| When Max. F. Schultz, a renowned Black Humor fiction critic, claims that Black Humor fiction is specific to the 1960s in America, he is actually stressing that the significance of Black Humor fiction lies in its idiosyncratic social backgrounds, and consequently, Black Humor fiction goes beyond, or even above, the mere domain of humor. As a representative of Black Humor fiction authors, Joseph Heller is heralded as one of the most remarkable masters of humor. Just as Schultz claims, the idiosyncrasy of Joseph Heller's humor also lies in the blackness in his fiction. The current dissertation focuses on this blackness and its medium—humor.Positioning itself in the literary transitional period from modernism to post-modernism, Heller's fiction conveys a rather complex set of black implications, which not only includes influences from the existentialism prevailing in his age, but also reflects the particular social backgrounds as well as his personal experiences. The black implications essentially concern the survival logic of modern people against an existential and absurd living background. The dissertation argues that hierarchy, mortality and absurdity are the key issues in the black implications in Heller's Black Humor fiction and attempts to present a well-illustrated network of the blackness through explicating the three key issues from perspectives of sociology, psychology and philosophy. The interdisciplinary framework combines the power theories of Michel Foucault, the argument of Ernest Becker on the struggles between physical mortality and spiritual immortality, and the metaphysics on the separation between existence and essence.The dissertation highlights two concerns in illustrating the blackness in Joseph Heller's fiction. Firstly, it makes a point of interpreting the three black implications and their interrelationship. Although there are not a few essays focusing their attentions on the black nature of Heller's fiction, few of them have tried to illustrate the general network of these implications. Actually, the three implications are upgraded one after another:power is the key to open the door to Heller's fictional world, death serves as the threshold to it, and absurdity, the essential issue to understand the blackness, creates the pervasive and fundamental atmosphere inside Heller's fictional world. Secondly, it focuses on the medium through which the blackness gets to be interpreted. With critics'deeper inquiry into Black Humor fiction, it has become clear that "humor" just functions as the medium while "black" is the nuclear in the term "Black Humor". And this is the reason why Heller claims that he does not employ humor without a black implication in his novels. To Heller, humor is only a medium that could and should convey the blackness to the readers. However, humor also plays an indispensible role in Heller's Black Humor fiction. On the one hand, humor and blackness are complementary to each other, because the prerequisite of humor, to "make surprise", presupposes the existence of absurdity, which is the essential component in Black Humor. On the other hand, there is always a tension between blackness and humor caused by the contradiction between this prerequisite and the restrictions of social reality, which would eventually lead to the dilemma of Black Humor fiction. This accounts for why Heller's first novel Catch-22 could never be artistically surmounted by his later works, and predicts the end of Black Humor fiction ever since the very day it came into being.This dissertation is organized into four chapters besides the Introduction and the Conclusion. In the Introduction, it reviews the existing study on Heller's fiction both abroad and at home, introduces the social, literary and personal influences contributing to Heller's artistic features, and then generalizes the three main black implications in his fiction:hierarchical power, mortality and absurdity. The following three chapters discuss the three black implications respectively. Chapter One focuses on the implication of power, Chapter Two analyzes the impact of mortality on Heller's fictional world, and Chapter Three concerns the separation between existence and essence, namely, absurdity. The last chapter examines the medium humor, through which the blackness is interpreted.Chapter One explores the power implication with Foucault's power theories in four perspectives, that is, the similarity between Panopticon and "Catch-22", sexuality, power discourse and the father-son relationship. The hierarchical system in Heller's fictional world is rather complicated—With the Panopticon-like "Catch-22" overseeing on top, Heller's characters are engrossed in their struggles for self-identities. According to Foucault, it is due to the unique layout that Panopticon is considered to be an extremely powerful modern prison—a tower stands in the center circled by a ring-shaped building with all the cells facing the tower. The layout makes sure that the prisoners are under best control with the least investment. And this is exactly the way that "Catch-22" functions. Even though it is intangible, the military rule can manipulate soldiers to behave according to the logic of an absurd world. The only soldier who scorns the existence of the Panopticon-like "Catch-22" and its concomitant absurdity is Yossarian, the protagonist in Catch-22.Heller's characters are lost in their self-identities under the pressure of the omnipresent absurdity, so they make every effort to obtain a sense of safety. Sexuality without love, the pursuit of discourse power and the tendency of a father to kill his own son are all manifested in their efforts to obtain the sense of safety. First of all, sexuality is a way of reproduction and a symbol for the continuity of life, and that is why all Heller's protagonists are indulged in sexual activities. What's more, to confess their sexual motivations and behaviors is a way to reestablish their self-identities for such Heller heroes as Slocum in Something Happened and King David in God Knows. Secondly, the manipulation of discourse power also contributes to the characters'sense of superiority. While language at large adds to the sense of absurdity, discourse power sets up the characters'confidence in the establishment of their self-identities. Therefore, Yossarian is more than happy with the word play when censoring the officials'letters, while Slocum jumps at any chance to outspeak others and manages to resolve life dilemmas just by shifting tenses in discourse. Thirdly, torturing or even murdering their own son is another cruel way of Heller's characters to obtain their sense of safety. Now that the Oedipus Complex presupposes the potential threat of the son—after he grows up, Oedipus will usurp the throne and kill the father Laius, so it is comprehensible that Laius kills the son first. Henceforth, when Slocum murders his beloved son, he actually eliminates the potential threat for his future life.Chapter Two focuses on the theme of mortality in Heller's fiction. Actually, while power is essential to establish their identities, death is what Heller's characters are most afraid of. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues that "transference" is one of the crucial processes to eliminate the fear of death, and the more abstract a transference object tends to be, the less afraid a person is of his physical termination. Therefore, Heller's ultimate concern is the spiritual immortality instead of its physical counterpart, even though all Heller's protagonists are in dread of their physical termination. Even though Yossarian in Catch-22 believes in his survival philosophy and never gives up any chance to be grounded, while Socrates in Picture This scorns any survival philosophy and is always prepared for his physical execution, they essentially share the same belief to achieve the spiritual immortality. This idealistic immortality gives rise to two major consequences.For one consequence, the extreme fear of mortality brings about the characters' confusion about the time gap between the "tick" sound and the "tock" sound, or to put it simply, the constant time warps. Since "tick" means a beginning and "tock" brings about the ending, the "tock" sound naturally causes the characters'panic. Therefore, characters like Dunbar try every absurd method to prolong the starting "tick" sound and postpone the ending "tock" sound, which also sheds light on the seemingly fragmented structure of Catch-22 and the confusion of the past and the present of Slocum in Something Happened. For the other consequence, since the death god Thanatos never leaves the love god Eros alone, the only way to keep Thanatos away is to become immune to love. This is the reason why Heller's protagonists make every effort to stay away from love. For example, in Catch-22 Nately is courageous to love but he is also killed first, Yossarian indulges in sex but never falls in deep love, and Slocum in Something Happened secretly and cruelly embraces a death wish towards the women that he loves. Besides, since homosexuality means the belonging to a minority, characters like Major Major in Catch-22 and King David in God Knows spare no effort to exclude themselves from the powerless the-other group. Because the characters try not to show affection towards others, Heller's fictional world is practically a wasteland of love. Even though death is pervasive in the fictional world, Heller skillfully insinuates a rebirth theme as a "tick" sound to compensate for the motif of spiritual immortality. For example, there are a great many rebirth images in Catch-22, such as the soldier in white symbolizing an Egypt rebirth goddess and Chief White Halfoat symbolizing the Mayan corn god. Sometimes, a death gives rise to a symbolic rebirth of a protagonist. For example, in Good as Gold the death of Sid leads to the awakening of Gold's Jewish consciousness and in Something Happened the death of the son brings Slocum back to the normal life from the edge of spiritual collapse.Chapter Three explicates absurdity, the third black implication. In Heller's fictional world, the hierarchical system and the pressing mortality share the same essential meaning—the separation between existence and essence. In The Metaphysics of Absurdity, H. Gene Blocker argues that the origin of absurdity lies in the separation between existence and essence. This separation is imbedded in Heller's fictional world and confuses Heller's protagonists as well as his readers about the moon and the finger pointing towards the moon. Heller mainly employs two ways to illustrate this disruption of existence from its supposed essence, namely, to challenge the authority and to make fun of the signifiers. Accordingly, Heller shows such a negative attitude towards the so-called authority and tradition that even God, the extreme authority in Western culture, turns into a clown in God Knows. And Heller also resorts to unusual writing skills such as paradoxes, deja vu and unusual negation to stress the ambiguous relationship between the signifier and the signified.In the absurd world, only those who can manipulate the epistemological disruption could gain the upper hand, while most of those who cannot tragically fall victim to absurdity. Besides, there is also another group of Heller's characters who resemble Kierkegaard's absurd knights. Kierkegaard separates his knights into two kinds:the knights of faith and the knights of infinite resignation. While knights of infinite resignation like Dunbar in Catch-22 realize the absurdity of the world, they can never possibly "jump" above the absurdity as knights of faith like Yossarian could do. To become a knight of faith is the main concern and the most miserable torture for Heller's characters. In a sense, Yossarian as the Heller's first protagonist is lucky, because Heller easily arranges him to be a knight of faith who "jumps" at the end of the novel, while Heller's other protagonists are doomed to struggle tragically on the verge of being a knight of faith. No matter whether a knight of faith or a knight of resignation that Heller's protagonists prove to be, all of them are inevitably exposed to two consequences, loneliness and moral insanity. Loneliness is unavoidable on their way to be a knight of faith, and the disruption between existence and essence endows the immoral with moral implications, which causes the "moral insanity".The last chapter examines humor, the medium of blackness. Actually, the significance of humor lies in the retrospection that it causes rather than the humorous effect on the spot. Since the application of humor is to interpret the black implications, the humor in Heller's Black Humor fiction has more functions besides the usual social corrective function of the traditional humor. For one thing, it helps the characters and the readers get over the horror caused by the blackness. For another, Heller gets to intensify tactfully the blackness with the manipulation of the readers'expectation of the humor release from the pressure caused by the blackness. The mechanism of Heller's humor mainly contains four ingredients:the manipulation of the readers'emotions, the unexpected tonal shift between physical and spiritual, the capricious focus changing from the intellectual effect to the effective one and the constant ironic literary references. Because Heller's protagonists show their nostalgia towards an ideal Orthodox morality, the humor in Heller's fiction often appears with more generative rather than degenerative satirical edges. With the development of society and the corresponding refreshment of literary themes, to be generative predicts a work to be conservative and eventually fall into literary cliche. However, humor constantly demands a degenerative satire to "make surprise". Hence, there always lies a potential danger for the integration of blackness and humor in Heller's fiction. With the satirical strength being reduced, the humorous effect and the absurd aura could be diminished till they are totally eliminated. Therefore, blackness and humor will inevitably cancel each other out.The conclusion of the dissertation is condensed into two points. Firstly, Heller's blackness essentially concerns the modern people's survival logic against an existential and absurd background. Power, mortality and absurdity are the three key issues in the blackness, which are integrated by the metaphysical separation between existence and essence. It is the willful manipulation of the moon and the finger pointing towards it that the hierarchically dominating class always employs to realize their tyranny; and it is the lack of an essential meaning of mortality that the very mention of death could curdle the protagonists'blood. In this way, lying at the kernel of Heller's fictional world, absurdity virtually accounts for the occurrence and existence of the blackness. Secondly, the tension between blackness and humor practically predicts the dying away of Black Humor fiction in the 1960s in America. The primary condition for a humor to achieve its effect is to "make surprise". Since Heller's Black Humor fiction tends to be more generatively satirical, its black implications are doomed to wear the readers'expectations out. When the readers are used to or even tired of the black implications, humor will lose its surprising appeal and the blackness will cease to sustain the readers'attention. Consequently, the humor in Heller's Black Humor fiction will lose its humorous effect and cannot provoke the readers'retrospection. This is a creative dilemma not only for Joseph Heller but also for other Black Humor novelists. Nevertheless, it can never be denied that Heller's integration of blackness and humor as well as his original rhetorical devices to achieve this integration is still inspiring contemporary authors, especially those of black humor. |
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