Playing a terrible game of pretend: Masculine performance and gender humor in the World War II novels of Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Weaver (Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Gordon Weaver)

This study of four novels set during World War II—Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and Eight Corners of the World by Gordon Weaver—analyzes the role of masculine performances and humor in the texts' gender dynamics. The aim is to approach these novels in light of Judith Butler's view of gender as performance. Bob Hope's jokes demarcate wartime's rapid changes, gender turbulence, and major shifts in military thinking that allowed soldiers to feel fear in combat but encouraged them to tough it out by “playing a terrible game of pretend.”; In Heller, gender catches underwrite military masculinity, and ridiculous antics of officers are juxtaposed to successful resistance by soldiers who reject demands to reaffirm their manhood and enact comic or “feminine” roles. In Pynchon, humor arises when characters and readers pretend that the sadomasochistic atmosphere in the novel does not vex their aspirations and ideals. Vonnegut's textual strategy distances the male narrator from scenes of emasculation during wartime. His partial self-effacement, which bears witness to losses caused by the bombing of Dresden, creates an ambivalent voice of a pacifist who describes senseless slaughter as predetermined. Weaver's Japanese narrator debunks the claims that masculinity is a timeless set of demands when situations force him to choose between being disloyal to friends and not living up to cultural ideals. Pointing to gaps between gender scripts and historical situations reveals the presence of male farce behind masculine image-making during the Reagan administration. These works juxtapose masculine ideals to improvisational performances in order to juxtapose cultural demands to gendered practices. Comic gender representation responds to cultural politics of the Cold War and nostalgia for the “good war” during the Vietnam War and Reagan years.