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


Good Sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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


Possible Source:

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

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


Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties

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


                 Nationality:  American 


                 To try to relate the social atmosphere of the early sixties to the key novels of the period would seem to be
                 a thankless task. We all know that there is no easy correspondence between the arts and society, and that
                 all due allowance must be made for individual genius working out its own salvation. Moreover, since
                 books like The Sot-Weed Factor, Catch-22, and V. are long and complex, they were also long in
                 gestating; it's difficult to say in what sense they belong to their moment of publication. But the cultural
                 climate of the period was also ... long in gestating, and the solitary labors of these very writers were surely
                 among the points of gestation. The new sensibility of the sixties was unusually pervasive; in retrospect we
                 can see how it touched every corner of our culture, any one of which, examined closely, helps illuminate
                 the general ferment, the movement of change. Without abridging the distinctive claims of individual genius
                 we can't help but notice a similarity of purpose and form, a common breakthrough, in many of the new
                 novels. This in turn was followed by a loss of verve and a diminution of force among several of the older
                 writers, as the cultural center seemed to make one of its periodic (and rather cruel) shifts. (p. 96) 
                 Fictional characters in the fifties can still subject life to a degree of personal control, can grow and change
                 within the limits of their personality. But the zany, two-dimensional characters in Vonnegut, Barth,
                 Pynchon, and Heller declare not simply their authors' departure from realism but also their brooding sense
                 that life is increasingly controlled by impersonal forces. For the realist of the fifties character is destiny; for
                 the comic-apocalyptic writer destiny turns character into a joke. For the fifties writer history is remote and
                 irrelevant compared to private people and their minute concerns; for the sixties writer history is absurd
                 but it can kill you. Books like Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 do not slowly gravitate toward death
                 like straightforward novels with unhappy endings. Because of their peculiar structurein which everything
                 is foreshadowed, everything happens at oncethey are drenched in death on all sides, like an epidemic
                 that breaks out everywhere at the same time. Thanks to the time scheme of Heller's book, characters seem
                 perpetually a-dying and reappearingquite a jokeso that we're shocked when they finally do disappear,
                 one by one, each with his own mock individuality, each to his utterly depersonalizing fate. And the Army
                 stands for fate or necessity itself; it's a machine not for fighting or killing but solely for devouring its own. 
                 Contradicting this pessimism, however, which sees individual life as manipulated and controlled from
                 without, is the high degree of artistic power and license that goes into accomplishing this effect. If the sense
                 of impotence and fatality in these novels expresses one side of the sensibility of the sixties, their creative
                 exuberance and originality points to another; something that's also crucial to the radicalism of the period,
                 the belief that old molds can be broken and recast, a sense that reality can be reshaped by the creative
                 will. In their inventiveness and plasticity these books are the fictional equivalent of utopian thinking. This is
                 why we must distinguish between verbal black humorists, such as Terry Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman,
                 and even Philip Roth, whose basic unit is the sick joke or the stand-up monologue, and what I would call
                  structural black humorists, such as Heller, Pynchon, and Vonnegut. The former take apart the well-made
                 novel and substitute nothing but the absurdist joke, the formless tirade, the cry in the dark; the latter tend
                 toward over-articulated forms, insanely comprehensive plots (the paradox that is more than verbal, that
                 seems inherent in the nature of things). Both kinds of black humorists are making an intense assertion of
                 selfthe former directly, the latter in vast structures of self-projectionthat flies in the face of the prevailing
                 depersonalization and external control. (pp. 99-100) 
                 In the pages that follow I'd like to look more closely at three representative black humor novels of the
                 early sixties, Mother Night, Catch-22, and The Crying of Lot 49. These books are neither antiquarian
                 nor excessively literary; in a complex way they develop a striking and unusual sense of history that in the
                 end tells us less about history than about the cultural tone of the period when they were written. Vonnegut
                 and Heller return to World War II not for purposes of historical recreation, not simply because it was their
                 own great formative experience, and certainly not to provide the vicarious thrills of the conventional war
                 novel. Rather, it's because the unsolved moral enigma of that period and that experience most closely
                 expresses the conundrum of contemporary life fifteen years later. Earlier writers had been able to approach
                 World War II with a certain moral simplicity; here after all was a just war if there ever was one. But
                 after fifteen more years of continuous cold war and the shadow of thermonuclear war, all war seemed
                 morally ambiguous if not outright insane; in the prolonged state of siege the whole culture seemed edged
                 with insanity. With that special prescience that novelists sometimes have, Catch-22, though published in
                 1961, anticipates the moral nausea of the Vietnam war, even famously anticipates the flight of deserters to
                 neutral Sweden. Similarly Vonnegut in Mother Night chooses a morally ambiguous double agent as his
                  hero, just as he writes about the problematic Allied bombing of Dresden rather than a Nazi atrocity in
                 Slaughterhouse-Five. 
                 Like Pynchon, but in a different way, both Vonnegut and Heller are interested in international intrigue; they
                 marvel at the zany and unpredictable personal element at work or play within the lumbering forces of
                 history. Heller's Milo Minderbinder is a satire not simply on the American capitalist entrepreneur but also
                 on the international wheeler-dealer, whose amoral machinations, so hilarious at first, become increasingly
                 somber, ugly, and deadlylike so much else in the bookso that we readers become implicated in our
                 own earlier laughter. Yet Milo is particularly close to the book's hero, Yossarian: the two understand each
                 other. They share an ethic of self-interest that in Yossarian comes close to providing the book's moral: as
                 in Celine, it's all a crock, look out for Number One. In the figure of Milo the book and its protagonist
                 confront their seamy underside, a hideous caricature of their own values. (pp. 106-07) 
                 I said earlier that characters in black humor novels tend to be cartoon-like and two-dimensional, without
                 the capacity to grow or change. To this we must add the qualification that the protagonist is usually
                 different: he doesn't completely belong to this mode of reality or system of representation. As Richard
                 Poirier has suggested apropos of Pynchon, the central character of these novels often moves on a different
                 plane: he shows at least the capacity to become a fuller, more sentient human being, a character in a
                 realistic novel. In the first part of the book the hero is typically enmeshed in a system of comic repetition:
                 tics of speech and behavior, entanglements of plot, all the routines of verbal black humor, life imitating
                 vaudeville. Heller, for example, like Dickens, knows how to make his own comic technique approximate
                 poignant human realities. And as the comedy in Catch-22 darkens, the system of dehumanization becomes
                 clearer, and the central character becomes increasingly isolated in his impulse to challenge and step outside
                 it. 
                 In Yossarian Heller introduces a new figure into postwar American fiction, descended from the schlemiel
                 of the Jewish novel but finally an inversion of that passive and unhappy figure. Heller tells us he's an
                 Assyrian, but only because (as he said to an interviewer) I wanted to get an extinct culture.... [M]y
                 purpose in doing so was to get an outsider, a man who was intrinsically an outsider. The typical schlemiel
                 is certainly no hero, but like Yossarian has a real instinct for survival. In earlier days Yossarian had really
                 tried to bomb the targets, as he was supposed to do. Now his only goal is to avoid flak, to keep alive.
                  Yossarian was the best man in the group at evasive action. This Yossarian is concerned only with saving
                 his skin, obsessed by the things that threaten his life. There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep
                 track of. And Heller gives us a wonderful catalogue of them, from Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo (they all
                 wanted him dead) to all the insane and fanatical people in his own army (they wanted to kill him, too) to
                 all the organs of his body, with their arsenal of fatal diseases: 
                      There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the
                      stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases
                      of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There
                      were even diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating
                      away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and
                      healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it
                      took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did.
                 Yossarian seems perilously close to the Sterling Hayden character in Dr. Strangelove, the general who
                 fears that women are sapping his vital bodily fluids. The insanity of the system, in this case the army, breeds
                 a defensive counter-insanity, a mentality of organized survival that mirrors the whole system of rationalized
                 human waste and devaluation. The self itself becomes an army, a totalitarian body politic, demanding total
                 vigilance against the threat of betrayal and insurrection. Each individual organ, each cell, becomes an
                 object of paranoid anxiety. I remember as a child being afraid I might forget to breathe, holding my breath
                 as long as I could, to be reassured it would still happen without me. Yossarian too has the childish wish
                 to assert the sort of outside control that he himself feels gripped by. 
                 The pattern of Catch-22 is similar to that of Mother Night: a world gone mad, a protagonist caught up in
                 the madness, who eventually steps outside it in a slightly mad way. The Sweden to which Yossarian flees
                 at the end of the book is something of a pipe dream, a pure elsewhere. Yossarian's friend Orr has made it
                 there (from the Mediterranean in a rowboat!), but Orr is Yossarian's opposite, utterly at home in the
                 world, as idiotically free of anxiety as Yossarian is dominated by it. Orr is the unkillable imp, the
                 irrepressible innocent, a likeable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep
                 him in a low income group all his life. Orr is the gentile Crusoe to Yossarian's Jewish neurotic; along with
                 the diabolical Milo they form a spectrum of the possibilities of survival in extreme situations, which include
                 not only wartime but just about all of modern life, indeed the whole human condition, for which the war is
                 ultimately a metaphor. 
                 But Yossarian goes through a second change before the book ends: he becomes a troublemaker and,
                 worse still, the unwilling keeper of the book's conscience, just as Nately's whore becomes the figure of
                 Nemesis, the haunting, surreal spirit of female revenge for the callous inhumanity of a man-made world.
                 The earlier Yossarian saw through the no-win bind of Catch-22 and set out monomaniacally to survive.
                 But as each of the others goes separately, uncomplainingly, to his predictable fate, Yossarian becomes
                 more and more the somber registrar of their deaths and exits: 
                      Nately's whore was on his mind, as were Kraft and Orr and Nately and Dunbar, and Kid
                      Sampson and McWatt, and all the poor and stupid and diseased people he had seen in Italy,
                      Egypt and North Africa and knew about in other areas of the world, and Snowden and
                      Nately's whore's kid sister were on his conscience, too.
                 Yossarian has come willy-nilly to brood about more than his own inner organs. Other people have become
                 a desperate reality to him, and with it has come a sense of their common fate, their mutual essence. The
                 secret of Snowden, who spills his guts in the tail of a plane, is revealed to Yossarian alone: 
                      His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty,
                      all right, he thought bitterly as he staredliver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the
                      stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes....
                      He wondered how in the world to begin to save him.
                       I'm cold, Snowden whispered. I'm cold.
                       There, there, Yossarian mumbled in a voice too low to be heard. There, there.
                      Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in
                      his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll
                      fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The
                      spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
                 Impelled perhaps by the unconscious Jewish identification, Heller paraphrases the famous humanizing
                 speech of Shylock (If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us,
                 do we not die?). But the final allusion to Lear is breathtaking: an impertinence to do it, the height of
                 chutzpah to bring it off. The scene must be read as a whole to see how well it worksit's the penultimate
                 moment of the bookbut even the delicate texture of these pages of prose would be nothing had not the
                  secret of Snowden been such an important leitmotif throughout the book. (Snowden's death had taken
                 place before the book opened, but it's fully remembered and decoded as he lies in the hospital in the
                 next-to-last chapter, as if its meaning, which underlies the whole book, had taken that long to be reduced
                 to its terrifying simplicity and finality.) The somber tone of this passagedespite the necessary farcical
                 touch of Yossarian's dislike of stewed tomatoesis something that's not available to verbal black humor,
                 which aims for wild incongruities at every turn, which is more at home with disgust and humiliation and
                 absurdity than with the simple terror of the world as it is; such a poignant effect requires a more fully human
                 respondent, which Yossarian has by now become. Heller's structural use of the secret of Snowden
                 makes it a time bomb of ineluctable tragic fact ticking away beneath the book's surface of farce and
                 rollicking insanity; except that the secret unfolds its revelations gradually, alongside the story, until it finally
                 becomes the story. 
                 When I first read Catch-22 I felt strongly that except for the Snowden chapter the book's final shift in tone
                 in the last seventy-five pages didn't work, that after doing an amazing comic adaptation of Kafka and
                 Dostoevsky most of the way, Heller unaccountably switched to imitating them directly in the finale, a
                 contest he couldn't win. Rereading the book I can see why I felt that waywe miss the sheer gratuitous
                 pleasure of the comedybut I also see how much the somber and even ugly side was present from the
                 beginning and how gradually the book modulates into it: for such laughter we have the devil to pay. The
                 Mr. Roberts element won't carry us all the way through. I'm now sure the last section works and makes
                 the whole book work; up against a wall, I'd have to call Catch-22 the best novel of the sixties. 
                 But what can we learn about the sixties from Catch-22? I think the popular success of the book can be
                 attributed to the widespread spiritual revulsion in the sixties against many of our most sacrosanct
                 institutions, including the army; to which our leaders replied by heightening just those things that had caused
                 the disgust in the first place, especially the quality of fraud, illusion, and manipulation in our public life. Just
                 as the response to war-protest was escalation and the solution to the failures of the bombing was more
                 bombing, so the push for more honesty in public debate was met by more public relations and bigger lies.
                 The Johnson administration's unshakable insistence that black was white, that escalation was really the
                 search for peace, and that the war was being won was a perfect realization of the structure of unreality and
                 insanity that runs as a theme through both Mother Night and Catch-22. One typical and well-deserved
                 victim is Doc Daneeka, who collaborates with the insanity of Catch-22 until it creates the general illusion
                 that he himself is dead (which, morally speaking, he is). Daneeka's merely physical presence is inadequate
                 to contradict his official demise; he is destroyed as much by his own demented survival ethic as by the
                 structure of unreality that is the army. We're all in this business of illusion together, says another doctor
                 when he asks Yossarian to substitute for a dead soldier whose parents are coming to see him die. As far
                 as we're concerned, the doctor says, one dying boy is just as good as any other, or just as bad. 
                       Giuseppe.
                       It's not Giuseppe, Ma. It's Yossarian.
                       What difference does it make? the mother answered in the same mourning tone, without
                      looking up. He's dying.
                 When the whole family starts crying, Yossarian cries too. It's not a show anymore. Somehow they're right,
                 the doctor's right, they are dying; in some sense it doesn't matter. A piece of ghoulish humor has turned
                 into something exceptionally moving. The same point is made with the Soldier in White, a mummy in
                 bandages whose only sign of life is an interchange of fluids. What is a man, anyway, when things have
                 come to this extremity? The ground is being readied for revealing Snowden's secret. The Lear theme is at
                 the heart of the book, no mere device for concluding it. 
                 Unlike the realistic novelists of the fifties, the black humorists suggest that besides our personal dilemmas,
                 which often loom so large in our imagination, we all share features of a common fate, enforced by society
                 and the general human condition. Though the quest for identity must inevitably be personal, in some sense
                 we are interchangeable. Furthermore, the quest will surely be thwarted if society becomes a vast structure
                 of illusion and duplicity, and hence treats us as even more interchangeable and manipulable than we
                 necessarily are. One effect of Vietnam and Watergate was that the official organs of our society lost much
                 of the respect and credence they had commanded. Even middle Americans began to live with less of a
                 mystified and paternalistic sense of Authority. The disillusionment and ruthless skepticismreally, spoiled
                 idealismof Catch-22, outlived the sixties to become a pervasive national mood. (pp. 112-19)
                 Source:  Morris Dickstein, Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties, in his Gates of Eden:
                 American Culture in the Sixties, 1977. Reprint by Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 91-127. Reproduced by
                 permission. 
                 Source Database:  Contemporary Literary Criticism 

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