On The Subversive Writing Techniques In Catch-22

Confronted with the unsteady situations of the mid-twentieth-century American society, a group of American novelists represented by Joseph Heller developed a new literary genre to better express their pent-up feelings of distress, discontent and even indignation. Instead of delineating life with"rational devices"(Harris 21) as in traditional novels, these novelists tried to depict social realities in a humorous and exaggerated manner to produce an absurd effect, and to affect the reader more intensely and overwhelmingly. Because of their distinctive style of writing, these writers were labeled as American"black humorists"(Pratt xx).Joseph Heller's representative work Catch-22 is a masterpiece of black humor. Heller skillfully combines the originally contradictory elements of the comic and the tragic, the farcical and the horrible to make penetrating exposure of and a scathing satire on the blackness of the prevailing bureaucracy in the war-time and postwar American society.Since the fiction's publication in 1961, both positive and negative critiques have come out. Some sing praises of the new book while others feeling puzzled by its loose structure do not speak highly of it.Despite the divergence in critical reception, Catch-22 with its special flavor of black humor appeals to generations of readers and critics to chew and digest it.Still in 1960s, in the later half, an important philosophical trend was born and grew in France, then spread to and flourished in America and influenced the whole western world. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida was the founder and main promoter of the revolutionary movement—Deconstruction, which aims to expose"unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions"(Simpson and Weiner Vol. IV, 346) in western philosophical and cultural traditions. His deconstructive theoretical system was developed on his unsparing efforts in undermining traditional"hierarchical oppositions"(Derrida Limited, 127) in Western metaphysics, for instance, speech/writing, presence/absence. Derrida's subversive theories and practice challenged and shook many mainstream notions and ideas in Western philosophical and cultural traditions.Likewise, Heller's writing techniques in Catch-22 manifest features that break with conventional literary modes. Being"iconoclastic"(Schulz 156) is the common ground for both Heller's writing strategies in Catch-22 and Derrida's deconstructive philosophy. Therefore, it's natural to connect the two and make an attempt to interpret the fiction and analyze Heller's writing skills from the perspective of subverting"binary oppositions"(Derrida Limited, 127) in literary tradition.The thesis thus relates Derrida's thoughts of subverting"hierarchical oppositions"to Heller's innovative writing techniques in Catch-22 to probe into how these artistic skills subvert a couple of"binary oppositions."By reading and analyzing intensively the original text, by referring to the relevant literature and critiques, the thesis finds that Heller's use of paradoxical and ambiguous language, brilliant portraiture of anti-heroic figures and a narrative that denies a chronological order can be interpreted as the subversion of such"hierarchical oppositions"in the literary tradition as clarity/ambiguity, hero/little man, and order/chaos, which are respectively expounded in the paper.Such subversive writing methods contribute to the novel's entire absurd atmosphere and effectively present a picture of a grotesque, mechanical and corrupted society. Therefore, the fiction is justifiably regarded as an"explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant book"(Brustein 31) and will continue to be read as an enlightening masterpiece.