In Katherine Hayles book Writing Machines Hayles discusses a Humument and the approach the author takes--or various approaches--to creating a new narrative from an old text. One approach Tom Phillips uses is obscuring varying amounts of text. This brings to mind the novel Catch-22 and Yossarian’s stint as a censor, at the beginning of the novel. Like Phillips, Yossarian reinvents the texts he is given--and the people who write them--by obscuring some text and leaving others. Further, like Phillips, Yossarian varies his approach to crossing out words--although for Phillips this takes the form of planning to revisit the same project, where Yossarian edits different letters in different ways, so that he is never revisiting or re-envisioning a particular text. One might say he is always re-imagining the letter form. Further, as compared to Phillips, Yossarian’s technique of revising is limited. He has a black pen he can use to cross out or scratch out words, where Phillips can cover text in pictures, or really any media he can imagine using. He can, however, add new words, which occasionally takes the form of rewriting the entire letter by crossing everything out, and adding some new, small statement. a “sense that every page offers multiple possibilities of treatment” (Hayles, 88).

Both Phillips and Yossarian participate in a resistance of the immateriality of words. For Phillips this comes out in emphasizing the materiality of choices in writing. His visual obscuring of some text and emphasis of other texts renders the storytelling process less transparent. He offers the options in an embodied state, while at the same time obscuring them, or rendering them inaccessible to the reader. Yossarian, too, renders the role of censorship more visible in the letters than it would have been if he had censored the expected information. Yossarian, instead, chooses to cross out articles, words that are seemingly above censorship, or perhaps too insignificant in value to be worth obscuring. On the other hand, he may create a particularly suggestive letter--that may have been mundane before censorship--by leaving nothing but the articles, so that it appears most of the content was either inappropriate or revealed too much.

The technique of visibly obscuring certain information also makes the reader “freshly aware that the character is never self-evidently on the page” (96), which can be seen in Catch-22 as well. There are characters writing these wartime letters within the World of Catch-22, but they are unavailable to us beyond our basic understanding that there is writing that is being obscured by Yossarian. This is less visceral than in Phillips work, where the text is present, but also covered beneath Phillips’ method of revealing and concealing, where we as readers of Catch-22 are asked to imagine, or understand that there are soldiers writing letters, but we are never given access to their actual letters, only to the construct that Yossarian creates.

Ultimately, Phillips work is a clearer, physical manifestation of obscuring and revealing texts, and embodying the the form of the book where Catch-22 embeds the layers of materiality into the imagined world of the text rather than rendering them physically present but unavailable. As a consequence, there is only so far the comparison between the two texts can be taken, especially since it is an imaginary character that Phillips is being compared to, rather than another author of a text. The texts aren’t perfectly paralleled, but there are definite similarities.