Geoffrey Green

Joseph Heller: From Your Mouth to God's Ear!

H e wrote about things that no else had the nerve or the inclination or the patience to undertake, let alone express. He was willing to follow a thought, an idea, a joke, an observation so extensively, so exhaustively, that one would marvel after reading him at how much there was to say about that which had previously seemed mundane. When he felt he had nothing to convey, he had the humility, the confidence, and the audacity to remain silent—and wait. He wrote about war and death and the institutions that promulgated them in a way that changed our understanding of our own era. And he could be heartpalpitatingly, mind-numbingly funny—inducing the laughter that accompanies tears, hysteria, and outrageous joy. And he wrote Catch-22. When an interviewer commented that he had never again written anything as good as Catch-22, Heller’s response was: “Who has?” Who has, indeed. Published in 1961, Heller’s novel did not achieve an immediate success. Its original title, “Catch-18,” was deemed by publishers to be too similar to Leon Uris’s best-selling novel, Mila 18, so a substitute number was concocted. The critical response was hardly acclaim; yet over the years, the book sold millions upon millions of copies, was translated into multitudinous languages, became a 1970 film directed by Mike Nichols—and its title, its theme, became a universal standard for the madness of war, the convoluted insanity of those institutions that waged war, and for the gallows humor that best describes the fate and fortune of those engaged in the death sentence we call life.

“A Search for the Most Deeply Hidden Human Values”: Film Adaptations of Post-1950 Novels

From the inception of film as an art form, writers have been fascinated by its potential, its technology, its ability to represent in a different manner than with words alone, but somehow including words as part of its inherent functioning. The list of writers enticed by film is a long one, too long to enumerate here. And the fascination has not been a one-way street. Just as writers have been drawn to film—to write screenplays, to write about films, to include film in their fiction—so filmmakers have been drawn to novels—as a source for adaptation, its authors providing the potential for new ideas, and the like. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, wrote about film for the Argentinean literary journal, Sur. In one such review, of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Borges approaches the film by means of the two plots he isolates. His terms of comparison are literary: beyond plot and narrative strategies, he compares the film to the work of Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad (214–15). In the 1950s, Orson Welles tried his hand at novel writing, producing a novel, Mr. Arkadin (1955), which he adapted into a film of the same name. In both novel and film, Welles has the title figure tell stories; one most especially, of the scorpion and the frog, probes the nature of character as a literary (and human) quality (414). Writing about cinema in 1953, Cesare Zavattini (renowned Italian neorealist screenwriter) describes its relation to reality:

“Trying to Talk about Paradox, or the Existence of That Which Does Not Exist”: The Transposition of The Blood Oranges from John Hawkes's 1972 Novel to Philip Haas's 1997 Film

A comparison of key features of John Hawkess novel, The Blood Oranges (1972), with Philip Haass film (1997) demonstrates the film to be constructed artfully and with meaningful attention to the Hawkes novel. An examination of the treatment of representative stylistic details and scenes in each, however, reveals in the Hawkes novel a fertile landscape for subtlety and interpretive richness, expressed in a wide range of tones—from comic irony to obsession to paradox. The Haas film, in contrast, represents a more limited interpretational manner: a product of specific (but delimiting) interpretive choices that diminish the profundity of the Hawkes text.

John Hawkes, Lyrical Visionary: An Appreciation of the Writer's Writer

To write fiction that portrays the nightmarish aspects of the unconscious is simply to say at the outset that the opposite view is equally true and equally valid. All my fiction is, in a sense, lyrical, even the most terrifying of it. The nightmare simply leads one toward—or the nightmare could not exist without an awareness of—purity. But even in the most paradisial worlds I’ve created, the roses conceal deadly thorns.

The Public Burning, Coover's Fiery Masterpiece, on Center Stage Again

Abstract This issue of Critique is devoted to Robert Coovers The Public Burning; the idea for such an issue was initially conceived by Cririques executive editors almost immediately after we received word that Grove Press was planning to reissue The Public Burning (with a new preface by William H. Gass) sometime in 1998. This reissue was an important literary event for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that the novel had somehow remained out of print for nearly fifteen years. A massive, unclassifiable work of great power, thematic ambition, linguistic bravado, and savage, Swiftian satiric wit, The Public Burning had originally ken published by Viking in 1977.