SOURCE: "Death and Black Humor," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1975, pp. 5-40.

That Black Humor has become a fit subject for the literary historian as well as the literary anatomist is demonstrated by the recent publication of three books—Charles B. Harris's Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd, Raymond M. Olderman's Beyond the Waste Land, and Max F. Schulz's Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties—which advance theories about the cultural causes of Black Humor.¹ Harris, Olderman, and Schulz rightly emphasize social dissonances and intellectual uncertainties as stimuli for the novelists they discuss, but a new sense of the finality of human existence causes much of the social disjunction and intellectual futility that Black Humor presents.² Although this proposition has about it the reductionism of Pynchon's Herbert Stencil, both the centrality of death in Black Humor and the importance of recognizing its centrality without discounting the Black Humorists' other concerns can be demonstrated. The theses of this essay are that the "blackness" of Black Humor is primarily funereal, that the fact and awareness of death are the basic sources of the pessimism or nihilism in such fiction, that the presence of death in such fiction does much to explain the kinds of heroes presented, the strategies of selfhood they adopt, and the kinds of endings and forms the writers employ, and that the Black Humorists' concern with death gives their fiction both a philosophical ultimacy and an artistic rationale. The argument begins with comments on John Updike's The Centaur and Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, which are controls for and, in Bellow's case, an introduction to the discussion of the Black Humorists. Although the death theme in all of the novels by the following authors will be discussed, it is seen as best presented in a representative novel by each: J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man; Joseph Heller, Catch-22; John Barth, The Floating Opera; John Hawkes, Second Skin; Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five; and Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. These are central and representative works of Black Humor; works by Terry Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman, James Purdy, and Donald Barthelme have not been included since they do not seem to take death as a central subject.

Modern writers other than the Black Humorists have dealt with death as a basic subject for fictional investigation, but the degree to which death pervades Black Humor and the way in which Black Humorists present death set them off from other novelists. Frederick J. Hoffman has analyzed modern Continental, English, and American authors' treatment of death, but his main interest was in the effects of modern mass violence rather than in the effects of an individual's conception of his own natural end or his responses to the natural deaths of those close to him.³ Murder, whether individual and for personal gain or mass and for political gain, is sometimes present in the Black Humorists' fiction, but they primarily concern themselves with the effects of an individual's consciousness of death rather than with the event itself. Consciousness may be stimulated by some violent event (suicide is prevalent), but usually an unfocused thought of death as a possibility or death from disease or accident sets the characters to thinking about mortality and devising strategies for coping with their consciousness. The emphasis on the consciousness of death influences the form of experience in the novels. Instead of using death as an event to round off action (as in The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, or Light in August), the Black Humorists most often place the event of death in the past before the action of the novel begins, near the beginning of the novel, or present it as a continuing process or perpetual possibility throughout the novel. Because death is a radical given, the flow of experience is from, instead of toward, the end. In concentrating on the characters' internal responses rather than on objective situations of violence, the Black Humorists also avoid the pornography of violence which saturates our pulps and popular films. Presented as it affects consciousness, death is apprehended by most Black Humor characters as a contractive end, as a final and ultimate denial of the future rather than a way to some futurity or immortality. By closing rather than opening possibilities, death becomes an element of existence, a process that is simultaneous with living. For the Black Humorists, man alive is in the midst of death; in their fiction, death is more than a convenient resolution for plot and more than a distant necessity for their characters—it is a cause of action rather than an effect, an end which dictates beginnings and middles. In their emphasis on the consciousness of death as a source of motivation, the Black Humorists have some antecedents in American fiction. Hemingway's whole career, it now seems, was a response to death of the self. Faulkner's Sartoris and As I Lay Dying both have the death of others as ground subjects. A basic theme in Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is Eugene Gant's growing awareness of time and death. More recent novelists have also given us characters who muse on their own or others' extinction. Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Saul Bellow have, in one or more novels, turned their attention to the meaning of personal extinction as a basic theme. Although Updike and Bellow have most consistently created characters who are tested by their awareness of death, they both handle the idea of death traditionally. The Centaur and Mr. Sammler's Planet have in common with Black Humor the centrality of death and characters who reveal themselves through their attitudes toward mortality, but the responses of the heroes, the resolutions and modes of the novels, and the authors' implied views are quite different from those in Black Humor.

The Centaur (1963) records the confrontations of two persons—George Caldwell and his son, Peter—with their consciousness of mortality. During the four days of the novel's action, George Caldwell, a middle-aged schoolteacher, entertains the possibility of and then accepts the certainty of his death. As he progresses from ambivalence—fear of death and longing for death—to the acceptance of death as part of a natural and spiritual economy, his son is initiated into a mortal world by becoming aware of his father's struggle. Death is presented as an internal process (rather than external event) which George and Peter Caldwell continually contemplate:

Since, five days ago, Caldwell grasped the possibility that he might die, took it into himself as you might swallow a butterfly, a curiously variable gravity has entered the fabric of things, that now makes all surfaces leadenly thick with heedless permanence and the next instant makes them dance with inconsequence, giddy as scarves. Nevertheless, among disintegrating surfaces he tries to hold his steadfast course.⁴

Caldwell's life is filled with economic privation, social isolation, professional frustration, mechanical failures, and the imagery of wasted junk, yet "he tries to hold his steadfast course." His fear of death could send him off on the kinds of adventures a hitchhiker recounts; his failure could send him winging toward the peace of resignation, but Caldwell continues his responsibilities as father, husband, and teacher. In very nearly the last words of the novel, "Chiron accepted death" (222)—and the life of cooperation and sacrifice the school-lesson volvox had introduced along with death. Caldwell-Chiron also accepts, without defining it, a religious faith which had been undermined by his sense of mortality. At the end of the novel, he is left on the boundary of earth and heaven with the promise of an eternal reward: immortality.

Peter Caldwell recalls the novel's four days as an adult in New York City, where he is "an authentic second-rate abstract expressionist living in an East Twenty-third Street loft with a Negro mistress" (81). In its proud elegiac tone, the novel implicitly honors Caldwell senior's religious acceptance of mortality and devalues Peter's responses to death, love and art (the first a way to make present time sacral, the second a way to stop time). For both men, death, as a time-release poison within, is the central fact of their existence which requires a definite response; their awareness is without desperation, if with sorrow. Updike's own view of the Caldwells filters through the Centaur myth which confers dignity upon George Caldwell for his sacrifice for others and his courage to continue as a hero of the ordinary. As the epigraph from Karl Barth—"Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth"—suggests, Updike's view is ultimately religious. The boundary between heaven and earth is most specifically man's mortality which must be considered a natural end and beginning rather than a wall or an easy avenue to transcendence. In his Epilogue, Updike gives Caldwell-Chiron the immortality of the Centauri constellation, an ending of undeniable, if indirectly stated, hopefulness.

A very similar resolution, devoid of Christian elements, is achieved at the end of Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Like George Caldwell, Artur Sammler instructs the disrespectful young, senses a general degeneration and personal ending, suspects nature and sexuality, lives in insane confusion, and yearns for the order of the past or the promise of a transcendent future. Also like Caldwell, Sammler is separated from his contemporaries by a consciousness of death which pervades the novel. Sammler and his wife were "killed" by a Nazi death squad, but somehow Sammler survived. Now he lives in New York City with his special and, despite his disclaimer, prideful knowledge of death. In the three days of the novel's present, Sammler changes his conception of death and accepts a life of moral responsibility even though he is an aged man. The stimulus for the change is Elya Gruner, who is dying of an aneurism. Gruner accepts his death, maintains his generous nature, and continues to perform his daily responsibilities. Sammler, abstracted and detached by his survival, learns from Gruner that the awareness of death does not confer a magical potency nor does it excuse selfishness. Under the pressure of such recognition and of events which demand his practical response, Sammler disavows his attempt at a pure spiritual transcendence. The novel ends with his prayer for Gruner which affirms Sammler's new knowledge, paralleling Caldwell's, that a moral contract in which the self sacrifices for others is the connection between heaven and earth. Many of the dualities of The Centaur—heaven/earth, intellection/natural appetites, futurism/nostalgia, parental responsibility/adult freedom—are present in Mr. Sammler's Planet and are resolved in much the same way. Death, the lateness of time, and the wideness of space tempt Sammler to escape from quotidian responsibilities, but Sammler changes and thus becomes, because of his advanced age, a special hero of the ordinary. Bellow does not, as Updike, hold out the promise of immortality, but Gruner's courage, Sammler's new knowledge and new beginning, and the prayer which concludes the novel suggest that death need not force men to abandon the "ordinary forms of common life" for terrified action or selfish disengagement.⁵

Sammler's continuing analysis of his culture is not invalidated by his change from abstraction to responsibility; in fact, his reflections are used to prefigure his shift, for Sammler does not follow out his own prescriptions until he learns that anyone can know the truth about death. Such commentary, a synthesis of sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories, makes Mr. Sammler's Planet a good, if negative, introduction to the world presented by Black Humor. Sammler, presumably, believes that modern historical processes have awarded men increased freedom from economic, political, social, and religious restrictions, but that the freedom has resulted in the new suffering of individual selfhood. Subject to a flooding of information and alternative forms of life by the media, the individual in our time loses the ability to give design to cultural phenomena. He retreats into subjectivity, makes impossible demands on complex realities, refuses "(death being sure and final) to go away from this earth unsatisfied" (34). Since "humankind could not endure futurelessness" and since "death was the sole visible future" (71), the individual selects out of the universally disseminated grab-bag of information the notion of Romantic transcendence, now debased to terms of immanence, to satisfy his longing for happiness. This "debased Romanticism" or "dark Romanticism" includes the following ways of coping with the thought of finality: primitivism, irrationality, mystery cults, sexuality, criminality, madness, and cultivation of freedom, spontaneity, innocence, and wholeness. The individual sacrifices religious or ethical criteria for aesthetic standards, thus making life a spectacle in which one acts or watches. If the actors are to elicit interest in their aesthetic life, they must mythologize themselves, must "expand by imagination and try to rise above the limitations of the ordinary forms of common life . . . hoping perhaps to get away (in some peculiar sense) from the death of their species" (135-6). Imaginative distinction and originality rather than imitation become rules for personality. This "passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement" (167), but man's imagination is overtaxed by the need to produce a figure of stature, a form of selfhood which would satisfy the promise of history and mitigate the fear of finality. Frustrated by his failed quest for transcendent singularity and ecstatic authenticity, the individual has a "peculiar longing for nonbeing" (214) and apocalypse. Bellow thus brings the circle of death to a full close: from fear of death to a longing for annihilation. Sammler renounces his own wish for death and his compulsive attraction to the actions of "dark Romanticism," but the heroes in Black Humor novels cannot accommodate themselves with Sammler's religious humanism. They live in the world he describes, a world of terror, debased Romantic gestures, aesthetic standards of behavior, and apocalypse, but they create it because other mediations between them and their deaths—religious faith, social faith, love, "the ordinary forms of common life"—have wasted away or have disintegrated under the pressure of finality. Taken together, the seven novels discussed below present the circular pattern of death analyzed in Mr. Sammler's Planet: self-assertion to imaginative construction to confusion and longing for annihilation.

Many of the themes of the debased Romanticism that Bellow describes are personified by Sebastian Dangerfield, the hero of J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man (1955).⁶ A poor American law student in Ireland, Dangerfield fears "that last and final chill, the one to be avoided at all costs" (191). Because his waking moments and nightmares are filled with elaborately imaged anxieties about his imminent and total annihilation, Dangerfield's primary daily project is avoiding the fact and thought of death. Although Donleavy uses the fable of the gingerbread boy—a figure running from parental authority, rather foolish bystanders, and extinction—to structure his picaresque novel and give symbolic resonance to its numerous chase scenes, the police, the landlords, and women who pursue Dangerfield are actually externalizations of his anxiety about internal time eating itself outward at an unknown rate to Nothing. His comment about intercourse sums up his attitude toward life in general: "matter, all of it, of time" (55). Terrified of time's irreversible progress toward putrefaction, Dangerfield flees his own consciousness through spontaneous, often criminal busyness and the resulting exhaustion, by drinking and whoring, by fantasizing about his rich past and future, by reveling in the funerals of others, and by pretending to himself and the Blessed Oliver Plunkett a religious faith. He becomes a closed self who protects his precious subjectivity by denying the value of others, by adopting masks and disguises, and by irrationally asserting the primacy of his own desires. Dangerfield's life is a combination of major defeats and minor victories, but near the end of the novel his hopes for wealth, sexual satiety, and peace seem answered, ironically enough, by his father's death. However, all his strategies for evading his consciousness of the end are exploded by his final reverie of death's horses running out to sea with him. The novel ends with a sad and despairing prayer: "God's mercy/On the wild/Ginger man" (347). Dangerfield's assertion of self (in the ways Bellow identifies as Romantic) brings only temporary relief from the fear of extinction which drives him to desperate denials of conventional codes.

Although The Ginger Man presents a man whose heart is "twisted with dying" (285), the mode of the novel is comic. Much of the action is slapstick, and the limited humanity of the characters makes them satiric objects or grotesque jokes, but most of the comedy in the novel is verbal. Dangerfield continually outwits and outtalks his "enemies" and uses his irony to pretend to himself that death is escapable and that he has "dignity." The reader is invited to laugh at some of Dangerfield's more innocent foibles and scrapes, but most often Donleavy sets up an alliance between his hero-narrator and the reader to laugh at respectability, morality, and weakness. It is a Dionysian laugh, but when death erupts into Dangerfield's consciousness, laughter often falters as a protective device. We are left with the same horror Dangerfield feels, a horror unmediated by religious belief, personal relationships, or the now mirthless laugh. We are like the gingerbread boy whose manic, taunting laugh has ended in the wolf's throat. Donleavy's achievement is thus primarily rhetorical. Through his shifting first- to third-person stream of consciousness, time-shattered syntax, and epitaphic rimes, he reverses our ordinary criteria of judgment and has us rejoice at Sebastian Dangerfield's continual reversal of others' expectations. Moral issues are reduced by the more basic question of life and death, and only an affirmation of vitality at any cost saves the novel from complete nihilism.

Donleavy's other novels also begin with the hero's awareness of death and the gap between self and the world such awareness causes; a clear progress is made, however, from the manic and comic desperation of The Ginger Man to the pathetic and sentimental resignation of The Onion Eaters.⁷A Singular Man takes a protagonist very like Dangerfield into a paranoid separation from life and death symbolized both by his fixation on his mausoleum and the novel's title. The heroes of The Saddest Summer of Samuel S, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, and The Onion Eaters all attempt to overcome their fear of their own death or their sadness about the death of others through love, but Donleavy too often sentimentalizes their relations by giving them an adolescent quality. The vitalistic technique of The Ginger Man slides in later novels toward more unified action, descriptions of setting, static consciousness, cliche, and even silence. The relative failure of Donleavy's later novels is instructive. With The Ginger Man he had explored a variety of ways to cope with death and found them ultimately wanting. Forced into seeking some resolution to his characters' victimization by their own consciousness, Donleavy turned away from the tension comedy creates to heterosexual love but (modifying Leslie Fiedler's thesis) found difficulty writing persuasively about love because of the effects of death. Only by diminishing death's effect and reducing his heroes' stature, as he does in The Beastly Beatitudes, does Donleavy make the man-woman relation more meaningful than the male alliance he treats in most of his fiction. Death, then, causes the bleakness of the characters' lives in Donleavy's fiction and also, after A Singular Man, reduces the author's ability to produce a fiction which avoids sentimentality—an illustration that death forces men, as characters in and creators of fiction, into pitiful weaknesses and sad resignation.

Sebastian Dangerfield has a severe "case of death"(139), but Yossarian in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is the Black Humor hero whose "deep-seated survival anxieties" most obviously and completely control his life.⁸ Although Catch-22 is a war novel, the death in it is not just a result of war; the logic of death that Heller establishes early in the novel makes his ending false. Yossarian's anxieties about death are evident before he reaches the war zone—he tells Mrs. Scheisskopf to "be furious you're going to die" (184)—and are extreme: he will not resign "himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday" (51) and thinks about war that he "could have lived without it—lived forever, perhaps" (69). As the missions mount, Heller has Yossarian become aware of death's reality and move from anxiety to paranoid evasive strategies which evidence a demonic and desperate imagination at work. The major raids trace Yossarian's progress toward an ever more probable death and the resultant paranoia: over Ferrara he loses courage, over Bologna he is reduced to a quivering hulk of terror, over Avignon he finds out Snowden's secret, and over Parma he is wounded himself. As the probability of death for Yossarian increases, the deaths of others become increasingly mysterious and absurd, as though death's power increased an increment in its repetition. Kraft's exploding in thin air and Clevinger's disappearing in a cloud begin a progress toward absurdity that ends with Dobbs and Nately colliding in mid-air and Dunbar and Major Major simply disappearing. Given the shortening odds, death's voracious consumption, and the almost ubiquitous Nately's whore, Yossarian decides to desert, but the condition of his now desperate, even murderous consciousness and the charnel state of the world make his renunciation of Cathcart's deal illogical and the ending of the novel sentimental. Yossarian has accepted the deal when he is wounded by Nately's whore, an act which precipitates his full consideration of Snowden's secret. But only if one interprets the spirit in "the spirit gone, man is garbage" (450) as principle, an interpretation at odds with Yossarian's original interpretation (177) and with the physical situation, can one accept Yossarian's change from a thanatophobic victim to a charitable idealist. Yossarian has said he would like to live in a hospital so doctors would operate at the first sign of an emergency and has said that, if worst comes to worst, death is made to behave in the hospital, yet he leaves the hospital to find Nately's whore's kid sister in Rome and then go to Sweden, a mission contradictory to his long-standing and persistent "mission against mortality" (180). Although Yossarian does not believe that his moral action will earn him a reward outside of time, Heller insists on his running to responsibilities, as if the author—against all the evidence he has adduced—wanted to demonstrate that the fear of death need not reduce man to amorality.

In order to multiply the evidence of death's power and to increase the relevance of his war-time situations to life in an America at peace, Heller gives the reader, in the term he uses to describe Snowden's intestines, "God's plenty" of death independent of the war. Nature, as Yossarian finds in his walk through the mushroom-filled woods, is hostile, and the sun is dying. Dunbar sees decades zipping through his hands; time finally catches the old man in Rome. Disease threatens Doc Daneeka and finishes Chief White Halfoat and the old colonel in the hospital. One could also be murdered by an Aarfy or Flume, be killed by a prank (Kid Sampson), or could accidentally drown. Suicide is McWatt's end, and Hungry Joe, the man nearest Yossarian in paranoia, just plain dies. To reinforce such multiple mortality, Heller introduces several long lists of ways to die, including a list of terminal diseases. The point is that if Scheisskopf, Wintergreen, Milo, and Cathcart were deposed, if the war were ended, if the planes were grounded, these men would still have natural or accidental death to cope with, and Yossarian would still have survival anxieties. War gives men a chance to do their worst to others and makes manifest those anxieties that make the act of living a fearful business; ultimately Heller suggests that the absurdity of dying in war is only in degree greater than the absurdity of dying anytime, anywhere. For a war novel, Catch-22 does not linger on the details of the events of death. Only in the Snowden episodes does Heller force us (and Yossarian) to bear the ironic, grisly details of death, and even in the Snowden sequences Yossarian's reactions are the primary subject of attention. Heller shares with the other Black Humorists, then, an interest in death as an element of existence, both as it affects the living and is a result of stupid policy decisions by a self-serving bureaucracy. For Heller, as for Donleavy and others, death is an absolute end (the chaplain, the man presumably most capable of accepting death, has terrifying, death-filled night-mares) which forces men into closed survival systems or desperate flight. That Heller felt the need to lessen the burden of survival in the ending of Catch-22 illustrates, like Donleavy's recent novels, that affirmation for the writer who knows and presents death's potency is desired but difficult to achieve.

In his more recent Something Happened, Heller treats paranoia and survival anxieties within a peacetime context. His hero, Bob Slocum, fears closed doors, fellow workers in his corporation, his family, and madmen in the street, but most of all he fears death: "I think about death. I think about it all the time. I dwell on it. I dread it. I don't really like it. Death runs in my family, it seems. People die from it, and I dream about death and weave⁹ ornate fantasies about death endlessly and ironically." Although he treats it ironically here, his own death, the deaths of mother, father, brother, the random deaths he witnesses, the feared deaths of his wife and children, all force him to live his diminished life from a survival kit, force him to protect himself with Yossarian-like verbal and physical deceptions. Like Yossarian, too, Slocum wants to "outlive everyone, even my children, my wife, and the Rocky Mountains" (327). Slocum would like to love and help his family, but his ego's desperate need for preservation prevents all but helpless good will: "all of them but my dead father petitioning me for some kind of relief that I cannot give them because I am in such helpless need myself (401). Ultimately, something does happen in the novel, and Bob Slocum destroys the person he loves most—his son, a double for himself—because of his morbid anxieties and vulnerability. A profound study of domestic life and the ramifications of death anxiety in our time, Something Happened extends the primal (and social) insights of Catch-22.

The terror of death's possibility and the manic activity and desperate physicality that it produces in The Ginger Man and Catch-22 give way in John Barth's The Floating Opera (1956) and John Hawkes's Second Skin (1964) to less obvious anxieties and more subtle methods of selfprotection. When threatened by that "last and final chill" or Snowden's secret, Dangerfield and Yossarian momentarily deceive themselves and others, but the hero-narrators of The Floating Opera and Second Skin expand and refine the strategy of deception to, literally, an art. They make their narrations life "stories," elaborate fictions which conceal or deny the degree to which death has dictated their lives. Barth's Todd Andrews—the name means "almost death"—has as his stated purpose explaining why he did not commit suicide.¹⁰ As Todd rambles through his account, he reveals a death-filled past (his cold-blooded murder of a German soldier and the suicide of his father) and a highly contingent present (Todd has a heart disease that could kill him at any moment). He says that his faulty heart is "the condition of my existence, the great fact of my life" (48) and that the "masks" of rake, saint, and cynic have protected him from thinking about his imminent demise. In June of 1954, these masks are no longer efficacious, so Todd plans to kill himself, along with seven hundred others, and thus rid himself of his anxiety about time and extinction. As Todd explains why he did not commit suicide, contradictions and inconsistencies prove him an unreliable and, probably, an intentionally deceiving narrator. Indirectly revealed through boat imagery and the floating opera metaphor is Todd's rationale for "autobiography" and life: ultimate irresponsibility to fact, irrelevance of contradiction, formal integrity, and life as a fiction to be given an aesthetic order. Because the facts of time and death cannot be physically avoided, mediated by relations, placed in some satisfactory rational order, or transcended through religious faith, Todd invents fictional selves and roles to substitute for himself. The ultimate role is the fiction, Todd's fiction, called The Floating Opera. Ebenezer Cooke in The Sot-Weed Factor sums up Todd's visceral truth: "That lives are stories, he assumed: that stories end, he allowed—how else could one begin another? But that the story-teller himself must live a particular tale and die—Unthinkable! Unthinkable!"¹¹ At the end of The Floating Opera, Todd projects a more ambitious, and presumably false, account of his life which the reader sees as further fictionalization of a life made miserable by its contact with the event and thought of death. Closed off from others by his inability to accept the "unthinkable" fact of mortality as end, Todd is left to the fate of Beckett's heroes—spinning webs of words against an impossible silence.

The Floating Opera is an excellent introduction to Barth's whole career, for although Andrews is sometimes ludicrous in his generalizations, he is the first of a line of protean fictionalizers with whom Barth identifies himself, and the novel itself has beneath its false realistic surface many of the qualities of Barth's later, more elaborately artificial fictions. In an interview, Barth commented that, like Todd Andrews, he was made nervous by "fact": "a certain kind of sensibility can be made very uncomfortable by the realization of the arbitrariness of physical facts and the inability to accept their finality . . . this impulse to imagine alternatives to the world can become a driving impulse for writers. I confess that it is for me."¹² Barth's response to arbitrariness and finality, also like Todd's, is to create alternative fictional universes with the same qualities—exploited conventions, outrageous artifices, virtuosity and idiosyncrasy, confuted expectations—Todd admired in his legal cases and employed in his "autobiography." In The End of the Road the arbitrariness and finality of fact, especially Rennie Morgan's death, are again responsible for radically unreliable narration. The narrator, Jake Horner, under the tutelage of a protean psychotherapist, denies any responsibility to fact in his "mytho-plastic" approach to life, a strategy which allows the imagination to distort reality to protect the self from others and from its consciousness of itself. Although personal death and duration do not as obviously press upon characters in Barth's later works (The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Chimera), all have protean fictionalizers (Henry Burlingame, Harold Bray, Polyeidus) who defend themselves against the finality of reality by denying identity, honesty, sincerity, and responsibility, and by assuming disguises or illusions. The fictional qualities of these novels—baroque artificiality, parody, overelaboration—are reflections of their covert heroes' survival strategies, for the novels themselves offer historical, allegorical, or mythological alternatives to the mundane reality in which the author's body has its existence. The comedy of such protean fiction stems from Barth's continual confuting of what seem to be the most valid expectations—physical, moral, and aesthetic. Barth finds man a pretentious fool, a being whose finest power—the mind—can do little to mediate the fact that it will be extinguished. Only the solipsistic imagination can both protect and make interesting a life whose temporality and physicality are a burden.

The hero of John Hawkes's Second Skin, a retired seaman called Skipper, shares with Todd Andrews a history of death, including a father's suicide, but in the novel the threat of time has been put away by Skipper's escape to an island of notime. Like Todd, Skipper proposes an autobiography, but in attempting to make a romance of his life he reveals a tragedy of innocence—innocence perverting and innocence perverted. Skipper's father, mother, wife, and only daughter have committed suicide; his son-in-law was murdered. Their deaths have caused Skipper some concern for his own longevity—he always thinks of his own safety before others'—and have made him consider his role in their deaths. Skipper rejects his possible guilt because his present life on a paradisiacal "wandering island" proves, he says, his innocence. 11 Skipper claims to be a man of "courage and love," but Hawkes allows the reader to see that Skipper has failed at marriage, has arranged the futile marriage of his daughter to a homosexual, and perversely kept his daughter in his power. These failures, Hawkes also suggests through imagery and Skipper's associations, are the result of Skipper's refusal to consider how the deaths of his father and mother retarded his psychological growth. Skipper's affections were focused on his mother; when she died, he was frozen into a pre-adolescent sexuality which he refuses to admit.¹⁴ The childhood deaths have also caused Skipper to cultivate a sentimental avoidance of facts and an "innocence" that allows him to evade his responsibilities to others. Because Skipper does not try to understand what Hawkes calls "the sack of the past slung around our necks," he becomes the selfish agent of suffering and death in his adult life, the Papa Cue Ball that knocks others into their graves.¹⁵ In Second Skin death is both the cause and the effect of man's fictionalizing reality. The desperation or pessimism that death caused the characters in the previous novels belongs, in Second Skin, only to the reader who sees through Skipper's selfcongratulation to a death-avoiding, dangerous, guilty "innocence." For Skipper, his narrative frees him from his unfortunate past, allows him a second, or new, skin. Hawkes's mode of narration, however, directs the reader to another meaning of the title: the self-protective garment of words that hides the "naked history" (15) of Skipper's life with death, death that extends no promise of a future.

Hawkes's work before Second Skin also treated the relationship of death and innocence, but in Second Skin and The Blood Oranges he best employs the comic mode. "Charivari" describes two middle-aged "innocent" adolescents destroying themselves and another. Naive attempts to controvert or preserve history produce the violence and death in The Cannibal. Both The Beetle Leg and The Lime Twig have characters who victimize themselves when they become fixed to their seemingly innocent fantasies of violence and death. In Second Skin Hawkes found a method of narration—first-person unreliability—which allowed him to treat "disability and inadequacy and hypocrisy with brutal humor" and the necessary detachment.¹⁶ Skipper entertains us with his clownish actions, but the "brutal" comedy Hawkes mentions is produced by the incongruity of Skipper's conception of himself and the reality he allows to be revealed. The novel has classical elements of comedy—hero's life integrated on a higher plane, love triumphing over death, lush pastoral setting, release from the past, new youthful innocence—but Hawkes uses them as parody to exploit the discrepancy between his false comic hero and the heroes of Shakespeare's comedies. In The Blood Oranges, Hawkes combines parallels with Twelfth Night and a fantasy setting with an "innocent" narrator who helps destroy two marriages and drives a friend to suicide to again question the value of good intentions and self-deception. In the more recent Death, Sleep & the Traveler, the hero is almost a parody of Hawkes's dangerous innocent. Allert Vanderveenan, attached to his fantasies of physical failure and sexual experiment, kills a young girl but maintains, in the last words of the novel, "I am not guilty."

In Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman (1966), the self-congratulatory innocence of Hawkes's Skipper modulates into Bill Barrett's insistent obtuseness and contrived indifference as responses to death. Bill's father, like Skipper's, killed himself and thus left his son in confusion, but the gradual dying of young Jamie Vaught from leukemia in the present time of the novel is the main-spring of Percy's episodic plot and the test of his characters. As Jamie's traveling companion, Bill might be expected to consider the meaning of contingent time, Jamie's death as a process of life, and his own mortality, but even at Jamie's deathbed Bill considers death as a public event, plays games to normalize the little time left, and refuses to let the thought of his own mortality penetrate his sluggish synapses. By choosing to remain ingenuously obtuse to death while searching for someone to direct his life, Bill shuts out others almost as surely as the more desperately active Dangerfield or rationally passive Andrews. Percy's other characters, including Jamie himself, are also measured by their reactions to death. Jamie's response is a restless but total avoidance until, minutes before his death, he accepts baptism. His parents resolutely deny the doctor's prognosis; his sister, Kitty, thinks only of her career as a Southern belle; and his sister-in-law, Rita, tries to save him through the latest technology and considers his death, in Heidegger's words, a matter of "public occurrence." Opposing these avoiders are Percy's raissoneur, Jamie's brother, Sutter, who believes "the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself and who has put alienated men into terminal wards in order that they might recover themselves, and Jamie's sister, Val, a Roman Catholic postulant and the agent of Jamie's baptism.¹⁷ After reading Sutter's notebooks and witnessing Jamie's baptism and death, Bill, at the very end of the novel, intimates that he may be a Parsival come twice to the Fisher King, that he may, just may, be willing to consider the authentic questions mortality raises. Because he lives in an environment where "death is as outlawed now as sin used to be" (291), Bill's interest in Sutter's philosophizing about death may well lapse into the obtuseness with which he has covered death and his life.

Percy has commented that "what it means to be a man living in the world who must die" is his major concern and that the dying youths in his novels are a "litmus test: to see which sphere of existence each protagonist lived in."¹⁸ In The Moviegoer, when protagonist Binx Boiling accepts his half-brother Lonnie's death, he moves one step in his search for an answer to the death-in-life he lives and perceives around him. In Love in the Ruins, Tom More despairs over his daughter's death, recovers himself through a suicide attempt, overcomes his pride, exorcizes his devil, marries, and finally accepts grace in a resolution similar to the one in Mr. Sammler's Planet. Percy's fiction has been moving to just such spiritual comic resolution, for both The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman poise their heroes on the edge of marriage, reintegration of life, and a hopeful future. Percy's comedy is, then, more traditional than that of other Black Humorists, more assuredly satiric, less pessimistically ironic and desperate. However, his placing man's avoidance or grudging acceptance of mortality at the center of his novels, his sense of a comically inverted world, and his malice toward conventional religious, social, and scientific pieties are consonant with the practices and attitudes of other Black Humorists.

The protagonists of The Ginger Man, Catch-22, The Floating Opera, Second Skin, and The Last Gentleman are all survivors of others' deaths as well as escapees from their consciousness of their own mortality, but those of Kurt Vonnegut most intently concentrate on the experience of survival. In his seven novels Vonnegut presents the by-products of twentieth-century violence, men deprived of normal responses and traditional purposes, men pitifully befuddled or insanely inspired by their survival of mass or individual death. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the late paradigm of a virtual obsession, perhaps because it treats Vonnegut's own survival of the Dresden bombing. In the introductory chapter, Vonnegut presents himself as a "pillar of salt," a man whose responses to personal death have been scrambled by his knowledge of the filled "corpse mines" of smoldering Dresden.¹⁹ How does an accidental man, a sport of nature whose law seems premature death, write a novel about an experience that inspires only silence?—that is the question Vonnegut solves by using a tone of sepulchral bemusement and the artifice of Tralfamadore, a planet where death is just another experience. In his comments about himself and Dresden experience, Vonnegut parallels the responses Robert Lifton found in the survivors of atomic attack. In the spell of a grotesque, unanticipated, and profoundly unnatural mass death, the survivor, says Lifton, is both attracted to and repelled by the experience he has illogically escaped. His guilt (for not dying) and his revulsion activate both a psychic numbing (Vonnegut's irony) and a search for a world-order (Tralfamadore) which will account for his suffering and the deaths of others. Lifton also states that such a death-focused imagination becomes painfully sensitized to the extremities of sadness and humor, a comment that applies directly to Vonnegut.²⁰ Vonnegut uses irony and artifice as ways into the silence that follows massacre, but his hero, Billy Pilgrim, finds only in the delusion of Tralfamadore, with its denial of time and offering of sex, a way to cope with his survival of Dresden and the many deaths before and after. Confronted with an overwhelming quantitative and qualitative reality of death which fits no rational category, Billy progressively distorts time and space and seizes upon the impossible category of Tralfamadore. His knowledge and space travels set him apart from his contemporaries, but his isolation makes little difference. His delusions hurt no one, and, besides, this world with all its comforts could do little to mediate Billy's memory. Diminished by his knowledge and magnified by his delusions, Billy finally accedes to his murder by another survivor of Dresden as the ultimate affirmation of his Tralfamadorian faith in the irrelevance of death's finality.

The comedy in Slaughterhouse-Five issues from the futility and mechanical repetition of phrase and action. The torment of time and the cruelty of the scenes we and Billy are forced to see mount a picture of life so horrible and determined that laughter is our only response. Billy cannot laugh and so goes mad; the reader, encouraged by Vonnegut, finds the irrelevance of man's gestures and the stupidity of his errors so pervasive that crying or rage would be reactions affirming a dignity absent in Vonnegut's death-defiled creatures. To produce the headshaking, mirthless laugh, Vonnegut says death is necessary. "you have to have death quite near, or terror, or you don't laugh out loud . . . you just sort of snicker to yourself."²¹ Or, as he quotes Celine in Slaughterhouse-Five, "no art is possible without a dance with death" (18). Slaughterhouse-Five is the "Duty-Dance with Death" that Vonnegut had been working toward in his previous novels. Both Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan have dehumanized survivors of wars as heroes. In Mother Night Vonnegut presents the first of his artist-heroes, Howard Campbell, Jr., who cannot cope with a memory of death, which is also a collaboration with Nazism. Cat's Cradle has as its narrator a man who survives (underground, as Vonnegut survived Dresden) the end of the world, only to be attracted to a comically futile suicide. Eliot Rosewater, hero of God Bless You, Mr, Rosewater, works out a crazy plan of charity and benevolence to expiate his guilt for killing innocent German firemen. In Breakfast of Champions, one of the two protagonists, Dwayne Hoover, goes mad not long after his wife commits suicide by drinking Drano. Vonnegut's survivors do not explicitly worry much about their own deaths; they are too busy trying to cope with their awareness of others' unnatural and grotesque extinction. Unable "to reinvent themselves and their universe" (87), they stumble along in a dance with a partner they did not choose until their consciousness of death brings them to madness or suicide.

With Vonnegut's heroes' madness and surrender to the death that has traumatized them, we approach the "peculiar longing for non-being" that Bellow identified as the result of death anxieties. In the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, the urge toward abandonment of anxieties and self is given detailed and complicated expression. Although Pynchon's most recent novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), would be impossible to describe here, it should be seen as fulfilling the death-caused apocalyptic strain in his imagination. In V., Pynchon's first novel, the three main plot lines converge in a Dance of Death and end in what he calls "a dream of annihilation."²² The protean V. takes into herself ever greater amounts of the inanimate or dead world and ends on Malta preaching the gospel of sterility. Benny Profane originally fears falling apart into fragments of inanimateness but eventually becomes a member of the Whole Sick Crew—representatives of the varieties of Romantic decadence—and ends running through a darkened Malta to the sea. Although Benny is capable of human kindness, he "yo-yos" toward an end of randomness. Herbert Stencil fears his degeneration to stillness, so follows the murderous V. and, perhaps, a twentieth-century disease or apocalyptic Plot With No Name. Stencil's purposeful but anxious quest also takes him toward the possibility of a personal ending if he should find the Circe-like V. As Frank Kermode has said, any ending, but especially an apocalypse, gives an order to the anarchy of experience in process, gives a meaning simply by ending what may have had no meaning without the closure.²³ Pynchon's attitude toward Stencil's and other characters' need for some hierophantic ending or encompassing principle of dissolution seems that of the old sailor, Mehemet: "Why say a disease? Only to bring it down to a size you can look at and feel comfortable?" (433). In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon returns to the quest for certainty with Oedipa Maas's search for what she hopes is a pattern of history and contemporary event which will give her presence in that pattern some meaning. However, the acronyms of the organization she hopes to find—D.E.A.T.H. and W.A.S.T.E.—and the violence surrounding the supposed Tristero empire give it a threatening, even slightly apocalyptic quality. For Oedipa, though, either paranoia or the secret empire are preferable to her present life in a kitsch America. If Oedipa is not forced into her quest by fear of death, she does share Stencil's tendency toward a fused revelation-destruction.

Gravity's Rainbow begins near the end of World War II in London, where the novel's main protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, and other characters wait in terror for the sudden and mindless death brought by the German V-rockets. When dispatched to the continent as a secret agent, Slothrop, like other Pynchon questers, fails to find the special rocket (00000) and plastic device (Schwarzgeraet) he seeks, but through his crisscrossing of Europe the rocket has become more than a death-dealing weapon: it has become the holy object in an apocalyptic religion, a symbolic vehicle for escaping from, overcoming, and then surrendering to death. Major Weissmann, who appeared in V. and is now "Blicero," the personification of death, summarizes the appeal of the rocket for the German scientists and military men who know it: "I want to break out—to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become."²⁴ Another character reinforces the sexual and suicidal meanings of the rocket when she describes its "great airless are as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm" (223). In V. Pynchon had entertained the possibility that "the act of love and the act of death are one" (385). At the end of Gravity's Rainbow, Blicero dramatizes the notion and his idea that Europe means death and perversion when he sends rocket 00000 aloft with Gottfried, his homosexual companion, inside a plastic shroud—an ultimate act of murderous pederasty. Although Blicero's act develops naturally from the etiology of the rocket, the original appeal of the rocket was not its terminal and self-destructive orgasm. Franz Poekler, one of the early scientists working on the rocket and a major character in the novel, first sees the rocket as a way to escape his "fear of extinction" (406) and to transcend the earth through science. The rocket, however, comes to have a life of its own, an arc that mirrors the once rising and now falling fortunes of Nazi Germany; it begins with the promise of victorious escape, peaks at a moment of stilled time, surrenders to gravity and death, and plunges to the earth and a glorious annihilation. The Germans in the late stages of the war identify with this last phase and give it majestic connotations of sexual climax: the ordained and glorious failure of the physical.

Although those who pursue Blicero and rocket 00000—Slothrop, the Herero Enzian, the Russian Tchitcherine—fail, their quests uncover a possible plot that pales the Rilke-influeneed German Goetterdaemmerung, Coincidences and connections suggest the existence of an international rocket cartel—a "They" who conspiie to make the self-destructive arc of the rocket the symbol for their actions—suicidally exhausting the world's energy resources for "Their" power and economic gain. For the collective "They," "the Serpent that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle" (412). A key figure in violating the world's contractive cycle is a psychologist turned chemist, Laszlo Jamf, who has responded to his own hatred of extinction and the deadly determinism of nature's pattern by discovering molecular displacement and plastics, a discovery that accelerates progress toward what Pynchon calls "Absolute Zero" or entropy. The rocket system, including its mysterious plastic component, represents all "Their" technology and industrialization, is "an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness" (324) of the earth's innards, but in its rainbow arc the rocket also symbolizes only half a circle, does not replenish the land, and thus represents the slogan of the supposed "They": "Once, only once" (413). As with the other Black Humorists, death for Pynchon is the driving force, the efficient cause of behavior, but in Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon removes its effects from the personal realm to a destructive conspiracy in the tissues of history itself. That some lead the world to suicide and that most applaud or, at least, foolishly concur with the "progress" toward Zero prove that the old mediations of our mortality, personal and cultural, have surrendered to the apocalyptic "dream of annihilation." "Their" irreversible pursuits are summarized by Jamf: "the absolute. Life and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy of the leap, the roar, the blood" (577, my italics). Pynchon's comment on the Faustian impulse of science comes when Jamf replaces the chemical formula C—H of pre-plastic time with a formula for deathless inanimateness: "in enormous letters, Si—N" (580).

Norman Brown, following Freud, has stated that "man aggressively builds immortal cultures and makes history in order to fight death."²⁵ In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon uses World War II Germany and the rocketry it spawned as perfect symbols for the culture of the West which builds its own final destruction because of its fear of mortality. These symbols of "control" and entropy, however, inhabit the same frame occupied by the comic collection of mystics, spiritualists, Skinnerites, Dale Carnegie zealots, and other maniacs housed at the "White Visitation," as if Pynchon were trying to cancel out his profundity with his comic banality. Gravity's Rainbow is filled with comic artifices—weird names, grotesque minor characters, mistaken identities, pratfalls, silly disguises, comic-book dialogue, fantasies, tall tales, linguistic jokes, games, musical-comedy impersonations, songs, and asides to the reader—which develop an alienation effect and suggest that, after all, the ultimacy of Gravity's Rainbow is not without its attendant foolishness. Perhaps no other method could reflect the foolish and sometimes life-supporting banalities that go on while "Their Control" and the rape of Gravity are proceeding with the certainty of a countdown. We do get and spend our private energies in our private ways underneath skies already plotted with the rockets' parabolic routes to our annihilation—perhaps the ultimate comic incongruity registered by the novel's beginning and ending. The novel opens with "A screaming comes across the sky" (3) and ends with the Mitch Miller invitation to "Follow the bouncing ball" (760) along one of Pynchon's songs: "Now everybody—"

If the books discussed above are representative, death, in its elemental and pervasive presence, is the primary source of the pessimism in Black Humor, is, in Henry James's words, "the real distinguished thing."²⁶ When Bruce Jay Friedman made his collection of Black Humorists in 1965, he found in the Zeitgeist "a fading line between fantasy and reality" and "a nervousness, a tempo, a near-hysterical new beat in the air, a punishing isolation and loneliness of a strange, frenzied new kind" which he offered as motivation for his group of writers.²⁷ Recent books on Black Humor have extended and refined Friedman's visceral analysis. In a study of Heller, Barth, Pynchon, and Vonnegut, Charles Harris finds their fiction a response to a "meaningless universe," a world made absurd by the "new logic" of modern science, technological control of life, social and political madness, and a general loss of the self.²⁸ Paralleling Harris, Max Schulz concentrates on "pluralism, conformity, and an irresolute value system" in his comments on the background of Barth, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Berger, Friedman, and others.²⁹ As described by Friedman, Harris, Schulz, and others, the manifest absurdities of life in America and the impossibility of rationally encompassing them are, indeed, stimuli for the Black Humorists' imaginations, yet the textual evidence offered by Black Humor suggests that death, apprehended as finality, is what makes rational explanations and social forms meaningless, absurd, useless. In terms that are not meant to be reductive, death is the uncaused cause, the prior physical and metaphysical fact that disturbs man's powers, undermines his structures, and questions his works. Tracing the intellectual history of the sense of finality (and futility) would be impossible here; most Black Humor, however, reflects Vonnegut's sentiment in Mother Night: "When you're dead you're dead."³⁰ Such futurelessness causes some Black Humor characters to jettison inhibitions and conventional codes and forces others into desperate strategies of evasion or physical transcendence, but the result is the same: a radical skepticism about or denial of traditional modes of behavior as logical responses to a now contracted existence. By radically foreshortening moral imperatives and reducing life to a matter of personal survival, the new nihilistic logic tramples on the beliefs and principles of many readers, yet as Yossarian found in Catch-22 there remains about it that "spinning reasonableness." If death is total extinction, perhaps all is permitted. In any event, if the world were better organized, if science broke through the Uncertainty Principle, if political leaders were not retired movie actors, that is, if all minor absurdities were cleared away, men would still be left to the primal encounter with their death and the desperation it causes when a sense of futurity is absent. To see Black Humor in any less absolute terms is to miss the philosophical and psychological ultimacy of these writers and to misunderstand their pessimism about conventional ways of making do, for the basic problem in Black Humor is not social and intellectual but personal and metaphysical, the problem of death.

In the two novels—The Centaur and Mr. Sammler's Planet—used as contrasts, the protagonists share the Black Humor heroes' hypersensitivity to death and are undermined by their awareness, yet by accepting themselves and the forms of ordinary life, they continue to or learn to carry out their daily moral responsibilities. Caldwell and Sammler are tempted by manic despair, self-delusion, denunciation of God, and abandonment to mortality, but at the ends of their novels they accept time and death, accept their place in a physical world, take their place in a spiritual universe, and turn toward future responsibilities. Because death is not a final and ultimate event for them, they retain a sense of the future and hope. The social worlds of the Black Humor novels are no more absurd or threatening than Updike's or Bellow's, but an absence of personal futurity, or a presence of finality, in Black Humor instigates the quite different responses of its protagonists to death. The heroes of these novels adopt survival strategies best described as evasive, singular, aesthetic, and protean. Unable to entertain the possibility of death and live a life of contented normalcy, these heroes construct elusive and illusive selves through elaborate acts of deception of both themselves and others. Trying to protect their precious subjectivity, Black Humor heroes become singular men for whom the outside world and others are the agents of annihilation, These strategies of avoiding or denying death and asserting the self are aesthetic, for they ignore humanistic, social, and religious conventions or responsibilities in favor of their creators' subjective and frequently amoral purposes. Forced by their consciousness into desperate acts of physicality, parody, and delusion, these absurd protagonists often seem shifting dramatizations of themselves, what Lifton has called "protean man."³¹

The Black Humor heroes' conceptions of themselves and their relationship to death define the nature of time in their fiction. If threatening time cannot be wrung of its fullness through vitalistic action, it can be slowed down, spatialized, or humanized by becoming fictional, and so allow escape to a delusion of no-time or some momentary transcendence. No matter what the strategy for disturbing the irreversible and mechanical order of Zeno's time, futurity, whether immanent or transcendent, remains highly contingent, sometimes possible but unlikely or parodied. These novels do not end with the repose and hope found in The Centaur and Mr. Sammler's Planet, but with depair, futile affirmation, bogus happiness, confusion, madness, or suicidal dreams. Either the heroes are too strong in their self-assertion or too weak from their conflict with death to love and carry out the moral responsibilities that Caldwell and Sammler accept. Most of these heroes are positive that the examined life is not worth living, and some of their creators share their distrust of a reality fraught with finality. Caldwell and Sammler are men devoted to the development of consciousness, but many of the Black Humor heroes and some of the Black Humorists themselves find consciousness, in its openness to all the messages mortality sends, the enemy. Only in Hawkes's Second Skin and Percy's The Last Gentleman of the seven novels discussed in detail does one find implicit condemnation of their deathevading heroes. In none of the novels does one find the faith in man's humanity and his relation with God that is expressed in The Centaur and Mr. Sammler's Planet. These comparisons and generalizations should not suggest that death causes all the anxieties nor controls all the facets of Black Humor, but they do suggest that basic to such fiction is a consciousness of death as final end which challenges traditional responses to mortality and undermines all value systems. Although an individual's terror of death may be produced by breakdowns in society and a general malaise, in Black Humor the fear of death is the given, is presented as the cause rather than the effect of the gap between the hero and himself, between the hero and his world. These writers are probably at the end of the historical process Bellow describes in Mr. Sammler's Planet, but in their fiction death is a beginning and not a part of some larger analysis.

The comic mode in which Donleavy, Heller, Barth, Hawkes, Percy, Vonnegut, and Pynchon work is also closely related to the centrality of death in their novels. The humor or comedy in their fiction has multiple sources, is of various kinds, employs many different devices and methods, and proceeds toward different ends. The focus of laughter demonstrates the variety: Donleavy and Heller have the reader laugh with their heroes at other characters; Hawkes, Percy, and Vonnegut focus laughter on their heroes; Barth sometimes laughs at the reader; and Pynchon and Vonnegut direct the reader's laughter at themselves. Death as final end, however, creates a basic incongruity. With the contraction of time and the sense of finality in Black Humor comes an attendant reduction of inherited human stature. His spiritual or social immortality cancelled by doubt and love diminished by fear, man in Black Humor begins to look very much like the "sick animal"—the animal that sees ahead of itself to death—that Norman Brown has called him. When a limited being assumes certain dignities although the conditions or beliefs supporting those dignities have eroded, when he insists against contrary internal and external evidence upon his own importance, when he thrashes violently about in his closed space and revolts against his necessary end, a basic and ultimate incongruity between self-assertion (life) and self-recognition (life ending) results and gives rise to the comedy in Black Humor.³² Most of the heroes in these novels are not essentially defined as social outcasts, stupid vulgarians, or grotesque caricatures, that is, as butts of social comedy. Rather, they are reduced to their often desperate and foolish actions, their single-minded manias, clownish self-deprecation or exaggerated self-assertion, by the consciousness of their own death or the death of others, They are victims of their imaginations, for they can imagine unending life yet daily know mortality. The incongruity is, again, not primarily social but personal and metaphysical: these are men psychologically worse than we are.

The comedy which comes out of this painful existential incongruity would probably be called ironic by Northrop Frye, a "comedy that brings us to the figure of the scape-goat ritual and the nightmare dream, the human symbol that concentrates our fears and hates."³³ Black Humor protagonists do suffer and live our deepest fears, but the energy, freedom, and imaginative resourcefulness of these characters and the formal playfulness of the novelists themselves make the fiction less bitterly ironic than pessimistically comic. An older, traditional comedy was, in Wylie Sypher's words, "a Carrying Away of Death, a triumph over mortality by some absurd faith in rebirth, restoration, and salvation."³⁴ Black Humor heroes have no such transcendent faith but do have character traits of an older comedy—craft, wit, imagination, vitality, resiliency, protean changeability, amorality, persistence, life itself—which enable them to match for a time the implacable power of their adversary. These characters are frauds, imposters, cheats, tricksters, and fools who manage in a clownish dance with death to spin death and themselves dizzy for a moment. They display a gallows humor that crazily works, for although madness and desperation are pervasive, they hold out against death, a temporary comic draw. None of the heroes, despite their anxieties, dies within the present time of their novels; they do survive, even if minimally and without the promise of a future. Although these heroes have comic character traits, Black Humor departs from traditional comic form by leaving its protagonists in the middle of their struggle and by tending toward death rather than life. Because the two terms of Black Humor's fundamental incongruity—self and death—are held in a relative balance, the fiction does not characteristically end in tragedy or pathos, although verging toward them.

Laughter is the novelists' primary rhetorical method of preserving such balance. Through a variety of artifices and control of tone, the Black Humorists alternate moments of painful awareness with moments of laughter, either the characters' or the reader's. Laughter does not "carry away" death, but it does create for the reader a literary environment in which death can be presented, Without the various kinds of laughter the novelists elicit, the reader might not tolerate that subject—death—which gives rise to the comedy and, in Vonnegut's view, intensifies it. As Norman Brown says, humor "openly confronts ideas that are in themselves painful or are connected with painful images, and thus it is instrumental in overcoming the automatic machinery of defense."³⁵ Once death is confronted, laughter can and often does function as a defense, a way of intellectually conquering the experience presented or evading it. Because laughter establishes distance between a person and his experience, it "makes possible an affirmation of life without the necessity of Meaning."³⁶ In The Centaur and Mr. Sammler's Planet comic futility turns into spiritual comedy, laughter becomes prayer, and a transcendent "meaning" is achieved. The Black Humor novels discussed here maintain a tension between comic persistence and deathly finality, between humor and blackness.

If one grants that the finality of death largely accounts for the Black Humorists' pessimism and their characters' actions and also contributes to the basic comic incongruity exploited in their fiction, critical judgments are affected. Black Humor has been criticized for its distortion, reduction, and simplification of human life and for the resultant literary dandyism, extravagance, and frivolity. A philosophical case can be made that death's finality need not reduce man's stature or cause despair; however, most of the Black Humorists begin with such an assumption—which critics have not so much refused to grant as simply ignored. If considered in social terms, less ultimate than the Black Humorists suggest, Black Humor could perhaps be called sentimental: exaggerated responses to the conditions of institutions and individual identity. But if their assumption—death's finality causes desperation—is accepted, then the outrageous acts of the heroes and the novelists' attempts to register the outrageousness and desperation with extravagant fictional techniques should be judged in relation to that donnee. Do the novelists, then, find the proper fictional terms and forms to execute their assumptions about life? Black Humor seems to flow in good Forsterian fashion from the existential conceptions of character and situation inherent in the novels. Some of the novels thrash the literary decorum dictated by the realistic novel, but the disorder, artifice, seeming artlessness, foiling of expectations, irrelevance, parody, and other techniques are valid methods for creating an atmosphere in which death can be considered and for reflecting the often bizarre and outlandish gestures of the fiction's characters. If, as Barth says, "the artist's mode or form" is to be "a metaphor for his concerns," then conventions must be pressed, perhaps parodied, to register the unconventional man, ridden with the new finality, that the fiction creates.³⁷

Barth and Vonnegut exemplify the different technical extremities to which writers can be forced by the ultimacy of death. Because Vonnegut wishes to reduce the world in his fiction to those basic matters on which men act, he gives us minimal prose and childlike illustrations in Breakfast of Champions as correlatives of simplified moral and psychological questions. Barth pushes literary decorum toward the other extreme. The arbitrariness and finality of the world encourage him to create a huge, monstrous, parodistic, artificial alternative to reality in Giles Goat-Boy. Their extremities are a logical outgrowth of basic assumptions that their authors have about the nature of mortality and man. The critical passwords for these and the other Black Humor fictions are "blurring of fact and fiction," epistemological uncertainty, and multiplicity, but the Black Humorists make certain that one fact remains unblurred by artifice, one single and absolute: taxes may be repealed but not death. Borges summarizes just such certainty:

Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.³⁸

Because the Black Humorists consider death in just these contractive terms, it becomes the absolute, like God or society in earlier fiction, which demands extraordinary fictional strategies. William May says that in contemporary America "only death—not life—has sufficient energy, vitality, and lure to command the morning headlines and to reduce men to attentiveness before it, like a priest at his daily devotions."³⁹ He further explains Americans' simultaneous avoidance of and preoccupation with death by using the category of the sacred, which demands a special response, a fearful attraction. In literary terms, the ultimacy of the subject of death drives the novelists to work out, implicitly or explicitly, an aesthetic rationale of freedom and possibility which recognizes that only by twisting conventions and confuting expectations can the novelist communicate the desperation of man in end-time. The new aesthetic also expresses the authors' rebellion against the value system inherent in the very form of the realistic novel. If one does not share the Black Humorists' philosophical assumptions, one can still understand their engagement with ultimacy as a result of excessive awareness and, perhaps more significantly, an introduction to a common future.

The effect Black Humor has upon Americans' consciousness of death is a subject even more speculative than the influence of American life on Black Humor, yet the parallel growth of Black Humor and the new discipline of thanatology has interesting implications. In 1956 the American Psychological Association held a symposium on death; some of the papers given decried the lack of research into all aspects of death.⁴⁰ Between 1956 and 1972, the bibliography on death has greatly increased, but much of the research remains inconclusive.⁴¹ The thanatologists generally agree that death has replaced sex as the taboo in America. As old people are shunted into retirement centers, as functionaries replace the family in caring for the dying, as Americans gain increasing control over natural processes and view themselves in the mechanistic terms of responsible producer and unfailing consumer, death becomes a crime, an unforgivable denial of the American myths of potency and expansiveness. Worshipping the suspended time of youth, the American adult engages in both verbal deception—the abounding euphemisms which veil reality—and material deception—the funeral and burial practices which mightily attempt to hide the fact of death. Whether or not these deceptions are "therapeutic" is not so easily answered. The existentially rooted psychologists, following Heidegger and Binswanger and best represented by Rollo May in this country, are positive that the acceptance of death "makes the individual existence real, absolute, and concrete."⁴² Norman Brown, in his reinterpretation of Freud, agrees that repressing mortality, a constituent of existence, has destructive results. Others, including Reich and Homey, are not so sure. Ernest Becker's view is also instructive; following Otto Rank and agreeing largely with the existential therapists and Norman Brown, Becker says that death is a more primal psychological problem than the Oedipal complex and that the repression of death is evidenced in and controls much of our action. However, he says that the problem of mortality is of such magnitude that man cannot exist without some repression and concludes that "the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? . . . What is the 'best' illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate foolishness?"⁴³ If one accepts Becker's theses, Eliot Rosewater's comment to his psychiatrist in Slaughterhouse-Five—"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living" (87-8)—is not as ridiculous as it seems, and the defensive strategies of some Black Humor heroes are not as crazy as they might have first appeared. Perhaps these writers are intoducing the new, post-existential man: death-haunted, illusion-creating, and slippery—but hardly ever, in Rollo May's terms, "real, absolute, and concrete."

The Black Humorists register both the American tendency toward the evasion or denial of death and the psychologists' uncertainty about the value of confronting death, yet by concentrating on the consciousness of death as a cause of action, Black Humorists bring death out of the concealment favored by most Americans and allow the reader to consider at a distance the problem of mortality. The novelists' comic mode breaches the defenses that the thanatologists find in Americans, but the comedy in Black Humor may also diminish the seriousness of mortality and the need to confront it. Thus considered, Black Humor is a simultaneous advance upon and retreat from death; it both endangers and protects its readers' consciousness in its fusion of death and comedy. Whether or not Black Humor is useful as imaginative thanatology, the novelists have again anticipated the psychologists and have charged ahead with case studies before the subject was frozen into ideologies. Part of the Black Humorists' achievement is to have picked up the signals of the race and converted them into fictions which do not shy away from ultimacy, fictions which render ultimacy in forms both new and effective.

¹ Charles B. Harris, Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd (New Haven: College and University Press, 1971); Raymond M. Olderman, Beyond the Waste Land (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972); Max F. Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1973); books with valuable essays on Black Humor are Harry Levin, ed., Veins of Humor, Harvard English Studies, No. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972) and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed., The Comic Imagination in American Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973).

² To demonstrate here the existence of such a sense of finality in the culture at large or the newness of it in anything but degree is not possible, but convincing arguments are made by Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, Living and Dying (New York: Praeger, 1974) and Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974).

³ Frederick J. Hoffman, The Mortal No (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964); see also Robert Detweiler, "The Moment of Death in Modern Fiction," Contemporary Literature, 13 (1972), 269-94.

⁴ John Updike, The Centaur (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1963), p. 149. Subsequent page references to the novels discussed are to the editions cited.

⁵ Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1970), p. 135.

⁶ J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (New York: Dell-Delta, 1966); published earlier than any of the other novels considered here, The Ginger Man should be recognized as an important seminal work in Black Humor.

⁷ Donleavy's latest novel, A Fairy Tale of New York, has a fighting hero and a Ginger Man atmosphere; it was written, Donleavy says, quite early in his career.

⁸ Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Dell, 1962), p. 312.

⁹ Joseph Heller, Something Happened (New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 343.

¹⁰ John Barth, The Floating Opera, Rev. ed. (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 3.

¹¹ John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), p. 288.

¹² John Enck, "John Barth: An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 8.

¹³ John Hawkes, Second Skin (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 44.

¹⁴ See Norman O. Brown's chapter "Death and Childhood" in Life Against Death (New York: Vintage, 1959) for a psychological commentary that fits all too well Hawkes's hero.

¹⁵ John Hawkes, "Notes on The Wild Goose Chase" in "Symposium: Fiction Today," Massachusetts Review, 3 (1962), 787.

¹⁶ Enck, p. 146.

¹⁷ Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 291.

¹⁸ Walker Percy, "From Facts to Fiction," Washington Post Book Week, 25 December 1966, p. 6; letter to Thomas LeClair, 1 November 1971.

¹⁹ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell-Delta, 1969), p. 19.

²⁰ Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967).

²¹ "We Talk To . . . Kurt Vonnegut," Mademoiselle, August 1970, p. 296.

²² Thomas Pynchon, V. (New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 191; Dance of Death references are found on pp. 185, 243, 276, and 282.

²³ Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967).

²⁴ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking-Compass, 1973), p. 724; compare Dr. Lal's attraction to the rocket in Mr. Sammler's Planet.

²⁵ Brown, p. 101.

²⁶ Quoted in Kermode, p. 164.

²⁷ Bruce Jay Friedman, "Foreward," Black Humor (New York: Bantam, 1965), p. viii.

²⁸ Harris, pp. 17-32.

²⁹ Schulz, pp. 3-15; see also Olderman's introductory chapter.

³⁰ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night (New York: Avon, 1967), p. vii.

³¹ Robert Jay Lifton, "Protean Man," Partisan Review, 35 (1968), 13-27; the consciousness of death drives "protean man" to his disguises and fluidity.

³² Lifton, in his preface to Living and Dying, says he believes death is "the ultimate source of mockery per se."

³³ Northrop Frye, Antomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 45.

³⁴ Wylie Sypher, "The Meanings of Comedy," in Comedy: Meaning and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), p. 37.

³⁵ Brown, p. 65; discussing death in literature, Anthony Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 262, says "the real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence."

³⁶ Olderman, p. 28.

³⁷ John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic, August 1967, p. 32.

³⁸ Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time," trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 227-8.

³⁹ William F. May, "The Sacral Power of Death in Contemporary Experience," in Death in American Experience, ed. Arien Mack (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 104.

⁴⁰ Herman Feifel, ed., The Meaning of Death (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).

⁴¹ Robert Kastenbaum and Ruth Aisenberg, The Psychology of Death (New York: Springer, 1972); see also Edith Wyschogrod, ed., The Phenomenon of Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) for a good selective bibliography.

⁴² Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger, eds. Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1958), p. 49; see also Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Norton, 1969).

⁴³ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), pp. 189, 202.