Papeles de trabajo

(Heller 1994a: 79)

This is partly an aesthetic point: Yossarian rejects the artifice o f high comedy, which pretends to be unaware o f its own comic status. However, for Heller, as well as for Yossarian, the degree to which comedy is self-aware is also a moral issue, an index o f its seriousness. In Catch-22, much o f the comedy is low, rather than high: it is the comedy o f slapstick, o f pantomime, o f farce. However, it is not escapist. Unlike high

Estragon: It's not Godot? Vladimir: It's not Godot. Estragon: Then who is it? Vladimir: It's Pozzo.

comedy, this is comedy aware o f its responsibilities and limitations, anxious comedy. The episode in which Hungry Joe tries to take nude photographs o f Luciana is typical.

Hungry Joe had paused in his attack to shoot pictures through the closed door. Yossarian could hear the cameras clicking. When both he and Luciana were ready, Yossarian waited for Hungry Joe's next charge and yanked the door open on him unexpectedly. Hungry Joe spilled forward into the room like a floundering frog. Yossarian skipped nimbly around him, guiding Luciana along behind him through the apartment and out into the hallway. They bounced down the stairs with a great roistering clatter, laughing out loud breathlessly and knocking their hilarious heads together each time they paused to rest. Near the bottom they met Nately and stopped laughing.

(Heller 1962a; 160)

Here the hi)inks o f Yossarian and Luciana are abruptly interrupted by the spectre o f Nately, a figure whose naïve seriousness, unlike that o f Augie March, stems from a non-egoistic romanticism, and marks him out, as the Old Man prophesies, for an early death. The two lovers are laughing at their own hilarity (as the grammatical ambiguity o f the phrase "hilarious heads" suggests - heads that are laughing hilariously and that are hilariously funny), at Hungry Joe's manic behaviour, and at the incongruity o f their laughter in the historical context in which they find themselves - an incongruity rudely reinforced by Nately's sudden appearance, which stops their laughter in their throats. This pattern - o f hysterical antics coming to an abrupt halt and being succeeded by a renewed sense o f despair - recurs in other scenes in the Roman brothel and in several scenes in the hospital, such as the synchronised molestation o f Nurse Duckett.

Next morning while she [Nurse Duckett] was standing bent over smoothing the sheets at the foot o f his bed, he [Yossarian] slipped his hand stealthily into the narrow space between her knees and, all at once, brought it up swiftly as far as it would go. Nurse Duckett screamed and jumped into the air a mile, but it wasn't high enough, and she squirmed and vaulted and seesawed back and forth on her divine fulcrum for almost a full fifteen seconds before she wiggled free and

retreated frantically into the aisle with an ashen, trembling face. She backed away too far, and Dunbar, who had watched from the beginning, sprang forward without warning and flung both arms around her bosom from behind. Nurse Duckett let out another scream and twisted away, fleeing far enough from Dunbar

for Yossarian to lunge forward and and grab her by the snatch again. Nurse Duckett bounced along the aisle again like a ping-pong ball with legs. Dunbar was waiting vigilantly, ready to pounce. She remembered him just in time and leaped aside. Dunbar missed completely and sailed over the bed to the floor, landing on his skull with a soggy, crunching thud that knocked him cold.

He woke up on the floor with a bleeding nose and exactly the same distressful head syptoms he had been feigning all along. The ward was in a chaotic uproar. Nurse Duckett was in tears, and Yossarian was consoling her apologetically ...

(Heller 1962a: 288)

This passage is initially offensive in its light-hearted depiction o f what is

essentially a sexual assault"*^, and if w e were to laugh it would be as a consequence o f the suspension o f sympathy demanded, according to the Bergsonian scheme, by the automatic behaviour o f the characters here. However, the flippant tone shifts radically at the end: the unconscious behaviour o f the buffoon gives way to a conscioypess o f the pain such buffoonery has caused, and Yossarian tries to console his victim. The joke ends not with a bang, but with a whimper - with an anti-punchline. This is the comedy which Bummidge speaks of, a comedy in which "When the laughing stops, there's still a big surplus o f pain", a comedy in which "Infinite sadness is salted with jokes" (Bellow 1966a: 77, 78).

The Yossarian of Catch-22, like the Yossarian of C losing Time, and like the author o f both novels, is, for all his clowning, fundamentally suspicious o f comedy. He explicitly rejects any humorous view o f the dangers o f war, as an ameliorating fiction.

Heller, it seems to me, is if anything more vulnerable to charges o f sexism and misogyny than B ellow and Roth, although his depiction o f women has not received the hostile attention from critics that theirs has (but then, this may simply be a consequence o f the relative lack o f critical attention generally accorded to Heller).

strangers he didn't know shot at him every time he flew up in the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny. And if that wasn't ftmny, there were lots o f things that weren't even funnier. There was nothing funny about living like a bum in a tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front that could gulp down a person with a cramp in the twinkling o f an eye and ship him back to shore three days later, all charges paid, bloated, blue and putrescent, water draining out through both cold nostrils.

(Heller 1962a: 17)

The characteristic nonsense grammar o f "And if that wasn't funny, there were lots o f things that weren't even funnier" might lead us to expect a light-hearted conceit such as the passage concerning Yossarian's (non)-contribution to the officers' club. Instead w e get a grim, powerful condemnation o f the circumstances in which Yossarian finds himself (the image o f the drowned man anticipating the brutal

anatomical details o f Snowden's death) which gives the lie to criticism that Yossarian's seriousness at the close o f the novel in his debate with Major Danby is a jarring

inconsistency. In fact, like Bummidge, Yossarian is "earnest when he is clowning and clowning when he means to be earnest" (Bellow 1966a: ix).

At one point in C losing Time Yossarian gives his son some advice about his future. The conversation begins with Michael telling his father that he has dropped out o f law school.

"Oh s h it... I keep pulling strings to get you in and you keep dropping out." "I can't help i t ... The more I find out about the practice o f law, the more I'm surprised it isn't illegal."

"That's one o f the reasons I gave that up too. H ow old are you?" "I'm not far from forty."

"You still have time."

"I'm not sure if you're joking or not."

"Neither am I ... But if you can delay the decision o f what to do with your life until you're old enough to retire, you will never have to make it."

"I still can't tell if you're joking."

"I'm still not always sure either ... Sometimes I mean what I say and don't mean it at the same time."

This is not the only moment in a Heller novel when the question o f comic intent is raised explicitly. In G o o d A s G old, Bruce Gold, exasperated by the self-

contradictions o f his old college friend and presidential aide, Ralph Newsom e, asks him whether "people here ever laugh or smile when you talk that way?":

"What way, Bruce?"

"You seem to qualify or contradict all your statements."

"Do I? ... Maybe I do seem a bit oxymoronic at times. I think everyone here talks that way. Maybe we're all oxymoronic. One time, though, at a high-level

meeting, I did say something everyone thought was funny. 'Let's build some death camps,' I said. And everyone laughed. I still can't figure out why. I was being serious.

(Heller 1979a: 122)

Whereas Yossarian's earnest clowning is self-conscious, in Ralph's case it is unconscious, and this turns him into a caricature. The comic incongruities o f Ralph's speech reflect his moral evasiveness, his refusal to accept responsibility for anything; Yossarian's use o f incongruity, however, reflects his open-mindedness, his rejection o f absolutism. Later in C losing Time Yossarian confesses that "A problem I have ... is that I'm almost always able to see both sides o f the question" (Heller 1994a: 189). However, Yossarian's schizophrenia - meaning something and not meaning it, joking and being serious at the same time - is not a disease, but a skill, a form o f sceptical comedy o f which Heller himself is particularly fond.

Much o f Heller's comedy springs from incongruity. Sometimes this involves inserting a single, subversive word into a sentence that otherwise makes perfect sense, as when Yossarian says o f Dunbar that he is "One o f the finest, least dedicated men in the entire world" (Heller 1962a: 14). Sometimes it works by building up our

expectations in a certain direction, only to dash them by suddenly wrenching us in the opposite direction, as in the descriptions o f the Texan, who "turned out to be good- humored, generous, and likeable. In three days nobody could stand him". Nurse Cramer, who "had ... a radiant, blooming complexion dotted with fetching sprays o f adorable freckles that Yossarian detested" and Nurse Duckett, who was "adult and

self-reliant... there was nothing she needed from anyone. Yossarian took pity on her and decided to help her" (Heller 1962a: 9, 167, 228).

Perhaps Heller's favourite kinds o f incongruity, however, are the oxymoron and the paradox. Examples o f both abound in Catch-22 ( for example, "Yossarian was in love with the maid in the lime-colored panties because she seemed to be the only woman left he could make love to without falling in love with"; "He [Colonel Cathcart] was someone in the know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was going on" [Heller 1962a. 132, 186] ), and in his other novels, too, frequently in the form o f aphorisms: "Nothing fails like success"; "If character is destiny, the good are damned" (Heller 1984: 79, 105); "Peace on earth would mean the end o f civilisation as we know it"; "Why would a man who had nothing to hide refuse to lie?" (Heller

1988: 100, 38) and " 'That's the only way to live, by preparing to die' " (Heller 1994a: 33)4»

The point about all these jokes is that, by inverting expected linguistic patterns, they subvert conventional wisdom. They force us to re-examine the ways in which w e think, and the ways in which w e use language - the ways in which w e make sense o f things. While they may appear glib or simply nonsensical, many o f these jokes actually contain a grim truth that arrests our laughter, or salts it until it turns bitter. His old friend and lover Frances Beach accuses the Yossarian of Closing Time o f having lost his sense o f humour ("You sound so bitter these days. You used to be funnier"),'*^ but the truth is that Yossarian's humour, like Heller's, had always been bitter, his bitterness funny.

This last example has a long history, appearing (in slightly different forms) in Montaigne and in a number o f classical texts.

I am reminded here o f the moment in Stardust M em ories when the hero o f the film (a film director, played by Woody Allen) is told by one o f his fans that his earlier, funnier films were much better than his more recent, serious ones. Like Heller, Allen is tom between the desire to be taken seriously and the compulsion to joke, and both these comments might be interpreted as coded ripostes to those seeking only laughs in their work.

Unlike Bummidge, however, in Yossarian's case the paradox is intended and is conceived, in Catch-22, as a conscious response to a paradoxical world in which the sane are insane and the insane sane. As Dr. Stubbs remarks, " 'That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left' " (Heller 1962a; 109). There is method in Yossarian's

madness - an underlying sanity that expresses itself in his judgment o f what is and what is not funny. It is not the capacity to laugh in the face o f horror, but the refusal to do so, that is the sign o f sanity - and moral worth - in Catch-22. One o f the greatest indictments o f a character in the novel is that he should laugh inappropriately, or urge others to do so. Colonel Cathcart criticises the chaplain for "tak[ing] things too

seriously" and urges him to "Let me see you laugh once in a while" (Heller 1962a: 276) while persecuting him and General Peckem exhibits a similar sadistic sense o f humour (ironically at Cathcart's expense, with whose sycophantic behaviour he likes to "have some fun" [Heller 1962a: 318] ). Then there are Yossarian's roommates, who epitomise the mindless heartiness that, in Aarfy, results in rape and murder.

They were the most depressing people Yossarian had ever been with. They were always in high spirits. They laughed at everything. They called him "Yo-Yo" jocularly and ... bombarded him with asinine shouts o f hilarious good-fellowship ...

(Heller 1962a: 341)

Again, paradox provides the moral key here: the roommates are "depressing" precisely because o f their unflagging "high spirits", which jar unpleasantly with the realities o f their situation (the use o f "bombarded" to describe their heartiness equates their social asininity with that o f their military activities, as well as reminding us that Yossarian was a bombardier, before his promotion after the Avignon mission). In Heller's anxious comedy, such essential lack o f seriousness represents a moral and aesthetic failing, a failure o f imagination that perpetuates the climate o f philistinism in

which men like Scheisskopf and Milo prosper.

Whereas Scheisskopf and Milo are unaware o f their own absurdity and the joking o f Yossarian's roommates is nothing more than "asinine ... good-fellowship",

Yossarian and Dunbar's antics, like the horseplay o f Vladimir and Estragon, proceed not from self-ignorance, but from self-conscioi^ess; not from exuberance, but from dejection; not from high spirits, but from profound gloom, from existential anxiety. Their periodic attempts to divert themselves are not so much a way o f escaping the reality o f their situation as a means o f "giv[ing themselves] the impression [they] exist" (Beckett 1988: 69).

Like Vladimir and Estragon, Yossarian and his comrades are so numbed by the routines o f their lives that their sense o f self is blurred. Indeed, military life is

essentially organised with a view to eradicating any individuality. Thus, when Nurse Cramer catches Yossarian bed-hopping, she scolds him by reminding him o f his status as a cog in the military machine.

"I suppose you just don't care if you kill yourself, do you?" "It's my self," he reminded her.

"I suppose you just don't care if you lose your leg, do you?" "It's my leg."

"It certainly is not your leg! " Nurse Cramer retorted. "That leg belongs to the U.S. government."

(Heller 1962a: 286)

While in the army, Yossarian's self, like his leg, is no longer his own. For Sammy Singer, looking back on his army days in Closing Time, this loss o f selfhood appears positive.

I experienced in the army a loss o f personal importance and individual identity that I found, to my amazement, I welcomed. I was part o f a directed herd, and I found m yself relieved to have everything mapped out for me, to be told what to do, and to be doing the same things as the rest.^®

(Heller 1994a; 212)

For Yossarian in Catch-22, however, military regimentation degrades,

dehumanises and defaces individuals until they are all interchangeable. The episode in which Yossarian is persuaded to stand in for a dead man to appease the grief o f his family who have come (too late) to bid him farewell reinforces this point, as does the refusal o f the authorities to acknowledge the existence o f the dead man in Yossarian's tent who dies before his arrival is registered ("his name was Mudd", w e are told, Heller unable to resist the pun) or that o f D oc Daneeka, whom they declare dead in the teeth o f his own protests (after Me Watt crashes his plane, in which Daneeka was officially travelling, into the side o f a mountain). At one point the hospital psychiatrist. Major Sanderson, tries to persuade Yossarian that he is actually A Fortiori (another example o f Heller's fondness for joke names), merely because he is occupying a bed registered in this name: "I've got an official army record to prove it" (Heller 1962a: 293).

In a sense, then, Yossarian's decision to desert is a decision to assert a selfhood that the army denies and his conversation with Major Danby towards the end o f the novel (in which he determines to "save m y self) is his self-explanation (Heller 1962a: 437). His refusal to wear a uniform earlier in the novel (after Nately's death) is an important anticipation o f this, as the uniform is the most potent symbol o f military

Sammy's sentiments echo those o f Joseph, the hero o f Bellow's D angling M an, who exclaims in the conclusion to that novel (whether ironically or not is open to question):

I am no longer to be accountable for myself. I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved o f self-determination, freedom canceled.