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Abstract
The double-bind dilemma that Hamlet is engulfed in places him in a catch-22 situation from which there seems to be no way out. Locked in a psychological impasse exacerbated by a deficient Oedipal process due to the father's death and mother's remarriage, he is driven into (feigning) insanity, a situation that brings him close to Yossarian, Heller's paranoid antihero who is as much inept in the face of the paternalistic ordeal he is subjected to as an army fighter. Evading the fear of castration on the one hand and becoming consumed with guilt for the incompetence to face the trial on the other give rise to problematic identities of both protagonists and numerous evasive strategies they plot. Nevertheless, through mainly linguistic/textual acts of defiance, these initially victimized subjects to the law of the father turn into rebels, mastering and thus making the Symbolic order backfire on itself.
Keywords: Catch-22, fort da game, Sigmund Freud, Hamlet, Imaginary/ Symbolic/Real order, Jacques Lacan, madness, mourning
Catch-22 and Hamlet: two sides of the same coin
Comparing Joseph Heller's antiwar Catch-22 (1961), a postmodern controversially absurd novel, and the acknowledged Renaissance play Hamlet (1602) seems enough of a farfetched idea. However, a psychological colouring of the two is what brings them closer together. The point of convergence between the two in this juxtaposition, in fact, is the focus on the conflicts within human psyche, which are inextricably linked with the common experience of being, rather than antagonistic external elements such as sociological, historical, and political forces or temporal, spatial considerations by which each work is touched.
In the present study the 'double bind' theory is not to be dealt with from the cultural studies viewpoint as discussed in H offer's article about Hamlet, although the definition is relevant here too: double bind in literature is a situation in which 'literary characters ... face difficult decisions when two of the basic principles upon which their lives are lived ... come into serious contradiction'.1 Facing the psychological impasse caused by the mother's remarriage and reawakening of his Oedipal fantasies, it is contended, firstly, by Freud and Jones that Hamlet, identifying with and simultaneously antagonizing Claudius (his second, causal father), cannot fulfil the Ghost's command to avenge, and for the same...