“Why Don’t You Just Say It as Simply as That?”: The Progression of Parrhesia in the Early Novels of Joseph Heller

Abstract

The critical placing of Joseph Heller (1923-1999) has long been underdeveloped, likely as a result of the dominance of Catch-22 (1961). As George J. Searles suggested in 1977, Heller was often dismissed as "simply another example of that peculiarly American literary phenomenon, the 'one book' author" (74). Despite the five Heller novels that followed the publication of Searles' article, Catch-22 has seemingly continued to pull the vast majority of critical attention towards it and, consequently, the wider perception of Heller's early novels has been somewhat neglected. When focus has progressed beyond Yossarian and the island of Pianosa to Heller's other two early novels (Something Happened [1974] and Good as Gold [1979]), there is a tendency to place his work primarily in ethnic terms, as in the work of Frederick C. Stern (who identified that after the publication of Something Happened, the tendency was to see Heller's characters as Jewish) andWayne C. Miller. This folds Heller into a larger group of Jewish-American authors writing roughly contemporaneously, including Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and perhaps the voice that now dominates such discussions, Philip Roth. However, Stern also suggests that "another category into which Heller fit was that of 'dark humorist'" (15). This has been echoed in more recent criticism which has equated Heller with the then-growing trend of black humor that dealt with taboo subjects by "comedians like Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Mort Sahl, and Lenny Bruce" (Fermaglich 61), a direction which might also be seen as reinscribing Heller's Jewishness, given the ethnic background of each member of this group. (120). This notion of preaching as a kind of democratic oratory from the heart of ancient Greece seems to underpin if not Heller's authorial intentions (though this perhaps comes more to the fore in aspects of his 1988 novel, Picture This), then at least his inclinations, when confronted by the social and political practice of postwar America.