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Catch-22 and Closing Time As Postmodern Anti-War Novels Bachelor‟S Diploma Thesis

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Catch-22 and Closing Time As Postmodern Anti-War Novels Bachelor‟S Diploma Thesis Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Alena Pápayová Catch-22 and Closing Time as Postmodern Anti-War Novels Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D. 2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author‟s signature Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D. for her valuable advice and comments. I would also like to thank my family and friends for providing priceless moral support and encouragement. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 5 1.1 The Theme of War in Literature .............................................................................. 6 1.2 A Postmodern Approach to War and Joseph Heller ................................................ 9 2. The Gap between Discourse and Reality: “I See Everything Twice” ............... 13 2.1 Catch-22 and Closing Time ................................................................................... 14 2.2 Putting Reality into Discourse ............................................................................... 19 2.3 The Critique of Bureaucracy and Social System ................................................... 25 3. Other Forms of Doubleness: “I’ve Got a Feeling I’ve Seen This Before” ........ 31 3.1 Temporal Aspect ................................................................................................... 31 3.2 Sane Insanity ......................................................................................................... 37 4. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 40 5. Works Cited ........................................................................................................... 46 1. Introduction Joseph Heller is famous mostly for his anti-war novel Catch-22. This book is known for its absurd portrayal of war machinery and its less known sequel Closing Time continues in this trend. This thesis introduces the elements connecting both books and analyses central topics and strategies that Heller uses. The central themes are war in Catch-22 and bureaucracy of organizations in Closing Time, but both topics are depicted in non-traditional way. Linda Hutcheon, who has written extensively about literary postmodernism, claims that one of the main purposes of postmodernism is “the challenge to traditional notions of perspective” (A Poetics 11) and both Heller‟s novels meets these criteria. Heller uses different strategies for portraying the absurdity and ambiguous aspect of these concepts. These strategies are included in Hutcheon‟s theoretical work and include parody, irony and discontinuity (A Poetics 5-15). Hence, Heller can be categorized as one of the postmodern writers as the techniques of postmodernism and his strategies corresponds. The primary sources of my thesis consist of two novels by Joseph Heller, Catch- 22 and Closing Time, which are analysed with the help of secondary sources. The core of the secondary sources is constituted by several books by Hutcheon and a number of journals and articles about literature. Considering the structure of the thesis, the introduction focuses on general overview of the theme of war in literature and then the postmodern approach to the topic of armed conflict and bureaucracy is presented. This outlook is important for pointing out the differences in the view on war and organizations between Heller and other war writers which is crucial for understanding why is Heller placed among writers of postmodern period. The thesis focuses on the central technique Heller uses in the both books – doubleness and duality. These strategies are Heller‟s main tools for portraying the 5 absurdity of the system. The ambiguity of language, the doubleness of reality and language of the book, difficult time frame of the book and often unintelligibly ambiguous definition of sanity and insanity, they all share the same feature - the two- sided aspect. The analysis of these aspects in the thesis offers a reliable guide through all Heller‟s ideas and techniques. 1.1 The Theme of War in Literature The theme of war has been present in literature for a long time and, as Catharine Savage Brosman observes, “war has been treated in many different modes and kinds of texts” from ancient times to contemporary literature (85). It is one of the many themes in literature, but its significance was clear from the beginning because “the role played by the Trojan war in the whole of ancient Western literature [...] can be considered the single most important topic of the body of literature inherited from early Western civilization” (Brosman 85). Eventually, other armed conflicts appeared and war, whether small and private or bloody and worldwide, became one of the central topics of literature. The authors have used various techniques for describing the war and the war literature has also served different purposes. This thesis focuses on the era which is by Brosman described as covering literature that has to “shape a sense of national purpose and inspire bellicose spirit” (86). Heller, as a writer of postmodern literature, on the other hand, tries“to demystify war and the military” (Brosman 89). The main purpose of his novels is an absurd portrayal of the military machine during the period of World War II and rules of society in the post-war period. His main character Yossarian refuses to sacrifice his life for the country and the only thing that is important is to survive. This might be one of the important postmodern strategies: writers refuse to portray heroism of the soldiers and use black comedy that highlights the importance of surviving. The 6 glorifying of soldiers as heroes fighting for their countries is abandoned and Heller rather asks the question, whether it is rational to sacrifice life for the country and kill innocent people in the process. However, World War II, as a major armed conflict in the modern era, has represented a problem for writers of war literature, because the writers have not been able to express the horrors of war which spread across the whole world. As James R. Dawes claims, “the first and most characteristic response to the war‟s chain of disasters, however, was silence” (158). The era after World War II was an era when people had to deal with what happened. Discussing the war and its horrors was not easy and it was even more difficult for writers whose job was to write stories for another generation of readers and therefore they often felt “the difficulty of describing it, of ʽsaying the unsayableʼ” (Brosman 91). The war left many people speechless about the horrors that occurred and the silence is also present in Heller‟s Catch-22 where it almost always has negative connotation. The characters often feel “rigid silence” (85), “constrained silence” (98) or “a frightened silence” (123). Seeing that Heller participated actively in World War II as “a bombardier with the 340th Bombardment Group [and] flew sixty combat missions over Italy and France” (Jason and Graves 154), he could have felt the same problem of putting his experience in words. Moreover, this experience can be transferred to the character of the bombardier Yossarian, the “antiheroic hero” (Stern 203), who has the same position in the war as Heller. Brosman expands the problematic aspect of portraying the war by asking how to describe the chaotic nature of war. She claims that “war [is] disorder” (91) which collides with strictly organized military system but at the same time the concept of disorganization cleverly grasps the picture of battlefield where everything is chaos. Therefore she asks an important question for war literature writers: “How can one 7 organize chaos?” (91). Heller may have contemplated this question when thinking about the structure of his most famous book, but despite it, Catch-22 is often referred to as chaotic, “episodic and formless” (Burhans 239). This is also supported by Brosman‟s view that “postmodernism solved the problem by writing chaos into the structure of fiction” (91). However, Burhans also argues that the book is carefully built up “on a central conflict, two sub-plots, and a host of motifs” (240). Heller cleverly uses a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing for completing the chaotical structure of time. Burhans calls this phenomenon “episodic zigzags” (240) and offers several schemes for organizing the chaos in the book. These schemes are proof that Heller has carefully built the structure of the novel to appear chaotic which corresponds with the disorder of any war. However, the principle is reversed. While in the real war the authorities try to keep everything under control and the chaos is only a “side effect,” Heller tries to make his book look chaotic, although in reality it has a carefully constructed scheme. Therefore his jumbled structure of the book implies both the image of battlefield and the image of the chaos in bureaucracy which is also depicted in more detail in the sequel. Closing Time, a continuation of Heller‟s strategy in Catch-22, moves from the war period into the time after the war. However, it depicts the impact of the war on the characters, as some of the crucial protagonists of the first book remain. Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder and chaplain Tappman
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