Heller yesterday we lost another of the great generation of writers who reached adulthood during the second world war. many of these didn't start writing immediately. heller was one who didn't -- he spent years writing magazine advertisements before he got down to serious work. i think the generation that actually fought the war (and like yossarian, heller actually *did* fly sixty combat missions) deserved all the time they needed afterward to get their thoughts together and retrieve a little sanity. sadly, that meant fewer books for the generations to follow. the more i read, the more i'm convinced that when future literary historians ask themselves what great twentieth-century american novelists wrote about, they're going to come back with a one line answer: they wrote about world war ii. there have been other subjects of fascination, certainly, but the shadow of world war two hangs over most of the nation's indelible novelistic fiction -- the fiction that isn't easily absorbed into the machinery of the filmed entertainment industry. and each time a writer born in the teens, twenties, or early thirties dies, i'm moved again to reflect upon how little modern written narratives seem to deviate from cinematic expectations and pacing. i've written before that i consider the ascendency of "serious" science fiction in the late forties and early fifties an oblique response to writers like norman mailer and leon uris -- novelists who used the old techniques of narrative realism to attempt to grapple with what had happened to the world during world war ii. sci-fi writers seemed to believe that the previous rules of literary representation were unequal to the enormity of the reality of the war, and consequently developed non-linear, hallucinatory, and surreal storytelling devices, leaning heavily on allegorical figures and occasionally absurd and sardonic humor. heller wasn't, in the strictest sense, a sci-fi novelist, but he attempted to do the same kind of thing that ballard did in *empire of the sun* and vonnegut did in *cat's cradle* and *slaughterhouse five* -- invent his own surreal vocabulary of usage, a vocabulary that could properly reflect the madness and dislocation of his (and the world's) war experience. what i'm trying to say here, in this disjointed eulogy, is this: writers like heller, pynchon and william gaddis didn't become experimental literary heroes by sitting in their living rooms, diagramming departures from conventional realist strategies for theoretical reasons. they didn't have to. they lived through a catastrophic, mind-warping event that defied representation in the language that had, up until that point, been used to tell stories. the old narrative framework and rules of engagement were rendered inadequate, and the post-realist novel emerged as a reaction rather than as a challenge. the fact that *catch-22* isn't even best read as a world war ii novel (it seems to me to resonate more clearly with vietnam and the emergent american resistance movements) doesn't obscure the fact that it was heller's own war experiences, and attempts to make sense of what happened to him, that engendered the "cubist" style of the book. the ease with which *catch-22* and the yossarian character mutated into *mash* (the television program, not the movie) and alan alda's interpretation of hawkeye pierce suggests an incomplete rejection of traditional story forms; and indeed, heller was always much less at odds with literary convention than were many of his contemporaries -- particularly pynchon, whose *gravity's rainbow*, for better or for worse, serves as a kind of culmination of the sci-fi movement against the realist interpretation of world war ii. yet *catch-22* served as a kind of easy exposure to experimentalism for millions of young americans, who, in this immensely readable narrative, were forced to confront the transience of time, character, and event. are we now losing the innovative spark, created by the intellectual friction of those who actually fought world war ii? are we set to retreat to a friendly, script-ready new realism, with novels serving as a kind of minor league for the filmed entertainment industry? with each death in this great generation of authors, we inch closer to an unfortunate end of the relevance of american writers. gotta find a way/ a better way/ a better way, Tris mc call |