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摘 要

在《第二十二条军规》中，约瑟夫•海勒描绘了一个权力场——空军中队。在这里有着各种等级的军官和士兵，它可以被视为一个小型的集权政体，权力在此发挥着重要的无形的作用。本文拟从福柯的权力理论出发，细读文本，分析人物与飞行中队之间的权力关系。在飞行中队及其飞行员的日常生活中，他们处于福柯式的权力监视之中。在此，第二十二条军规较好地扮演了圆形监狱理论中“瞭望塔”的角色。第二十二条军规又可以看作是控制者和被控制者之间的媒介，是当权者话语权的集中体现；同时体制又借助于权力和话语对人们起着重要的影响和控制作用。

关键词：权力；圆形监狱；话语；体制；第二十二条军规

Contents

1. Introduction …………………………………………………..1

2. Literature Review……………………………………………2

3. Panopticism…………………………………………………….3

3.1 Definition of Panopticism……………………………………...3

3.2 Panopticism and Power………………………………………...5

3.3 Panopticism and Catch-22..........................................................6

4. Discourse…………………………………………………….....8

4.1 Definition of Discourse……………………………………….8

4.2 Discourse and Power…………………………………………9

4.3 Discourse and Catch-22………………………………………10

5. Institution……………………………………………………...11

5.1Definition of Institution ……………………………………….11

5.2 Institution and Power………………………………………….12

5.3 Institution and Catch-22…………………………....................13

6. Conclusion……………………………………………………..15

Works Cited………………………………………………………..16

1. Introduction

Catch-22 represents an utterly unsentimental vision of war, in which there would be no glory and honor but cruelty and nightmare. To some extent, it presents a war story that is at once “hilarious, grotesque, cynical, and stirring” (Miller＆Phillips, 2011: 3). In American history of literature, it is famous for the style of “black humor”. “Black humor…in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world play out their roles in what Ionesco called a ‘tragic farce’, in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying and absurd”(Abrams and Harpham, 2010: 2). Here, ‘absurd’ is similar to ‘grotesque’, which covers ‘paradox’, ‘self-contradictory’ and ‘irrationality’. “In the early twentieth century, the concept of the grotesque [is] as a condition of modern life rather than as a fantastic or supernatural phenomenon… In Madness and Civilization, for instance, in which Foucault discussed how western society has identified and treated insane, the analogies to the modern grotesque become inescapable”(Dunne,2005: 2-3).In contemporary society, the meaning of “grotesque” has greatly changed. It turns up as a milieu alienated by modern life rather than as an illusory and supernatural phenomenon. In this way, modern grotesque essentially is a phenomenon that individual is more and more helpless and surrender to another power. Just like “Catch”, all the soldiers in Air Force squadron are in a large power network.

Michael Foucault points out that “Power is everywhere，not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” “Power,” insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the omnipresent effect that comes from the complicated relationship of different visible and invisible forces. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: “power is not an institution, not a structure; neither is it certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (Foucault, 1991: 93). In Foucault’s power theory, Panopticism and Discourse theory play an important role. In “Catch-22”, it is not difficult to find that the Air Force squadron is just like a panopticon, and “The ‘catch-22’ is just a snare that one cannot escape no matter how he tries” (Wang Zhuo＆Li Quanwen, 2010: 353). Like the tower in the centre of panopticon, it exists all the time. In other words, “catch-22” is “any paradoxical, circular reasoning that catches its victim in its illogic and serves those who have made the law” (Miller＆Phillips, 2011: 7). Thus, catch-22 also reflects discourse theory. It as an invisible instruction controls all soldiers.

Body of my paper is mainly divided into three chapters. Chapter One examines the relation between Panopticon and power, builds up the connection between Panopticon and “Catch - 22”, and comes to the conclusion that the soldiers in the Air Force squadron is completely away from freedom. They are all imprisoned by the squadron, by the “catch-22”, or, even by themselves.

Chapter Two explores Foucault’s Power/Discourse theory, and describes the relationship between power and discourse, and the interaction between discourse and Catch - 22. In the micro totalitarian regime, nobody has the real power, and all people are just the puppet manipulated by the “catch - 22”. “Catch-22”, the epitome of the discourse, is the medium between authority and soldiers, by which, authority control the soldiers.

Chapter Three maps the relation between institution and power. They conspire with and support each other. Catch – 22 delineates this relation in Air Force, which is the vision in the real life. To be frank, everyone is in the panopticon, for the intangible force, whenever and wherever, is surrounding us. We never have the complete freedom. No matter what we do, we are restricted by rules, principles, experience or laws.

2．Literature Review

Joseph Heller is a famous American satirical novelist. He served as an Air Force bombardier in the Second World War. His first novel, Catch-22, remains his most famous work. “Heller uses the English pun ‘catch’ to mean that the ‘Catch-22’ is just a snare that one cannot escape no matter how he tries” (Wang Zhuo＆Li Quanwen , 2010: 353).

In China, critics talk about the novel mainly in three aspects: artistic technique, characters, and themes, in which, themes have been discussed most, such as black humor and grotesque. Liu Yujuan argues that Catch – 22, with regard to shaping of characters, arrangement of structure and style of language, is completely different from other genre’s works. Firstly, the way of humor he adopted is different from traditional humor. Secondly, in the shaping of characters, the novel uses the concept of anti-hero to doubt and question all the traditional value. These characters often mock what they respect, destruct what they build, deny what they confirm and reject what they accept. Thirdly, the anti-novel structure, made up of disordered form, is consistent with grotesque content (Liu Yujuan, 2004: 102). Zhang Hao’s “On the Linguistic Representations of Back Humor in Catch-22” discusses how the repetition, the linguistic contrast and representations of black humor in the novel Catch-22 serve its absurd theme with concrete, typical examples (Zhang Hao, 2007: 115). Tangwen, in “The Operation Mechanism of CASH in Catch-22— An Analysis Based on Foucault’s Power Theory”, points that the military rule in the novel exists as an authoritative power and exerts great influence, for even though invisible and ambiguous it is equipped with enormous adaptability. Michael Foucault made thorough and general research on power theory in the sociological field. With his analysis, it is noticeable that “Catch-22”, the intricate design of which resembles Panopticon, turns more powerful with its invisible/implement. The hero Yossarian, after being well informed of its mechanics, gains the access to escape from “Catch-22” (Tang Wen, 2011: 64).Wang Shihong examines the power relation in the novel and argues, “Power is the relationship, the network, the field, and the power is the incarnation of the depressing environment” (Wang Shihong, 2007: 116).

3. Panopticism

3.1 Definition of Panopticism

Decameron is a world-famous literary fiction, whose background depicts seven women and three men fled to suburb to avoid plague. “A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear”(Foucault, 1991:198). However, in order to control the spread of virus and the increase of death, “an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town” (Foucault, 1991:196). In the town, everyone has no freedom. The whole town was partitioned, divided into distinct quarters and under consistent surveillance. If anyone tries to leave the street, “he will be condemned to death” (Foucault,1991:196). Therefore, “there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power” (Foucault, 1991:198-199).

“If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects” (Foucault, 1991:199).

“Bentham"s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition” (Foucault, 1991:201). Foucault examines Panopticism in Discipline and Punish, and depicts in detail that what Panopticon is:

We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other (Foucault, 1991: 200).

In this building, all that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a lunatic, or a condemned man, a worker or a schoolchild. According to Foucault, with the help of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, “it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions -- to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide -- it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap” (Foucault, 1991: 200) In this architecture, man will feel be controlled by an intangible, invisible eye, which is consistently observing him, oppressing him, and eventually conquer him. Consequently, the most important role the Panopticon plays is to give the prisoners a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. In this way, the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action. And in the surveillance comes the power. This architectural apparatus would “be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers” (Foucault, 1991: 201). In the mechanism of power, a prisoner would be constantly observed by an inspector. Gradually he knows himself to be watched even if there would be no inspector. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that “power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” (Foucault, 1991: 201).

3.2 Panopticism and Power

In this mode, what the structure expressed is power. “This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded,in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure”(Foucault, 1991:198). Panopticon is created by power, which is used to realize the control of authority. As a state apparatus, prison is one of the most sheer and obvious form of power. Hence as an abstract idea, panopticon embodies that dominator has been pursuing the perfect mechanism of power. What interests Foucault is how power is strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? How will power, by strengthening its forces, be able to increase those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside the sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty. The king in the history is an example. Turning up before the public, the king would expose some force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others; he would exercise this new physics of power represented by panopticism. The domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their different forces, their spatial relations; what are required are mechanisms that analyses distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations. At the theoretical level, Bentham defines a different method to analyze the relationship of the social body and the power; in terms of practice, he defines a procedure of subordination of bodies and forces that must increase the utility of power while practicing the economy of the prince. “Panopticism is the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline” (Foucault, 1991: 208). Thus, Panopticon is a new mechanism of power, and makes the power more valid and concealed. According to Foucault, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could keep itself invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the completely social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network. Moreover, this everlasting observation has to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers. Foucault argues that “throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex documentary organization. And, unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of behavior, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions -- a permanent account of individuals’ behavior” (Foucault , 1991: 214).

3.3 Panopticism and Catch-22

The soldiers in the Air Force squadron are consistently observed by the eyes named power, which is equal to the inmates in the Panopticon. Air Force squadron and Panopticon have something in common – visibility and unverifiability. In a totalitarian regime, self-enslavement is the highest form of the enslavement and the highest approval for authority. Authority uses some “tools” to render soldiers receive all the irrationality willingly. “One of the statements that the novel makes is that the rules that govern individuals also tend to shape their thoughts. The early chapters show us how the soldiers, imprisoned by the paradox of catch-22, take this type of paradox to heart, pursuing irrelevancy, meaninglessness, and sense are impossible” (Miller＆Phillips, 2011: 59). For instance, “ ‘T.S. Eliot’—a simple, harmless phrase that Peckem interprets as something complicated and sinister. Part of the irony here is that insubstantial aspects of the soldiers’ lives” (Miller＆Phillips, 2011: 61). Milo, the powerful mess officer, who controls an international black-market syndicate and is revered in obscure corners all over the world ruthlessly goes after profit and bombs his own men as part of a contract with Germany. Colonel Cathcart, the ambitious unintelligent officer in charge of Yossarian’s squadron, who wants to be a general and he tries to impress his superiors by bravely volunteering his men for dangerous combat duty whenever he gets the chance. Milo or Cathcart, as officers, their performance is so irrational, however, soldiers still blindly comply with them, because they are tamed by power, in other words, they are self-enslaved.

If the Air Force squadron is a panopticon, catch-22 would play the role of centre tower, whose control is visible but unverifiable. It seems to be paradoxical, but firmly shackles every soldier. The catch is always there, but it can be illustrated in different ways any time. “Catch-22” is a law defined in various ways throughout the novel. The first time the law turns up is when Yossarian finds that it is possible to be discharged from military service because of insanity. Always looking for a way out, Yossarian declares that he is insane, only to find out that by declaring that he is insane he has proved that he is obviously sane—since any sane person would claim that he or she is insane in order to avoid flying bombing missions. Elsewhere catch-22 is defined as a law that is illegal to read. Ironically, the place where it says that it is illegal is in catch-22 itself.

As the operation mechanism of power, there exists a strict hierarchy in the Air Force squadron, the high-level officers take predominance over common soldiers. Soldiers are completely controlled by officers and catches. They have no freedom, their lives do not belong to themselves and they are just treated by officers as pieces on a chess board. Especially the catch-22, “the “catch-22” is just a snare that one cannot escape no matter how he tries” (Wang Zhuo＆Li Quanwen , 2010: 353). According to catch-22, a crazy is permitted to avoiding performing flying missions; however, it must be applied for by himself. Meanwhile, if you can sense that flying is so dangerous that you apply for, you will carry on performing flying missions because you are sober. One of the most frightening aspects of catch-22 is the fact that “the lives and deaths of the men in Yossarian’s squadron are governed not by their own decisions concerning dangerous risks but by the decisions of an impersonal, frightening bureaucracy” (Miller＆Phillips, 2011: 35). The men must risk their lives even when they know that their missions are useless, as when they are forced to keep flying combat missions late in the novel even after they learn that the Allies have essentially won the war. The bureaucrats are absolutely deaf to any attempts that the men make to reason with them logically; they defy logic at every turn” Thus, soldiers have no freedom, even the control of their own lives.

4. Discourse

4.1 Definition of Discourse

If we say Panopticon is an obvious product of power, then, discourse is latent. Foucault, isolating discourse from appearance field, thinks that we live in a world construed by signal and language. There is nothing in the world but language. Michel Foucault’s early writings paved the way for discourse research and his work put forward two terms, ‘discursive practices’ and ‘discursive formation’, which were used to analyze the particular institutions and how they establish orders of truth, or the common sense on ‘reality’.

Object of discourse is never monocultural and invariable. When we talk about something in a special field, we might confine our mind and attention on a special level. “But one would soon realize that each of these discourses in turn constituted its object and worked it to the point of transforming it altogether” (Foucault, 1969: 36). Therefore, statements are multiple. Although “statements different in form, and dispersed in time, form a group if they refer to one and the same object” (Foucault, 1969: 35), the object cannot individualize the statements. “Statements belonging to psychopathology all seem to refer to an object that emerges in various ways in individual or social experience and which may be called madness. But I soon realized that the unity of the object ‘madness’ does not enable one to individualize a group of statements, and to establish between them a relation that is both constant and describable” (Foucault, 1969: 35).There is some regular to control the discourse itself. “Moreover, the unity of the discourses on madness would be the interplay of the rules that define the transformations of these different objects, their non-identity through time, the break produced in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence”.( Foucault, 1969: 36)

People cannot express and communicate unless they abide by the inner regular of language. More or less, language constructs nature of man, and history does not really exist, because discourse creates the history and the nature of human. Moreover, Foucault also creates a sequence of discourse, in which there is no individual as the dominance, the sequence is the only dominance. Foucault considers discourse as a mechanism not a mark. The content the discourse once spoken out, it will have its own way of existence and be the object pursued by power so that has some function.

4.2. Discourse and Power

Foucault examines discourse greatly in his works. Foucauldian discourse analysis is a form of discourse analysis, focusing on power relationships in society as expressed through language and practices. In other words, Foucauldian method analyzes how the social world, expressed through language, is affected by various sources of power. The analysis attempts to understand how individuals view the world, and studies categorizations, personal and institutional relationships, ideology, and politics.

In the relation between discourse and power, knowledge plays an important role. “We”，Foucault says, “should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault, 1969: 27). However, knowledge cannot break up with discourse. “This group of elements, formed in a regular manner by a discursive practice; and which are indispensable to the constitution of a science, although they are not necessarily destined to give rise to one, can he called knowledge. Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice” (Foucault, 1969: 201). Discourse and Power are closely linked in Foucault’s works. They, in our life, build up “a multiple network of diverse elements -- walls, space, institution, rules, discourse” (Foucault, 1991: 307). Therefore, discourse is the inevitable part of power. Foucault points that discourse once spoken out, it has its own form of existence. “At the level of discourse and their domains, however, practically the opposite phenomenon with sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward (Foucault, 1978: 18). For Foucault, this is one of the most important spheres where power operates. He puts the emphasis upon the multiplication of discourse concerning sex in the field of the operation of power itself. It is “an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endless accumulated detail” (Foucault, 1978: 18).

4.3. Discourse and Catch-22

In Catch-22, the catch itself is a form of discourse. It consists in words, sentences and language. It is the medium between the governed and governor. As I mentioned earlier, according to catch-22, a crazy is permitted to avoiding performing flying missions, however, it must be applied for by himself. Meanwhile, if you can sense that flying is so dangerous, you will carry on performing flying missions because you are sober. In other word, soldiers are all controlled by the discourse.

“‘Can’t you ground someone who’s crazy?’

‘Oh, sure. I have to. There’s a rule saying I have to ground anyone who’s crazy.”

……

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. ‘Is Orr crazy?’

‘He sure is,’ Doc Daneeka said.

‘Can you ground him?’

‘I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.’

‘Then why doesn’t he ask you to?’

‘Because he’s crazy,’Doc Daneeka said. ‘He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.’

……

‘Sure there’s a catch,’ Doc Daneeka replied. ‘Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy’” (Heller, 2010: 23).

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