196
PARTISAN REVIEW
War II with a certain moral simplicity; here after all was a "just war"
if
there ever was one . But after fifteen more years of continuous cold
war and the shadow of thermonuclear war , all war seemed morally
ambiguous
if
not outright insane ; in the prolonged state of siege the
whole culture seemed edged with insanity. With that special prescience
that novelists sometimes have ,
Catch-22,
though published in 1961,
anticipates the moral nausea of the Vietnam war, even famously
anticipates the flight of deserters
to
neutral Sweden. Similarly Vonne–
gut in
Mother Night
chooses a morally ambiguous double-agent as
his "hero," just as he writes about the problematic Allied bombing
of Dresden rather than a Nazi atrocity in
Slaughterhouse-Five.
Like Pynchon, but in a different way, both Vonnegut and Heller
are interested in international intrigue; they marvel at the zany and
unpredictable personal element at work or play within the lumbering
forces of history . Heller's Milo Minderbinder is a satire not simply on
the American capitalist entrepreneur but also on the international
wheeler-dealer, whose amoral machinations , so hilarious at first, be–
come increasingly sombre, ugly and deadly-like so much else in the
book-so that we readers become implicated in our own earlier
laughter. Yet Milo is particularly close
to
the book's hero Yossarian :
the two understand each other. They share an ethic of self-interest
which in Yossarian comes close to providing the book's moral. As in
Celine, it's all a crock: look out for Number One . In the figure of
Milo the book and its protagonist confront their seamy underside , a
hideous caricature of their own values.
This doubling effect is typical of works of structural black humor.
In the historical plot of
V.
the central character is called Stencil, and
one key structural element is the pairing of fathers and sons-Hugh
Godolphin and Evan Godolphin, Sidney Stencil and Herbert Stencil.
The younger Stencil's quest for V., which is also a search for parents
and identity, is an attempt
to
decipher a history whose meaning is
encoded in the fragmentary remains of previous histories and earlier
generations . Hence the striking resemblance between
V.
and the
oedipal detective novels that Ross Macdonald has been writing since
The Galton Case
in 1959. In Macdonald the mysteries of the present
are always solved by decoding the past; there 's an abundance of
missing parents , traumatized children , and buried corpses that have
been mouldering for a generation. In late novels like
The Under-
