Catch-22—Joseph Heller

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

At the risk of repeating something everyone already knows, the expression, Catch-22, names a common bureaucratic paradox in which needing something makes one ineligible for it. In Catch-22, the novel, the protagonist, Captain John Yossarian, has become terrified of flying bombing missions, and wants to get excused from flying them. By the rules, insane people don’t have to fly, so he feigns insanity. But merely asking not to fly proves his sanity, so he must continue flying.

Joseph Heller published Catch-22 in 1961. He drew from his experiences in World War II. The novel occupies a place among the best and most influential anti-war novels of all time, although Heller never criticized the reasons for the war. Even if fought for a moral purpose, though, and guided by reason, a war requires the mobilization of a great number of people, weaponry, machinery, and resources, for the sole purpose of killing another great number of people, despite their weaponry, machinery, and resources. Any such massive organization of people and resources requires a bureaucracy, and Catch-22 may be the most thorough take-down of bureaucracies ever written. So, Heller accepts the ends of US participation in WWII, while satirizing and condemning the means. While Heller set the novel during the Liberation of Italy in WWII, he wrote it during the Korean War, it became wildly popular during the Vietnam War, and its satire stays relevant even now. If one views any war from a distance, it might make great sense or have great moral worth; however, meaning and moral worth give way to absurdity and evil as one gets closer to the action. And anyone caught in the middle of a war can only laugh or go crazy.

Throughout the novel, Yossarian struggles to stay alive in the midst of terror, to keep his sanity in the midst of horror, and to act rationally in the midst of madness. In all three of these struggles, he prevails. Ultimately, he emerges as one of the few characters in the novel with integrity.

A major source of the novel’s humor comes from blatant contradictions. Commanders issue self-defeating orders, people express incompatible beliefs, the narrator even gives contradictory descriptions. By squeezing two opposites into a sentence or two, Heller jars us and startles a laugh out of us. “This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded Nately of his father because the two were nothing alike.” Or this, “The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

A second source of humor comes from the repetitive dialogue. People will ask a question by quizzically repeating a statement someone else has just made, or they will answer a question by repeating it back as a statement. Sometimes, people simply repeat what they’ve heard as though the repetition might bring understanding. For instance, in a written message to the troops, sent out by Colonel Cargill on behalf of General Peckem, Colonel Cargill asks, merely as a rhetorical aside, “Name, for example, one poet who makes money.” Upon reading this, ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen calls up Cargill, and without identifying or explaining himself, says, “T.S. Eliot,” then hangs up. Cargill, of course, has no idea what the phone call means.

Colonel Cargill, in Rome, was perplexed.

“Who was it?” asked General Peckem.

“I don’t know,” Colonel Cargill replied.

“What did he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“'T.S. Eliot'” Colonel Cargill informed him.

“What’s that?”

“'T.S. Eliot'”Colonel Cargill repeated.

“Just 'T.S.—'”

“Yes sir. That’s all he said. Just 'T.S. Eliot.'”

“I wonder what it means,” General Peckem reflected.

Colonel Cargill wondered, too.

“T.S. Eliot,” General Peckem mused.

“T.S. Eliot,” Colonel Cargill echoed with the same funereal puzzlement.

General Peckem roused himself after a moment with an unctuous and benignant smile. His expression was shrewd and sophisticated. His eyes gleamed maliciously. “Have someone get me General Dreedle,” he requested Colonel Cargill. “Don’t let him know who’s calling.”

Colonel Cargill handed him the phone.

“T.S. Eliot,” General Peckem said, and hung up.

“Who was it?” asked Colonel Moodus.

…

Heller’s craftsmanship amazes me. The complete set of forty-two chapters and fifty named characters, each with their own story, resembles a well-designed mosaic. We keep jumping back and forth in time, and often circling back to the same incidents, but the seemingly chaotic presentation feels like it makes some sense because the ending of each chapter connects nicely with the beginning of the next one. So one might say he used a stream of consciousness as an organizing principle, letting one thought lead us naturally to another. Thus Heller takes us by the hand deep into a hellscape, joking all the way. But, at least in the first half of the novel, he lets us know that horrors lurk just outside the immediate narrative. The death of Snowden, for example. We know that someone named Snowden died during a bombing mission. We learn that his death disturbed Yossarian deeply, but we don’t know why that death in particular caused such trauma. Each mention of Snowden at various points in the novel tells us a little more about his death. But Heller holds off giving us the complete scene until the penultimate chapter. And by then, he’s prepared us with many other gruesome deaths already. In fact, by the end of the novel, laughable absurdity has given way to serious absurdity, as all in Yossarian’s squadron have died pointless, meaningless deaths, except for Yossarian himself. Well, all but one whom we learn about long after we have given him up for dead. And that person’s escape offers Yossarian a glimmer of hope for himself in the final chapter.

Heller makes use of a non-chronological structure to separate the setup of a joke from the punchline. Or he raises a question in one chapter, but answers it after a few other chapters have intervened. This allows him to build toward a powerful climax without having to concoct a sequence of events that build on each other toward a climactic outcome, as happens in most traditional plots.

The intensity of both the narrative and the dialogue impressed me, and I doubted when I started reading that Heller could keep it up for over four hundred pages without flagging or without losing my interest. But he populates the short chapters with a small crowd of characters, each one of whom brings along some crazy backstory, and, what with all the fragmented chronology, the frenetic pace never slackens.

I’ll offer one example of how he uses backstory to keep the jokes flowing. The chapter entitled “Major Major Major Major,” introduces us to Major Major. Major’s father, thinking himself clever, had named his son Major Major Major. An IBM error (one of many anachronisms in the novel) assigned him the rank of Major when he enlisted, creating an awkward situation for his trainers whom he outranked. Anyway, rather than belabor the silliness of the name, Heller tells us a little about the father.

He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he did not earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day to make sure the chores would not be done.

Major Major himself (played by Bob Newhart in the movie) had a job that seemed to involve little more than signing papers. Unfortunately, every paper he signed came back to him after circulating for a few days and picking up some more endorsements. One day, just for fun,

… he signed Washington Irving’s name to one of the documents instead of his own, to see how it would feel. He liked it. He liked it so much that for the rest of the afternoon he did the same with all the official documents.

He knew he would have to pay a price for this frivolity. But the next day, nothing.

He had sinned, and it was good, for none of the documents to which he had signed Washington Irving’s name ever came back! Here, at last, was progress, and Major Major threw himself into his new career with gusto. Signing Washington Irving’s name to official documents was not much of a career, perhaps, but it was less monotonous than signing ‘Major Major Major.’

While not everyone will understand this characterization, I would describe Catch-22 as what might happen if Kafka had written a script for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. As with most books that school boards have tried to ban, this one deserves reading. I really don’t know why I waited this long.

For next week, I’ll read the story collection by Isak Dinesen, Winter’s Tales.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

Catch-22, the 1970 movie directed by Mike Nichols

Complete Poems and Plays, T. S. Eliot

Winter’s Tales, by Isak Dinesen

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