Joseph Heller, Something Happened, and the Art of Excess

JOSEPH HELLER, SOMETHING HAPPENED, AND THE ART OF EXCESS Thomas LeClair* In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes distinguishes between the text of pleasure, "the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading," and the text of bliss, "the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language."1 While Barthes insists that bliss comes "only with the absolutely new" (p. 40), American novelists in the 1970s demonstrate that the text of bliss can also be produced by excess. If recent books by Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Joseph McElroy lack the militant orginality of the nouveau roman, they do have an unsettling massiveness or multiplicity of implication that exceeds the norms of conventional fiction—the text of pleasure. For the American novelist who writes for a large audience or publishes with a commercial press, a work of excess has the rhetorical advantage of soliciting conventional responses which are then overturned because excess forces the reader to reconsider such notions as proportion, propriety, quantity, and value. Unable to consume the excessive text, the reader feels that "state of loss" and crisis in "his relation with language" that Barthes rather ironically calls bliss. The strategy of excess Heller employs in Something Happened can be usefully contrasted with the method of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow . In the terms of information theory, Gravity's Rainbow is overloaded, Something Happened is redundant. The multiplicity of events, characters, discourses, and codes of meaning in Pynchon's book creates a diversity, an informational improbability, that readers cannot process into some familiar configuration. Despite its apocalyptic "Thomas LeClair is a Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He has published articles on contemporary American literature in Critique, Studies in American Fiction, Contemporary Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and other journals. His reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Saturday Review, and The New York Times Book Review. He is currently working on a collection of interviews with American novelists and on a critical study of "excessive" novels of the 1970s. 246Thomas LeClair sentiments, the novel itself is an open system. Its excess of information suggests plenitude, possibility. Something Happened is by comparison decidedly closed. By imposing strict imaginative and linguistic constraints on his narrator, Heller creates a redundant text, one in which clearly limited elements—characters, actions, words—are combined, recombined in probable ways, and even repeated. As reviewers noted, not always with sympathy, this redundancy was a large artistic risk for Heller. If an overloaded novel resists its reader, the reader of Something Happened may resist being under-informed, understimulated ; he may feel "a certain boredom," Barthes remarks. The novel succeeds because its repetitiveness is wholly functional, creating a double effect: one mimetic, one metaphysical. Coming late to the corporate man in the exurbs, as he came late to war in Catch-22, Heller uses excessive familiarity to defamiliarize a social experience often treated by other novelists; he uses redundancy to renew. Once redundancy has created a memorable character to ride the 5:45 of his readers' imaginations, Heller presses it further to create a sense of futility that he makes instructive by implicating readers in it and by making that futility metaphysical and not just Bob Slocum's personal despair. A set of disturbing thematic and aesthetic paradoxes arises from the novel's excess. In the world of Bob Slocum and in the fictional system that is Something Happened, fullness is emptiness, largeness is smallness, motion suggests stillness, and articulation implies silence. These reversals in turn contribute to Heller's most important accomplishment in the novel: demonstrating the ultimate futility of quantitative and causal thinking. Thinking of himself as trapped in a job and in a family, Bob Slocum is most surely and instructively trapped in a mode of thinking and in the language of that thinking. It is Heller's realistic portrayal of Slocum's...