``Consider the corporate, epistemological hall of mirrors described by archetypal organization man Bob Slocum in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), one of the best, most chilling, business novels ever written:..'' Carl Remick
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The quotes from `Something Happened' posted by Carl Remick got me to go back and look up a few notes on Joseph Heller's second novel to recall it---and remember what I thought about it at the time.
See Kurt Vonnegut's NYT review:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-something.html
I read it in the mid-70s and was profoundly disappointed in it. But I was just into my thirties at the time and that was in the end of an afterglow of the 60s, the felling of Vietnam and Nixon, and the possible beginning of a different way of life for another generation.
In that period, Something Happened seem dated, since my own perception and that of most of my friends of our parent's generation was coincident with the novel. Slocum was Dad, or close enough to Dad's slightly younger buddies, to make it boringly familiar. The novel was about their generation, not ours. It was at least part of the reason for attempting to set out on a different ordering of worlds.
Now some thirty years later, turning fifty-nine, in a far darker period, where our idiot emperor apparently rules the earth from Texas, or at least the media pretends he does, a novel like Something Happened, might make better reading.
Perhaps the most difficult realization of all is that having known in advance that Slocum's world was the personification of death, a way of life that was living death---having known that, you would expect, something different from those who had already gain some living truth of this novel in their guts. The idea that they did know, and then proceeded in their own lives to replicate more or less that same trajectory in variation is a haunting astonishment.
So then my grand motif for Something Happened is essentially the telos of the bourgeois, to literally become dead labor, or the labor of the dead. The possibility that even foreknowledge and rebellion against this trajectory, will somehow only succeed in a minor variation of the same theme, constitutes the novel's tragedy and mythos. The comic relief, if you can call it that, is provided by the endless neurotic ramblings of the narrator, who knows he is living death and whose only resistance to his fate (which is in fact material success), is to tell us how miserable he is. Slocum is the commodity, turned self-conscious, selling his own death as if it were his life.
But, I would have to re-read the novel to develop any of this, and I might see it differently now. That is how I remember it, back when.
The trouble was, I had already seen some disturbing alternatives evolving to living this commodified stupidity as a labor in death, in friends who were going off to find their roots. Those roots turned out to be religion, Judaism and Christianity. In that period, I saw Islam as part of the US black community's socio-cultural response and resistance to dying white, so to speak.
So, bringing this back into the present, I should have read the Bible and Quran back then. But since I am slowly slogging my way along with them now, I can see the nature of the appeal, even if at the end of the day, the texts themselves are nonsense. If you are trapped within the extremely narrow spiritual and intellectual limits of bourgeois life, then these ancient systems of conduct and thought, might appear as a viable alternative. This might be so, especially if you come upon them while in the throws of some other failed project---say in business, crime or politics---fields which like religion, abound in dreams of self-deception.
And, from there it is no longer much of a reach to find yourself sitting in an airline terminal with a box cutter in your back bag.
Chuck Grimes