SOURCE: Craig, David M. “From Avignon to Catch-22.” War, Literature, and the Arts 6, no. 2 (fall-winter 1994): 27-54.

[In the following essay, Craig discusses the influence of Heller's World War II experience as a pilot over Avignon on the writing of Catch-22.]

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Dylan Thomas

Joseph Heller's experiences as a bombardier over Avignon during World War II were catalytic to his career as a writer. In the experiences over Avignon, Catch-22 begins. These experiences did not spark Heller's desire to be an author, for that had burned unabated since childhood.¹ Nor did the reaction the Avignon experiences occasioned occur quickly, regularly, or consciously. Rather, Avignon provided in highly compressed from Heller's essential subject—human mortality—and Avignon engaged his imagination in a way that this subject could eventually be given expression. No Catch-22 reader is likely to forget the result, the Snowden death scene over Avignon or the secret of Snowden's entrails: “Man was matter … Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage” (429-430). While the evidence for the importance of Avignon is unmistakable, many pieces of the story are unknown or missing today. Heller's public accounts of these experiences come long after he has begun to feature Avignon in his writing, and, predictably, these accounts partake of the persona of Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22.² The accounts are couched in jokes that distance the experience from the man.

Heller's early writing furnishes some of the links between his real-life experience and Catch-22, and these early fictional versions of Avignon illuminate the novel (and, for that matter, Heller's subsequent writing) as if by ultraviolet light, defamiliarizing the familiar. Avignon serves as the setting for two unpublished stories, “The Miracle of Danrossane” and “Crippled Phoenix,” Heller's only short stories about the war.³ Avignon also figures prominently in the planning material for Catch-22, most notably in an early draft of the Snowden death scene.⁴ In this material, not in the published stories that preceded Catch-22, one first discovers Heller's masterplot, the core narrative that propels each of his novels. This masterplot—what I call the “dead child story”—consists of the same constellation of narrative elements: guilt, secret knowledge, bad faith, and the death of children (or, alternatively, of wounded innocents). The thrust and destination of this narrative is death, a death that serves, as does Snowden's in Catch-22, as the occasion for narrative clarification.⁵ The narrative's import is as humanly simple and as humanly complex as mortality itself: humans are matter. With this masterplot, Heller seeks to do what Tolstoy does in The Death of Ivan Ilych, to have character and reader alike experience the immanence and imminence of death. Like Ivan Ilych, we are apt to be resisting readers, able to acknowledge, as Ivan does, the rightness of the syllogistic reasoning that says “Caius (or Snowden) is a man; men are mortal”; but not wanting, as Ivan and Yossarian do not want, to apply this abstraction to ourselves. Heller's early writing about Avignon, then, allows exploration of the process by which he draws upon and gains control over personal experience and documents its “increasingly conscious transformation into writing” (Said 196).⁶

Each of the accounts of Avignon—“The Miracle of Danrossane,” “Crippled Phoenix,” the early manuscript, the published one, and, as I discuss elsewhere, “Catch-22 Revisited”—has an aspect of meta-narration entailing a struggle of how to locate and voice the story. In “The Miracle of Danrossane,” the Avignon story—that is, the dead child story—is a secret known only by the local residents, and Heller's plot unfolds his American protagonist's efforts to find someone who will disclose the secret. In “Crippled Phoenix,” the story resides within the principal characters themselves, in the guilty pasts of Dan Cramer, an American pilot, and Morain, a member of the French underground. The plots of both stories depend upon working out what can and cannot be told as well as what can and cannot be confronted. In an early manuscript version of the Snowden death scene, Yossarian endeavors to have the chaplain understand his own reactions to what happened over Avignon, not the event itself. Finally, in Catch-22, Yossarian endeavors to unlock the significance of Snowden's dying words and, in so doing, to plumb the meaning of death. As in the previous versions, Yossarian's understanding hinges upon telling the story of what happened, albeit to himself. In each story of Avignon, Heller makes the telling of the story as important as the having told, as if the repeated tellings will help the author himself understand what happened.

During the war, Heller flew two missions to Avignon. Before the Avignon missions, he had, by his own account, romanticized war: “I wanted action, not security. I wanted a sky full of dogfights, daredevils and billowing parachutes. I was twenty-one years old. I was dumb” (“Revisited” 51). Avignon shatters his romantic wishes, for as he remarks in “Catch-22 Revisited”: “There was the war, in Avignon, not in Rome or Ile Rousse or Poggibonsi or even Ferrara” (141).⁷ On the August 8, 1944 mission to bomb a railroad bridge, Heller for the first time saw a plane shot down.⁸ As a bombardier on one of the lead planes, which had been assigned to drop metallic paper to disrupt the radar for the anti-aircraft guns, Heller could look back on what was happening to the rest of the squadron. He saw a burning plane fall into an uncontrollable spin. Parachutes billowed and opened: he would later learn that three men had gotten out, while three others were killed in the crash. One of the three survivors was found by members of the Avignon underground, hidden and eventually smuggled back across enemy lines. This mission provides the basis for the “Crippled Phoenix” and, presumably, the inspiration for the survivor's guilt that its protagonist Dan Cramer experiences.

On August 15, 1944, Heller's squadron returned to Avignon to bomb another railroad bridge over the Rhone, and this mission would provide the model for the Snowden death scene. For both Heller and Yossarian, it was their 37th mission. In notes Heller made in 1966 about the mission, he records: “Man wounded in leg. Wohlstein and Moon killed” (“Chronology 2/13/66,” Heller papers, Brandeis University). According to Heller, the details from the novel correspond

… perhaps ninety percent to what I did experience. I did have a co-pilot go berserk and grab the controls. The earphones did pull out. I did think I was dying for what seemed like thirty minutes but was actually three-hundredths of a second. When I did plug my earphones in, there was a guy sobbing on the intercom, “Help the bombardier, but the gunner was only shot in the leg.”

(Heller, “Translating” 357)

In recounting the experience, Heller confines the correspondences between the actual and the novelistic Avignon missions to “physical details” and denies any similarity between Yossarian's emotional reactions and his own.⁹

Heller's own explanations as well as his fictional use of Avignon indicate that more than physical details are at play. Whether factual or fictional, each account that Heller gives of Avignon contains an Ur-plot that turns upon an intense experience of personal mortality. In answering interviewers' questions about his own experience, Heller repeatedly dwells on his sensation that he had died in the air above Avignon. He remembers pressing the talk button of his head set, hearing nothing, and thinking he was already dead. Heller stresses his sense of distorted time, of events that unfolded in microseconds seeming to last much longer.¹⁰ His change of habits after this Avignon mission also testifies to the mission's effects; from then on, Heller carried a personal first-aid kit and vowed never to fly once his combat missions were over (a vow kept until 1960 when a 24-hour train ride convinced him to reassess the dangers of flying). The comic “Catch-22 Revisited” retelling provides a perspective on Heller's reactions in that he makes himself, not the wounded airman, the victim. “I went to the hospital the next day. He looked fine. They had given him blood, and he was going to be all right. But I was in terrible shape, and I had twenty-three more missions to fly” (“Revisited” 142). Of course, the wound becomes mortal in Catch-22, or as Heller laconically describes the wound's change: “He was shot through the leg … But I added to it and had him shot in the middle” (Barnard 298).

“The Miracle of Danrossane” and “Crippled Phoenix” mark the artistic steps by which the wound gets relocated. Together with the early draft of the Snowden death scene and Catch-22 itself, the stories offer a complex range of reactions to death: denial, confusion, immersion, and understanding. While all of these reactions figure in each work, one predominates in each, as if designating stages in Heller's thinking, from denial in “The Miracle of Danrossane” to understanding in Catch-22. As this progression indicates, the stories and manuscript draft of the death scene provided the vehicle by which Heller worked out his master plot, and determined that death could serve as thrust and destination for his narratives. In the stories, the journey toward this death is spatial and temporal, a visit to Avignon in “Danrossane” and a return to it in “Crippled Phoenix.” In Catch-22 and the novels that follow, the journey becomes psychological and emotional, one culminating in a death that surfaces, like Snowden's does, as if from the protagonist's subconscious.

“The Miracle of Danrossane,” the slighter of the two unpublished war stories, recounts a correspondent's visit to the village outside Avignon where his father was born. This story's plot turns upon a father's denying his sons' deaths. The correspondent is intrigued by the name of the inn in which he stays, L'Auberge des Sept Fils [Inn of the Seven Sons]. While Durland, the innkeeper, will not talk about the name, the mayor tells the correspondent Durland's story. This telling provides the principal plot of Heller's story. Even though Durland had been a Nazi collaborator during the war, his seven sons had been killed by the Nazis as a reprisal for the death of two German soldiers. Durland himself bears responsibility for his sons' deaths because he neglected to protect them. The story is irony-laden: the Nazis' random selection of reprisal victims results in the deaths of Durland's sons (hence the darkly ironic title); although the Nazis think their selection random, one of Durland's sons has, in fact, been involved in killing the Nazi soldiers as revenge for the rape of a village girl by the soldiers; one of the actual killers goes free even though he volunteers to turn himself over to the Nazis and despite the mayor's informing on him. Durland himself never comes to terms with his sons' deaths; in fact, he tells the correspondent that his sons are out working in the fields.

In this earliest Avignon story, Heller announces the concerns that will characterize his subsequent accounts, as well as provide the principal concerns of his novels: guilt, secret knowledge, bad faith, and, most crucially, the death of children. “The Miracle of Danrossane”'s underlying structure has the primitive, evocative force of a folk tale. A young man, who is looking symbolically for his father (and thus for his own origins), finds a surrogate whose act of paternal bad faith has caused his own sons' deaths. Refusing to acknowledge their deaths or his own complicity in them, this father lives “respectably” in a house memorializing the dead sons. When the correspondent discovers the father's secret, he returns home and, as artist, transforms the secret into story. Thus conceived, the story the reader has just read originates in guilty, concealed knowledge—a conception that aligns it with such myths as those of Prometheus and the Garden of Eden, myths which Heller explicitly draws upon in Catch-22. The architecture of “Danrossane,” particularly the crucial element of the sons' deaths, is striking for the way that it anticipates the design of Heller's novels. Later characterizing this design, Heller says:

Death is always present as a climactic event that never happens to the protagonist but affects him profoundly. I think I'm drawing unconsciously from experience for inspiration. The child, the dependent child or sacrificed child is always there. I would think that the death of my father when I was about five years old had much to do with that. There was almost no conversation about it … Indeed, the traumatized child denies death very successfully, and then sublimates it, which I think is the process that went on in me. But it leaves me very sensitive to the helplessness of children and the ease with which they can be destroyed or betrayed deliberately or otherwise.¹¹

(Flippo 60)

Whether one accepts Heller's psychological explanation for the phenomenon or not, one cannot escape the way in which death serves as climactic event and as catalyst for narrative clarification in his writing and does so from the onset of his career.

“Crippled Phoenix” marks another step on Heller's journey toward Catch-22. Guilt-caused confusion characterizes the story's account of death, and, like the novel, this story features a protagonist who has been wounded in the leg. As its title signifies, the life after the Avignon death is crippling; there is no phoenix-like resurrection. Evidently, Heller spent considerable time on the story, for there are three versions of it in the Brandeis collection and he tried placing it with different literary agents. Possessing clear affinities with Catch-22, as well as with Something Happened, “Crippled Phoenix” tells a double story of conscience: that of Dan Cramer, an American pilot who feels guilty for surviving the crash in which he was the only survivor, and of Morain, a French peasant who aided with Cramer's escape after the crash. Cramer has returned to Avignon to see Morain, to whom he feels grateful and about whom he feels guilty because Morain's son had been killed when a bombardier with one mission left to fly dropped his bombs too early. Cramer has an additional reason for guilt in that he has been unfaithful to his wife during a recent stay in London, and, even in bed with his wife in Avignon, he finds his mind wandering back to Luciana, a wartime liaison in Rome.¹²

More crucial to the action of the story, Cramer fails to come to terms with all this guilt. First, although Cramer goes to see Morain with the intention “of help[ing] him in some way,” he cannot provide the support that Morain wants, for Morain suffers from his own wartime guilt. To Cramer, Morain confesses that he was afraid his daughter would be taken away to a Nazi work camp and so he forced her to become the mistress of a German official (which ruins her life and that of her child born of the relationship). Although Morain explicitly asks him to return to visit, Cramer, even after agreeing to, cannot bring himself to do so. Second, he fails to come to terms with his wife, although he shares some of the details with her about the wartime plane crash, which he alone survived. Convinced that his wife is too superficial to understand his feelings, especially about the war, he allows her to believe that their marital difficulties have been reconciled, all the while despising her.

Significantly, Cramer, who stands in Yossarian's position as participant in events of the past, cannot fully disclose his story to anyone; he thus remains isolated and tormented. In a symbolically resonant moment, Heller communicates the moral wilderness that Cramer has brought himself into because he is unable to confront his guilt; he also conveys the way in which Cramer has deliberately estranged himself from his wife.

Suddenly, though, [Cramer] was frightened. The forest was immediately before them (his guide, his wife, and himself), and he realized that Katherine belonged only to the fringe of his emotions, on that their endless surface of amiability and routine, and that everything might still be all right if he kept her there. But they were already between the trees.

This passage forecasts the role that Avignon will play in Catch-22 (as well as anticipates Slocum's marriage in Something Happened). The passage locates the wilderness within the self, that wilderness which, as Conrad demonstrates in Heart of Darkness, is the territory of the modern condition. While the same elements—dead children, secret knowledge, guilt, and bad faith—constitute the story, Heller relocates them. In “Danrossane,” Durland's history was part of public discourse, unknown only to the correspondent, the outsider. In “Crippled Phoenix,” Cramer's and Morain's pasts are secret—in particular, the responsibility that each feels for a death. Each discloses his guilty past in the vain hope of confessional relief. However, both disclosures fail because the two men look to others to assuage their own inner guilt: Morain to Cramer when the injured party is his daughter and Cramer to his wife when he cannot accept his own actions. The guilty knowledge of what happened at Avignon isolates and estranges, at least until what happened there can be fully confronted and related. As the early manuscript version of the Snowden death scene powerfully suggests, this is what Catch-22 is about.

An early draft of the Snowden scene documents Heller's evolving conception of Avignon and dramatizes the imperative for reporting what happened there. Snowden represents the death at a distance—Yossarian recounts the experience to the chaplain. Yet, this early version is raw and, in some ways, more emotionally charged than the novel. While the Snowden scene plays off the bloody hands scene in Macbeth, the literary allusion seems like a patina over what Heller will call in God Knows the “stink of mortality and reek of mankind” (107). In Heller's early rendering, Yossarian not only sees death, but also immerses himself in it.

“Dirty hands,” Yossarian said. “Yesterday they touched a dead man's flesh.”

The chaplain attempts to comfort him, but Yossarian continues:

“A dead man's private parts. I spoke to Doc Daneeker. Probably his lungs, his pancreas, his liver, his stomach, and some canned tomatoes that he had for breakfast. I hate canned tomatoes …”

The chaplain tries again.

“But you don't understand. I enjoyed it. I actually enjoyed touching the graying flesh, the clotting blood. I actually enjoyed touching his lungs, his pancreas, his liver, his stomach and some canned tomatoes from his breakfast, even though I hate canned tomatoes. I made excuses to myself to touch every shriveling shred.”

The chaplain tries one final time to console Yossarian.

“But even that's not the worst of it. I rubbed blood all over myself. And do you know why I rubbed blood all over myself? To impress people. To impress those God damned Red Cross biddies with the smiles and doughnuts … and by God, it impressed, even Doc Daneeker, who broke down and gave me some codeine and told me about Cathcart and a tour of duty.”

(Heller papers, Brandeis University)

There are many noteworthy differences between this early version and the published one. Snowden's mortal wound is open, displaying what Heller will call in the novel “God's plenty” (429). Yossarian is compelled to touch the viscera, then compelled to relate to the chaplain his enjoyment of doing so. He has previously told Doc Daneeker about his experience. In Catch-22, Yossarian tells no one, although his recollections have the quality of telling the story to himself. Time works differently as well. In the manuscript, the experience, only a day old, has the immediacy of the here and now, while in the novel version, it emerges as if from Yossarian's subconsciousness. In Catch-22, the intensity of Yossarian's remembrance erupts into the present: “liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach, and bits of … stewed tomatoes” (429). The same message is embedded in both—man is matter—but in the manuscript, Yossarian, and perhaps Heller, has not yet apprehended its significance.

The unpublished early version is, at once, more public and more private than the Avignon of the Catch-22. The appropriation of the dirty hands motif from Macbeth dissociates this version from Heller himself, connecting it to a literary past rather than a personal one.¹³ Also by having Yossarian report the story, Heller publicizes Avignon in a way that third-person narration would not. This recounting of Avignon proclaims Yossarian's guilty consciousness, whereas the novel displaces it into the tree-of-life episode, in which Yossarian's nakedness reveals his guilt (likewise triggered by Snowden's blood).¹⁴ Simultaneously, this early version is more private, more evocative of the Heller who experienced Avignon and of the author who repeatedly sets key scenes there. The confessional quality of the incident, with Yossarian trying to make the chaplain understand what he has done, directs attention to the personal reaction to the experience. Finally, Yossarian's revelation that, on one level, he enjoyed the experience points to the complexity of Heller's own experience over Avignon. This early version illustrates the attraction of the horrifying—an attraction that Heller seems compelled to specify.

Significantly, before the idea for Catch-22 came to him, Heller had virtually given up writing. Of the time between the short stories that he wrote in the forties and the novel which he began in 1953, Heller later said, “I wanted to write something that was very good and I had nothing good to write. So I wrote nothing” (Sam Merrill 68). Out of the silence—a silence that he partially filled with reading—came a new method of writing, anti-realist and comic in orientation. Reading

the comic novels of Evelyn Waugh and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night … Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, and … Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark particularly, I was comprehending for the first time that there were different ways to tell a story, and the methods these people used were much more compatible with my own technical ability … with my own imagination.

(Ruas 151)

The realization that there are many ways to tell a story is what Heller's evolving use of the Avignon experiences documents.¹⁵ The discovery was long in coming, though, for he did not publish Catch-22 until 1961, sixteen years after the publication of his first story. By this time, he was 38, the same age as two other late-blooming, first-time novelists, George Eliot and Willa Cather.

Heller's key discovery involves discourse, not story, the how of narrative rather than the what.¹⁶ His Avignon short stories (as did most of his other short stories) had linear plots that unfolded on a single narrative level. In each, characters journeyed to Avignon (or nearby Danrossane) to learn something from the past. Heller's narrative method was straightforward, the plots proceeding until access was gained to characters who disclose crucial, secret knowledge from the past. In Catch-22, Heller makes discourse—the narrative act itself—part of the story as well as its means of transmission. The Avignon mission on which Snowden dies illustrates this. As is well-known, Heller's narrator distributes references to the mission throughout the novel; sometimes cryptically as in the first reference: “Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?” (35); sometimes explicitly as in: “the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane” (170). In effect, the narrator dissects the Avignon plot as if performing a narrative autopsy on Snowden. This dissection creates a much richer narrative progression than that of the Avignon stories, one that depends upon discourse (the vertical narrative axis) as well as upon story (the horizontal axis).¹⁷ Three effects follow from this: first, the meaning of Snowden's secret depends upon the interplay among narrative levels and involves the contrast of tragic and comic perspectives; second, Heller uses the synthetic dimension of narrative to complicate the narrative progression so that the authorial reader must participate in the unraveling of Snowden's secret; and third, Heller can make the text the verbal embodiment of Snowden's secret, that is, mortality exists in the conjunction of mind and matter.¹⁸

Heller's first reference to Avignon typifies the way he takes advantage of the interplay among the narrative levels. Yossarian's question about the Snowdens of yesteryear has complementary roles in the novel's story and discourse, in each case providing the pathway to who Snowden is and what his secret entails. For Yossarian, the question speaks to both an actual and a linguistic quest; he wants to know “why so many people were trying so hard to kill him” (34). To gain the knowledge he seeks, Yossarian, like the protagonists of the Avignon stories, must unlock a secret from the past, a secret of which Snowden is the embodiment (potentially, this knowledge is already available to him because he has already ministered to the dying Snowden). But the question is also about language as well as about history, as becomes clear when Yossarian translates it into French: “Ou sont les Neigedens d'antan?” [Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?] (35). Heller underscores the seriousness of this linguistic dimension with the narrator's comment about Yossarian's willingness “to pursue [the corporal of whom he asked his question] through all the words of the world” (35). The narrator, of course, knows the answer to Yossarian's question, but instead of relating it, explains to the narrative audience why the question is so upsetting.¹⁹ In doing so, the narrator also makes this query part of another narrative, that of the Fall. “Group Headquarters was alarmed, for there was no telling what people might find out once they were free to ask whatever questions they wanted to”—a concern for which Colonel Korn devises the ingenious solution of permitting only those people to ask questions who never asked any (35). At this moment, the story is simultaneously proceeding on different narrative planes, its comedy, in part, stemming from the resulting incongruity. Heller's discourse takes Yossarian's question to a higher level where Group Headquarters' response echoes the fears of the God from Genesis, who worries that Adam and Eve, possessing the knowledge of good and evil, may now be tempted to eat from the tree of life. The mythic echoes refigure Yossarian's Avignon experience as a fall into mortality and mortal knowledge, a point that Heller makes more forcefully in the subsequent tree-of-life scene.

The reference to “the secret Snowden had spilled to Yossarian” exemplifies the synthetic narrative progression of Catch-22, the progression implied by the novel's language. The episode advances the plot: for Yossarian, being in the hospital is better than flying over Avignon with Snowden dying (164). As the narrator formulates the matter, it is not just because the hospital is safer, protecting Yossarian from war, but also because people “couldn't dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave” (164). Death has become a character and its plot is the Lisa Doolittle story: “They had taught her manners. They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady” (164). With this conception, Yossarian and the narrator seek to control death. Of course, their plotting undoes them. In Heller's mordant, novel-long joke, death is no lady, although this metaphor does, for Heller, speak to its nature.²⁰ As with the many euphemisms for death, this reference makes dying seem familiar, comfortable, and acceptable.

As novelist, Heller knows better, representing death as violent, certain, and inevitable; and yet, he rages against its sway. In Catch-22, unlike his Avignon stories, he finds a form to express his outrage, the humor of the novel's discourse being its expression. His handling of “the secret Snowden had spilled to Yossarian” reference can illustrate this: his mixing comic and tragic perspectives; his verbal pyrotechnics, his delight in language as language; and his presentation of crucial narrative information (i.e. what exactly the secret entails) in a way that resists understanding. The passage itself iconically embodies Snowden's secret, the coded message encased by and hidden among the myriad external and internal threats to one's life.

There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. There was Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, for example, and they were all out to kill him. There was Lieutenant Scheisskopf with his fanaticism for parades and there was the bloated colonel with his fat mustache and his fanaticism for retribution, and they wanted to kill him. There was Appleby, Havermeyer, Black, and Korn … There were bartenders, bricklayers and bus conductors all over the world who wanted him dead, landlords and tenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to Avignon …

There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries …

(170-71)

Heller is in high comic form here. Repetition, alliteration and pseudo-classification schemes, among other things, control the sequencing of details, and the details themselves multiply, even as I truncate them with ellipses, as if the details were cancer cells. The nonsense of this—“the many diseases … [of] a truly diseased mind”—has, of course, a deadly seriousness, although neither Yossarian, nor the narrative or authorial audiences can entirely understand this yet (171). It is easier to proclaim human mortality than to understand it, easier to catalog external and internal threats to one's life than to comprehend them. This is what Catch-22 is about; this is what readers along with Yossarian must be educated to. As the “The Miracle of Danrossane,” “Crippled Phoenix,” and the early version of the Snowden death scene demonstrate, here is also the journey that Heller himself has made from Avignon to Catch-22.

The second Avignon mission serves further to educate Yossarian and the authorial audience, and Heller's handling of it illumines the way in which he has transmuted experience into art. The mission is largely non-narrated, because Yossarian does not fly on it, having been previously wounded in the leg over Leghorn. Nevertheless, the mission provides an essential gateway to apprehending Snowden's secret and to Sweden, where Yossarian can indeed “live forever or die in the attempt” (29). In his notes to the novel, Heller describes how Yossarian's squadron comes to return to Avignon, and this description highlights another interpretation of Snowden's death, that of the army bureaucracy. “In the Chaplain's presence, Colonel Cathcart volunteers the Group for another mission to Avignon: he is instituting the procedure of having form letters sent to the families of casualties, and he wants to obtain a large number of casualties quickly enough to be written up in the Christmas issue of the Saturday Evening Post” (Heller papers, Brandeis University). In fact, however, no one is killed on the mission, although Orr, Yossarian's bunkmate and guide to Sweden is shot down. Orr seizes the opportunity to test all the equipment and supplies on his life raft in preparation for his journey to Sweden. After the mission, Yossarian leaves the hospital only to learn that the number of mandatory flying missions has been raised once more. At this news, he agrees to enlist in Dobbs' plot to assassinate Colonel Cathcart. If Yossarian would instead listen to Orr, who wants Yossarian to fly with him, Yossarian would have taken the direct route to Sweden, for Orr is shot down on his next mission, only to resurface in Sweden at novel's end. However, Yossarian would have not learned what he needs to, nor would Heller's readers.

In narrative terms, this Avignon mission operates according to the principle of substitution. The premises of the Snowden scene are reversed, with Yossarian himself playing the part of injured airman. For example, when Yossarian is wounded in the leg, he immediately overestimates the seriousness of the wound, immediately believing it to be life-denying, albeit sexually so. “I have lost my balls! Aarfy, I lost my balls! … I said I lost my balls! Can't you hear me? I'm wounded in the groin!” (283-284). In Heller's notes to the novel, the wound was, in fact, intended as a castration, a conception that lends further evidence to the importance Avignon holds to Heller (Nagel, “The Catch-22 Note Cards” 52-53). During the mission itself, Yossarian safely resides in the hospital recuperating, a proleptic version of the stay during which he finally cracks Snowden's secret. The danger of the mission also constitutes a substitution, the ambitious colonels who need casualties causing the real peril, rather than the Germans. This Avignon episode underscores what Yossarian has yet to learn: the significance of the threat posed by living in society, confirmed when Yossarian subsequently agrees to be the colonels' pal and to say nice things about them. At novel's end, thinking about this deal, he allows himself to remember Snowden and for first time meditates on his own experience over Avignon. Examining the entrails, albeit in memory, Yossarian confronts what he has previously refused to acknowledge.

With the design of the Snowden death scene, Heller expects the authorial audience to return to Avignon with Yossarian, demanding that they too inspect Snowden's exposed vital organs and understand the message those organs contain. The narrative approach is erratic, recapitulating the comi-tragic rhythms of the novel as a whole.²¹ Yossarian is in the hospital recovering from the side wound that the knife-wielding Nately's whore inflicts on him. Predictably, the danger that the wound occasions results from the doctors who want to treat him by operating on his liver, not from treating the wound itself.²² Heller's method is comic, but his point is serious:

“Where were you born?” [asks a fat, gruff colonel with a mustache.]

“On a battlefield,” [Yossarian] answers.

“No, no. In what state were you born?”

“In a state of innocence.”

(420)

The meaning and humor of this exchange depend upon the interplay between discourse and story. The incongruity of meanings that results alerts the authorial audience to what Yossarian must still learn. He does not yet realize the deal that he has just accepted from Colonels Cathcart and Korn to “[s]ay nice things about [them]” (416) is “a way to lose [him]self” (456). To discover this and to learn Snowden's secret, Yossarian must first unravel the message of the strange man who keeps repeating, “we've got your pal, buddy. We've got your pal” (422). At this point in the novel, Colonel Korn, the chaplain, and Aarfy all fit the message, for each could be the pal: Korn because he knows what the deal demands, Aarfy because he has been the navigator on so many of Yossarian's “missions,” and the chaplain because he has indeed been Yossarian's friend. Instinctively, Yossarian realizes that each of the obvious possibilities is wrong, and in “the sleepless bedridden nights that take an eternity to dissolve into dawn” (426), he resolves the riddle. In the perverse logic of riddles, Snowden “had never been his pal” but was “a vaguely familiar kid who was badly wounded and freezing to death” (426). If Snowden was only vaguely familiar in life, he will become, through the power of recollection, intimately known in death. In death, he is Yossarian's pal and catalyst for his essential discovery of self.²³

The death scene is so frequently analyzed that it needs little further examination here. I want, however, briefly to consider a passage from earlier in the novel which sets up this inspection. Its progression is reminiscent of Heller's own artistic journey toward Avignon: slow, hesitant, made in uncertain steps. The passage speaks to the problem at the heart of Catch-22, that of locating the wound and telling its story.

And Yossarian crawled slowly out of the nose and up on the top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear section of the plane—passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for—to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval naked wound that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit. And the small, slight tail gunner was lying on the floor beside Snowden in a dead faint, his face as white as a handkerchief, so that Yossarian sprang forward with revulsion to help him first.

(341)

Yossarian crawls back through the plane, as if moving back in time as well as in space. He mislocates the wound and even then cannot immediately bring himself to treat it, choosing instead to aid the tail gunner. The essential story, human mortality, is reified in Snowden's flesh. In his revulsion, Yossarian can better deal with the gunner's “dead faint” than with Snowden's living wound. The simile, “like blind things with lives of their own,” renders mortality as a mysterious otherness, not just Snowden's but also, implicitly, Yossarian's own.

Eventually, Yossarian traces the wound with his fingers, just as he did in the manuscript version, and when he does, he unwittingly begins to explore his own mortality as well as Snowden's deadly wound. Yossarian finds “[t]he actual contact with the dead flesh … not nearly as repulsive as he had anticipated, and excuse to caress the wound with his fingers again and again to convince himself of his own courage” (428). The reworking of these details from the manuscript confirms their importance, but significantly shifts the emphasis and meaning of the scene. In the manuscript, Yossarian caresses the viscera, in the novel the fleshy leg wound. In the manuscript, Yossarian attempts to “impress” others with actions as if this will authenticate his courage, while in the novel he wants to ascertain his own courage. But, in both cases, he initially touches without understanding. In fact, after fingering and then treating Snowden's leg wound, Yossarian can assure him confidently, “You're going to be all right, kid … Everything is under control” (429). Of course, it isn't. What Yossarian needs to understand lies open before him, signified by the blood “dripping … like snow melting on the eaves, but viscous and red, already thickening as it dropped” (emphasis added, 427). For Heller, the mystery of mortality lies in human embodiment—in the flesh, not in the spirit. Life begins and ends with the body. With his hands inside Snowden's wound, Yossarian experiences this, feels what he does not yet understand. However, his physical grasp anticipates and makes possible apprehension of the message of Snowden's entrails.

In Yossarian's famous insight, Heller defines mortality as a fusion of mind and matter, Yossarian's conceptualization of man enduring even as Snowden's body dissolves into bloody inert matter. Reflecting upon Snowden's death, Yossarian comes to understand his own mortality. As Denis de Rougement observes, “Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness are in league” (51). Heller insists that Yossarian trace the contours of Snowden's and thus his own mortality: “liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach, and bits of stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch” (429). The prose is hard and violent, as hard and violent as Snowden's wounds; its violence partakes of the violence of Heller's experience of treating a wounded colleague. The viscera of humans tether them to the material world. The viscera also take in the material world, digesting it like Snowden's stewed tomatoes. When the digestive process is viewed as Snowden's is, it becomes ugly and repulsive. But Heller believes these entrails also allow the viewer, as prophets have long believed, to detect the secrets of human existence: “Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all” (429-430).²⁴ Finally, Yossarian deciphers the message that has been available to him all along. The message identifies the two components of humanity: the material that inexorably leads to death, and the spiritual that Heller leaves deliberately ambiguous. In formulating the spiritual element, Heller omits the verb, so that the statement reads “the spirit gone.” This formulation neither affirms nor denies the existence of spirit; it simply announces the concept. Without predication, the concept cannot be completed or brought to fulfillment. As deconstructionists would argue, the verb's absence only can be noted.

Heller's insistence that his authorial audience inspect Snowden's viscera also accomplishes quite a different end, what Bakhtin calls the “familiarization of the world through laughter” (23). “In this plane (the plane of laughter) one can disrespectfully walk around whole objects; therefore, the back and rear portions of an object (and also its innards, not normally accessible for viewing) assume special prominence” (23). Death, of course, is the object that Heller wants to inspect. By means of such elements as “the Snowdens of yesteryear,” the Death that behaves, and the litany of threats to Yossarian's life, Heller has taken his authorial audience on this kind of narrative walk in his peripatetic approach to Avignon. In the catalog of Snowden's vital organs, Yossarian, the narrator, and Heller act out the imperatives for Bakhtin's comic formula. Having already familiarized the reader with the elements of this catalog, especially the liver and the tomatoes, the beginning and ending of the catalog, Heller allows the reality of mortality to be known, familiarized in a laughter that ridicules. Death, as well as life, is stripped in Heller's catalog, his comic dismemberment destroying the power that death had when it was unknown.

In retracing some of Heller's steps to the Snowden death scene, one is reminded of the blacking factory sections of David Copperfield and how they have helped to explain so much of Charles Dickens's life and art. Like Dickens, Heller uses his art to digest personal shocks, to explain them to himself, and to give an intelligible picture of the world in which such things occur.²⁵ So too like Dickens, Heller is a great humorist, and the acuity of his social vision frequently has been missed, as was Dickens's, in the laughter his fiction occasions. This laughter offers an escape from social institutions whose grip on the individual seems as intractable as that of Catch-22 on Yossarian. While providing the pathway and accommodation for Snowden's secret, this laughter is begotten by pain. Heller's early representations of Avignon instance this; there is no humor in “The Miracle of Danrossane” or “Crippled Phoenix.” For Heller, the painful recognition of Snowden's secret generates anger, anger usually expressed by black humor and unleashed by the genius of his novelistic discourse. He rages against the dying of the light.²⁶

Notes

1. Since childhood, Heller wrote stories and submitted them for publication, sending them to places like the New York Daily News, Liberty, and Collier's. He also dreamed of becoming a dramatist and in high school aspired to writing comedies like those of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufmann.

2. Heller's interviews continually address the issue of correspondence between his life and fiction, with Heller giving a variety of answers, sometimes contradictorily so. For a representative selection of interviews treating his war experience, see: Heller, “Translating,” Gentlemen's Quarterly, Sam Merrill, Weatherby, Barnard, and Flippo.

3. “The Miracle of Danrossane,” “Crippled Phoenix,” and all other unpublished material to which I refer are part of a collection of Heller's papers that Brandeis University Library holds. In addition to these stories, Heller also worked on a novel about the war as early as 1945, which involved a flier nearing the end of his required quota of bombing missions and thinking about the meaning of the war.

4. James Nagel has done the seminal work on the manuscript and other working papers for Catch-22, but much more study remains to be done. Nagel isolates interesting and important changes between Heller's early plans and published novel, arguing that this material documents the author's “meticulous planning and analysis of his novel at each state of composition” (“Note Cards” 404); see Nagel.

5. While the Snowden death scene in Catch-22 provides the most memorable formulation of such a death, variants on this story reappear at the end of the rest of Heller's work. In the novels, the crucial death always occurs in the penultimate chapter, with the exception of Good as Gold in which the funeral occurs in the penultimate chapter. In We Bombed in New Haven, Captain Starkey must tell and retell each newly named version of his son that he will die on the next bombing mission. In the ending of Something Happened, Slocum finally calls back to memory the details of the accident in which he killed his son, the spurting blood and twisted arms and legs. But he resists the knowledge available in this recollection, concluding it instead with the plea, “Don't tell my wife” (562). In a reversal of the pattern, Good as Gold closes with Bruce Gold standing at his mother's grave hoping for a message that does not come. The death of another “child,” his brother Sid, has brought him to the cemetery. God Knows concludes with King David yearning for a God who will understand and make understandable the grief he feels for his dead sons: “I feel nearer to God when I am deepest in anguish” (338). In Picture This, Heller revises one of history's most famous death scenes, that of Socrates, so that he dies with the retching and convulsions caused by ingesting hemlock. Finally, in Closing Time, Heller uses Kilroy's death to mourn the passing of the World War II generation, to parody the dead child story, and to cast a retrospective light upon Catch-22 in general and Snowden's death in particular.

6. Said makes a larger point about the relationship between certain writers' careers and the texts produced by them that can usefully be applied to Heller and, by extension, to his authorial returns to Avignon: “the text is a multidimensional structure extending from the beginning to the end of the writer's career. A text is the source and aim of a man's desire to be an author, it is the form of his attempts, it contains the elements of his coherence, and in a whole range of complex and differing ways it incarnates the pressures upon the writer of his psychology, his time, his society. The unity between career and text, then, is a unity between an intelligible pattern of events and for the most part their increasingly conscious transformation into writing” (196).

7. Each of these sites has personal significance to Heller: Rome, which Heller visited shortly after it was liberated, afforded him his most memorable wartime leave (see Note 12); Il Rousse was an army rest camp on Corsica near where he was based; Poggibonsi was the destination for his first bombing mission, a mission on which he got bored and dropped his bombs too late; and Ferrara was the first mission on which Heller's squadron lost a plane.

8. There is a discrepancy in Heller's dating of this first Avignon mission; he lists it as August 8 in the “Chronology 2/13/66” and as August 3 in “Catch-22 Revisited.” In the “Chronology,” Heller describes the mission as follows: “Rail Road bridge. Hirsch shot down, Burrhus, Yellon killed. First plane I saw shot down” (Heller papers, Brandeis University).

9. Notably, Robert Merrill, among others, agrees with Heller: “the fact that Catch-22 appeared sixteen years after the end of World War II suggests that its author was not primarily interested in recapturing the intensity of his own experiences” (4).

10. See, for example, Sam Merrill 68 and Barnard 298.

11. In recounting a letter that his editor received from Bruno Bettelheim, Heller extends the implication of this narrative pattern, admitting in the case of Something Happened that the protagonist may be complicit in the child's death: “Now it could be that in terms of drawing on recesses of my mind, with which I'm not in touch, what Bruno Bettelheim said was there [i.e., the validity of a death in which a father deliberately kills his son]. I was not aware that I was aware of it“(Ruas 164).

12. Luciana apparently is an early version of the Luciana of Catch-22. As Cramer remembers her: “Luciana was best. Tall, young, and graceful, she was a novice at love, and he remembered her smile as she came to him, her ingenuous astonishment at the sudden force of her passion, and the fumbling manner.” This early appearance of Luciana is also interesting for the light that it sheds on Heller's artistic recycling of personal experience. As he tells interviewer Sam Merrill, “[Yossarian's] encounter with Luciana, the Roman whore, corresponds exactly with an experience I had. He sleeps with her, she refuses money and suggests that he keep her address on a slip of paper … That's exactly what happened to me in Rome. Luciana was Yossarian's vision of a perfect relationship. That's why he saw her only once, and perhaps that's why I saw her only once. If he examined perfection too closely, imperfections would show up” (64). As Catch-22 reveals though, the Luciana plot is more closely tied to Heller's core authorial concerns than his remarks about his own personal experience would indicate. In the novel, Luciana's “perfection” is already impaired, for she has been wounded in an air raid and wears a pink chemise to hide her scar even while making love with Yossarian. Yossarian, however, is fascinated by it, runs his hands over it, and insists that she relate its story. Later after he has torn up the slip of paper with her address on it, Yossarian's search for her leads him into symbolic encounters with death: death in his nightmares about the Bologna mission and proleptic death he looks for her in Snowden's room.

13. While the allusion to Macbeth dissociates the experience from Heller's own, it also represents a connection, for Heller studied Shakespeare at Oxford while on a Fulbright Fellowship between writing his Avignon stories and planning Catch-22. This study may well provide another pathway between Heller's personal experience and the novel. The planning material to Catch-22 reveals the extensive role literary allusions played in Heller's conception of the novel, especially Shakespearean allusions. For studies of these allusions in Catch-22, see Larson, and Aubrey and McCarron.

14. The importance of these elements—death, blood, guilt, and touch—is confirmed by the way that Heller reworks them in Something Happened. In its climactic episode, Slocum responds to the “streams of blood spurting from holes in his [son's] face and head and pouring down over one hand from inside a sleeve” by clutching him to his chest and in the process accidentally suffocating him (562). Unlike Yossarian, Slocum resists recounting the event, instead refiguring it, as Heller's chapter title tells us, into how “My boy has stopped talking to me.”

15. David Seed shows how war novels like James Jones's From Here to Eternity and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead also contributed to Heller's evolving conception of Catch-22; see 23-33.

16. Extending structuralist thought, Seymour Chatman uses the distinction, story and discourse, to differentiate between narrative content and the means by which this content is transmitted.

17. Patrick O'Neill insightfully demonstrates the way in which humor in modern and postmodern texts depends upon privileging discourse over story. In particular, he is interested in what he calls entropic comedy, comedy that is aware of the fictionality of all discourse and “of the element of play” that is involved in the production of any meaning (23). O'Neill's discussion of Catch-22 as an example of entropic satire is also valuable, although I disagree with his conclusion that the novel's discourse undercuts the implications of its story.

18. I borrow the notion of a synthetic element of narrative from James Phelan, although I am modifying his definition. Phelan explores the relationship between character and narrative progression, and he conceives of three aspects of character, which in turn contribute to narrative progression: thematic (as conveyer of narrative and authorial meaning), mimetic (as designation for a “person,” albeit a textual one), and synthetic (as linguistic construct). I use the concept of synthetic component of narrative progression, without attaching it to character.

19. Peter Rabinowitz distinguishes between narrative and authorial audiences. The authorial audience is the ideal reader posited by an author, the reader who completely attends to authorial intentionality. By contrast, the narrative audience is the reader implied by the text itself, by its narrative and rhetorical structure; this reader participates in the illusion that the text is real, that it constitutes a world.

20. There are several ways in which Heller's imagination links death and women. In the short stories, women frequently occasion symbolic, if not literal deaths. For example, in the unpublished “The Death of the Dying Swan,” when Sidney Cooper returns home, he gives up his quest for life and, in effect, accepts death: “He longed for people who were real, people who lived with honest passions and found vigorous pleasure in the mere event of existing, people for whom death came too soon” (Heller papers, Brandeis University). Something Happened and Good as Gold work variations on this pattern. But Heller also associates women with insensate death, that in which senility (the death of the mind) precedes physical demise. The most noteworthy example of this occurs when Slocum believes his mother's senility and death foretell his own: “I can see myself all mapped out inanimately in stages around that dining room table, from mute beginning (Derek) to mute, fatal, bovine end (Mother), passive and submissive as a cow, and even beyond through my missing father (Dad)” (401). Finally, Heller connects passion with death, as when he uses Yossarian's love-making with Nurse Duckett on the beach to set up the scene in which McWatt's plane hits Kid Sampson, thereby turning the ocean red with blood and severed limbs. Similarly, Yossarian's passion for Luciana leads to death, albeit via memory and dreams.

21. Heller's comic strategies depend upon continually negating or reversing expectations. Typically, Heller's scenes suddenly darken in mood, as he reveals that what the reader has just been laughing at begets violence, death, or the morally outrageous; or similarly, dark scenes beget comic ones, dramatically changing the character of the text. Thus, the comic and the tragic function both as figure and ground in much the way they do in an Escher drawing. They constitute a pattern in which the relationship between figure and ground constantly reverses itself, so that first one element then another assumes the foreground.

22. The threat to operate on Yossarian's liver extends a novel-long joke and set of allusions to the Prometheus myth. As in this instance, the effect is usually double-edged, occasioning laughter and signifying mortality. The motif culminates, of course, in the Snowden death scene when Yossarian inspects the wounded airman's liver along with the other viscera. Heller uses tomatoes to a similar end, especially all the jokes about the chaplain's hot plum tomato. The stewed tomatoes that spill out of Snowden's stomach take part of their meaning from the tomato jokes that preceded them.

23. Heller reprises this conception in his conclusions to God Knows and Closing Time. In God Knows, the image of David's youthful self provides the catalyst for self-discovery. Lying on his deathbed, David serves as his own Snowden. In Closing Time, Yossarian and Sammy Singer, a narrator and Heller figure, talk about how Snowden, scarcely an acquaintance in life, becomes the closest of friends in death and the source for what they want to talk about for the rest of their lives.

24. This inspection accomplishes another kind of education as well, one that undercuts the typical military education and that reproduces the experience of combat veterans. As an aside, it bears attention that Heller satirically treats military education throughout Catch-22; for example, in such episodes as Lieutenant Scheisskopf's parades and the many briefing sessions. As described by John Keegan in his classic study The Face of Battle, the aim of such an education “is to reduce war to a set of rules and a system of procedures—and thereby to make orderly and rational what is essentially chaotic and instinctive. It is an aim analogous to that … pursued by medical schools in their fostering among their students a detached attitude to pain and distress in their patients, particularly victims of accidents” (20). Yossarian has long recognized the insanity of war, but he has not, even while treating the wounded Snowden, taken the next step of recognizing his complicity in this insanity. Nor has he yet comprehended the effects of a “military” education. As his subsequent actions demonstrate, his studied recollection of Snowden's death occasions these recognitions. The death scene also serves as a brilliant representation of the sensations of the combat veteran. Again to draw upon John Keegan, in battle the combatants experience a “sense of littleness, almost of nothingness, of their abandonment in a physical wilderness, dominated by vast impersonal forces, from which even the passage of time had been eliminated. The dimensions of the battlefield (in this instance the inside of combat aircraft) … reduced [the combatant's] subjective role, objectively vital though it was, to that of a mere victim” (322). Keegan's account closely parallels Yossarian's sensations in the Snowden scene and defines what Yossarian—and by extension the reader—must be reeducated to reject.

25. Edmund Wilson provides the classic formulation of the effects of childhood trauma on Dickens's subsequent career in “Dickens: The Two Scrooges.” In part, I have adapted Wilson's argument to discuss the effects Avignon have on Heller's fiction and to draw my characterization of Dickens's comic art.

26. I have greatly benefited from the suggestions of Linda Van Buskirk, Randall Craig, Donald Purcell, John Serio, and Peter Freitag.

Works Cited

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Barnard, Ken. “Interview with Joseph Heller.” A Catch-22 Casebook, eds. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald. New York: Crowell, 1973. 294-301.

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———. “Catch-22 and After.” Gentleman's Quarterly. March 1963, 95 +.

———. “Catch-22 Revisited.” Holiday April 1967: 44 +.

———. “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie.” A Catch-22 Casebook, eds. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald. New York: Crowell, 1973.

———. Something Happened. New York: Knopf, 1974.

———. Good as Gold. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

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———. Closing Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

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