“ O N E E N D L E S S R O U N D ” : S O M E T H I N G H A P P E N E D A N D T H E P U R G A T O R I A L N O V E L PATRICIA MERIVALE University of British Columbia W h i,e Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, is by general agreement one of the most attractive good books of the twentieth century, surely his second novel, Something Happened (1974), must, to go by the scathingly negative reviews and the lack of subsequent critical or public response, be one of the least attractive. In sharp contradistinction to Catch-22, it has usually been judged as a long, repetitive, and tediously unsuccessful satire on American corporate life, city and suburban, or at best merely another example of the male menopause novels of the sixties and especially the seventies, to which every American novelist over forty has by now made a contribution. I cannot defend Something Happened from charges of length, repetitive ness, and tediousness, but I can at least suggest a purposiveness and intel lectual integrity in the book if it is seen not as an ineffectual satire (if it is chiefly satiric, as many critics supposed, they were quite right in finding it ineffectively so), but as a purgatorial novel, one whose proper literary associations are with the purgatorial fictions of Albert Camus, William Golding, and some nineteenth-century Russian authors (especially Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin)1 rather than with the middle-aged identity quests of Bellow, Updike, Roth, Cheever, Percy, John Fowles, and even of Heller himself, in his two more recent novels, Good as Gold and Good God! . . . [Go] sit and bite your nails in Aquitaine. In the small circle of pain within the skull You still shall tramp and tread one endless round Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves, Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave, Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe Which never is belief. ... T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral2 These lines provide an appropriate epigraph for all those nineteenth and twentieth-century fictions (by Yeats, Beckett, Conrad, Strindberg, Eliot himself), whose place of action is some purgatorial landscape, whose time is a past, present, and future all at once, a time-out-of-time, whose characters E n g l is h S tu d ie s in C a n a d a , x i, 4, December 1985 are in one way or another the living dead, and whose theme is a neverending recollection and confession of guilt. The purgatories of Heller and of his nearest analogues, the Camus of La Chute (which Heller has read)3 and the William Golding of Free Fall and Pincher Martin (which it seems safe to assume he has read), are more like Yeats’s4 or Beckett’s5than like Dante’s, for they all lack the hope of redemption. But insofar as each author echoes Dante, it is the Dante of the Inferno rather than of the Purgatorio. Golding epitomizes the theological imprecision of the modern usage of “purgatory” and “hell” by saying “ ‘Just to be Pincher [Martin] is purgatory; to be Pincher for eternity is hell.’ ”6 “Just to be Pincher” is enough to stretch the novel form to its limits. The narrative structure in Something Happened, La Chute, and Pincher Martin (both 1956) and Free Fall (1959) is basically that of the confes sional. It is obliquely Dantean: “I was such and such a person, and I did thus and so; that is why I am here.” But Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground provides a model for expanding the Dantean anecdote to novel length. For the most part other persons and “actual” events exist only in the narrator’s confessional retrospect; the narrator chiefly exists in the timeless world of reminiscence, “tread[ing] one endless round” to recollect, make a pattern of, and “justify” his actions to himself. And to justify them, also, to some ambiguously fictional auditor, “hypocrite lecteur, mon sem blable, mon frère” ; “you,” fellow-lawyer of La Chute; “you,” the reader in...