Where are the Hellers and Gaddises of yesteryear? The fiftieth anniversary of the 1961 publication of Catch-22 has crept up on us, marked by the publication of the first major biography of the novel’s author, Joseph Heller; after a brief period out-of-print, William Gaddis‘ first two novels, The Recognitions (1955) and J R (1975) will be republished early next year by Dalkey Archive Press; a biography of Gaddis and a collection of his letters are also in preparation for the next few years. All three books (as well as the books by these authors that followed), explicitly comic in genre, anatomized the post-war American world with the same savage indignation that fuelled Jonathan Swift’s satire, and each in their way (along with Heller’s second, and possibly best, novel, Something Happened, from 1975) explored in fictional form the social and cultural industries similarly anatomized by Theodor Adorno. They are extraordinarily cruel, and extraordinarily funny, books — but none of them end with any hope for a redemption of the world, or the race.

I was fortunate enough to be acquainted with Gaddis for a brief time in the late 1970s, when I took a class he offered under the grim title The Literature of Failure at Bard College; over the years I’ve read just about all the books by these two writers, and I wonder what they might have made of a world swiftly descending into networked collapse and failure. Perhaps, wherever they are, they feel lucky that they’re dead. Gaddis, especially, was obsessed by communications systems of media, the law, aesthetics and culture; Heller’s mordant picture of the administered society, exemplified by the World War II military, far outstripped even the most catastrophic and disastrous insights of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and others. Enthusiasts who enjoy Heller’s satire of double-talk and opportunism often seem to forget that the final section of Catch-22 is one of the darkest prose nightmares of contemporary experience, inspired by the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Celine and darkened by the mid-air evisceration of one of Yossarian’s comrades and the rape and murder of one of the female characters of the book. These writers’ second novels, Something Happened and J R, published within one year of each other in the mid-1970s, are brilliantly contemporary, their comedy operating through an obscenely tragic mode.

When critics like myself compare two authors, they often tend to cherry-pick superficial biographical resemblances and hope that these resemblances find some echoes in deeper considerations of the work. It is an unnecessary project, but it is a road in. Both Gaddis and Heller spent time in the advertising, business and public relations industries before writing their first novels; both tended to work in large-scale narrative forms (Catch-22 weighs in at 453 pages, The Recognitions at twice that); both writers shared the same agent (Candida Donadio); both of their final novels (Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man and Gaddis’ Agape Agape) were brief, distilled metafictional monologues that attempted various kinds of summings-up; and both died in East Hampton, Heller in 1999 and Gaddis in 1998. But there are others more specific to the work and not the men. Both works share a fondness for Swiftian scatalogical punning (Heller’s Lieutenant Scheisskopf and Gaddis’ art critic Recktall Brown, for two examples); both experimented in various ways with established long narrative forms (the time and place structure of Catch-22 as well as the more daring metanarrative tricks of Picture This; Gaddis’ dialogue-heavy pastiche style which drew in texts from advertising, business, religious literature and even legal opinions — a “mash-up” text long before anyone came up with the term “mash-up”); and, more significantly, their visions became progressively darker as their careers went on.

Both authors also have been lumped in with the “black humor” novelists of the 1950s and 1960s, a genre which included authors like Terry Southern, James Purdy and John Barth, but rather than the nihilism of these authors Gaddis and Heller expressed more of an anarchic pessimism. They might be considered the comedy entertainment offered each evening in the cabaret of the Grand Hotel Abyss, offering a satire that goes beyond satire and denying the possibility of a Dionysian freedom of the individual. The trajectory of both authors’ careers suggests two other similarities: first, that satire had increasingly become an inadequate form for their darker conclusions about the world, ending in tragic visions instead; second, that we now live in a world which they both prophesied. Rather than great American writers of the 20th century, they are more properly great American writers of the 21st. Heller is best known for a novel set in World War II and upon its publication was compared by less imaginative critics with novels by Norman Mailer and James Jones; Gaddis’ first novel is set in a world immediately following that war; both writers’ second novels were more local and immediate, set in mid-1970s urban America (Gaddis limited his canvas to the few miles between Massapequa, Long Island, and Wall Street). But as I begin to re-read both writers, I find that they could easily have been written today; the headlines of their newspapers are not at all dissimilar to those of our own.

As I begin to re-read the novels of both writers over the next few months (as well as Swift, I hope; it is about time to revisit Gulliver and his travels again), I am encouraged by this: their books live in a way that others do not; and far from being about war or high finance or the legal system, they are about the human spirit. Among the two most perspicacious reviewers of Catch-22 at the time of its publication were the British critic Philip Toynbee and the American theatre director Robert Brustein. “When I began reading Catch-22 I thought it was a farcical satire on life in the United States Army Air Force,” Toynbee wrote. He continued:

Later I believed that Mr. Heller’s target was modern war and all those who are responsible for waging it. Still later it seemed that he was attacking social organization and anyone who derives power from it. But by the end of the book it had become plain to me that it is — no other phrase will do — the human condition itself which is the object of Mr. Heller’s outraged fury and disgust. … For the fact is that all my successive interpretations of the book now seem to me to have been accurate, even if the earlier ones were also incomplete. The book has an immense and devastating theme, but this theme is illustrated, as it should be, by means of an observed reality.

In a 1961 issue of The New Republic, Robert Brustein concurred, and added:

For, contrary to the armchair pronouncements of patriotic ideologues, Yossarian’s obsessive concern for survival makes him not only morally dead, but one of the most morally vibrant figures in recent literature … Finding his absolutes in the freedom to be, in a world dominated by cruelty, carnage, inhumanity, and a rage to destroy itself, Heller has come upon a new morality based on an old ideal, the morality of refusal. Perhaps — now that Catch-22 has found its most deadly nuclear form — we have reached the point where even the logic of survival is unworkable.

Both Gaddis and Heller courageously demonstrate the absolute necessity and the ultimate futility of saying “no.” The means by which this two-letter word extends across a wide bookshelf is a lesson in metaphysics and aesthetics itself, and provides, if not hope, recognition of a kindred perspective of human experience.

There are two fine interviews with these authors available online in the Paris Review‘s Art of Fiction series, William Gaddis’ here and Joseph Heller’s here.