status and deservedly inspires regular study, the vast majority of Heller's later work languishes as the forgettable aftershocks of his literary one hit wonder. Given the current debate over the place of Catch-22 in the recent American literary canon and the widespread critical dismissal of Heller's subsequent novels, a reexamination of Heller's oeuvre seems necessary, especially in the absence of any critical treatment of the author's final novel, A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man. Agreeing with the assessment of Catch-22 by the Modem Library as one of the most important novels of the twentieth-century1, I seek to refute the negative perception of Heller's fiction by viewing Catch-22 not as the quirky exception to an otherwise insignificant body of writing, but rather as a piece of an intricately unified existentialist worldview only partially articulated in the author's most famous work. I argue that Heller, while frequently thrust into the shade beneath the postmodern parasol, actually represents a bridge linking America's ontologically-focused postmodern fiction with the primarily European writing concerned with the existential Absurd. I suggest that while Heller certainly does employ such typical characteristics of postmodern fiction as seemingly formless narrative structure, paranoia, intertextuality and pastiche, his use of these tactics work to achieve an entirely different effect on the reader from that of his postmodern contemporaries. Whereas such late twentieth century literary figures as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon use these strategies to depict a world of vague paranoia and frightening uncertainty, Heller presents an absurd world not very different from that of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett. It is Heller's

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Only Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lolita, Brave New World, and The Sound and the Furv are ranked higher than Catch-22.

unique use of "standard" postmodern conventions that places him amongst America's most innovative and important writers. I have divided my thesis into three primary sections, On the Absurd, On Structure, and On the Postmodern. The difficulty in delineating Heller's treatment of absurdity lies in the reader's tendency to become confused by the verbose and repetitious style of the author's fiction. Unlike the relatively straightforward philosophical novels of Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical content of Heller's fiction lies beneath the surface of the prose, waiting for the reader to recognize its presence in a novel more overtly focused on war, politics, or art.. Compounding the critic's task, each of Heller's novels promotes absurd revolt and existential authenticity through the simultaneous exploitation of several distinct thematic and structural components. The first section establishes Heller's worldview as compatible with that of the European existentialists. Taking my theoretical framework from Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, Martin Esslin's The Theater of the Absurd, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, I argue that Heller's treatment of the Absurd extends far beyond Catch-22. This first section examines Heller's direct relationship to the philosophical tenets associated with the existential Absurd. Since each of Heller's subsequent novels builds upon and expands the philosophical outlook he presents in Catch-22, I have decided to examine the novelist's entire career as a whole rather than risk redundancy by proceeding through a novel by novel evaluation of Heller's exploration of the human condition. In order to do so in a logical and readable manner, I have avoided the inclusion of certain absurdist conventions that have received considerable critical attention among Heller scholars, most notably the failure of language. Instead, I focus on Heller's method of

forcing his reader into recognizing the illusory nature of the authority humanity has bestowed upon certain institutions, the author's subsequent revelation of the inhumane drives which cause human suffering, and the final espousal of an existentially authentic lifestyle. Although these ideas often appear simultaneously in Heller's fiction, I have separated them in order to better illustrate their individual functions for the reader. It is my contention that Heller's seven novels, when viewed as a whole, represent one man's attempt to guide the individual from an unquestioning acceptance of tyrannical and malevolent authority, through the horrifying uncertainty experienced by such postmodern creations as Pynchon's Oedipa Maas, into a Camusean revolt against injustice, absurdity, and mortality. The remaining two sections of the thesis, On Structure and On the Postmodern, aim to locate Heller's place in the recent American literary canon while exploring some of the unique ways in which Heller reinforces the existential concerns examined in On the Absurd.

The second section, On Structure, focuses on Heller's innovative

development of dejd vu as an organizing principle. I argue that, despite the popular assertion that Heller's fiction embodies "the post-Modemist sensibility" of deliberately writing "formlessly, repetitiously" confusing novels to express the postmodern man's need for epistemological certainty, Heller's novels are consciously intricate creations designed to emphasize the author's absurdist worldview (Epstein 99-101). Dejd vu, I argue, lies at the center of each of Heller's novels and the elasticity of the device enables the author to explore topics as varied as military corruption in World War II, moral relativism in corporate America, anti-Semitism, religious doubt, late-life depression, and artistic integrity while continuing to investigate the absurdity of the human condition.

My third and final section, On the Postmodern, addresses the critical question of Heller's place alongside other postmodern American writers. Building on the previous two divisions, I argue that while Heller's fiction deservedly belongs in postmodern literature classes besides novels by Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, Coover, Barthelme, Gaddis, and others, Heller's work is unique in its seemingly anachronistic concern with an absurdist worldview. This final section explores Heller's use of such postmodern conventions as pastiche, intertextuality, and paranoia to further bolster his existential approach towards life. After considering Heller's unique blend of postmodern pastiche and intertextual referentiality as a way to align his work with similarly concerned existential writers, I turn my attention to the postmodern fascination with paranoia. Juxtaposing Catch-22 with Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, I find that Joseph Heller's departure from conventional postmodern fiction is most evident in his representation of the paranoid individual confronting social order. In Pynchon's fiction, for instance, neither the reader nor the protagonist can say for certain what is real and what is illusory. Whether Pynchon's Trystero is a conspiratorial organization spanning the globe and affecting Oedipa Maas's role as executrix of Pierce Inverarity's estate, an elaborate practical joke concocted by an intelligent, yet warped real estate mogul, or the paranoid delusions of a Califomian housewife is never explained in the novella. The protagonist's own theories about life wrestle with those of the reader to present an ultimately confusing sense that "something" runs the world. Postmodern ontology thrives on this sense of uncertainty. Truth may or may not exist and it does not matter, as long as the individual's theory of life's structure is heuristic. Paranoia in Heller, on the other hand, invariably reveals a malignant,

unfeeling structure based on greed, self-propagation, and self-preservation. Paranoia, for Heller's protagonists, turns out to be a fear of mortality. Thus it might be said that postmodernists in the vein of Pynchon deal more with trying to uncover the truth, while Heller focuses on living with the truth. My contention throughout this thesis is that Heller's fiction is unique among American postmodernists in its innovative use of postmodern themes and form to present the continued relevance of a supposedly anachronistic absurdist worldview in postmodern America. Proceeding by means of close readings and thematic analysis, I hope to dispel some of the doubts surrounding Joseph Heller's importance to American letters.

On the Absurd The only really ugly thing on earth is the death that comes before true death arrives. Nelson Algren ***

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up. Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Joseph Heller and the Absurd Lying in bed one evening in 1955, Joseph Heller found himself contemplating Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night when, seemingly out of nowhere, the first line of what was to become Catch-22 flashed across his mind. That same year, the thirty-two year old advertising copywriter wrote, rewrote, and published "The Texan," the first chapter of a novel he called Catch-18 in New World Writing no. 7, a quarterly anthology dedicated to novels in progress. Around the same time as Heller wrote the first chapter of what would become the bestselling work of serious literature in American publishing history, Alfred A. Knopf published the first American edition of The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus's penetrating analysis of the absurdity of the human

condition. Generally considered "the most extended treatment of the philosophical Absurd," Camus's treatise provides valuable insight for anyone approaching the work of Joseph Heller, an author whose novels, according to Steven Potts, present "a vision of a bleak universe that, in Absurd, existentialist fashion, lacks meaning or inherent values" (Potts, Antiheroic Antinovel 63; From Here to Absurdity 25). For Camus, the individual is likely to possess a number of "ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living" (4). As long as the human being maintains a belief in such an illusion, he or she will remain content, despite living what Martin Esslin describes as "an existence that has become trite, mechanical, complacent" (291). The illusory sense of comfort one feels towards his or her existence results from the unquestioning acceptance of some guiding principle arranging human life into an easily understood and recognizable pattern. The familiarity one feels towards the structure of his or her life fosters an illusory sense of certainty that the authority determining the structure is infallible. For some people, however, a moment arises when "the chain of daily gestures is broken" and he or she must confront the unsettling absurdity lurking behind his or her hitherto comfortable life (Camus 12). According to Camus, the "absurd moment" occurs when the individual confronts the inhumanity of humankind: At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this

incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. (14-15) The sudden realization that humanity succumbs to the yoke of essentially arbitrary routine invites the suddenly lucid individual to consider the implications this new consciousness has upon his or her life: Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined [...] the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand...the world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us" (4, 14). It is here, in what Martin Esslin calls "a universe deprived of what was once its center and its living purpose, a world deprived of a generally accepted integrating principle, which has become disjointed, purposeless—absurd" that Joseph Heller's fiction unfolds (290). The extreme strain Heller's meaningless universe imposes upon his protagonists crushes the human spirit and leads to a definitive confrontation with mortality, the only certainty such an existence allows. Yet, as David M. Craig argues, Heller "never accepts death. The endings of his novels virtually shriek about its inevitability, but death remains an opponent to be grappled with, even though it cannot be overcome" (252). Although, as Mordecai Richler notes in his 1984 review of God Knows for the New York Times, "Heller's subject matter has varied from novel to novel," the novelist repeatedly returns to the individual's struggle to wrench meaning from an

existence unflinchingly moving towards the inevitability of death (1). Taken as a whole, Heller's novels represent a half century's struggle to articulate a way for the individual to live a dignified and genuine existence in the face of the Absurd. In order to make a convincing case for his worldview, Heller initially bombards his reader with evidence testifying to the spurious nature of generally accepted truths about the world, forcing the reader to encounter the Absurd as his protagonists discover the human condition. Heller's novels systematically uncover the relativity behind such accepted structures as the military, the American Dream, Western religion, Western philosophy, and the historical record in order to reveal the dark secret at the root of human suffering: the insatiable human appetite for power, prestige, and profit. Once the reader joins Heller's protagonists in recognizing the malignant motives lurking behind the illusory guiding principles of human existence, he or she must, along with Heller's fictional heroes, find a way to respond to the unfeeling cosmos. Through the actions and words of Captain John Yossarian, Robert Slocum, Bruce Gold, and King David, Joseph Heller examines the possible lifestyles available to the individual upon confronting the absurdity of the human condition. Yossarian, Heller's most famous protagonist, embraces an attitude that, according to Jean Kennard, "is basically that of Jean Paul Sartre and the early Albert Camus" (75). In both Catch-22 (1961) and Closing Time (1994), Yossarian combats the Absurd through behavior analogous to the actions espoused by Camus's absurd man in a state of revolt. Rather than succumb to the "odious" temptation to join the establishment, Yossarian engages in an "unceasing struggle" against the freedom-denying "truths" that are the byproduct of corporate, government, and military interests (Camus 31). Yossarian's "continual

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rejection" of and "conscious dissatisfaction" with the inhumanity of self-serving authorities represents the authentic existence Camus advances as the most honorable and satisfying lifestyle for the absurd man (31). In contrast to Yossarian, "whose rebellious stance implie[s] an existential faith in human freedom" by "defining a morality for the absurd world," Heller centers his second novel, 1974's Something Happened, around Bob Slocum, a middle management executive whose response to the "non-specific anxiety which existentialists consider an authentic mode of being [...] is decidedly inauthentic" (Strehle 550). In fact, when he conceived of the inauthentic Slocum, as Heller recalls in an interview with George Plimpton, he intended the narrator to be "the most contemptible character in literature," an individual whose actions are diametrically opposed to Yossarian's laudable conduct (109). By juxtaposing Slocum's existential failure with his earlier protagonist's heroic revolt, Heller articulates his belief that the individual, if he or she is to live a dignified life, must confront the human condition authentically, without succumbing to the illusory structure offered by one of the world's spurious organizing principles. Having identified and delineated the responses at either end of the existential continuum in his first two novels, Heller's two subsequent books, Good as Gold (1979) and God Knows (1984) explore the area between the authentic and the inauthentic existences of Yossarian and Slocum. In Good as Gold, Bruce Gold, a college English professor finds himself enticed with the prospect of becoming U.S. Secretary of State, a possibility which forces him to exist "between Washington and New York, Gentile and Jew, the nihilism and opportunism of politics and the viciousness and strangled love of family life" (Beatty 164). In the limbo between Gold's ethnically-oriented Brooklyn life

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and his desired position in an anti-Semitic government administration, Heller locates an interesting and uniquely American variation on the existential Absurd. As Leonard Michaels notes in a review of Good as Gold, the novel's "deepest subject" is: [AJlienation—being what you are not, feeling what you don't feel, thinking what you don't think, living a life that isn't yours. Essentially, then, "Good as Gold" is about some American Jews, their bastardized existence, their sense of congenital inauthenticity. Kafka's agonies of personal identity are brought up to date by Heller and remade American— bold and commercial. (168) In other words, Good as Gold presents Heller's damning indictment of the JewishAmerican who actively suppresses his or her natural inclinations and cultural tendencies in order to integrate into the WASP-dominated cultural arenas of American society. Heller shows, in Camus's terms, the danger one encounters in pursuing the false "hope of a promised land" seemingly available to all Americans willing to embrace the Zeitgeist of American politics (6). Given the peripheral status of the Jew in American culture, Bruce Gold is already Camus's outsider, forced to struggle against a world that will not fully accept him. In his attempts to become part of the society which oppresses the JewishAmerican, Bruce Gold's inauthentic behavior elicits derision from his family, his political patrons, and from the novelist. Gold redeems himself by retreating into ethnicity when he leaves the spiritual vacuum of Washington to sit shivah for his brother's death and begins to appreciate the rich cultural heritage he could never quite escape from. Finally, in God Knows, the reader encounters the emaciated King David as he recounts his life from his deathbed. As the dying king's monologue rambles from triumph

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to defeat, from his past to his present, the reader notices that David harbors an intense hatred for God, a deity he interprets as "all-powerful but crankily arbitrary, willful but unpredictable in handing down decrees and distributing rewards and punishments" (FHTA 107). While Steven Potts declares that "David, true to his anachronistic character in this novel, takes a late twentieth-century stance of existentialist rebellion" by rejecting God and making "a leap away from faith," David's resistance is nothing like the Absurd revolt Camus and Heller encourage (FHTA 107). Whereas Yossarian's rebellion contains the "total absence of hope" for a restoration of a unifying belief to justify his existence, the "continual rejection," and "conscious dissatisfaction" Camus identifies as central to the Absurd revolt, King David vacillates between not caring "[wjhether God is dead or not" and lamenting that "I want my God back" (GK 8, 353). According to David Seed, endowing David with "uncertainties and ambivalence about the meaning of his own experience," Joseph Heller provides the reader with an unsettling portrait of a man unable to come to terms with the human condition. (173) Indignant and terrified by his imminent demise, King David experiences extreme angst in the face of the Absurd that emphasizes the necessity of acknowledging, accepting, and ultimately revolting against the human condition. At first glance, as Richler observes, Joseph Heller's seven novels seem vastly different from one another, ranging in subject matter from the zany antics of a group of cartoon airmen serving in the Mediterranean during the Second World War to the obsessive psychological meanderings of a corporate executive, from the JewishAmerican experience to a freewheeling romp through all of Western history. The seemingly divergent subjects Heller treats are, however, deceptively similar. Beginning

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with Catch-22, each of Heller's novels returns to the theme of Absurdity, approaching the existential dilemma of the modem man from a different angle to emphasize the ubiquity of the Absurd and to present an overwhelming argument in favor of adopting the authentic lifestyle espoused by the French existentialist Albert Camus, as articulated in The Myth of Sisyphus.

The Pillars Crumble

Martin Esslin, in his introduction to The Theater of the Absurd, notes that the individual's initial confrontation with the Absurd begins with a "sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions" (xviii). In order to bring his reader into a proper state of mind in which to consider the options available to the Absurd individual, Joseph Heller uses novels such as Picture This, God Knows, and Catch-22 to undermine and "sweep away" the basic assumptions and certitudes governing human life. Heller's most blatant assault on humanity's faith in socially-constructed certitudes, Picture This, uses actual historical documents to debunk humanity's faith in Western art, philosophy, and the historical record itself. Similar to Picture This in that it "partakes less of fiction than fact," God Knows uses the story of one of the Old Testament's most beloved figures, King David, to deflate the Judeo-Christian religious authority prevalent in the Western world (FHTA 126). Catch-22, on the other hand, uses a fictionalized military bureaucracy to shake the reader's faith in the very real authority wielded by the government and military.

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Early in Picture This, the narrator presents Rembrandt van Rijn as he creates his famous painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, but notes that the "bust of Homer was a copy" (PT 14). He continues, describing the Homer as "an authentic Hellenistic imitation of a Hellenic reproduction of a statue for which there had never been an authentic original subject" (14). In fact, he observes, the irrefutable existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey cannot make up for the fact that there is absolutely "no proof that the composer of these epics was real" (14). Thus, in one brief passage, Joseph Heller's sardonically pedantic narrator sets the tone for the entire novel. Taking just one of the many "fictions that have come down to us as 'fact,'" the narrator reveals, with the "gloomy wit and not unexpected cynicism" of a Heller protagonist, the spurious nature of artistic authority (FHTA 126). Decoding the narrator's rather convoluted deconstruction of Rembrandt's painting, the reader attempts to imagine a seventeenth-century Dutch interpretation "on canvas in color of [a] copy in plaster or stone of an imitation in marble of the likeness of a man whom nobody [...] had ever seen and of whose existence there is no reliable written or oral verification" (44). Having grasped the many layers of doubt distorting Homer's portraiture, the reader feels isolated from a painting he or she had presumed, only moments earlier, to be a simple depiction of Aristotle glancing at a bust of a poet. Later, the narrator reveals that Rembrandt models his Aristotle not on a bust of the philosopher the painter has in his studio, but rather upon the appearance of a friend who "was tall, olive-skinned, with a long black beard, black melancholy eyes, and Slavic, Eastern, perhaps Semitic features" (185). With each layer of pigment Rembrandt adds to his painting, the narrator reveals additional elements that bring the work's authenticity into question. In lieu of the clothing

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a man of Aristotle's social position would have worn in ancient Athens, Rembrandt dresses the philosopher in "a white Renaissance surplice and a medieval black robe" and adorns his neck with a pendant depicting his student, Alexander the Great, a man whose fame occurred after the death of Aristotle (13). Later, the narrator reveals that the painting known as the Portrait of Aristotle was, at different times, believed to be either a portrait of the Roman poet Virgil or the Dutch writer Pieter Hooft by various Rembrandt "experts" (306). Finally, the reader leams that the painting "may not be by Rembrandt" at all, but rather by a pupil such as Govert Flinck, "so divinely gifted in learning the lessons of his master" that experts cannot detect the forgery (351). In the words of Heller critic Judith Ruderman, the spiraling doubt the reader feels in light of the novel's revelations about the painting results from the recognition that he or she has fallen prey to "the human tendency to mistake fantasy for reality." (125). By revealing the spurious "images and designs" with which the reader may have been deceived into unquestioningly accepting the authenticity of Rembrandt's painting, the narrator makes it possible for the reader to perceive "the denseness and strangeness of the world that is the absurd" (Camus 14). In Picture This, Heller's illusion-shattering romp extends far beyond the frame encasing Rembrandt's painting. The caustic narration also seeks to topple the very pillars upon which Western thought stand by discrediting both Aristotle and his mentor, Plato. Describing the former as "the father of logic, psychology, political science, literary criticism,

physics, physiology, biology

and other natural

sciences,

aesthetics,

epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics and the scientific study of language," the narrator clearly identifies Aristotle with the foundations of Western philosophy, science, and

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morality (262). Having established Aristotle as the basis for many of humankind's most valued intellectual disciplines, the narrator begins tugging at the rug beneath the philosopher's feet. The narrator reveals that "[ljike all scrupulous men of letters, Aristotle never wished to see any of his work go to waste, bad or good, right or wrong," paving the way for a series of humorous examples depicting the philosopher as hypocritical and hopelessly obtuse (287). The narrator notes, for example, that although Aristotle maintains "[tjhere are no known absolute moral standards, [he] always proceeded as though he knew there were" and when asked for proof, replies that "[cjertain things are obviously true and do not require proof (288). One particularly humorous example of such an "obviously true" fact appears in the narrator's delineation of Aristotle's ideal society: "His people would be up before daybreak, for such habits, he said, contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. Aristotle was up before daybreak one morning and concluded that women have fewer teeth than men" (289). Learning of such ludicrous theories as Aristotle's conception of female dentition, the reader begins to question the unreserved authority many people give to the philosopher. Plato, unlike his harmlessly illogical protege, emerges from the pages of Picture This as "a misanthrope who valued order over freedom and the abstract soul over human life [and ultimately] responsible through his writings for ceding to the modem world dictatorship and Western religion" (FHTA 129). The narrator also shows that Plato's philosophy, when not influenced by a profound hatred for mankind, often becomes nonsensical. For instance, Plato, who has "said more about the soul than anyone has ever said," describes the immortal human soul in the most preposterous of terms:

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From the center outward, the soul enclosed the body on all sides in a circle, was compounded of elements, and, being divided at harmony intervals, formed two circles that touched each other twice, and with the interior circle, which was slit six times over, made seven circles in all. The interior circle of the soul moved by way of the diagonal to the left, and the other, the outer circle, moved by way of the side to the right. Thus, the one was supreme, because it was a single circle, while the other interior circle was divided. The Supreme is the circle of the Same, the latter the circle of the Other, by which [...] the motion of the soul was the motion of the universe together with the revolutions of the planets. (258) The narrator continues to paraphrase Plato's nonsensical conception of the soul for more than two pages and concludes by revealing the influence these ideas had upon the philosopher's "Theory of Ideas," considered by many to be "the most important contribution ever made to the philosophy of religion" (260). The narrator also shares a few disarming facts about the texts from which the teachings of Plato and Aristotle have been gleaned. Plato's Republic, for instance, recounts a conversation "that ostensibly took place one evening in 421 B.C., approximately fifty years before publication, when Plato was just seven" (261). Additionally, Plato writes that he "was home sick on the day Socrates died" and bases his famous Phaedo on a conversation between Phaedo and Echecrates (342). As if instilling doubts about the validity of Plato's authorship was not enough to send the reader into a frenetic reevaluation of his or her faith in the origins of Western philosophy, the narrator adds a final straw to ensure that the reader no longer accepts Western thought at face

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value. Recalling that the Greek physician and writer Galen once wrote that by the second century A.D., libraries "were already paying high prices for manuscripts by illustrious figures" such as Plato or Aristotle, the narrator explains that many of these cherished texts are, in fact, "spurious documents by skillful forgers" (257). The reader, by now completely uncertain about what to believe, cringes at the narrator's final observation on the matter: "[t]he document in which Galen says this may be spurious" (257). By casting doubt upon the genius of Aristotle and Plato and by showing how their most famous and influential works may be nothing more than the skilled forgeries of money-hungry Roman artisans, Picture This shakes the reader's faith in the authority of Western thought and encourages him or her to question his or her own deep-seated beliefs on the matter. Such uncertainty forces the reader to perceive what Camus calls the "hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know," a rudimentary recognition of the "practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life" (18). Applying the same "droll if dark ironies [and] subversive one-liners" to the notion of historiography, Heller's narrator emphasizes the value in questioning hitherto "infallible" facts and "demonstrates the spuriousness of history" (FHTA 127; Craig 191). For instance, the narrator describes the world maps designed by Gerardus Mercator: [T]hose maps most familiar to children and adults throughout the world from early education onward, have remained indispensable in schools, travels, and war since the publication of the complete Mercator Atlas in 1595. They were conceived as a technique for depicting our globe

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accurately on a flat surface. They do not depict the world accurately. No map of the world on a printed page is a map of the world. (116) Later, the narrator digresses from his discussion of Henry Hudson's explorations to mention that the Hudson River, one of the explorer's most famous discoveries is, in fact, "not a river" (117). Continuing his commentary, the narrator adds, "[t]he East River on the opposite side of the island of Manhattan is not a river either" (117). In disclosing the inaccuracy of world maps and by mentioning such misnomers as the two "rivers" engulfing the island of Manhattan, the narrator startles the reader into acknowledging the extent to which, in Craig's words, his or her understanding of the world has been shaped by the "fabrications so often taken as truths" (194). Having thus shaken the reader's faith in historical fact, the narrator abandons the rather innocuous geographical nit-picking demonstrated above in favor of revealing the "blind repetitions of pointless cycles of greed, brutality and ignorance" masquerading, throughout Western history, as justice, fair government, and free enterprise (Adam 9). Before exploring Heller's treatment of the malignant motives lurking behind the illusory truths with which humanity seeks to obscure the absurd nature of the universe, however, a brief examination of Heller's earlier attempts at debunking faith in various authorities proves enlightening. In God Knows, for instance, King David undercuts the authority many people place in Judaism and Christianity by exposing the shortcomings of the Bible when tested by modem sensibilities. By demonstrating in terms of religion the "practical assent and simulated ignorance" Camus describes, Heller attempts to disintegrate the reader's faith in the most sacrosanct of life's guiding principles. Hoping that the contemporary reader will appreciate a flippant critique of certain Jewish dietary

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conventions, David makes use of an anachronistic "[Mel] Brooksian Borsch Belt shtik"" to ridicule and devalue such customs (FHTA 99). So, while God promises "a good land, a land of brooks or water, or fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity," His decrees seem unfair and silly when David describes the deity's insistence upon: [A] complicated set of restrictive dietary laws that have not made life easier. To the goyim He gives bacon, sweet pork, juicy sirloin, and rare prime ribs of beef. To us He gives a pastrami. In Egypt we get the fat of the land. In Leviticus He prohibits us from eating it. A perpetual statute He makes it yet, that we eat neither the fat nor the blood. The blood contained the spirit of life and therefore belonged only to Him. The fat was bad for our gall bladders. (24) Elsewhere, David prepares the reader for his more disturbing critiques by humorously pointing out the ridiculousness of various Biblical laws. For instance, a warrior cannot engage in "holy battle for at least three days after lying with a woman. Or with a man either, for that matter, or even with a sheep, a goat or a turkey" (10). The modem reader, David hopes, will recognize the quirky Mosaic laws regarding cleanliness and combat and laugh at the absurd notion that God will strike a violator dead. By presenting Biblical material in a humorous manner, David hopes to produce the "absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter" (Bergson 4). Thus, David establishes what Henri Bergson calls "a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity" between himself and the reader allowing the reader to share his sense of detached superiority

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towards Biblical material (6). Having emotionally severed the reader from the ostensibly sacred text, David sets about attacking the Bible with a mordant confidence the reader would disapprove of had he or she remained sympathetic to the scriptures. Now, when describing the same Promised Land as he had a mere sixteen pages earlier David injects a pronounced tone of indignant frustration into his shtik: Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us, He gives sand. To Cannes, He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO. Our winters are rainy, our summers hot. To people who didn't know how to wind a wristwatch He gives underground oceans of oil. To us He gives hernia, piles and antiSemitism. (40) Thus, as David Seed observes, God's "covenantal promise is revised into a series of liabilities" by David (172). Having enlisted the reader's confidence, David presents the Biblical God as a sham, a deity whose empty promises have been ignored by believers still willing to adhere to His obscure laws. David also brings the validity of the Bible into question by pointing out a number of inconsistencies that make it impossible for the reader to accept the text as the literal word of God. Heller's David, for example, baldly states that the authors of works such as the Bible are "poets, not historians or journalists," implying that an element of human invention prevents the scriptures from being entirely factual (30). He insists that the Bible, like all literature should be appreciated for their "beauty rather than factual accuracy" and supplies an example from one of his own statements:

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A striking case in point can be found in my notable "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice." If literal truth and common sense were factors, there would be no way to account for the enduring popularity of this mellifluous statement, for the people in Gath and Askelon knew about Saul's defeat and death at Gilboa a good two and a half weeks before I did. Such departures from reality may be explained on aesthetic grounds. (30) Later, David recalls the time Samuel tells Saul that the Lord has withdrawn favor for him as king: And Samuel said unto Saul stringently, "The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day and hath given it to a neighbor of think that is better than thou." Now, strictly speaking, this was not true. In fact, it was a bald lie, for it was not until afterward, in Samuel I, Chapter 16, that the Lord, repenting that he had made Saul king over Israel, commanded Samuel to go to Jesse of Bethlehem to find the king He had provided Himself from among Jesse's sons. (115) In revealing the humorously irrelevant passages of the Bible as well as by uncovering factual discrepancies in the sacred texts of Judeo-Christian religion, Heller's David forces the reader to question the veracity of one of Western society's most highly regarded authorities. Thus, as he divests the world of another revered falsehood, Heller compounds the considerable doubt inspired by works such as Picture This and urges the reader to view the world as fundamentally absurd.

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One final example of Joseph Heller's use of fiction to weaken the reader's faith in institutional authority can be located in Catch-22"s treatment of Great Depression era agricultural subsidizations. By briefly recalling the benefits given to Major Major's father by the United States government, Heller draws the reader's attention to the inherent fallibility of such venerated institutions. As Steven Potts observes, "Major Major's father is portrayed as a salt-of-the-earth American, a Calvinist farmer who preaches traditional American values" (FHTA 21). In other words, Heller clearly identifies Mr. Major as the ideal representative of the demographic to which such socialistic benefits were extended. However, as Heller notes: His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the country [and] he made much money. (93) Although the account of Mr. Major's deceitful agricultural practices initially appears to be more of a criticism of greed than an indictment of governmental fallibility, a closer consideration of the passage reveals Heller's invitation for the reader to question his or her faith in competent government.

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While the aforementioned passage deals specifically with the socialistic reforms instituted during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration to alleviate the economic woes resulting from the Great Depression in America, Mr. Major's history encourages any reader, regardless of nationality, to question whether or not a government can truly know what is best for its constituents. Clearly, if a government seeks to serve its people in the best way possible, it would not be a particularly far-fetched idea to expect the use of taxes to subsidize farmers during droughts and other dire circumstances. However, when a farmer can use his or her land to cultivate crops, one would expect any government aid to be directed towards ensuring a tumescent harvest. One would also expect a competent government to regulate the dispersal of such aid so as to thwart abuses of the system. In perceiving that a man as overtly lazy at Mr. Major can locate and exploit a loophole to such an extent that he becomes wealthy without cessation of government aid, the reader suspects the government of an appalling inability to monitor its own activities. In other words, the individual realizes that a government supposedly "knowing what is best" is, in fact, a group of men and women no more authoritative than him- or herself and, as Mr. Major's activities prove, only in possession of power to the extent that people decide to acknowledge. By weakening the reader's faith in so many institutions, Joseph Heller forces the individual to realize, in Jean Kennard's words, that "[w]hen everything is questionable, it is a small step to questioning one's own identity" and realizing that "the authoritative values which determine the rules of behavior are man-made," not the certainties he or she had presumed they were (77-78). This realization uncovers the disturbing possibility that the "world has no meaning but is simply there" (Kennard 75). For Camus, "the moment

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absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all" and the individual seeks an understanding of the world hitherto unavailable (22). He or she, having achieved awareness, senses the utter pointlessness of human suffering and indignantly recognizes the selfish interests motivating this misery. Once the individual swallows the bitter pill of Absurd recognition, he or she faces what Camus calls the "constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity" and a choice between an existentially authentic life of revolt or an inauthentic life of self-deceit and spiritual death (54). Joseph Heller uses this scenario to depict a decidedly bleak interpretation of the motives driving mankind before unreservedly promoting a life lived with "the certainty of a crushing fate, without the recognition that ought to accompany it" (54).

Assessing the Damage Perhaps nowhere in Joseph Heller's fiction is the inhumanity of mankind presented in such harrowing detail and at such length as in the thirty-ninth chapter of Catch-22, "The Eternal City." Although a sizable amount of critical attention has been paid to this famous passage, the most extensive and insightful examination to date remains Minna Doskow's essay, "The Night Journey in 'Catch-22,'" first published in 1967. In Doskow's opinion, Rome is "a city of universal destruction," a microcosm of the modem world (187). Yossarian begins his journey through the Italian capital in an effort to locate and help the younger sister of Nately's Whore who had been chased "away with the rest of the broads" by military policemen when dismantling a makeshift brothel frequented by enlisted men and officers on leave (414).

Immediately, Yossarian

questions what possible motivations the authorities might have had for evacuating the

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women and thrusting a defenseless twelve-year-old girl "[r]ight out into the street" (414). Having enlisted the assistance of Milo Minderbinder, Yossarian sets out to locate the missing child. Milo initially expresses glowing approval of Yossarian's humanitarian mission but after learning that "the profit in illegal tobacco is very high," Milo abandons the search. When Yossarian questions him, Milo assumes "a look of epileptic lust" and starts "towards the door as though in a spell," repeatedly muttering "Illegal tobacco, illegal tobacco" (421). Donald Monk interprets Milo's behavior as "capitalist freeenterprise run amok" and cites it as evidence of the "kind of profit-motive which permits the moral viciousness" plaguing modem society (213). Having lost Milo to the lure of fiscal gain, Yossarian seeks assistance from the police commissioner, but the official only desires to resume "fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins" and threatens to arrest Yossarian if he does not leave the station (420). Thus, greed and lust prevents a military official and a policeman from attempting to save a girl in danger. As Yossarian continues through "the streets encountering sickness hunger, poverty, sadistic cruelty and coercion and viewing an entire gallery of mutilated bodies and warped souls," the reader cannot help wondering just how much of the degradation and pain he encounters is the result of similar motives (Doskow 187). Elsewhere in Catch-22, the reader encounters Colonel Cathcart, "a simon-pure opportunist," as Granville Hicks writes, "who will stop at nothing to get promoted, who is constantly courting the favor of his superiors, who does not care how many men are killed if he can get a little favorable publicity" (11). Cathcart longs "to be a general so desperately he was willing to try anything," including a warped attempt to impress the editors of The Saturday Evening Post by forcing his squadron to perform staggering

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numbers of dangerous bombing missions (199). Although many of the best men in his command die while flying superfluous bombing missions, Cathcart "never hesitate[s] to volunteer his men for any target available" (64). Made indifferent by his monomaniacal desire for fame, Cathcart does not care that his men have already flown more missions than required of them and decides that "[n]o target was too dangerous for his group to attack" (64). Later in the novel, Cathcart orders his men to create a roadblock for the Germans by "bombing a tiny undefended village, reducing the whole community to rubble" (335). Although "the mission is entirely unnecessary" and its sole purpose "is to delay German reinforcements at a time when [the U.S. is not] even planning an offensive," Cathcart forces his men to fly in hopes of snapping a few impressive aerial photographs (335). When the men of the squadron express horror at the prospect of killing peaceful people who will "pour out into the streets to wave when they see [the] planes coming, all the children and dogs and old people," Colonel Kom only emphasizes Cathcart's desire for "a good clean aerial photograph he won't be ashamed to send through channels" in hopes of impressing General Peckem with a tight bomb pattern (337-38). Disturbingly, a "bomb pattern" is nothing more than an empty neologism coined by the General. As Peckem explains to Schiesskopf: A bomb pattern is a term I dreamed up just several weeks ago. It means nothing but you'll be surprised at how rapidly it's caught on. Why I've got all sorts of people convinced I think it's important for the bombs to explode close together and make a neat aerial photograph. There's one

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colonel [Cathcart] in Pianosa who's hardly concerned any more with whether he hits the target or not. (335) In Catch-22, then, military authorities such as those represented by Cathcart, Kom, and Peckem do not care about the value of human life. For men such as Cathcart, men are expendable tools which can be used to build a statistical profile that may impress the editors of newspapers. He dehumanizes the innocent people in the tiny mountain hamlet into barely visible components of a photograph he hopes will earn him the esteem of other military officials as well as the aforementioned newspaper editors. For Peckem, the deadly bomb patterns merely represent the success of his practical joke and he responds to the news of innocent people slaughtered in the name of aerial photography by "twinkling with self-satisfied good humor" (335). Clearly, in the world of Catch-22, the powerful will pursue their passions at the expense of anyone standing in their way. This motif, however, is not limited to the pages of Heller's most famous novel, but runs through the entirety of his work. In Something Happened, as Thomas LeClair observes, "corporate value poisons private life" since the policies of the company employing Slocum affect the private lives of its employees (250). Thus, for Slocum, family life is important only as a way to improve his career. The appearance of a successful marriage, for instance, is pivotal in vocational security: Unmarried men are not wanted in the Sales Department, not even widowers, for the company has learned from experience that it is difficult and dangerous for unmarried salesmen to mix socially with prominent executives and their wives or participate with them in responsible civic

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affairs [...] If a salesman's wife dies and he is not ready to remarry, he is usually moved into an administrative position after several months of mourning. Bachelors are never hired for the sales force, and salesmen who get divorced, or whose wives die, know they had better remarry or begin looking ahead to a different job. (27) Since family life is inextricably linked to corporate success and because Bob Slocum's business aspirations dominate his existence, he refuses to condone dissent within his household. For instance, when his wife and teenage daughter begin discussing the girl's desire to leave home, Slocum forbids further discussion by adopting a "potent and articulate" counterargument (157). Immediately upon recognizing his "victory," Slocum "wishes that Green or someone else I yearn to impress [in the company], like Jane or Horace White [...] were in a position to witness me so fluent and dominating" (157). Since strong debating skills are valued at work, Slocum relishes his ability to exercise them at home, quashing in the process any undesirable elements. The result of such behavior, Slocum observes, is that his "wife is unhappy," his "children are unhappy," and his "little boy is having a difficult time" (71, 130, 218). Disturbingly, Slocum values the company's policy on unhappiness over his own family's wellbeing: The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness [...] unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids

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are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be mined. (534-35) For Slocum, then, the health of his family has become subordinate to the appearance of stability necessary to earn promotions within the corporate structure. Although a child's suicide would be "overlooked" by his company, Slocum still fears the effect "a disgraceful social disease" such as his daughter's melancholia will have on his career. Thus, her teenage depression, in Slocum's warped understanding, becomes "an obdurate refusal to be happy and have fun" and he recalls: I have been so enraged at her at times for having nothing to do that I have wanted to seize her fiercely by the shoulders, my darling little girl, and shake her, pummel her frenziedly on the face and shoulders with the sides of both my fists, and scream: "Be happy—God dammit! You selfish little bitch! Can't you see our lives depend on it?" (173) Sadly, Slocum realizes the extent to which his corporate mentality harms his family and decides, despite its malignant effect, "I want the money. I want the prestige" (136). The full force of the self-serving attitude inspiring so much misery emerges in Slocum's epigrammatic self assessment, "I am a shit. But at least I am a successful one" (200). Elsewhere in Heller's work, human suffering emerges as the omnipresent byproduct of humankind's selfish desire for power. In Good as Gold, "[t]he American economic system was barbarous, resulting naturally in barbarianism and entrenched imbecility on all levels of culture. Technology and finance mass-produced poverty at

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increasing speed" (73). In God Knows, David recalls starting wars because "[something in man requires an enemy, something in mankind demands a hostile balance of power" (249). In Closing Time, wealthy people squander money that could be used to help the poor because "[e]ven in a recession, the country was awash in money. Even amid poverty, there was room for much waste" while the government seeks "everlasting fame" by developing "the ultimate weapon that could lead to the end of the world" and causing widespread paranoia in the process (411, 71). Clearly, Heller seeks to convince his readers of a general selfishness lurking behind many of mankind's guiding mentalities, but he also advances the belief that those in power camouflage their malevolence and greed in order to deceive people who will object to the indifference the powerful hold towards those they oppress. Picture This effectively demonstrates the ubiquitous presence of these malignant motivations by examining three distinct periods of human history: the Athenian Golden Age, the seventeenth century Dutch Golden Age, and the Cold War of the late twentieth century. The narrator matter-of-factly proceeds through his history lesson, detachedly covering some of the most lamentable events in Athenian and Dutch history in terms eerily appropriate to situations occurring in the latter half of the twentieth century. By "inviting the reader to make connections" between past epochs and his or her own society, the narrator enables his audience to realize that a great many presumptions about the natural order of the world are nothing more than convenient facades for the greedy interests of those people holding power (Seed 190). For instance, in the division of Picture This called "The Age of Pericles," the narrator explains that a list of Athenian casualties "for 459 B.C. contains the names of

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Athenians who died that year in wars in places like Cyprus, Egypt, Halieis, Aegina, and the Megarid" (143). However, the narrator continues, 459 B.C. "officially was a year of peace. The wars they died in were not wars" (143). As the reader's confusion mounts, the narrator flatly declares that these military conflicts "were police actions" (143). The modem reader, familiar with the buzzwords peppering newspaper columns and television newscasts since the 1960s, must pause at the seemingly anachronistic use of "police actions" to describe events in ancient Athenian society. Having learned only moments earlier that the so-called "year of peace" occurred during the second year of Pericles's reign, a period which "began with fifteen years of war," the reader perceives the lies with which the ruling oligarchy cloak their bellicose activities. Sensing the dishonesty of Pericles and his supporters, the reader realizes that the Athenian politicians have simply manipulated language and dressed a series of deadly wars as "police actions" in order not to upset the populace (143). Earlier in the novel, the reader will recall, the narrator describes former U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson, as a man who "lied to the American people and the American Congress and secretly and deceitfully took the nation openly into a war in Southeast Asia it could not win and did not, persevering obstinately [...] as resolutely as did Pericles" (132). Upon making this connection, the reader grasps the narrator's message: the "police actions" undertaken by modem governments such as the United States in areas such as Vietnam are simply wars that are renamed by aggressive regimes to avoid inciting domestic outrage while feeding an insatiable appetite for power. Having already forced the reader to consider the terrifying absurdity inherent to the human condition, Heller angers the reader by revealing the stupefying prevalence of

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greed and indifference in the world. Recognizing the essential pointlessness of life, the reader indignantly senses that the suffering he or she experiences results from the selfserving actions of other people. The individual, upon processing the magnitude of the absurd discovery must either revolt against the cruel and unfeeling cosmos or retreat into an inauthentic acceptance of the brutally arbitrary conditions of human suffering.

Emerging from the Rubble

For Albert Camus, when "man stands face to face" with the pointless nature of existence, "[h]e feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is bom of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world" (28). According to his The Myth of Sisyphus, the longing one experiences for a worldview guided by absolute principles can be termed nostalgia. Camus endorses a rejection of the nostalgic desire to make a leap of faith back into a familiar world by choosing to live in full awareness of the absurdity of existence. Any leap of faith undertaken by an aware individual amounts to Sartre's mauvaise foi (bad faith), the inauthentic act of lying to oneself as a means of escaping the angst caused by the absurd. Joseph Heller, like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, promotes the authentic existence an acceptance of the absurd makes possible. Heller uses the indecisive King David to emphasize the necessity of making a choice between authenticity and mauvaise foi by showing the suffering caused by nostalgia. He promotes an authentic lifestyle by inviting the reader to juxtapose the responsible choices made by John Yossarian and Bruce Gold with the irresponsible choice made by Bob Slocum. By placing Heller's first four

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protagonists side-by-side, the reader perceives the philosophical thread uniting four seemingly unrelated texts. In addition to the various ailments caused by his advanced age, Heller's King David suffers from "moldering spells of solitary depression and anxiety" (79). Similar to the "willies" Bob Slocum experiences in Something Happened, this is "a state of nonspecific anxiety which existentialists consider an authentic mode of being" (Strehle 550). David, however, waivers between an acceptance of his suffering and the nostalgic desire to believe in God again. Early in God Knows, David reports that God "might now be dead," but "[wjhether God is dead or not hardly matters" (8). With this statement, David comes across as an agnostic who is indifferent to the possibility of God's existence. Nevertheless, despite his apparent indifference, David "cannot help wondering what would happen if I tried speaking to God once more. Would he hear me? Will he reply? I have a notion He might if I promised to forgive Him. I'm afraid that He won't." (21). Shortly thereafter, David asks "who needs Gods like Him?" since "the same things come alike to the righteous and the wicked" (31). David's vacillation results from his inability to "make sense of the quiet in the universe" (287). His earlier admission that he "did seem to have a need to believe in [God]" can be considered absurd nostalgia because it implies a desire to return to a state where the world could be explained by God's existence (118). Instead, David feels "forsaken by the world" and insists that "I have a monkey on my back that I cannot shake off, and I know who that monkey is: His name is God" (317, 337). In other words, David feels the anxiety of the absurd and perceives the void, but his inability to reject the nostalgic hope for a return to faith results in an unceasing angst that fills the king with "uncertainties and ambivalence about the meaning

35

of his own experience" (Seed 173). According to Albert Camus, the king's "insistence upon familiarity" and "appetite for clarity" causes his angst (17). David's existential pain only serves to emphasize the need for the aware individual to reject nostalgia and "live without appeal" (Camus 60, emphasis in the original). Despite Jon Woodson's doubt that "Catch-22 is absurd in any sense," more than four decades of scholarship echo Jim Castelli's assertion that "more than any other book, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has captured the absurdities and frustrations of a generation" (Woodson 56, Castelli 199, emphasis Woodson's). In fact, Yossarian's relationship to the absurd remains one of the most discussed aspects of Heller's novel. His confrontation with the absurd is, by far, the most frequently cited passage in Catch-22: Yossarian was cold...and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. 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 bum. 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. (450) Significantly, the full force of Yossarian's absurd realization occurs during his convalescence in the hospital after having been stabbed by Nately's whore. The attack occurs only seconds after Yossarian receives the promise of an honorable discharge by agreeing to Cathcart and Kom's request that he "Like us. Be our pal. Say nice things about us here and back in the States. Become one of the boys" (436). Had Yossarian carried out his end of the bargain, he would have had to take the inauthentic stance of

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supporting a system bent on the destruction of the individual for no reason other than feeding Colonel Cathcart's frenetic attempt at newspaper coverage. Instead, Snowden's message convinces Yossarian to reject the deal. By recognizing the vital nature of the human spirit, Yossarian realizes that "whatever eliminates that spirit—physical death, moral death—turns man into garbage" (Richter 159). As David H. Richter observes, "it does not matter whether one is shot to death or dehumanized through becoming a servant of Catch-22: garbage is garbage" (159). Having barely survived physical death at the hands of Nately's whore, Yossarian perceives the equally unappealing spiritual death implicit in the "odious deal" offered by Cathcart and Korn. If accepting the "odious deal" amounts to an inauthentic moral death and flying more missions inevitably leads to physical death, the absurd hero must find another option since in Camus's terms, "[i]t is essential to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will" (55). Thus, true to his earlier assertion that he would "live forever or die in the attempt" and inspired by Orr's successful escape to Sweden, Yossarian decides to abscond (38). When Major Danby cautions Yossarian against acting irresponsibly, Yossarian asserts that "I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them" (461, emphasis Heller's). In other words, Yossarian accepts the responsibility the absurd individual must assume for his or her life. Despite Danby's insistence to Yossarian that he will "always be alone. No one will ever be on your side, and you'll always live in danger of betrayal," the bombardier perseveres in his absurd revolt (461). Just as the absurd rebellion is "temporally limited" by death and is "devoid of future," Yossarian knows his plight is doomed, but knows "at least I'll be trying" (Camus 66, Catch-22 462). However, it is the doomed revolt that "gives life its value" and "restores a

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majesty to that life" by imbuing it with unflinching bravery in the face of death, the "supreme abuse" of existence (Camus 55, 90). Thus, Yossarian moves beyond the existential angst of King David and embodies the heroic possibilities of choosing an existence founded upon individual responsibility and a wholesale rejection of death. Like Yossarian, Bruce Gold finds himself with the opportunity to join the ranks of the destructive authority running his world. Describing Gold's sense of alienation, Charles Berryman writes that "the bedeviled hero of the novel never feels at home" in his predominantly Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood (130). In other words, like the absurd man Camus describes, Gold "feels an alien, a stranger" in his own identity (6). In order to alleviate the alienation Gold experiences as a result of his ethnic estrangement, he attempts to become a part of the anti-Semitic "WASP power structure" by securing a cabinet appointment (Potts FHTA 90). Unfortunately for Gold, the prevailing attitude in government circles is that, in Washington, "every Jew should have a big gentile for a friend, and every successful American should own a Jew" (469). In other words, for a Jew to become successful in Washington, he or she must either toady to a more powerful gentile or willingly serve the interests of "successful" employers. To date, Gold realizes, the only truly successful Jewish person to exist in Washington is Henry Kissinger, a man Julius Gold insists "ain't no Jew" (381). Both Bruce and Julius Gold denounce Kissinger as a shonda [shame] to his race because the Secretary "goes to great lengths to deny his Jewish past in order to get ahead in Washington circles" (Ruderman 155). Thus, "[t]he risk Gold runs in trying to become the first real Jewish Secretary of State is that he will be forced to act like Henry Kissinger, and that would mean his moral destruction" (Beatty 164).

38

As Gold continues to make his bid for Secretary of State, Heller increasingly parallels Gold's plight with that of Kissinger's until the reader realizes that the two men are, in many ways, interchangeable. In fact, Heller emphasizes Kissinger's role as a "double" for Gold by having the Governor, in a particularly revealing instance of parapraxis, refer to Kissinger as "Gold" (470). Elsewhere, when Pugh Biddle Conover ridicules Kissinger's sycophantic behavior towards wealthy sponsors such as Nelson Rockefeller, he asks Gold, "You know the type? Of course you do—look who I ask" (408). In addition to identifying such explicit pairings, Judith Ruderman's examination of the similarities between Gold and Kissinger uncovers a few less apparent parallels: Gold is invited to the White House on the basis of his published work; Nixon was similarly impressed with Kissinger's. Gold will later acquire a tall girlfriend, as Kissinger does a wife...Additionally, as Andrea Conover put it, '"Everyone we know has a Ph.D. I have a Ph.D. But you're the only one we know that's called Doctor. " Henry Kissinger, of course, is also called Doctor, and the reader is quick to make the connection... (95) Since Gold so clearly resembles Kissinger, the reader realizes that if the former does become as Secretary of State, he will, in effect, also become another Henry Kissinger. Heller emphasizes the amorality of this option by depicting the Secretary of State as an inauthentic individual who willingly ignores ethical considerations when he can curry political favor. For instance, when the reader leams that the testimony of William C. Sullivan, one of Kissinger's subordinate colleagues in the State Department, reveals that "[t]he justification for the [Cambodian] war is the reelection of the President," Kissinger insists that "I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved"

39

(362). Kissinger's indifferent treatment of a war "in which an estimated five hundred thousand people died," presages the Governor's later assertion that Kissinger's "God was Nixon" (362, 469). Interestingly, Gold locates a newspaper clipping where Kissinger calls Nixon "anti-Semitic" in front of Bob Woodward and Leonard Bernstein, proving that Kissinger has become a "willing sycophant to anti-Semites" (387). Elsewhere, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan recalls that Kissinger "ended up exchanging the security of Israel for the good graces of the oil companies" (382). In other words, Kissinger denies his Jewish heritage in order to join the Establishment. In contrast to the inauthentic and amoral Kissinger stands Bruce Gold's brother, Sid. Bom in Russia and brought to the United States as a child of six, Sid embodies the Jewish-American experience. Recalling the many abuses the Golds suffered as "the only Jewish family" living "in the Christian section of Bensonhearst," Sid provides a voice for the ethnic outsider in America (321). Unlike Bruce, Sid refused to attend college in order "to work in the laundry" and support his relatives (320). As a younger man, Sid clandestinely "paid for everything" anyone in his family needed because Julius Gold was such a poor businessman (324). The result of Sid's kindness is a close-knit, supportive family. Thus, as Wayne C. Miller observes, Sid proves that "no matter what, the necessity of maintaining the close human connections that family provides" is the most honorable and authentic existence an individual can choose (192). Essentially, the action of Good as Gold revolves around Bruce Gold's need to choose between "on the one hand, the moral death of public success with its power and pleasures and, on the other hand, the possibilities of a personal alternative" (Miller 184). The event that forces this decision is Sid's sudden and unexpected death. At a major

40

Washington party when the news arrives, Gold must choose between remaining at the Embassy Ball in order to meet and impress the President and respecting "the personal commitment to family, friends, and...the composite of values that grow out of the American Jewish experience" Sid had typified (Miller 184). As Miller notes, Sid's death calls Gold "back to the authenticity of his own experience and to the necessity of taking on the responsibilities that grow out of his past" (192). Gold chooses to forfeit his career options in Washington and returns home to sit shivah for Sid. By choosing to reject the temptations of political power, Gold finally embraces his Jewish heritage and the difficult "outsider" status it carries. Wayne Miller views Gold's decision in existentialist terms: ...the novel presents the possibilities of the achievement of authenticity through a commitment to one's personal, familial, and cultural past...the ethnic dimension can provide an alternative to simply functioning as a cog in a corporate or bureaucratic machine (195). Thus, Gold's decision to assume responsibility for his family is an authentic way of refusing the temptation to trade his heritage for a government position. Interestingly, in an interview with Steven W. Potts, Joseph Heller asserts that "an American with a Jewish background [is] not much different from Americans of Irish background or Protestant backgrounds" (FHTA 93). In other words, the Jewish experience, with all of its inherent alienation, is virtually the same as any other experience. It is the human condition itself. Consequently, Gold's authentic acceptance of family responsibility and ethnicity is merely an updated version of Yossarian's refusal to become part of the system. The absurd revolt, as Heller shows, is relative to the individual.

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While John Yossarian and Bruce Gold reject the temptation to become a cog in a corporate or bureaucratic machine, Bob Slocum cannot resist the lure of "fitting in" (568). At one point, in a deceptively laconic comment, Slocum explains "I would like to fit in. I wish I believed in God" (496). In what appears to be a mere admission of atheism and feelings of alienation, Slocum actually reveals quite a bit about himself. For instance, the fact that he connects the concept of fitting in with a belief in the Judeo-Christian God exposes Slocum's underlying impression that his alienation results from his atheistic worldview. Secondly, by amending his first comment with the second, Slocum's statement also implies a desire to alleviate his disaffection by adopting a belief in the divine. In other words, Slocum does not want to be responsible for his own happiness and nostalgically yearns for a God that will assume this responsibility and give meaning to his existence. Unlike the indecisively nostalgic King David in God Knows or the ultimately individualistic protagonists of Catch-22 and Good as Gold, Slocum refuses to accept the anxiety his sense of alienation causes. Instead, Slocum rums towards a deterministic worldview which releases the individual from his or her personal responsibility. In fact, Slocum says, "I get the willies" instead of accepting the fact that he has made himself anxious. The verb "get" implies that Slocum believes the willies actually originate somewhere outside of himself. Additionally, when Slocum ponders the physical symptoms of the willies at the beginning of Something Happened, his determinism leads him to decide that "[s]omething must have happened to me sometime" to occasion their presence (3). Susan Strehle identifies the first invocation of the novel's title as Slocum's "consciousness resisting its own freedom and responsibility" (550). The entire novel, in fact, revolves around Slocum's need to avoid responsibility.

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In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre treats determinism as a form of mauvais foi: Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts makes it transcendent; it assigns them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses. (78-79) In an absurd world, then, the inauthentic individual may seek to escape the personal responsibility such a universe dictates by blaming one's actions on internal factors reified as things. Not surprisingly, Slocum places the responsibility for many of his actions on internal factors he considers to be separate from himself. For instance, Slocum uses psychoanalytic theory to deny responsibility for his mistreatment of Derek and his nurse: "My id suppurates into my ego and makes me aggressive and disagreeable" (393). Later, Slocum blames his treatment of Ben Zack on an "inhuman form" spreading within his body (493). When he feels depressed, Slocum notes that "I get the blues I can't lose; they decide when to leave" (506). As Slocum reifies his impulses and moods into entities separate from himself, the reader becomes acutely aware of Slocum's inability to accept the responsibility for his own mood or his treatment of others. At one point, when

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Slocum considers his suppressed desire to kick the crippled Andy Kagle in the leg, he actually personifies his sordid cravings: It's not I who wants to kick Kagle in the leg. New people are hatching inside my head always, whether I want them to or not, and become permanent residents the moment I take notice of them. We are often at cross purposes. They have time. They have time to work without interruption at whatever it is they came there to do, and they saunter away with great self-possession into darknesses I've not been able to penetrate. They weave back in forth in droves...The man who wants to make me kick Kagle in the leg is a worldly relaxed fellow with black silk socks and a gray pin-stripe suit...Vile these evil, sordid, miniature human beings who populate my brain, like living fingers with faces and souls... (535-37) Rather than acknowledge to himself that, in his godless universe, much of the suffering he finds disturbing is his own fault, Slocum avoids the absurd task of accepting the responsibility for his actions by creating "miniature human beings" to relieve him of responsibility. While Slocum's deterministic approach towards life intrigues the reader and raises questions about schizophrenic disorders, Heller's real objective is to juxtapose Slocum's inauthentic attitude with the authentic outlook of his nine-year-old son. As Susan Strehle observes, "this son has served as the locus of a set of existential values which the reader and Slocum find more attractive than Slocum's own values" (553). Although the boy, like Slocum, is an atheist, the fact that he lacks the "certainty of a God giving a meaning to life" does not constitute a license "to behave badly with impunity"

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(Camus 67). Rather, the child treats everyone with respect and affection. While the boy is incapable of presenting an existential worldview verbally, he clearly demonstrates an authentic lifestyle through his behavior. Above all, Slocum's son rejects the petty competitive spirit and greed so prevalent in his father's world. Rather than engage in the destructive aggression characterizing the corporate mentality, Slocum's son takes up what Camus calls "the absurd joy par excellence," the act of creation (93). The boy's creative spirit manifests itself in the creation of laughter and joy out of negative situations. The first instance of the boy's comedic craft occurs during a family dinner which disintegrates into a destructive and hurtful argument. As the speaking rums into shouting, Slocum's son diffuses the tension: "'Ole,' says my boy and we all smile" (110). Another instance occurs during an athletic event. Although he is one of the fastest runners in his class, Slocum's son takes no pleasure in winning. At one point, Slocum recollects, his son stopped running and "was motioning heartily to the fat, wheezing, unhappy little boy he was racing against on the other team to hurry and catch up, so they could laugh together and run the rest of the way side by side" (314). On another occasion, Slocum's son snubs his father's greedy attitude by simply giving money away. When an angry Slocum questions the child, the boy replies that "I was happy...and whenever I'm happy, I like to give something away (302). The boy explains that he was happy because he wanted to tease his father by giving his money away and "when I knew about that, I wanted to give the money away because I was happy about wanting to give the nickel away" (302). In other words, Slocum's son finds his father's parsimonious corporate attitude worthy of criticism and, in the process, shows how kindness and selfless behavior offer far more

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benefits than avarice does. Since Slocum, like the reader, cannot help laughing along with the jocular youth, he tells his son that the boy's generosity is "all right" and confides, parenthetically, to the reader that "I feel again that I want to kiss him" (302). Such a response, for Strehle, "reveals a sense that his son is better than he is" and that "[b]y demonstrating the superiority of an affectionate nature, the child evokes an alternative which Slocum has rejected" (554). Despite their differences, Slocum insists that "I identify with [my son] too closely" (338). In fact, Slocum claims that "hiding inside of me somewhere, I know (I feel him inside me. I feel it beyond doubt), is a timid little boy just like my son who wants to be his best friend and wishes he could come outside and play" (231). Later, as Slocum considers the threat social expectations might have upon the generous and affectionate nature of his son, he equates the boy with himself: ...my little boy grows up tortured and puzzled, uncertain who, beside himself he is supposed to be...or who, if he thinks like I do, himself even is. Go find him. Go find me. Lost deep inside his small self already is the smaller boy he used to be, the original article. Or is there? If that is not so, if there is no vanished and irretrievable little me and him so starkly different from what each of us since has been forced to become, if there is no wandering, desolate lost little being I yeam for...who took a sudden inevitable lurch into some inaccessible black recess at a moment when I must have been staring the other way...and left me disoriented all by myself to continue willy-nilly on my own—-then how the fuck did I ever

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get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me in this direction.. .for I would not have picked this way for the world. (307). Evidentially, Slocum's concern for his son is little more than a vehicle to allow him to wallow in his own self-pity. Clearly, Slocum's uneasiness about the boy's maturing reflects his own dissatisfaction with what he has become. This disappointment finds articulation in Slocum's later assertion that "I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up, I want to be a little boy" (340). Given his close identification with the boy, Slocum's statement reveals a latent desire to abandon his corporate mentality and choose the authentic lifestyle personified by his son. Shortly after deciding that he would like to become a little boy, Slocum reveals that whenever his son becomes "scared, I'm scared...When he quivers I quake. My nose runs when he's got a cold. I sneeze too and my throat turns sore. When he has a fever, my temples bum and throb and my joints and muscles rum stiff and sore" (341). Susan Strehle observes that Slocum's "literal physical identification with his son suggests that, for Slocum, his son has become the little boy" he wishes to be (555). The tension caused by Slocum's simultaneous desires to climb the corporate ladder and adopt the selfless, and existentially authentic lifestyle of his son reaches the boiling point when the company offers Slocum Andy Kagle's job. Although the promotion could mean a few extra dollars and some minor prestige within his corporate office, taking Kagle's job requires that Slocum contribute to a plan that would essentially lead to his friend's dismissal and prevent the crippled man from making a living. Since he does not have to take the job, Slocum's choice is basically that of his son's during the aforementioned footrace. He must either sacrifice another person's self-worth by accepting the fleeting

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glory his "success" would provide, or slow down and allow the enfeebled man catch up and join in a laughter-filled joie de vivre. Strehle argues that the "clear choice between these alternatives emphasizes [Slocum's] freedom for the reader" (555). Deterministically deciding that "[i]t is God's will," Slocum takes Kagle's job (540). It is here that Slocum's inauthentic determinism proves destructive and convinces the reader of the necessity to choose an authentic response such as Yossarian's or Gold's. As Strehle observes, the passage of Something Happened "in which Slocum takes Kagle's job begins with an ostensible reference to getting rid of Derek by sending him to a home; however, the statement refers even more strongly" to his older, nameless son (555). Slocum starts this section of his monologue by insisting that "I've got to get rid of him. There's no getting away from it. (He is so sweet. People who meet him tell us how sweet he is. They are being sweet when they say so)" (503). It is important to note that nowhere in the nearly six hundred pages of his monologue does Slocum ever give any indication that anyone refers to the retarded Derek in such glowing terms. In fact, the section preceding the one in which Slocum takes Kagle's job begins with a rather nasty description of the helpless child: It is not true that retarded (brain-damaged, idiot,

feeble-minded,

emotionally disturbed, autistic) children are the necessary favorites of their parents or that they are always uncommonly beautiful and lovable, for Derek, our youngest child is not especially good-looking, and we do not love him at all. (We would prefer not to think about him. We don't want to talk about him.) (359)

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Clearly, "sweet" does not fit in with Slocum's view of the child. The description, however, proves strikingly consistent with the view people seem to have of Slocum's older, nameless boy. Whereas Derek "makes everyone uncomfortable, his brother "is a good looking son, kind and inquisitive and everyone likes him" (265, 230). Thus, as Strehle notes, Slocum's "seeming reference to Derek contains an even more pointed reference to the other little boy" (555). Towards the end of the novel, as Slocum thinks about his deceased father, he mentions that "I want him back" (561). Immediately afterwards, Slocum says "I want my little boy back too. I don't want to lose him. I do" (561). Although the "little boy" Slocum refers to seems to be his older son, he is also describing the idealistic "little Bob Slocum" he claims exists inside himself, the "timid little boy" who symbolizes a return to childhood innocence and authentic living (231). Finally, after hundreds of pages of Slocum's rumination, something happens in Something Happened and Bob Slocum describes how a minor car accident shatters the glass of a store window and causes his son to suffer from "superficial lacerations of the scalp and face, a bruised hip, a deep cut on his arm" (562). When Slocum recognizes his injured son, he immediately decides that "[h]e is dying" and rushes towards the bloodied boy so that he can comfort him (562). He decides that "I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze" (562). The next paragraph informs the reader that the child has died. Tragically, the doctor informs Slocum that the boy's death was not a result of the relatively minor injuries his son sustained in the automobile accident, but rather "was due to asphyxiation" (562).

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Eerily, over three hundred pages earlier, the boy had asked Slocum "If you do want to get rid of me, how will you do it," to which Slocum replies, "With hugs and kisses" (235) Thus, the possibility that the apparently accidental smothering is really a premeditated filicide enters the reader's mind. Accordingly, when Slocum says "I have to get rid of him," he may be obliquely referring to the belief that it is his son, not his own reservations, that make his promotion less desirable. His solution, then, is to eliminate the child. If, as James M. Mellard asserts, the boy's death "had to happen, it was the something that had to happen, if Slocum was to come to terms with his life," it is not unlikely that, in his deterministic approach towards life, Slocum uses the "dying" boy's pain as a pretext for killing him (Excess 153). Strehle provides an insightful analysis of the incident: Slocum is sure that this is the fated disaster he has predicted for his son throughout the novel. He acts to finish off the boy because he tells himself that death has already come from the outside, from the environment, from the car that crashed through the store window. But the reader understands, though Slocum is unable to face it himself, that nothing simply happens by itself: people make things happen. (556) Without his son acting as a constant reminder of how wonderful a selfless life can be, Slocum can rationalize that his opportunism is "the only way." The fact that the next and final chapter of Something Happened makes no mention of the boy's death and recounts the ease with which Slocum has "taken command" at work suggests that his son's demise has facilitated the transition for Slocum (569). Hoping that the reader is disgusted by the man Heller uses Slocum's determinism to show the horrible results an existentially

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inauthentic life can cause. By not assuming personal responsibility for one's conduct, murder becomes "an accident" and mining a friend's career becomes "God's will." In comparison to Yossarian's refusal to allow his actions to cause the deaths of innocent people and Gold's decision not to sacrifice his family's happiness by abandoning them in a time of need, the pain caused by Slocum's refusal to accept the responsibility for his own petty careerism provides a convincing argument against inauthentic living. By divesting the world of its illusory "truths," Joseph Heller forces his reader to confront the terrifying possibility that existence is essentially meaningless and, as in the philosophy of Albert Camus, ultimately absurd. Heller's objective, rather than bring the reader into despair, is to posit a fulfilling alternative to the hopelessness dictated by the absurd. In order to do so, Heller first presents human suffering as the futile side-effect of the human appetite for money, power, and prestige. In doing so, he enlists the reader in a revolt against such conditions, urging the individual to embrace his or her own absurdity and to find fulfillment by accepting the responsibility of his or her actions. Using King David to reveal the dangers of existentially indecisive behavior, Heller shows the necessity to abandon hope and live an absurd life on its own terms. As Yossarian and Bruce Gold prove, the individual can accept his estrangement from the illusory authority of institutions such as religion, the military, or government by refusing to sacrifice individual integrity in order to fit in. To convince any skeptics, Heller uses the horrendous implications of Bob Slocum's determinism to emphasize the necessity of accepting responsibility for one's life and deeds in an absurd universe. In effect, Joseph Heller's entire career expands and amends the absurdist worldview he first expressed in Catch-22.

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•77

.".:....—rzrrrrxrzGrr.

On Structure [TJhey want me to have form: that means they want me to have their pernicious, ossiferous skin-and-griefform, and I won i. D.H. Lawrence, from a letter to Ernest Collings dated Dec. 24, 1912 ***

// 's deja vu all over

again. Lawrence "Yogi" Berra

> • • " • " * • . * - "

Critical Reception and the Question of Structure in Heller's Fiction In the forty years between Richard G. Stem's declaration that because Catch-22 "gasps for want of craft and sensibility...the book is no novel" and Harold Bloom's recent assessment of "Heller's half-dozen subsequent books [as] scarcely readable," concerns about the alleged formlessness of Joseph Heller's fiction have not been resolved (Stem 50, Bloom 1). With the appearance of Catch-22 in 1961 came the first of the structural complaints that would resurface with the publication of each subsequent Heller novel. Whitney Balliet, in one of the more hostile of the book's reviews, insists that Catch-22 "is not really a book. It doesn't even seem to have been written; instead it gives the impression of having been shouted on paper" (247). Similarly, in his now infamous anonymously-published review of Catch-22 in Daedalus, Roger H. Smith laments the book's "fragmented structure" as a literary faux pas and angrily proclaims that the novel "tells no story" and has "no characters" (158). Interestingly, in his 1957 essay "On Several Obsolete Notions," Alain Robbe-Grillet notes that such reactions reveal the

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modem reader's unfortunate tendency to judge a novel's worth by measuring it against an obsolete, "ready-made, sclerotic form which is no more than a formula" for the nineteenth-century realistic novel (46). Insisting that "[traditional criticism has its vocabulary," Robbe-Grillet observes how discussions centered on terms such as "character", "story", "atmosphere"' "form", and "narrative ability" prevent the reader from recognizing that these concepts represent only one type of novel and not the nature of the novelistic form itself (25). As Jean Kennard points out, Robbe-Grillet's view is that "a novel is for most readers a story and that the judgment made on the book will consist chiefly on an appreciation of its plot, its gradual development, its equilibrium" (80). With the significant exception of Good as Gold, Joseph Heller's fiction does not conform to the obsolescent concepts Robbe-Grillet identifies, particularly to the notion of a chronological storyline. Not surprisingly, then, scores of critics have sought to fit Heller's fiction into traditional categories, while an equally large number have sought to uncover previously unheard of structural elements in Heller's novels. While most of the novel's detractors and a good percentage of its advocates complain of Catch-22 's seemingly formless organization, several interesting and insightful analyses have emerged in the years since the book's initial appearance. John Wain, for instance, identifies a number of similarities to Noman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Jones's From Here to Eternity and advances the notion that Heller's "scrambling of the narrative" is a "completely justified" method of portraying the tumultuous events one should find in any great war novel (169). In an oft-cited piece, Constance Denniston maintains that Catch-22, like Melville's Confidence Man and Twain's Pudd'nhead

Wilson, fulfills Northrop Frye's definition of a romance-parody.

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Victor J. Milne views the novel as a classically epic work with "notable parallels to the Iliad" while Jesse Ritter calls Catch-22 an "avatar of a new fictional genre—the social surrealist novel...an extension of the modem ironic mode...a mixture of picaresque, romance-parody, and anatomy (or Menippean Satire)" (Milne 51, Ritter 73). In a particularly far-fetched and unconvincing attempt "to amend thirty years of critical misinterpretation," Jon Woodson forces a reading of Catch-22 as a retelling of the Gilgamesh Epic and James Joyce's Finnegan 's Wake (35). Over four decades have passed since the publication of Catch-22, but no definitive structural analysis has emerged to end the debate. Although considerably less critical attention has been paid to Heller's subsequent novels, nearly every study of his work has sought to resolve the problem of repetition and formlessness in Heller's work. With the publication of Something Happened in 1974, scores of interested critics advanced structural theories to defend the novel against the accusations of formlessness and redundancy. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in one of the earliest positive assessments of Heller's novel, considers Something Happened to be "structured as a suspense novel" (97). In a more recent study of the novel, Patricia Merivale identifies Something Happened as a purgatorial novel in the tradition of Camus, Golding, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, while in a similar thematic vein, Richard Hauer Costa finds a great many structural parallels between Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground and Something Happened. Although Heller's next novel, Good as Gold, follows a chronological order and strikes most reviewers as a straight parody of the AmericanJewish novels of Roth and Bellow, the publication of God Knows in 1984 met with the familiar accusations of formlessness and redundancy.

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Picture This, as David M. Craig observes, "has the most insistently antithetical vision and structure of any Heller novel" (190). Not surprisingly, the novel received the most scathing reviews of Heller's career and has the fewest apologists. Judith Ruderman, in an otherwise dismissive study of the novel, insightfully suggests that Picture This is "not about its subject so much it is the subject" (121). Interestingly, the anonymous introduction to an excerpt of Picture This printed in the October 1988 issue of Connoisseur insists that the novel should be "read like a painting" (128). Considering the way in which the novel abandons one event to cover another before returning and adding detail to the first, the accusations of formlessness may dissolve to reveal a mimetic structure as Ruderman suspects. In other words, one may envision Picture This as a painter's canvas upon which Heller "paints" piecemeal in order to allow one section to "dry" while moving to another area. Once a section dries, Heller can return to it and add additional details without smearing the original paint. Although Closing Time and the posthumously published A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man received a respectable amount of press coverage, nearly no critical studies of either novel exist. However, Sanford Pinsker, in one of the few articles to mention Closing Time, does suggest Heller's later fiction "is experimental enough to provoke a wide range of critical speculation about its narrative structure and literary devices" (31). With so much attention being given to the structure of Heller's fiction, one would expect some comparative studies to exist, but with the notable exception of David Craig's Tilting at Mortality, few critical studies attempt to identify structural elements that have shaped Heller's fiction over the course of his career. Seeking to rectify this unfortunate critical oversight, the reader will discover that Heller has structured his fiction so as to emphasize

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the absurd themes his novels examine. Using apparently formless narratives to create a sense of confusion, Heller emphasizes the importance of key themes in his novels through the use of dejd vu. Far from creating a redundant and circular storyline, dejd vu is a structural technique of incremental revelation where the meaning of a particular scene is gradually unveiled over the course of the novel as new details are added each time the scene is recalled. With dejd vu as his central structural device, Heller emphasizes the inevitability of death, the terrifying absence of God, the existential malaise of the human condition, and the futility of human endeavor, the very themes which concern his protagonists as they encounter the absurd.

/ See Everything Twice: Joseph Heller and the Method ofDeja vu

Mordecai Richler, in his review of God Knows for the New York Times, insightfully suggests that Joseph Heller "doesn't so much tell a story as peel it like an onion—returning to the same event again and again, only to strip another layer of meaning from it, saving the last skin for the moving final pages" (1). Referring to the same technique in Heller's first novel, James M. Mellard observes, that virtually "everything in Catch-22 is introduced as if one had seen it before, so one tries to trap and nourish impressions when they occur" (DV 30). Since the initial mention of an event often seems de-contextualized and pointless, the reader finds him- or herself questioning the significance of a seemingly random image. Heller capitalizes on this sense of curiosity by forcing "the recurring images to accumulate meanings until their full significance, their essence is finally perceived" (DV3\). In other words, Heller's form of

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dejd vu is not the redundant repetition of a single scene, but rather a calculated method of reviewing and expanding crucial moments of the narrative to delay the reader's full understanding of an image until he or she recognizes its significance to the narrative. Although Heller's methodical use of dejd vu appears in each of his novels, the most effective example occurs in Catch-22 and revolves around the death of the radio gunner, Howard Snowden, in Yossarian's airplane. The first mention of Snowden in Catch-22 occurs in the chapter entitled "Doc Daneeka" and seems to be an off-color joke. At an educational session, Yossarian challenges his commanding officers to field "the question with no answer," an inappropriate pun on Francois Villon's "Ballade des dames de temps jadis" 1 : "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" The question upset them, because Snowden had been killed over Angringon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and seized the controls away from Huple. The corporal played it dumb. "What?" he asked. "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" "I'm afraid I don't understand." "Ou sont les Neigedens ddntan?"

Yossarian asked to make it

easier for him. (44) Immediately following this exchange, the reader leams that Yossarian "was ready to pursue [the corporal] through all the words in the world to wring the knowledge from him if he could" (44). Although some inferences may be made from the passage, the reader In the original French, Villon asks, "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?" (line 16).

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only leams for certain that Yossarian is disturbed by Snowden's death in a plane flown by Huple and Dobbs. Later, as the narrator describes Yossarian's habit of hollering "Hard, hard, hard, hard you bastard hard!" at McWatt after each bombing mission, the reader leams that, with one exception, Yossarian's yelling is the only voice to break the silence of the intercom during flight (59). The one exception, the narrator observes, occurred "the pitiful time of the mess on the mission to Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and began weeping pathetically for help" (59). Having removed a layer of the onion skin, Joseph Heller reveals Yossarian's interest in Snowden's death stems from his involvement in the young gunner's demise: "Help him, help him," Dobbs sobbed. "Help Him, help him." "Help who? Help who?" called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back into the intercom system... "The bombardier, the bombardier," Dobbs answered in a cry when Yossarian spoke. "He doesn't answer, he doesn't answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier." "I'm the bombardier," Yossarian cried back at him. "I'm the bombardier. I'm all right. I'm all right." "Then help him, help him," Dobbs begged. "Help him, help him." And Snowden lay dying in the back. (59) After learning that Snowden's death occurred in Yossarian's plane, the reader begins to sympathize with the bombardier. Thus, Yossarian's "question with no answer" is not so

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much a poor joke as it is an indication of the bombardier's emotional disruption after having witnessed Snowden's death. Over one hundred pages later, as Yossarian considers the nature of death, he decides that he would rather pass away "inside the hospital" where death "had to act like a lady" rather than "freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane" (175-76). Peeling away yet another layer, the reader leams that Snowden had apparently communicated a "secret" to Yossarian just before he died. Additionally, the reader leams that Yossarian had tried to comfort Snowden by saying "There, there" every time the boy whimpered "I'm cold" (176). Having learned of Yossarian's direct contact with Snowden, the reader suspects that it is Snowden's comment that disturbs the bombardier. Later, the narrator removes an additional layer and the reader leams that "Yossarian lost his nerve on the mission to Avignon because Snowden had lost his guts...because their pilot that day was Huple, who was only fifteen years old" (235). Thus, the reader leams that Yossarian's pusillanimous behavior throughout the novel has been the result of Snowden's loss of courage upon learning his aircraft was piloted by a child. As the narrator continues peeling away layers, the reader discovers that Yossarian treats Snowden for "the wrong wound": [A] yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit. (342)

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Finally, in a three page passage towards the end of the novel, the narrator peels away the last layer and the reader grasps the full horror of the event. After describing Yossarian's meticulous treatment of Snowden's wounded thigh, the narrator mentions "a strangely colored stain" too small for the bombardier to have seen until he had dressed the larger wound: Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit....Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out...Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared—liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch...he gazed down at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. (459-50) In horror, the reader discovers that Heller has literalized his cliches. Snowden actually does spill his secret and he literally does lose his guts because a fifteen year old cannot fly an airplane. Significantly, Snowden's secret, that the "spirit gone, man is garb age... Ripeness was all" (450) echoes observations made by Camus in 777
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justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command out condition. (15-16). Snowden's secret, then, is the absurd recognition that death is impersonal, indiscriminate and, above all, inevitable. Like Camus's absurd man, Yossarian experiences the "privileged and bitter moment in which hope has no further place" and must face the absurdity of human existence. In the words of Robbe-Grillet, Heller's novel reveals an "absolute need [for] the reader's cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance" (156). By structuring Catch-22 around the concept of dejd vu. Heller enlists the reader's participation in piecing together the novel's message. With each layer of meaning the narrator reveals, the reader makes connections to previously nonsensical passages of the text illuminated by the details added to the recurring story of Snowden's death. For instance, long before the reader leams that Snowden has bled on Yossarian, he or she leams that Yossarian appears naked in formation because a man had been "killed in his plane... over Angrignon and bled all over" the bombardier's uniform (228). Elsewhere, the chaplain reports that he had seen a naked man sitting in a tree while he presided over Snowden's funeral. Although Heller's fragmented novel presents these two events in different contexts, the dejd vu technique of the novel invites the reader to make connections between them as he or she gradually collects information about Snowden's death. Once the reader leams that Yossarian had flown with Snowden over Avignon and that the bombardier had dressed the gunner's wounds, he or she will realize that the blood on Yossarian's uniform is Snowden's. Having connected Yossarian's nudity to Snowden's death, the reader will understand that "the naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral" is

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also the grieving bombardier (214). Thus, dejd vu gradually releases information to the reader so that he or she may make sense of the seemingly unrelated elements of the text. The reader's sense of reconstructing the narrative parallels Yossarian's gradual realization, via Snowden's death, that "the spirit gone, man is garbage" (450). In other words, the mimetic structure of Catch-22 uses dejd vu to imitate the processes of a mind trying to come to terms with mortality. As he or she slowly connects the different manifestations of Yossarian's terrible fixation, the reader gradually perceives the extent to which Snowden's terrible secret affects the bombardier. Only by structuring Catch-22 as an apparently formless novel can Heller engage his readers in paralleling Yossarian's search for an understanding of humanity's absurd condition.

Deja vu After Catch-22

Although a sizable amount of Heller criticism deals with dejd vu in Catch-22, the relatively few studies of Something Happened suggest that the technique is equally important to the structure of Heller's second novel. Despite Thomas LeClair's observation that "the chapters [in Something Happened] are increasingly digressive and fragmented" as the monologue progresses, the novel itself is meticulously structured around certain repetitive images and themes (256). In other words, Slocum's often tedious redundancy actually serves to unite the entire narrative. In Something Happened, Heller uses dejd vu to inform the reader of a truth Slocum represses about himself, namely that he had planned the filicide he laments. Slocum avoids this truth by spreading the facts about his son's death over more than "five hundred pages of entropic data in

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language characterized by ambiguity, redundancy, and irrelevancy" (Tucker 329). Since, as Lindsey Tucker observes, "information theory posits the idea that the longer the message is, the more numerous become the number of possible meanings carried within the code," Slocum's rambling narrative represents an attempt to find another "possible meaning" for his son's death that fits in with his inauthentic determinism (329)2 . However, in his frenetic attempt to explain away the something that has happened in his life, Bob Slocum inadvertently reveals the truth to the reader through his redundant monologue. Since information theory posits that "redundancy is defined as the factor by which messages are increased due to language structure...redundancy can minimize entropy because repetition of a message can result in the attainment of additional information." (Tucker 331). In other words, redundancy becomes the dejd vu effect of incremental revelation. Although Slocum hides the truth from himself by scattering the incriminating details throughout his narrative, the reader collects the information as Slocum releases it and pieces together the story Slocum cannot accept. At one point in his narrative, Slocum digresses from a catalogue of his nightmares to admit that "I know so many things I'm afraid to find out" (168). However, before he can pursue the train of thought any further, Slocum digresses again and begins to discuss his daughter's nightmares and her teenage angst. For Judith Ruderman, such digressions represent Slocum's attempt "to disrupt the search for meaning" (58). Despite Slocum's deliberate refusal to continue his meditation about what he knows, the incongruous parenthetical statement remains with the reader long after Slocum's digression distracts the narrator. The reader also notices a number of instances where Slocum discusses his

2

See the first section of this thesis, "On the Absurd," for an examination of the existentially inauthentic nature of Slocum's determinist worldview.

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son in violent terms, before veering off in another narrative direction. For instance, Slocum interrupts a discussion of his mother's final days in a nursing home to recall a time when he found his frightened son waiting for him "stationary on the pavement...on his tiny bare feet as though every bone in his ankles had already been crushed" (319). Although Slocum soon returns to his account of the nursing home in which he had placed his mother, the scene stands out in the reader's mind because Slocum repeats the story a number of times throughout the narrative. Later, when Slocum recollects a similar situation, he mentions that "I wanted to kill him...I was ashamed of him and wanted to disown him...then I wanted to clasp him to me lovingly and protectively and shed tears of misery and deepest compassion over him...because I wanted to kill him" (336). Shortly after sharing this story with the reader, Slocum digresses again and begins to discuss an adolescent sexual experience he had had with a female cousin. Elsewhere, the reader experiences dejd vu as Slocum frequently mentions a fear of harming the boy: "I love him so much I just know he is going to die" (166) "I worry about him and expect the worst to happen to him...maybe the worst has happened to him" (225) "Something bad is going to happen to him. I know that now. I know it will. And something bad is going to happen to me too, because it does happen to him. Perhaps it is happening to him already. I think it is" (23031) I have the recurring fear that he will die before I do.. .But what would I do to protect him? I think I know what I would do. Nothing" (305)

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"I would have murdered my boy" (316) "I could not assure him categorically that he would never be in a serious accident or fall fatally ill" (342) Although Slocum's narrative never treats this fixation at length, the frequency with which Slocum's anxiety seeps into his rambling monologue evokes a sense of dejd vu in the reader with each mention. As a result, the reader focuses on Slocum's fear even as the narrator explores other subject matter. However, the significance of such episodes only emerges after the reader leams of the boy's death: I want my little boy back too. I don't want to lose him. I do. "Something happened!" a youth in his early teens calls excitedly to a friend who goes running ahead to look. A crowd is collecting at the shopping center...My boy is lying on the ground...He is screaming in agony and horror, with legs and arms twisted brokenly and streams of blood spurting from holes in his face and head... He is dying...He looks beggingly at me for help. His screams are piercing....I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze. "Death," says the doctor, "was due to asphyxiation." (561-62) Upon reading this passage, the reader recognizes a problem with Slocum's narrative voice. Slocum presents the event, which initially seems to be a past incident, the

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something that has happened in Something Happened, in the present tense. Not long after, Slocum mentions that "I miss my boy," reinforcing the reader's suspicion that the death has already occurred. Given the apparent lapse in temporal consistency, the reader recalls the many occasions on which Slocum mentions hurting his son. Looking back at the instance when Slocum recalls envisioning the boy "as though every bone in his ankles had already been crushed," the reader notices the term already (319). Slocum's use of the term already indicates to the reader that, at the time of Slocum's writing, the boy had already sustained the injuries Slocum associates with the automobile accident. This realization encourages the reader to remember the many instances where Slocum mentions hurting his son, most of which are also in the present tense. Since the child's death must have occurred prior to the writing of the narrative, using the present tense "testifies to the alienation of the narrator from his life" (Ruderman 56). As Ruderman suggests, "[w]hat is conflicted is repeated, in an unsatisfactory way, as a mechanism of defense against it, as if this eternal presentness could somehow justify and hence undo the past" (57). Since the reader exists outside of Slocum's mind, he or she can accumulate the details Slocum periodically releases and reconstruct the horrific scenario. The use of dejd vu attunes the reader to the central concern of the novel, Slocum's attempt to identify something that has happened to release him from culpability. As an existentially inauthentic individual, Slocum cannot accept responsibility for his actions and uses his entire monologue as a means of eluding the truth. However, dejd vu keeps the reader focused on Slocum's relationship with his son and allows him or her to recognize the truth Slocum hides from himself: he has murdered his existentially authentic son in order to espouse an inauthentic lifestyle.

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Although Heller's most extensive use of dejd vu occurs in his first two novels, a number of studies have shown that the structural device reappears in each of Heller's subsequent novels, with the exception of the posthumously published A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man. With no critical treatment to date, A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man provides fertile ground for an assessment of Heller's characteristic structural technique as it develops over nearly four decades of writing. Prior to examining the use of dejd \nt in A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, however, a review of Heller's use of the technique in the four novels he published between Something Happened and his final novel proves enlightening. Despite the fact that Good as Gold is Heller's most structurally traditional novel and the plot unfolds more or less chronologically, a few critics have located instances of dejd vu in the text. Leonard Michaels, for instance, identifies the absurdly extravagant political positions Ralph Newsome regularly promises Bruce Gold as a type of dejd vu. Michaels observes that Newsome's political "temptations are offered several times, always with greater intensity" until, finally, "Newsome sees no reason Bruce Gold can't be Secretary of State or head of NATO" (170). Using this mild form of dejd \m, Heller enables his reader to parallel Bruce Gold's gradual realization that Newsome's promises are empty and that Gold's ethnicity renders his chances of advancement practically impossible. In a similar vein, Steven W. Potts recognizes elements of dejd vu in the Henry Kissinger storyline. As Gold continues to encounter anti-Semitism in Washington, his hatred of Kissinger escalates until Gold finally recognizes just how inauthentic a Jewish person's behavior must be if he or she is to assimilate into the WASP power structure.

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Despite the fact that God Knows won the Medici Prize for the best piece of fiction by a non-French writer in 1986, only a handful of critical studies have found the book worth examining. Of these studies, the overwhelming emphasis has been on Heller's appropriation of the Bible or Heller's late career turn towards Jewish fiction. However, in an insightful discussion of God Knows, David Craig observes that the deaths of David's children "like those of Snowden and of Slocum's son, forces the reader to re-see the narrative and to reassess the relationship of its parts" (155). In a method similar to the dejd vu of Catch-22, David's narrative initially starts out in a light-hearted fashion and introduces certain key details in a flippant manner. For instance, after recollecting his infamous confrontation with Goliath as "just about the biggest goddamn mistake I ever made," David adds, "Fucking Bathsheba, then fucking her again, then again and again and again...could have been my second biggest mistake. Nathan really got on my ass about that one and the next thing I knew there was a dead baby. Love is potent stuff, isn't it?" (15). Maintaining the comparatively light tone, David calls Nathan's prophetic vision of the death a "zinger" (19). However, as the narrative progresses, "David's narrative darkens, as he wrestles with a life that rums to loss" and he "transforms his own memories into furies" (Craig 155). Thus, as the king obsessively broods over the same details, the prophetic "zinger" evolves into a violent "murder" on the part of God (241). In other words, with each return to the subject of his child's death, David peels away another layer of emotional distance until, finally, he unveils the throbbing wound at the center of his narrative. Using dejd vu to remove the final layer encasing the memory, David recalls "losing both my baby and my God" at the same moment (287). Having never received from God "the justification I wanted for the death of the child," David

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experiences only a "vast and impenetrable silence" as he approaches his own death (289). Given the fact that David insists, "I want my God back," the dejd vu technique focuses the reader's attention on the one event preventing David from believing in God (353). Thus, dejd vu in God Knows serves to emphasize David's inability to believe in a God that he believes has committed infanticide. The entire narrative, then, emerges as David's futile attempt to reconcile his desire to believe in God with his incapacity to do so. In Picture This, as David Seed observes, Heller retells the trial of Socrates by returning "to a device he had used in Catch-22, namely the expanding reference" (211). Seed continues, calling this form of dejd vu "at once a device for creating suspense and also becomes a way of bringing out an episode's importance" (211). Like Catch-22 and Something Happened, Heller's use of dejd vu in Picture This relies on a final detail, recalled at the very end of the novel, to force the reader to reevaluate the entire story. In this case, the narrator reveals that despite Plato's description "[d]eath by hemlock is not as peaceful as he portrays: there is retching, slurring of speech, convulsions, and uncontrollable vomiting" (350). The reader, having accepted the narrator's retelling of the trial of Socrates as accurate for over three hundred pages, becomes disoriented. By discrediting his source material, the narrator undermines his own statements and leaves the reader unable to accept anything as a truth. Since the purpose of Picture This is to alienate the reader by exposing the spurious authority exhibited by certain institutions, casting doubt over the narrative itself alienates the reader even further and emphasizes the absurd task of coming to understand a world divested of its illusions. With Closing Time, Heller explores the unique form of dejd vu a sequel makes possible. As Sanford Pinsker notes, Closing Time "greatly expands both the world and

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the formula" Heller created with Catch-22 (38). In other words, Closing Time acts as dejd vu on a grand scale by recreating and adding details to Catch-22. By reprising such famous scenes from Catch-22 as Yossarian's hospital stays, Heller uses dejd vu to ease his reader back into the fictional world he depicts in Catch-22. However, Heller's most innovative use of dejd \>u emerges as Closing Time reveals the impact certain events have had and continue to exert on characters such as Yossarian and Sammy Singer half a century after World War Two. Once again, Howard Snowden, the radio gunner whose secret haunts Catch-22, provides the best example of dejd vu. In the same manner of expanding reference as Heller used in Catch-22, the reader of Closing Time leams that Sammy Singer, one of the two first-person narrators of Heller's sequel, had been the tail gunner who had fainted after Snowden had been hit by flak. Singer still remembers the incident and, significantly, identifies it as a moment as unforgettable to him as Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy or the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are to other men and women of his generation. Singer recalls, "I know where I was when the radio gunner Snowden was killed on the second mission to Avignon, and that meant more to me then than the Kennedy assassination did later, and still does" (211). Later, Singer meets Yossarian in a hospital in New York after not having seen one another for five decades. Importantly, their conversation immediately turns to Howard Snowden: "You remember Snowden then, Howard Snowden? On that mission to Avignon?" "Sam, could I ever forget? I would have used up all the morphine in the first-aid kit when I saw him in such pain. That fucking Milo. (353)

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After a few digressions, the conversation returns to Snowden: "It's funny about Snowden." Singer hesitated. "I didn't know him that well." "I'd never noticed him." "But now I feel he's one of my closest friends." "I have that feeling too." (356) The fact that the two men find themselves discussing and remembering Snowden's death five decades after they had witnessed the event indicates to the reader that Snowden and his absurd secret have made an incredibly strong impact on the lives of both men. Discussing the dejd vu effect Snowden's story has on Yossarian and Sammy, David Craig writes, "[l]ike the grain of sand in an oyster, Snowden...rubs and irritates, wounds the consciousness until, against the irritation of mortality, a story comes into existence, complete and exquisite like a pearl" (214). In other words, Snowden's secret has remained with the men and has continuously reminded them of the absurdity of human existence. As Camus explains, the absurd "challenges the world anew every second" and it is the task of the absurd man to persevere in the face of this constant awareness (54). By using dejd vu to illustrate the relevance of Snowden's secret to Yossarian and Singer so many years after his death, Heller shows his reader that the individual can live a full and rewarding life even after accepting the fact that "man is matter." This, to borrow Craig's term, is the pearl Heller presents to his reader. In A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, Joseph Heller uses dejd vu to fuse the structure of the novel to its central theme, the futility of human endeavor. Like Closing Time, A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man is, in itself, a form of dejd vu. In fact, to truly

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appreciate A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, one must be familiar enough with Heller's career to recognize the many themes and ideas Heller revisits in his final novel. With the elderly novelist Eugene Pota serving as a thinly-veiled stand in for Heller himself, A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man borrows images and ideas from Heller's entire career to depict an author unable to write a final novel. Towards the end of A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, Pota explains to his friend that "writing is about the only way I can define myself. I won't know what I'm doing with my life any longer if I'm not writing a book" (226). Pota's friend replies, "that's what comes with lasting so long. Gene. It's another one of the prices we have to pay for keeping alive" (226). Significantly, Pota "often appropriated as his own personal infirmity the concluding words of the unnameable voice in Samuel Beckett's 77ze Unnameable, T must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on'" (21). In other words, Pota finds himself stuck in the "vast and impenetrable silence" King David complains of in God Knows and feels he must write his way out of despair (GK 289). The tragedy of A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man is that Pota cannot write his novel. Early in A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, for instance, Pota considers using a bit of trivia he used in "an earlier novel, that Reno Nevada, and Spokane, Washington were both farther west than Los Angeles" (10). Although Pota suspects that "[n]o one might catch the repetition," the reader may recall Yossarian asks his son, "Michael, which is farther west—Reno, Nevada, or Los Angeles?" in Closing Time (Artist 10; CT 239). Giving up this idea, Pota contemplates writing a" political farce" until he realizes "he had already done that subject to smaller or larger extent in one earlier work or another" (17). Just as the idea reminds the reader of Good as Gold, Pota adds "that

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everything he thought of writing about he had already written about before at least once in exactly that same vein" (18). Dejd vu, then, has become a symptom of writer's block. Using dejd vu, the novel mimetically depicts Pota's failure by taking the form of the pages from the author's aborted novels as they pile up on his desk. After half a dozen false starts, Pota finally finds a workable idea and creates a cover page: A SEXUAL BIOGRAPHY OF MY WIFE A New Novel by Eugene Pota (51) However, Pota cannot write anything that seems worthwhile and abandons the idea. Forty pages later, after numerous attempts to write a Biblical novel reminiscent of Heller's God Knows, Pota returns to A Sexual Biography of My Wife, but inserts the term "great" before "New Novel" (93). Failing again, Pota attempts to write updated versions of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground, but finds these ideas just as barren. Removing the word "great" from the title, Pota picks up A Sexual Biography of My Wife another time before abandoning it in dejd vu fashion by aborting the novel at the title page (123). After a couple of additional false starts, the dejd vu effect of A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man intensifies and the title page appears with slight alterations on two consecutive pages (197-99). In the end, having started A Sexual Biography of My Wife half a dozen times, Pota gives up and "began to think seriously of writing the book" the reader is holding (233). A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, then, presents the reader with the result of the human desire to continue in face

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of inevitable failure. The reader's sense of dejd vu at Pota's thematic plundering of Heller's earlier work compounds the sense of dejd vu resulting from the frequent appearance of the title page for A Sexual Biography of My Wife. In the end, Heller achieves what Pota cannot, a final novel. Finally breaking out of the non-progressive dejd vu of failed human creativity, Heller leaves his readers with one last portrait of the absurd struggle against "the certainty of a crushing fate" (Camus 54). The novels of Joseph Heller, then, are not the poorly-structured and thematically unrelated works critics have accused the author of having written. Rather, Heller unifies his entire body of work with creative variations on the dejd vu structure he first employed in his first novel, Catch-22. By using repetitive images to reveal information, focus the reader's attention, and mimetically emphasize certain themes, Joseph Heller has proven himself to be both an innovative prose stylist as well as a remarkably consistent novelist. Invariably, the dejd vu structure leads the reader back to the same concern Heller expresses throughout his career, the individual's confrontation with the absurd.

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On the Postmodern Whether we call this shift to postmodernity a change of paradigm or plane or episteme, whether we see the postmodern as a moment, a movement, a project, a condition or a period, something important is happening. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hucheon ***

Something must have happened to me sometime. Bob Slocum, Something Happened ***

Just because you 're paranoid, Don V mean they 're not after you. Nirvana, "Territorial Pissings"

Given the semantic fluidity inherent to the nomenclature of postmodern theory, classifying a novelist as a "postmodern" writer often inspires some confusion. Since the task of defining Joseph Heller as a postmodern writer, a late modernist black humorist, a traditional picaresque novelist, a Jewish-American fabulist, or any number of other labels has confounded scholars for over four decades, any new attempt to place the novelist under the postmodern rubric necessarily requires a much longer treatment than this study can accommodate. However, the student of Joseph Heller's fiction will benefit from an examination of the novelist's use of certain postmodern conventions to further his existentially Absurd worldview. Although he saturates his fiction with such concerns as entropy, resistance to metanarratives, and self-reflexivity, Joseph Heller's most

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significant contribution to postmodern American fiction is his use of pastiche and paranoia to emphasize the existential themes he explores throughout his career.

Pastiche

In his seminal work of cultural criticism, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,

Fredric Jameson identifies pastiche as parody "without a

vocation...the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language" (17). Additionally, Jameson continues, pastiche "is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and or any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists" (17). In other words, pastiche is an imitation of an earlier artistic technique which ignores the original context of the style. For Linda Hutcheon, this amounts to "disregarding] the context of and continuum with the past" (90). However, in her vociferous disavowal of Jameson's assertion, Hutcheon argues that pastiche, or "postmodern parody," does not ignore "the context of the past representations it cites, but uses irony to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably separated from that past today" (90). Interestingly, neither Jameson nor Hutcheon provide adequate definitions for understanding Heller's use of pastiche. In fact, Heller's relationship to previous works of literature seems to exist in an area between postmodern pastiche and mere intertextual references. Although Joseph Heller's fiction have been read as traditional pastiches of works as diverse as Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Beckett's Trilogy, Kafka's The

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Trial The Inferno of Dante, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and numerous other canonical works, Heller does not parody his models. Neither does Heller use pastiche to acknowledge contemporary society's separation from the past. Rather, Heller draws on works by writers such as Kafka, Dante, and Mann in order to emphasize the ubiquity of mortality and absurdity throughout history and literature. Additionally, in A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, Heller uses pastiche as a means of expressing the futility of human endeavor. Heller's use of pastiche, then, is closer to the original meaning of the term, as an Anglicized version of the Italian pasticcio ("Pastiche," def. 1). According to the Oxford English

Dictionaiy,

literary pasticcio

may emerge as the collage-like

incorporation "of various pieces from different authors or sources" into a new work ("Pasticcio," def. lb). Unlike postmodern pastiche, pasticcio may or may not exist as a "professed imitation of the style of another" (def. lc). Furthermore, literary pasticcio may be "made up of fragments pieced together or copied with modification from an original" (def. lc). In other words, Heller's use of pastiche differs from his postmodern contemporaries by remaining closer to the etymological origins of the term as a form of artistic borrowing that extends beyond the mere stylistic imitation Jameson identifies. Chaplain Tappman, in the dramatization of Catch-22, begins a letter to his wife with "Dear wife. Someone must have been telling lies about me, for without having done anything wrong..." (173). Although the chaplain's letter is interrupted by the intrusion of the Major, the reader will recognize Heller's deliberate paraphrase of the opening line of Franz Kafka's The Trial: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning" (1). Heller's novel, while never alluding to Kafka as explicitly as the dramatization of Catch-22, uses

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pastiche to transpose elements of The Trial into the interrogation scenes of Chaplain Tappman in "The Cellar." Discussing the scene with Dale Gold in 1969, Heller explains: Kafka's The Trial was very much present. It's the idea of being charged with something and not knowing what it is, and being judged guilty and they'll tell him what he's guilty of once they find out what crime he's done and they're sure he must have committed some crime because everybody's committed some crime. (59) Clearly, Heller wants his reader to relate Chaplain Tappman's experience to that of Joseph K. For instance, the Kafkaesque presumption that the accusation of an individual's guilt sufficiently

proves that guilt permeates Chaplain

Tappman's

interrogation: "Why did you steal [the plum tomato] from Colonel Cathcart if you didn't want it?" "I didn't steal it from Colonel Cathcart!" "Then why are you so guilty, if you didn't steal it?" "I'm not guilty!" "Then why would we be questioning you if you weren't guilty?" (395) Reading this passage, one may recall Joseph K.'s conversation with the prison chaplain about his case: "...You are held to be guilty...Your guilt is supposed, for the present, at least, to have been proved." "But I am not guilty," said K.; "it's a mistake. And, if it comes to that, how can any man be called guilty? We are all

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simply men here, one as much as the other." "That is true," said the priest, "but that's how all guilty men talk." (210) In addition to thematic and linguistic transpositions, Chaplain Tappman's ordeal incorporates some of the details Joseph K. encounters. For instance, in The Trial, K. cannot identify the rank of the two officials arresting him and wonders why "[n]one of you has a uniform" whereas, in Catch-22, Tappman finds his interrogator's "lack of insignia disconcerting" (Kafka 11; C 22 395). By paraphrasing lines and passages from The Trial as well as by borrowing certain images from the novel, Joseph Heller imbues Catch-22 with the harrowing absurdity associated with Kafka's book. For Steven Potts, Heller's pastiche of The Trial during the interrogation of the chaplain in Catch-22 reveals that "[f]act is of no importance" in determining justice in an absurd world (AA 97). Potts continues, asserting that the chaplain's punishment "if and when it comes, will be as arbitrary as his guilt, very much like the guilt and punishment of Kafka's protagonist in The Trial" (AA 97). In other words, Heller's pastiche emphasizes the relevance of Kafka's concern with a random and absurd cosmos to contemporary American society. A more elaborate instance of pastiche in Heller's fiction can be found in Closing Time, where the author incorporates characters, settings, and themes from Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice and Dante Aligheiri's Inferno into his account of Yossarian's encounter with mortality. As David Craig observes, Heller's pastiche of such canonical texts in Closing Time "derive their force and vision from the proximity of death" (242). Early in the novel, after Yossarian has a meal with Patrick and Frances Beach, he notices a man, "plebian in appearance with a knapsack and a hiking pole" standing in front of the Frank Campbell Funeral Home (82). Later, during a conversation

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between Jerry Gaffney and Yossarian, the reader leams that the man Yossarian had seen was a "red-haired man with a walking stick and green rucksack on his back" (199). Not long afterward, as Yossarian discusses life and literature with his son at Rockefeller Center, the man reappears and, in dejd vu fashion, receives a more detailed description: [Yossarian] saw a redheaded man with a walking stick and a loose green rucksack...Yossarian had the idea that he had seen him before. The man had thin lips, orange lashes, a straight, sharp nose, and his face was of the fragile, milk-white complexion not uncommon among people of that hair color...he turned Yossarian's way with an arrogant air...Their eyes locked, and all at once Yossarian thought he had met him before, at the North Cemetary in Munich at the entrance to the mortuary chapel...This man

flaunted

a fuming

cigarette recklessly,

as though

equally

contemptuous of him and cancer...while Yossarian stared back at him...the man grinned brazenly, and Yossarian suffered an inward shudder... (234-35) The reader, along with Yossarian, realizes that this man is "the mysterious red-haired man whose presence and swift disappearance had been unsettling to Gustav Aschenbach" in Death in Venice (CT 234). The appearance of the redheaded man in Closing Time clearly echoes both the situation and the prose style found in Mann's novella: He was of medium height, thin, beardless, and strikingly snub-nosed; he belonged to the red-haired type and possessed its milky, freckled skin.. .he had the indigenous rucksack buckled on his back...In his right hand, slantwise to the ground, he held an iron-shod stick...and he stood there

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sharply peering up into space out of colourless, red-lashed eyes...the man had a bold and domineering, even a ruthless air, and his lips completed the picture by seeming to curl back... (4-5) Clearly, in Closing Time, Heller has appropriated both Mann's descriptive tone as well as one of the most memorable characters in Death in Venice. By placing the red-haired man in Closing Time, Joseph Heller encourages the reader to identify Yossarian with Gustave Aschenbach1. Heller strengthens the connection by allowing Yossarian to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Mann's protagonist. For instance, in addition to experiencing similar emotional reactions to the red-haired man, both Yossarian and Aschenbach immediately secure transportation away from the man, leaving in a limousine and a tram car, respectively. Later, when discussing the novella with his son, Yossarian explains to Michael, "I find myself identifying in selfpity with a fictional German with no humor or any other likable trait" because, like Aschenbach, he finds himself living devoid of the passion he needs to appreciate life (243). As David Craig observes, the "unknown red-headed man serves Heller as he did Mann, occasioning a proleptic version of the story that follows" (243). In other words, just as the redheaded man personifies death for Aschenbach in Mann's novella, his frequent reappearances in Closing Time serve to remind Yossarian of his imminent death. Since, as Craig asserts, "the truth of mortality can be understood only when death is proximate," Heller literally places death within sight of Yossarian in order to force him to examine his life (Craig 243). Yossarian, at this point, realizes that "I make money from Milo, whom I don't care for and condemn" (CT 243). Perceiving that the authentic

1

In Closing Time, Aschenbach's first name is spelled "Gustav," but in the Lowe-Porter translation of Death in Venice cited above, Aschenbach spells his name "Gustave."

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lifestyle he embraced in Catch-22 has metamorphosed into the inauthentic existence typified by Bob Slocum, Yossarian vows to devote his remaining time on earth to helping those people he cares about. Embarking on his "Rhine Journey," Yossarian abandons Aschenbach's passionless life and rejects Milo's corporatism by improving the lives of his son, his girlfriend, and Chaplain Tappman. Thus, Heller's pastiche of Mann's novella helps reacquaint Yossarian with his existentially authentic beliefs. A second example of pastiche in Closing Time is the appearance of Dante's Inferno in New York City's Port Authority Bus Terminal. In Closing Time, Dante's fictionalized Virgil becomes a former New York City police officer named McBride. Leading Yossarian into the bowels of the terminal, McBride pauses to observe a sign reading "EMERGENCY ENTERANCE/KEEP OUT/VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT," a twentieth-century version of Dante's "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrante" (CT 98; Inf. 3. 9). McBride, reminiscent of the good-natured Virgil, "had never been unable to outgrow the sympathy he suffered for every type of victim he encountered" and tries to inform Yossarian of the terrible inhumanity causing so much pain in the world (93). Continuing their conversation about social ills, McBride and Yossarian descend a staircase and experience a terrible aural assault: Yossarian froze when he heard the noise begin. It was an animal, the heaving ire of something live, the ominous burring of some dangerous beast disturbed, a rumble welling in smoldering stages into an elongated snarling. Next came growling, guttural and deadly, and an agitated shudder of awakened power, and the movement of veering limbs striding

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about underneath where he could not see. Then a second animal joined in; perhaps there were three. (101) Although Steven Potts suggests that the noises are made by Cerberus, the guard of the underworld, the three bestial voices Yossarian hears are more suggestive of the leopard, lion and she-wolf Dante encounters in the woods. As Yossarian continues into the depths of Heller's modem day Inferno, he encounters Irvin Faust, William Saroyan, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens (344). Similarly, Dante encounters Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid as he first enters Hell (4.73-75). Not long afterward, Yossarian sees Jerzy Kosinski, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, and Sylvia Plath in "the populous zone of the suicides," an echo of Dante's forest of suicides (CT 344). Steeplechase Park, Coney Island's famous boardwalk amusement park, in Closing Time becomes a modem-day Dis, sandwiched between the bus terminal above and an infernal lake of ice, a dark forest, a desert of scorching sand, and rivers of boiling blood and pitch below. Presiding over Heller's Inferno is George C. Tilyou, the entrepreneur behind the park. Having "made more money than he ever could spend," Tilyou represents the ruthless capitalist spirit Heller identifies as polemical to the authentic lifestyle he promotes throughout his oeuvre (111). In fact, Tilyou's two closest cronies, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, complete an unholy capitalist triumvirate at the center of Heller's Hell. As Yossarian enters the infernal Steeplechase Park, he finds "himself inside a brilliantly illuminated hallway of magic mirrors" (342). As David Craig observes:

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Tilyou's funhouse mirrors do not distort Yossarian's image, but rather reveal his disfigured

humanity...he has become the sum of his

choices...the willing, well-paid employee of M & ME & A enterprises, a man without qualities...he has cashed in on the self-deceptive greed that capitalism inspires. (247) Significantly, as Yossarian peers into the mirrors he realizes that "[h]is authentic appearance, his objective structure, was no longer absolute. He had to wonder what he truly looked like" (342). Having descended into the pits of Hell, Yossarian discovers that he has become an inauthentic individual by straying from the World War Two era Yossarian, a bright youth "with a blooming outlook, an optimistic figure" (343). Recognizing that he has become one of the capitalist purveyors of human suffering, Yossarian understands that he, in his present state, belongs in Hell alongside Tilyou, Morgan, and Rockefeller. Swooning at the realization, Yossarian collapses and awakes in the hospital. During his convalescence, Yossarian considers his corporate ties and, when offered a great deal of money, he replies "I don't want any of it" (364). Thus, Heller's pastiche of the Inferno follows Dante's model of "constructing...a man whose inner drives and desires are revealed" to stray from the right path as he travels through Hell (Craig 248). By doing so, Heller allows Yossarian to understand the evil of his inauthentic behavior and encourages the reader to follow him back to the right path, the existential authenticity he embraces in Catch-22. Heller's use of pastiche in A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man resembles the way in which dejd vu comes to represent the futility of Eugene Pota's creative drive. Since Pota equates writing with "keeping alive" and maintaining one's identity, the

84

reader understands that, for the elderly novelist, writer's block is tantamount to dying (226). However, like Yossarian before him, Pota is "determined to live forever or die in the attempt" (C 22 38). A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, then, records Pota's desperate attempt to overcome writer's block and write one final novel to give meaning to his life. When the reader first meets Pota, the author has just abandoned a novel where Samuel Clemens's Tom Sawyer and Aunt Polly have been transposed into modem-day New York City. Giving that up, Pota explores the possibilities of writing novels about Zeus and Hera, Isaac and Abraham, and scores of other Greek and Christian figures before attempting to write a novel about a man named Greg Sanders, Kafka's Gregor Samsa. The novel begins as a pastiche of The Metamorphosis and The Trial: Someone must have been telling grave lies about him, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, Greg Sanders (Pota wrote) awoke from an uneasy sleep to find himself transformed into a sizable brown bug carting around something of a humpbacked hard shell on top of him... (96) Upon reading this, one recalls both the aforementioned opening line of The Trial as well as Kafka's opening to The Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one fine morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" (M 89). Discouraged by his lack of originality, Pota begins a new book: Call me Gene. I am a mean Gene...spiteful...malevolent and sneaky too. I gorge myself on spleen. I keep my real self hidden, dwell underground, where hardly anyone can spy me. I'm not always at my best, my constitution is

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not always what it should be, but that doesn't disturb me and I don't care. I don't see a doctor. When I'm not feeling my best, I sometimes injure others, do wicked things. I assert my bad nature in different sly and spiteful ways. (110) Clearly Pota's newest attempt at writing only echoes the beginning of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From The Underground: "I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been" (3). Unable to write anything original, Eugene Pota, as Frederic Jameson would argue, resorts to pastiche. However, rather than simply retell canonical stories, Heller uses Pota's pastiche to emphasize the writer's struggle to create an authentic piece of work and, by extension, breathe new life into his elderly body. Tellingly, both Kafka and Dostoyevsky have been singled out by Albert Camus as writers who have explored the Absurd in their fiction. It comes as no surprise, then, that Heller's protagonist, in his absurd struggle to create and live authentically, first turns to such writers for inspiration before finally triumphing and writing an original work, A Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man.

They Really Are Trying to Kill Yossarian: Paranoia in Heller's Fiction

D. C. Dougherty, in an essay exploring paranoia in Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, and Joseph Heller, observes:

86

The purpose of such "paranoid fictions" is not...to represent aberrant psychological states but to explore the metaphoric implications of the condition. For these writers paranoia is an especially effective metaphor for their characters' sense of powerlessness and for the consequent notion that in an apparently random universe one way individual human beings can assert their own meaning or significance is to identify a nemesis, thereby justifying the assumptions that one's life seems to be a "plot" and that whatever happens is the result of a definable cause. (70) Clearly, Dougherty identifies paranoia as a symptom of life in a seemingly pointless, absurd cosmos. In Heller's fiction, paranoia serves to warn both the protagonist and the reader of the very real danger caused by the self-interested bureaucracies imposing order on the world. Revealing paranoia as the inevitable, Heller urges the reader to follow his characters in an absurd revolt against the accepted world. In this way, Heller's exploitation of paranoia differs a great deal from the treatment the condition receives in the work of such major postmodern American writers as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. According to John A. McClure, Pynchon and DeLillo depict characters who, unlike those in Heller's fiction: give up the struggle because they are not getting anywhere, because they cannot go on, because the horizons of conspiracy have begun to seem coterminous with those of organized social life itself, and because, in spite of the fact, they have caught a glimpse of zones, within the larger "culture of conspiracy," where conspiracy, ever a presence, does not define existence. (260-61)

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Although Dougherty asserts that, among recent major American authors, "Heller comes closest to a traditional, clinical application of [paranoia]," most critics associate Pynchon with the concept (70). Therefore, as "the quintessential postmodern author" of counterconspiracy fiction, Pynchon serves as an excellent contrast to Joseph Heller for anyone exploring the use of paranoia in the latter's fiction (Pettman 261). A comparative study of Heller's Catch-22 and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, then, reveals Heller's unique use of one of postmodernism's dominant themes.2 In The Ciying of Lot 49, as Oedipa Maas has been asked to serve as executrix of Pierce Inverarity's estate and travels to the fictional Califomian town of San Narciso in order to meet with lawyers and sort out Inverarity's affairs. While at a local bar, Oedipa receives a bland letter from her husband, the envelope of which seems to have been marred by a typographical error at the post office: "REPORT ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POTS MASTER" (33). Not long afterwards, Oedipa goes to the lavatory and sees a neatly-carved graffito on a toilet stall: "Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7391, L.A." (38). A strange symbol accompanies the message:

Tr
2

1 have selected Catch-22 and The Crying of Lot 49 for this study because they remain their respective author's most assigned texts. One should note that both Pynchon and Heller treat paranoia extensively throughout their oeuvres.

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additional details that seem to indicate the existence of a global conspiracy somehow related to WASTE. For instance, after learning of Inverarity's enthusiastic philatelism, Oedipa finds a stamp in his collection containing the same muted postal horn she had seen scrawled on the lavatory wall. Unfortunately, as Oedipa accumulates information that seems to support the existence of a worldwide organization called the Tristero, she also collects evidence that apparently disproves the existence of the same organization. Incessantly escalating in scope, Oedipa's investigation of the Tristero grows to include Pierce Inverarity, Jacobean revenge drama, San Narciso County, the Yoyodyne Corporation, and her own husband and psychotherapist. Unable to definitively answer her questions, Oedipa must resign herself to a terrifying state of uncertainty: Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (150-51) As Oedipa collects "evidence that might lead towards a synthesis [of the information], more and contradictory evidence turns up to undermine or contradict any reasonable conclusion" (Dougherty 72). As a result, Oedipa must resort to paranoia in order to explain her life in a rational and acceptable manner. Dougherty adds: In his epistemological approach to the metaphor, then, Pynchon treats paranoia as a 'desperate rationality' or an instance that, if events themselves will not make sense, one can impose logic and consistency on

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them by transforming their randomness into the consequence of the will of some nemesis. (72) In a sense, paranoia becomes a surrogate for religious faith in an absurd world. Seren Kierkegaard, for instance, envisions a God so unimaginably vast and distant that the individual cannot possibly comprehend the deity. The philosopher, in a leap of faith away from the anxiety of agnostic doubt, encourages the individual to believe in this unknowable God without any definitive evidence of His existence. Similarly, despite her doubts, Oedipa Maas considers accepting the existence of the Tristero as a means of quashing the anxiety of not understanding the world around her. In this way, paranoia is a form of mauvais foi for an individual confronting the absurd. In other words, paranoia allows the individual to deny his or her personal responsibility by placing the blame on an unseen, entirely hypothetical form of authority. Joseph Heller, unlike Thomas Pynchon, uses paranoia to encourage a rejection of the System. Like many of the serious themes treated in Catch-22, paranoia initially seems comical. The reader will recall an early conversation between Clevinger and Yossarian: "Who specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?" "Every one of them," Yossarian told him. "Every one of whom?" "Every one of whom do you think?" "I haven't any idea." "Then how do you know they aren't?" (26) Like Pynchon and countless other writers concerned with paranoia and conspiracy theory, Heller depicts an individual seemingly convinced that there is plot bent on his

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destruction. The humor, of course, resides in the fact that the reader knows that the "they" Yossarian refers to are, in fact, the same German soldiers the bombardier routinely bombs from above. However, Yossarian's fear of "they" soon assumes a much darker tone: There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. There was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, for example, and they were all out to kill him.. .There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell...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. (181 -82)3 As David Seed observes, "Yossarian imagines himself at the focus of a massive conspiracy in a comically exaggerated form of paranoia which might seem ludicrous but which is repeatedly being confirmed by the facts" (28). In other words, Yossarian's paranoia amounts to a fear of death and "they" has become a term for any force which could cause his mortality. Paranoia, then, represents the inevitable in Heller's fiction. At the end of Catch-22, Yossarian realizes that "If I were to give up my life now, it wouldn't be for my country. It would be for Cathcart and Kom" (456). Although Yossarian recognizes that he will die as a result of some physical ailment if he is not killed by a human enemy first, the bombardier rejects the notion of sacrificing his life for 3

It is interesting to note that Closing Time deals with the death of Yossarian's generation at the hands of the diseases Yossarian fears in Catch-22. For a more detailed consideration of Closing Time's treatment of these issues, see David Craig's excellent section on Kilroy in Tilting Towards Mortality.

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his military superiors. In a sense, this is Camus's revolt. By keeping human mortality— the "certainty of a crushing fate"—at the forefront of his consciousness, Yossarian accepts the inevitability of mortality "without the resignation that ought to accompany it" (Camus 54). For Yossarian, "They" may be after him, but he plans on living forever or dying in the attempt.

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Afterword In terms reminiscent of Albert Camus's concept of revolt, David Craig asserts that Joseph Heller "never accepts death...his novels virtually shriek about its inevitability, but death remains an opponent to be grappled with, even though it cannot be overcome. To accept one's death would be tantamount to acknowledging the rightness of a bully's conquest" (252). Joseph Heller, perhaps more than any other major postmodern American writer, presents his reader with a body of work consistent with Camus's philosophical outlook. Debunking the authority of institutions such as patriotism, the American Dream, Judeo-Christian religion, and the historical record, Heller's fiction reflects

the

postmodern

condition

Lyotard

defines

as

"incredulity

towards

metanarratives" (72). However, rather than wallow in a state of postmodern doubt, Heller's protagonists, as David Craig observes, uncover the existence of malevolent forces which exploit humanity's tendency to accept such metanarratives. Enlisting the reader's sympathy, Heller's protagonists struggle to survive in the presence of these malignant powers. By depicting both the heroic revolt against the System by characters such as Yossarian and the tragic results of an existentially inauthentic assimilation into the System by characters such as Bob Slocum, Heller promotes a distinctly absurdist morality. In order to reinforce the existential thrust of his worldview, Joseph Heller structures his novels around the concept of dejd vu. As his reader progresses through Heller's often labyrinthine texts, the author deliberately returns to certain pivotal episodes in order to focus the reader's attention on the themes they represent. Just as the spotlight

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of Catch-22 intensifies to reveal Snowden's horrifying secret over the course of the narrative, each of Heller's subsequent novels relies on the gradual expansion of certain scenes to emphasize the omnipresence of mortality and the futility of human life. Given the thematic prominence of the individual's struggle against the absurdity of existence and against institutions such as the military or multinational corporations which exploit the human desire for certainty, the dejd vu effect in Heller's fiction ensures that the reader will consider the impact an awareness of mortality and absurdity exerts on one's existence in the shadow of such forces. Classifying Joseph Heller as a postmodernist has led some critics to consider the author's tendency towards literary pastiche and his treatment of paranoia. Although Heller certainly incorporates earlier texts into his fiction, his literary borrowing is not quite the form of pastiche Frederic Jameson identifies as central to postmodern creation, nor is it merely an empty echoing of previous work. Instead, Heller's pastiche transcends Jameson's narrow definition and functions as a variety of the broader concept originally called pasticcio. By borrowing famous literary characters, situations, and styles which deal with absurdity, mortality, and futility, Heller draws his reader's attention to the ubiquity of these themes throughout literary history and emphasizes their relevance to the individual today. Finally, Heller reveals that the paranoia so prevalent in the postmodern world is little more than a manifestation of the very human fear of mortality. Rather than suggest the existence of the massive conspiracies which characterize the fiction of such postmodern writers as Thomas Pynchon, Heller depicts a world where delusions of persecution would be a way to avoid the harrowing secret in Snowden's entrails: that man is nothing more than dying matter. Although the paranoia found in Pynchon's fiction may

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be neurotic, it does provide a reason for suffering by attributing the responsibility to some conspiratorial "they." Heller's characters, on the other hand, cannot blame a conspiracy for human suffering; death comes to everyone: "[s]ooner or later [God] murders us all, doesn't He, and back we go to the dust from which we came" (GK 241). Life, then, is the individual's futile struggle against mortality, a fight so consuming that it leaves no room for delusory neuroses. Thus, as death is inevitable and Yossarian's fear of mortality is considered to be paranoid behavior, paranoia must be the human being's fear of the inevitable, Sartre's existential nausea. Although some influential critics dismiss Catch-22 as a Period Piece, professors, students, businesspeople, retirees, and individuals from all other walks of life continue to read the novel. With a popular Mike Nichols film version spinning in DVD players around the world, frequent appearances on high school and university syllabi, and an entry in the dictionary, Catch-22 has become a cultural icon. Unfortunately, as a result of the novel's massive sales and its embodiment of the countercultural Zeitgeist of the 1960s, Heller's subsequent fiction has been unfavorably compared to Catch-22 as weak aftershocks to a literary one hit wonder. By dismissing Heller's career after the publication of his first novel, readers have done a great disservice to one of America's most famous authors. Rather than failed attempts to recapture the zany tone of Catch-22, each of Heller's succeeding novels expand on the existential questions the author probes in his famous debut. Even without taking the high literary quality of Heller's later novels into consideration, the six novels Heller published after 1961 provide valuable insights into one of America's most important works of literature, Catch-22. If for no other

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reason, Heller's entire career deserves greater critical attention as a way to enhance our understanding of the human condition in contemporary America.

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Works Cited Adam, Robert M. "History is a Bust." Rev. of Picture This, by Joseph Heller. New York Times. 11 Sept. 1988, late ed., sec 7:9+. Aligheiri, Dante. The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Robert Pinsky. Bilingual ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994. Balliet, Whitney. Rev. of Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. The New Yorker 9 Dec. 1961: 14748. Bergson, Henri. Laughter; An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesly Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: The Macmillon Co., 1911. Beatty, Jack. Rev. of Good as Gold, by Joseph Heller. Nagel, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller 163-67. Berryman, Charles. Decade of Novels, Fiction of the 1970s: Form and Challenge. Troy: Whitson Publishing Company, 1990. Bloom, Harold, ed. Joseph Heller's Catch-22. New York: Chelsea House, 2001. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus.Trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage, 1991. Castelli. Jim. "'Catch-22' and the New Hero." The Catholic World 211 (1970): 199-202. Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller's Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. Denniston, Constance. "'Catch-22': A Romance-Parody." Kiley and McDonald 51-57. Doskow, Minna. "The Night Journey in 'Catch-22.'" Twentieth Century Literature 12 (1967): 186-193. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From the Underground. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1994. Dougherty, D. C. "Nemeses and MacGuffins: Paranoia as Focal Metaphor in Stanley Elkin, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon." Review of Contemporary Fiction 15.2 (1995): 70-78. Epstein, Joseph. "Joseph Heller's Milk Train: Nothing More to Express." Rev. of Something Happened, by Joseph Heller. Nagel, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller 97-101.

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Esslin, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. Garden City: Doubleday, 1961. Heller, Joseph. A Portrait of An Artist as an Old Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. —. Catch-22. New York: Scribner, 1996. —• Catch-22: A Dramatization. New York: Delta, 1973 —. Closing Time. New York: Scribner, 1994. —. God Knows. New York: Scribner, 1984. —. Good as Gold. New York: Pocket Books, 1980. —. Interview with Dale Gold. Sorkin, 56-60. —. Interview with George Plimpton. Sorkin, 105-17. —. Picture This. New York: Scribner, 1988. —. Something Happened. New York: Scribner, 1997. Hicks, Granville. "Medals for Madness." Rev. of Catch-22. by Joseph Heller. Nagel, Critical Essays on Catch-22 11-12. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Kafka, Franz. "The Metamorphosis." The Complete Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schoken, 1995. 89-139.

—. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1992. Kennard, Jean. "Joseph Heller: At War With Absurdity." Mosaic 4.3 (1971): 75-87. Kiley, Frederick and Walter McDonald, eds. A 'Catch-22' Casebook. Ed. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973 "Last Laugh." Anonymous Introduction. Connoisseur. 8 Oct. 1988: 128.

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LeClair, Thomas. "Joseph Heller, Something Happened, and the Art of Excess." Studies in American Fiction 9(1981): 245-60. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge." Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hucheon. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. 7190. Mann, Thomas. "Death in Venice." Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage, 1989. 3-73. McClure, John A. "Pynchon, DeLillo, and the Conventional Counterconspiracy Narrative." Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ed. Peter Knight. New York: New York UP, 2002. 255-73. Mellard, James M. "'Catch-22': Dejd vu and the labyrinth of Memory." Bucknell Review 16.2(1966): 29-44. —. "Something Happened: The Imagenary, The Symbolic, and the Discourse of the Family." Nagel, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller 138-155. Michaels, Leonard. "Bruce Gold's American Experience." Rev. of Good as Gold, by Joseph Heller. Nagel, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. 167-172. Merivale, Patricia. '"One Endless Round': Something Happened and the Purgatorial Novel." English Studies in Canada 11.4 (1985): 438-449. Miller, Wayne C. "Ethnic Identity as Moral Focus: A Reading of Joseph Heller's Good as Gold. " Nagel, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller 183-95. Milne, Victor J. "Heller's 'Bologniad': A Theological Perspective on 'Catch-22.'" Critique 12.2 (1970): 50-69. Monk, Donald. "An Experiment in Therapy: A Study of'Catch-22.'" Kiley and McDonald 212-220. Nagel, James, ed. Critical Essays on Catch-22. Encino: Dickenson Publishing Company, 1972. —, ed. Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1984. "Pasticcio." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. "Pastiche." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

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Pettman, Dominic. "Thomas Pynchon." Postmodernism: The Key Figures. Ed. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli. Maiden (MA): Blackwell, 2002. 261-66. Pinsker, Sanford. "Once More Into the Breach: Joseph Heller Gives Catch-22 a Second Act." Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts 50 (2000):28-39. Potts, Steven W. Catch-22: Antiheroic Antinovel. Boston: Twayne, 1989. —• From Here to Absurdity: The Moral Battlefields of Joseph Heller. San Bernardino: The Borgo Press, 1995. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Perennial, 1999. Richler, Mordecai. "He Who Laughs Last." Rev. of God Knows, by Joseph Heller. New York Times. 23 Sept. 1984, late ed., sec. 7:1+. Richter, David H. Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1974. Ritter, Jesse. "Fearful Comedy: 'Catch-22' as Avatar of the Social Surrealist Novel." Kiley and McDonald 73-86. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1965. Ruderman, Judith. Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Smith, Roger H. Rev. of Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Daedalus 92 (1963): 155-65. Sorkin_Adam J., ed. Conversations With Joseph Heller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. Stem, Richard G. "Bombers Away." Rev. of Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Nagel, Critical Essays on Catch-22 13. Strehle, Susan. '"A Permanent Game of Excuses': Determinism in Heller's Something Happened."" Modem Fiction Studies 24 (1978-79): 550-56.

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Tucker, Lindsey. "Entropy and Information Theory in Heller's Something Happened."" Contemporary Literature 25.3 (1984): 323-340. Villon, Francois. "Ballade des dames de temps jadis" L'Encyclopedie de L'Agora. 23 May 2003 . Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Rev. of Something Happened. Nagel, Critical Essays on Joseph Heller 93-97. Wain, John. "A New Novel About Old Troubles." The Critical Quarterly. 5 (1965): 16873. Woodson, Jon. A Study of Joseph Heller's Catch-22: Going Around Twice. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

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