Something Happened
Doyle, Mary Jo
Gnosticism, and Neo-Platonism, one will miss entirely the substance of the chief intellectual movements in contemporary philosophy. Thus, Molnar classifies as "magic" the aspiration in modern...
...And again I have that powerful, momentary, spiteful impulse to injure her, wound her deeply with a cutting retort, to reach out over the dining room table and smack her hard on the side of the face or neck, to kick her viciously under the table in her ankle or shin...
...If this continues, the critics of American foreign policy are going to be performing before empty seats when they attempt to turn the State Department into an international equivalent of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare—which is probably the essence of any genuine reform they might suggest...
...He tells us repeatedly that he and his family and the people with whom he works are unhappy...
...When Nazi Germany disregarded the Treaty of Versailles and militarized the Rhineland, the French vacillated and the British actually rushed out to sign a naval agreement allowing Germany naval tonnage in excess of that which both nations had agreed to in the 1919 treaty...
...It is the classical-Christian teaching, of course, that any such reconciliation is not possible within the limitations of political existence...
...Nevertheless, if Americans revert to their pre-1941 position, Mr...
...Over a century ago Tocqueville assayed the disrelish democracies have for the conduct of energetic foreign affairs, and students of American history have long noted this tendency amongst Americans...
...In an absurd world, however, that premise is false...
...Does he too giggle and get the willies now...
...he only giggles at his own inanity...
...Slocum is incapable of affirmative action to save himself...
...In such circumstances democracies tend to act without resolution, without wisdom, and occasionally without honor...
...he has merely learned to hide behind them...
...In doing so, he has perpetuated the absurdity...
...Thus, Molnar classifies as "magic" the aspiration in modern philosophy to change "the heterogeneities of the universe into a homogeneity, a way of transmuting the being of things into a new being...
...In each chapter he deals with a segment of this life (his work at his office, his wife, his children, and his own image of himself), but instead of triumphing over the physical wasteland he portrays, he sinks deeper and deeper into the muck of the absurd...
...Everybody is impressed with how bravely I've been able to move into Kagle's position and carry on with the work of organizing the convention...
...From that point on, as Germany knocked off one weak neighbor after another, the democracies stammered and looked for the fire escape...
...name address city state zip date of change' The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 31 it, and then create his own rules by which to live...
...Heller has failed to recreate Yossarian's spirit: a spirit which can conquer the physical ;natter of man...
...Slocum has not accepted his responsibilities...
...Only since the Second World War have Americans inclined toward a global foreign policy...
...Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation...
...I would lose all energy and souland be left with almost no substance I could feel...
...If nothing else, we could laugh at the ludicrous atrocities...
...America in the 1930s was at one with the Britain Churchill observed: "This was one of those awful periods which recur in our history, when the noble British nation, seems to fall from its high estate, loses al trace of sense or purpose, and appears tc cower from the menace of foreign peril...
...Heller once was able to create an antihero with whom I was pleased to identify...
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...Schlesinger and his associates are going to have a difficult time shipping pharmaceuticals and grain to the new governments of Southeast Asia...
...While Yossarian battled hypocrisy in a military situation, Heller has placed Slocum in the day-to-day business world which most of us face...
...Perhaps the best contrast between Heller's affirmative black humor and his new negative approach can be seen in Slocum's inability to fight back at a world which has denied him hope of a satisfying existence...
...Hence, he merely becomes another hollow man who whimpers...
...And what about Heller...
...Winston Churchill called the thirties the locust years and those years reveal the grave difficulties democracies face in dealing with aggressive militaristic regimes...
...But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them...
...No one understands that carrying on bravely was the easiest thingto do...
...As a black humorist in Catch-22, Heller proved that man's spirit could survive in an absurd universe if he were willing to accept the fact of the absurdity, laugh at changing your address...
...The sensibility of the average American has suffered an enormous amount of abuse in recent years as the critics have debonairly bludgeoned him for being a militarist or a dullard or whatever else might service their short-term polemical purposes...
...Slocum is the epitome of the middle class...
...I'm not running away from my responsibilities, I'm running to them...
...In his powerful novel, Catch-22, Heller showed that man could survive midst the myriad inconsistencies of the so-called institutions...
...And, after reading his entire narrative, I've got the willies...
...While Yossarian chooses to stay in the hospital instead of going back to the war, Heller does not allow Slocum any kind of rational choice...
...The variety of utopian aspirations which have literally wrought havoc with Western political order since the French Revolution, including the rise of National Socialism and the Communist movement, he argues, are historical extensions of medieval alchemical and religious experiments which wrought havoc in the medieval world (for a complementary analysis, see: Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium...
...I hope that Something Happened was just a temporary sojourn in the world of nihilism, and that in 13 more years he will give us another wonderful novel which reasserts his faith in the power of man to overcome the mundane through affirmative action of the spirit...
...I've got an unhappy wife to support and two unhappy children to take care of...
...Print your new address and mail this form to The Alternative...
...There's nothing negative in running away to save my life...
...He doesn't laugh at the absurdity...
...But, physical activity leaves him limp...
...Throughout his lengthy, repetitive and very boring narrative, Slocum recreates events in his life in which positive action was necessary forsurvival of the spirit...
...The critics act as though a democratic electorate is a giant tuba, capable of playing any tune the critics blow into it, once minor adjustments are made...
...But to aspire to construct such a system was in itself to become like God, a goal which is at the basis of the modern project, that is, to find a final solution, the ultimate reconciliation of the contradictions of existence...
...To carry on seems to be the best thing to do, but it is merely a continuation of the system...
...Slocum's first line in Something Happened is "I get the willies...
...The Alternative Circulation Department P.O...
...The Spirit gone, man is garbage...
...Slocum, however, is merely a shell of that fighting spirit...
...Slocum wants to fight, but his spirit isn't strong enough to justify action...
...He knows that the hospital is the safest place to be during the war, so he doesn't intend to be released...
...But, despite the fact that.Slocum exists in the same bureaucratic absurdity as Yossarian, he is the embodiment of inactivity and indecision...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 please attach address label here El Please renew my subscription year...
...He had learned the lesson of Snowden: "Man was matter...
...frothing pious platitudes while foemer forge their arms...
...Before that Americans focused on their domestic problems and raised George Washington's farewell advice first to folk wisdom, thence to dogma...
...His premise is that something happened sometime to make him what he is...
...In the Far East General Hideki Tojo grew in stature and ambition...
...He knows that "if it became jaundice they could treat it...
...But once Mr...
...Alas, I fear my reflections cannot end here with happy visions of Secretary of State Arthur Schlesinger vainly exhorting 210 million baseball fans to chip in for a system of junior colleges for the idealists of modern Indochina...
...In Slocum, Heller has personified the stink of rancid decay...
...Yossarian had an undying spirit that proved that he and, hence I, could retaliate in some way against the inconsistencies of absurdity...
...I've got eight unhappy people working for me who have problems and unhappy dependents of their own...
...Through it all a grim axiom emerged: the successes of aggressive militarists encourage more militarists...
...Disillusionment with Wilsonian idealism turned American intellectuals toward the kind of introspection that has captured our own aging subjects of Camelot...
...In the beginning of his account he tells us that he is "powerless to decide...
...I can do nothing though, but ignore her...
...Nobody knows what I have done...
...A fascination with pacifism swept American campuses just as it had swept English campuses, and native American isolationism intensified with the country's growing economic weakness...
...They have vast international designs for what they would call "cooperation" with the Third World and even the Communist world...
...Unfortunately we live in a world inhabited by greedy militarists and aggressive totalitarians, and as the first half of the century made clear, democratic nations do not fare very well in diplomatic jousts with militarists—not when their citizens are looking inward...
...I doubt the American electorate is so adaptable...
...In the beginning of the book, for example, Yossarian is in an Army hospital with "almost jaundice...
...It will hurt...
...If it didn't become jaundice and went away, they could discharge him...
...Already they are edging in that direction...
...Molnar draws this conclusion from the analysis of his subject, and does so persuasively...
...Yossarian fought, he kicked back at the system, and then he ran...
...Finally, in the last chapter, Slocum takes command, but only because he has given in to the system...
...He is suggesting that we should recognize the sentiment in modern philosophy that reality is unacceptable, and that the philosopher's purpose, what Molnar calls his "magic quest," should be to modify the constitution of being...
...As the news of the day makes poignantly clear, we are now very close to an embodiment of Nevin( Chamberlain's England, and to add to the bleakness of our ordeal there is II( Churchill to deride...
...I've got anxiety...
...He repeatedly tells the reader that he wants to hurt those who intensify the anguish of the absurd...
...My daughter makes me feel foolish again...
...Sometime during those 13 long years he spent writing Something Happened, he lost his faith in the ability of man to overcome catch-22 and all the other inane systems by which he is forced to live...
...0 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) sensibility of the electorate...
...He is Something Happened by Joseph Heller Knopf $10 unable to make decisions which will positively affect himself or his family...
...Hence, he spends his entire life looking for explanations of sequences that have no logical basis...
...In Catch-22, Yossarian continuously defied the system...
...Johnson': commitment had been made there re (continued on page 35) 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 197...
...His running away from it was simply another form of defiance...
...Important: allow six weeks for address change...
...The people in Slocum's life want someone to take command and reinforce their commitment to life...
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...so he left to find a more rewarding existence for himself...
...Slocum never understands or accepts the fact that the world in which he lives is absurd...
...It happened to Joseph Heller...
...Instead of the daring rebel he once gave us, Heller now gives us a snivelling slob...
...He knew he was incapable of changing the status quo...
...I hope not...
...He is unable to perform physically or emotionally when he is brought face to face with decisive activity...
...Hence, Slocum looks for solutions whichare inaccessible, if not altogether nonexistent...
...I've got a jawbone that's deteriorating and someday soon I'm going to have to have all my teeth pulled...
...During most of the decade only neutrality legislation could get through Congress, as Arthur Schlesinger from an earlier incarnation astutely observed...
...Yossarian, however, is not confused at all...
...By "real knowledge" Hegel meant the actualization of the divine in his own system...
...Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy...
...He has a home in the suburbs, two cars in his garage, a middle-of-the-road position in his corporation, and even two and two-thirds children (one child is mentally handicapped, and therefore Slocum does not consider him a "whole" human being...
...And, having learned it, he refused to allow his spirit to take refuge in nonexistence...
...Yossarian is infinite...
...In fact I doubt that any democratic electorate is, at least in matters of foreign policy...
...Enclosed is my check for $6.00...
...It is the condition of being in which we perceive reality as it is, and attempt to convey that consciousness to those who wish also to know...
...When the Italians snatched Ethiopia the members of the League of Nations shrieked and swooned, but they recognized the Italian conquest...
...The third decade of this century bears a riveting similarity to our present trials...
...In Yossarian we saw spirit defying the rot of the body, but in Slocum we see only the garbage, the ruin...
...The intellectualcritics of American policy are themselves too pretentious to be isolationist...
...In German Idealism, especially, one finds a "philosophic" reworking and fine-tuning of the old alchemical and Gnostic apparatus into a full-blown intellectual system which, with Hegel, seeks to divert the philosophic enterprise from the love of knowledge and become real knowledge...
...Meanwhile the Americans were living through a period of blissful isolation and the American Congress was immobilized by partisanship...
...Philosophy is not an endeavor by which we take upon ourselves the role of God in the affairs of man...
...Nothing happened that really mattered in one way or another...
...Book Review/Mary Jo Doyle Nothing Happens • • Something happened, but it didn't happen to Bob Slocum...
...I've got bad feet...
...A citizenry can only endure so much confusion before it reverts to the simplest credos, and I suspect that if the pounding of their sensibilities continues Americans will stagger back to the simpler truths of isolationism...
...Our military involvement in Indochina was not a wise policy, not from a strategic standpoint and certainly not in the way i was executed...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
