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Middle Earth various issues, 1967-1968

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Cathcart who demand the pointless bombing of an undefended and perhaps friendly mountain village. He is a ridiculous person, but also consequential -- a monstrous combination. Heller quite methodically refuses us the opportunity of being for one moment mistaken about this Cathcart. He is a criminal all around, everyone's executioner: a clear and present danger. The question is: Why is Cathcart not assassinated? In a chapter opening with the cold horror of Snowden's death and the pushing of the number of missions up to 60, the terrified and angry Dobbs proposes Cathcart's assassination to Yossarian, who need only tell Dobbs that it's a good idea. Yossarian clearly thinks it is; Cathcart should be punished, removed. But he cannot or will not tell Dobbs to proceed. A bit later, the roles are reversed, and this time it is Doobs, who now has his 60 missions under his belt, who will not conspire with Yossarian. The men are unable to generate any coherent opposition to those who victimize and, in the crudest sense, exploit them. Something keeps Cathcart alive. One feels its presence as soon as Dobbs lays his proposal before Yossarian; one knows already that Cathcart is secure, that even is Yossarian had assented to the plan, Dobbs would have muffed its execution, wound up no doubt killing himself. Cathcart seems to wear a charm, the same charm that all the other officers seem to wear and which none of the men of the squardrom apparently can ever possess. What is this charm? The charm, I believe, is a special version of Camus' Absurd Cosmos. And it is hanging, in fact, not around Cathcart's neck, but around Yossarian's. It is on the men of the squadron. It is on Heller and his situation. And perhaps -- but perhaps not -- it is also on the world. Recall the way in which Catch-22 tells its story. The technique could hardly be further removed from that of the Homeric poem or even the mainline novel of the 19th and 20th centuries: there is no sequential, step-by-step development through time of an increasingly charged situation, and one does not have the sense that a world is coming into being or is being altered before one's eyes; there is hardly any sense at all of the massing of contradictory pressures or of a buildup for a conventional climax or denouement. Rather, the narrative stream wanders from thread to thread as if each were a line on an initially invisible map, and with each touching of each story line its dimensions and meanings are spread outwards toward the others more and more, so that by the last page, they all touch, and we have the feeling that a world, a unified body of experience, has been finally disclosed. Thus, the circulating narrational structure of the novel, moving with the degrees of freedom in time which are customarily reserved for space, has in itself prepositioned a world which is already in being, a complete tense, but basically static world whose larger form is proof against all assaults: a world which is not in the process of being changed. And the effect of this digressive, apparently undisciplined narrative pattern is to persuade us that in this novel history is not about to take place; we are not about to witness the transfiguration of a world. Impossible to endure as it is, the world of Catch-22 is not under seige. There is no other moral or practical world which threatens to supplant it. The world of Catch-22, that is, is one in which the possibility of political, historical rebellion has already been foreclosed. There can be no revolution here. Only try to imagine what happens to the psychological ambience of the book, its tone and spirit, if Yossarian -- a bombardier after all who kills people every day -- should actually bring off the assassination of the war criminal, Cathcart. We have been able to smile with derision at this immune and safeguarded Cathcart who kills and kills with impunity. As soon, however, as he is killed, that superior smile seems no longer possible. Everything becomes suddenly very serious; almost automatically, a search for the mode of his assassin's tragic downfall shoots immediately into the book. Yossarian who makes his rebellion political and real -- revolutionary -- is a Yossarian who can no longer be focused by means of the underlying assumptions of the novel. Such a Yossarian breaks the bounds of reality which the novel has made implicit and in terms of which it realizes its formal coherence. And this would of course be all the clearer were Yossarian to be joined in this revolution by his co-victims: a crucial action would in this case have transcended and surpassed the practical limits of action which Haller's perception of the world has put into place. At first, this may seem to say nothing more than that Heller's novel is all of a piece. In fact, one may for a moment almost see in this refusal of the revolutionary option a proof of the novel's authenticity. That a revolution, a massive change in the moral and social order, should at one and the same time be both mandatory and impossible may actually be the most important element of our situation. A novel that expressed and explored this definitive predicament would be novel which one could not write without great experience and agony -- a novel very much worth having. But Heller has not written this novel. At the last minute, he in fact kills the dilemma which he had seemed to pose by introducing a third term. If historical revolution is impossible, he says, private rebellion is not. A rebellion which amounts only to an escape is produced at the very moment the last dice are being rolled. It turns out to be the reverse side of the twenty-second catch, or perhaps it is catch-23: To an unthinkable revolution and an unendurable regime, Heller suddenly adds the alternative of desertion. If men cannot remake their social destinies by acting together in history, then each man, it seems, can avoid social destiny altogether by escaping history -- by escaping politics, by taking asylum in this nonaligned Sweden which Yossarian is headed for at the unconvincingly festive and to my mind disastrous close of the novel. Nonaligned: that is, a country without politics, presumably therefore without Colonel Cathcarts, a country in which social history is no longer individually contingent. One is reminded again of Camus' 'passionate longing for solitude and silence.' Heller's crazy world, as in different ways perhaps with Kesey's insane world and the early Salinger's phony one, originates in the same disaffiliation from history as the absurd world of Camus. Just as Camus evades history by redefining rebellion as a metaphysical act, so Heller evades it by redefining rebellion as privatistic. A Yossarian in neutral Sweden -- perhaps what Heller really wants to say here, by the way, is Eden -- is a Kilroy without objectives, a McMurphy without Big Nurse, an Ishmael without Captain Ahab. And of course it is well known that one need not migrate to arrive in this Sweden. It is nearly everywhere. It is in the East Village and the Haight-Ashbury. It is in camp art and the newer team art, the art without signature. It is in the sanctum of Optical and Acrylic contsructivism and the machine esthetic of the hard and efficient surface. It is in an art culture of once ironic iron which today has apparently abandoned its original subversive content in favor of sheer enthusiasm for a world without people, a very clean and orderly utopia. It is in the new preoccupation with sensibility and the McLuhanite extension of the senses. It is in the new grotesque, which offers to cover up the hour's malaise, the time's bleeding conscience, through the expedient of a so-called black laughter which turns out to be only all too long-suffering, servile, and pale. All of them pretending to be avant-garde and rebellious, all of them at the same time increasingly addicted to what is, increasingly alien from that which is not yet, these new Swedens, these Wonderlands without contents, without histories and futures, these Expos of polite defeat, are everywhere. In the end, very like Camus, Heller has tired to buy time for himself and his culture, snarled with lunacy and injustice as it is, by wrapping up everything is a tissue of cynicism and privileged impotence. History being insufferable but unchangeable, he says the good man is therefore morally reprieved from the awful sentence of having to change it. In the company of Camus' solitary rebel, he need only desert. What Heller finally offers us super-sensitive Westerners is a contemporary world in which we may ignore what threatens us by its example, what challenges us to change our lives. A world, that is, in which there is no Fanny Lou Hamer, no Schwerner, Chaney or Goodman, no Castro or Guevara or Nguyen Huu Tho; a world without fundamental tension, one which is not destined for significant transformation, a world in which the summons to partisanship has been muffled if not ridiculed by a nihilism which has recently discovered gaiety, a despair which has learned how to frolic in the ruins of a certain hope. Maybe this was a remotely defensible posture in that decade before the First World War when another solitary rebel deserted another homeland 'to forge,' as he put it in a tone now forbidden, 'in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.' But several wars and revolutions have changed the situation. The conscience exists, standing before us now asking not to be created or perfected but to be chosen and defended, in need of champions, not exiles. Any fiction which refuses that request is henceforth a collaborationist fiction, a fiction which tells the terrible lie that Carmichael and Bravo and Montes do not exist. It will require indeed a post-realistic fiction to tell this lie, a fiction which suddenly wants to toy with the notion that after reality there might still be something left. There will not be. There will only be men who can catch an eternally difficult reality and those who cannot. Those who cannot will continue to conceal their desertion beneath an historical sadness endlessly more intricate in design and in decoration even lovely; we shall continue to hear the sighs of an expiring culture whose self-confidence is being permanently broken. And those, on the other hand, who will have the courage to see what is there in the world and to see moveover what that world needs to become -- these people, putting their own comfort last and laboring to acquire skills which come far from naturally to the modern Westerner, will concentrate all their power on that moment when the good man in hell, acting in acute foreknowledge of probably defeat, nevertheless acts -- the true existentialist who chooses his history, who chooses his situation, and who chooses to change it; who declines exile and desertion, and who declines to be defeated by a despair which he nevertheless refuses to reject. Such people will have no interest in a fiction of post-realism. They will decide and again decide to live as fully as they can in that eternal hour before the eternal revolution which is eternally the moment of a man's communion with his brothers.

MIDDLE EARTH: an alive be-weekly, underground newspaper, publishing in Iowa City, Iowa, and hitting the newsstands every other Friday (barring editorial screw-ups)
Marge Duskey: Publisher and Janiting Editor
Dave Miller, Editor in Chief, Chief Editor, etc.
Everett Frost, Editor of what's left over
Lena Baker, Chief typist, and presumptive proofreader
Faith Barron, art editor -- nominally
Penny Schoner, Resource person & pasteup-layout
Al Nelson, Roy Harvey, photographers and roving ambassadors
(vacancy for), advertising
Business and Editorial and Complaint Dept., RFD 1, Iowa City
MIDDLE EARTH is not (not) in competition with its beloved sister publication, The Iowa Defender. MIDDLE EARTH is, in fact, an ardent defender of the Defender. We figure if you can afford 15¢ for ME, you might as well go the whole quarter and get the ID, and vice versa. MIDDLE EARTH is in desperate need of slave labor! If you are interested in learning how to Varitype better than we do now, or paste-up, copy-editing, pushing papers, etc. -- in learning any or all aspects of how an offset publication is or isn't done, AND you are willing to spend time getting ME out, THEN WE NEED YOU! Contact either Dave Miller (683-2783) or Everett (Answer Man) Frost (338-576) and we'll put you to work. We are also in need of unpublished WRITERS, If you are willing to pole through the refuse and rubble of Iowa, Iowa City, or University of Iowa life and to write it up into the sterling, off-beat prose that our pages are famous for, then contact us...

Saving...

Cathcart who demand the pointless bombing of an undefended and perhaps friendly mountain village. He is a ridiculous person, but also consequential -- a monstrous combination. Heller quite methodically refuses us the opportunity of being for one moment mistaken about this Cathcart. He is a criminal all around, everyone's executioner: a clear and present danger. The question is: Why is Cathcart not assassinated? In a chapter opening with the cold horror of Snowden's death and the pushing of the number of missions up to 60, the terrified and angry Dobbs proposes Cathcart's assassination to Yossarian, who need only tell Dobbs that it's a good idea. Yossarian clearly thinks it is; Cathcart should be punished, removed. But he cannot or will not tell Dobbs to proceed. A bit later, the roles are reversed, and this time it is Doobs, who now has his 60 missions under his belt, who will not conspire with Yossarian. The men are unable to generate any coherent opposition to those who victimize and, in the crudest sense, exploit them. Something keeps Cathcart alive. One feels its presence as soon as Dobbs lays his proposal before Yossarian; one knows already that Cathcart is secure, that even is Yossarian had assented to the plan, Dobbs would have muffed its execution, wound up no doubt killing himself. Cathcart seems to wear a charm, the same charm that all the other officers seem to wear and which none of the men of the squardrom apparently can ever possess. What is this charm? The charm, I believe, is a special version of Camus' Absurd Cosmos. And it is hanging, in fact, not around Cathcart's neck, but around Yossarian's. It is on the men of the squadron. It is on Heller and his situation. And perhaps -- but perhaps not -- it is also on the world. Recall the way in which Catch-22 tells its story. The technique could hardly be further removed from that of the Homeric poem or even the mainline novel of the 19th and 20th centuries: there is no sequential, step-by-step development through time of an increasingly charged situation, and one does not have the sense that a world is coming into being or is being altered before one's eyes; there is hardly any sense at all of the massing of contradictory pressures or of a buildup for a conventional climax or denouement. Rather, the narrative stream wanders from thread to thread as if each were a line on an initially invisible map, and with each touching of each story line its dimensions and meanings are spread outwards toward the others more and more, so that by the last page, they all touch, and we have the feeling that a world, a unified body of experience, has been finally disclosed. Thus, the circulating narrational structure of the novel, moving with the degrees of freedom in time which are customarily reserved for space, has in itself prepositioned a world which is already in being, a complete tense, but basically static world whose larger form is proof against all assaults: a world which is not in the process of being changed. And the effect of this digressive, apparently undisciplined narrative pattern is to persuade us that in this novel history is not about to take place; we are not about to witness the transfiguration of a world. Impossible to endure as it is, the world of Catch-22 is not under seige. There is no other moral or practical world which threatens to supplant it. The world of Catch-22, that is, is one in which the possibility of political, historical rebellion has already been foreclosed. There can be no revolution here. Only try to imagine what happens to the psychological ambience of the book, its tone and spirit, if Yossarian -- a bombardier after all who kills people every day -- should actually bring off the assassination of the war criminal, Cathcart. We have been able to smile with derision at this immune and safeguarded Cathcart who kills and kills with impunity. As soon, however, as he is killed, that superior smile seems no longer possible. Everything becomes suddenly very serious; almost automatically, a search for the mode of his assassin's tragic downfall shoots immediately into the book. Yossarian who makes his rebellion political and real -- revolutionary -- is a Yossarian who can no longer be focused by means of the underlying assumptions of the novel. Such a Yossarian breaks the bounds of reality which the novel has made implicit and in terms of which it realizes its formal coherence. And this would of course be all the clearer were Yossarian to be joined in this revolution by his co-victims: a crucial action would in this case have transcended and surpassed the practical limits of action which Haller's perception of the world has put into place. At first, this may seem to say nothing more than that Heller's novel is all of a piece. In fact, one may for a moment almost see in this refusal of the revolutionary option a proof of the novel's authenticity. That a revolution, a massive change in the moral and social order, should at one and the same time be both mandatory and impossible may actually be the most important element of our situation. A novel that expressed and explored this definitive predicament would be novel which one could not write without great experience and agony -- a novel very much worth having. But Heller has not written this novel. At the last minute, he in fact kills the dilemma which he had seemed to pose by introducing a third term. If historical revolution is impossible, he says, private rebellion is not. A rebellion which amounts only to an escape is produced at the very moment the last dice are being rolled. It turns out to be the reverse side of the twenty-second catch, or perhaps it is catch-23: To an unthinkable revolution and an unendurable regime, Heller suddenly adds the alternative of desertion. If men cannot remake their social destinies by acting together in history, then each man, it seems, can avoid social destiny altogether by escaping history -- by escaping politics, by taking asylum in this nonaligned Sweden which Yossarian is headed for at the unconvincingly festive and to my mind disastrous close of the novel. Nonaligned: that is, a country without politics, presumably therefore without Colonel Cathcarts, a country in which social history is no longer individually contingent. One is reminded again of Camus' 'passionate longing for solitude and silence.' Heller's crazy world, as in different ways perhaps with Kesey's insane world and the early Salinger's phony one, originates in the same disaffiliation from history as the absurd world of Camus. Just as Camus evades history by redefining rebellion as a metaphysical act, so Heller evades it by redefining rebellion as privatistic. A Yossarian in neutral Sweden -- perhaps what Heller really wants to say here, by the way, is Eden -- is a Kilroy without objectives, a McMurphy without Big Nurse, an Ishmael without Captain Ahab. And of course it is well known that one need not migrate to arrive in this Sweden. It is nearly everywhere. It is in the East Village and the Haight-Ashbury. It is in camp art and the newer team art, the art without signature. It is in the sanctum of Optical and Acrylic contsructivism and the machine esthetic of the hard and efficient surface. It is in an art culture of once ironic iron which today has apparently abandoned its original subversive content in favor of sheer enthusiasm for a world without people, a very clean and orderly utopia. It is in the new preoccupation with sensibility and the McLuhanite extension of the senses. It is in the new grotesque, which offers to cover up the hour's malaise, the time's bleeding conscience, through the expedient of a so-called black laughter which turns out to be only all too long-suffering, servile, and pale. All of them pretending to be avant-garde and rebellious, all of them at the same time increasingly addicted to what is, increasingly alien from that which is not yet, these new Swedens, these Wonderlands without contents, without histories and futures, these Expos of polite defeat, are everywhere. In the end, very like Camus, Heller has tired to buy time for himself and his culture, snarled with lunacy and injustice as it is, by wrapping up everything is a tissue of cynicism and privileged impotence. History being insufferable but unchangeable, he says the good man is therefore morally reprieved from the awful sentence of having to change it. In the company of Camus' solitary rebel, he need only desert. What Heller finally offers us super-sensitive Westerners is a contemporary world in which we may ignore what threatens us by its example, what challenges us to change our lives. A world, that is, in which there is no Fanny Lou Hamer, no Schwerner, Chaney or Goodman, no Castro or Guevara or Nguyen Huu Tho; a world without fundamental tension, one which is not destined for significant transformation, a world in which the summons to partisanship has been muffled if not ridiculed by a nihilism which has recently discovered gaiety, a despair which has learned how to frolic in the ruins of a certain hope. Maybe this was a remotely defensible posture in that decade before the First World War when another solitary rebel deserted another homeland 'to forge,' as he put it in a tone now forbidden, 'in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.' But several wars and revolutions have changed the situation. The conscience exists, standing before us now asking not to be created or perfected but to be chosen and defended, in need of champions, not exiles. Any fiction which refuses that request is henceforth a collaborationist fiction, a fiction which tells the terrible lie that Carmichael and Bravo and Montes do not exist. It will require indeed a post-realistic fiction to tell this lie, a fiction which suddenly wants to toy with the notion that after reality there might still be something left. There will not be. There will only be men who can catch an eternally difficult reality and those who cannot. Those who cannot will continue to conceal their desertion beneath an historical sadness endlessly more intricate in design and in decoration even lovely; we shall continue to hear the sighs of an expiring culture whose self-confidence is being permanently broken. And those, on the other hand, who will have the courage to see what is there in the world and to see moveover what that world needs to become -- these people, putting their own comfort last and laboring to acquire skills which come far from naturally to the modern Westerner, will concentrate all their power on that moment when the good man in hell, acting in acute foreknowledge of probably defeat, nevertheless acts -- the true existentialist who chooses his history, who chooses his situation, and who chooses to change it; who declines exile and desertion, and who declines to be defeated by a despair which he nevertheless refuses to reject. Such people will have no interest in a fiction of post-realism. They will decide and again decide to live as fully as they can in that eternal hour before the eternal revolution which is eternally the moment of a man's communion with his brothers. MIDDLE EARTH: an alive be-weekly, underground newspaper, publishing in Iowa City, Iowa, and hitting the newsstands every other Friday (barring editorial screw-ups) Marge Duskey: Publisher and Janiting Editor Dave Miller, Editor in Chief, Chief Editor, etc. Everett Frost, Editor of what's left over Lena Baker, Chief typist, and presumptive proofreader Faith Barron, art editor -- nominally Penny Schoner, Resource person & pasteup-layout Al Nelson, Roy Harvey, photographers and roving ambassadors (vacancy for), advertising Business and Editorial and Complaint Dept., RFD 1, Iowa City MIDDLE EARTH is not (not) in competition with its beloved sister publication, The Iowa Defender. MIDDLE EARTH is, in fact, an ardent defender of the Defender. We figure if you can afford 15¢ for ME, you might as well go the whole quarter and get the ID, and vice versa. MIDDLE EARTH is in desperate need of slave labor! If you are interested in learning how to Varitype better than we do now, or paste-up, copy-editing, pushing papers, etc. -- in learning any or all aspects of how an offset publication is or isn't done, AND you are willing to spend time getting ME out, THEN WE NEED YOU! Contact either Dave Miller (683-2783) or Everett (Answer Man) Frost (338-576) and we'll put you to work. We are also in need of unpublished WRITERS, If you are willing to pole through the refuse and rubble of Iowa, Iowa City, or University of Iowa life and to write it up into the sterling, off-beat prose that our pages are famous for, then contact us...