MORRIS DICKSTEIN
203
first place , especially the quality of fraud , illusion, and manipulation
in our public life. Just as the response to war-protest was escalation
and the solution to the failures of the bombing was more bombing,
so the push for more honesty in public debate was met by more pub–
lic relations and bigger lies . The Johnson administration's unshake–
able insistence that black was white , that escalation was really the
search for peace, and that the war was being won , was a perfect reali–
zation of the structure of unreality and insanity that runs as a theme
through both
Mother Night
and
Catch-22.
"We' re all in this business
of illusion together," says Doc Daneeka, who himself later suffers
from the general illusion that he is dead, which, morally speaking,
he is. Daneeka, whose merely physical presence is powerless to con–
tradict his "official" demise , is destroyed as much by his own insane
ethic as by the structure of unreality that is the army. When he asks
Yossarian to substitute for a dead soldier whose parents are coming to
see him die , he says : "As far as we ' re concerned, one dying boy is just
as good as any other, or just as bad . ... All you've got to do is lie
there a few minutes and die a little ." Surprisingly, when Yossarian
does it, the parents go along:
" Giuseppe ."
" It 's not Giuseppe, Ma. It 's Yossarian."
" What difference does it make?" the mother answered in
the same mourning tone, without looking up. " He 's dying."
When the whole family starts crying Yossarian cries too. It's not a
show anymore . Somehow they ' re right, Daneeka's right , they
are
all
dying; in some sense it
doesn 't
matter. A piece of ghoulish humor
has turned into something exceptionally moving. The same point is
made with the Soldier in White , a mummy in bandages whose only
sign of life is an interchange of fluids . What
is
a man , anyway, when
things have come to this extremity? The ground is being readied for
revealing Snowden's secret . The
Lear
theme is at the heart of the
book, no mere device for concluding it.
Unlike the realistic novelists of the fifties, the black humorists
suggest that besides our personal dilemmas , which often loom so
large in our imagination , we all share features of a common fate,
enforced by society and the general human condition . Though the
quest for identity must inevitably be personal , in some sense we
are
