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Formal Experiment and Social Discontent: Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Brian Way
Brian Way
Affiliation:
University College of Swansea
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Extract

Joseph Heller's brilliant first novel, Catch-22, has the power to transform American literature, to re-invigorate a fiction which, since 1955, has tended to work over, with declining vitality, the formulae of earlier years. He combines an experimental attitude towards formal problems with a fully contemporary sense of what it means for a writer to be a radical in the current phase of American culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 1968 , pp. 253 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1968

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References

page 254 note 1 Chase, Richard, The American Novel and its Tradition (London, 1958), pp. 199–200Google Scholar.

page 256 note 1 Mills, C. Wright, The Power Élite (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. In some areas of American life the rise of bureaucracy had begun much earlier than the New Deal. William Miller shows that: ‘First among the railroads, but by the turn of the century in many other lines as well, the characteristic big business firm had become a big bureaucracy’ (Miller, William, ‘The business élite in business bureaucracies’, in Miller, William (ed.), Men in Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 286–8)Google Scholar. However, the consciousness of this change was slow to percolate: Frank Norris, writing of the railroads at a time when they were wholly bureaucratized, shows no awareness whatever of their organizational character. In so far as power is exercised by men, and not by economic ‘laws’, Norris shows it being wielded by tycoons like Shelgrim and Gerard, and particularly by the villainous S. Behrman—a cartoon image not of the bureaucrat but of the bloated capitalist.

page 257 note 1 Way, Brian: ‘Albee and the Absurd: The American Dream and The Zoo Story’, in Brown, John Russell and Harris, Bernard (eds.) Stratford-on-Avon Studies 10, American Theatre (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

page 260 note 1 Kafka, Franz, Investigations of a Dog, from Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Willa, and Muir, Edwin (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 103Google Scholar.

page 260 note 2 Sarraute, Nathalie, ‘From Dostoievski to Kafka’, in Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion, trans. Jolas, Maria (London, 1963), p. 82Google Scholar.

page 262 note 1 Cockburn, Alex, review of Catch-22, New Left Review, no. 18 (London, 01–02 1963), p. 88Google Scholar.

page 264 note 1 I am indebted to a former colleague, Kent Thompson, now teaching at the University of New Brunswick, for this suggestion.

page 264 note 2 Brecht, Bertolt, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Bentley, Eric, Brecht, : Plays, vol. ii (London, 1962), p. 5Google Scholar.

page 270 note 1 Mary McCarthy in Vietnam, the London Observer, 30 April, 7 and 14 May 1967, particularly the third article. (These originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.) Subsequently published in book form: Vietnam (London, 1967)Google Scholar.