POLITICS JULY 6, 2011
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I initially read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 while squirreled away in a Toronto hotel room during the 1997 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. It was December, and I had just finished my first semester teaching English at West Point. Heller’s novel was a revelation—an outrageous fiction opening a window onto the various paradoxes and pathologies that characterize institutional cultures everywhere. More important, it helped me to make sense of my recent introduction to military culture. Heller’s glorious caricatures—ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, the clerk to whom even generals defer; Major Major, the squadron commander who is never in his office except when he’s out; Colonel Cathcart, the group commander at once “dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined … complacent and insecure”—became bywords for their real-life avatars.
Catch-22 was the extreme case—a system gone wild—that illuminated the quotidian and thus made suddenly intelligible to me a new world’s unfamiliar vocabularies, rituals, preoccupations, and assumptions. It showed me what was different about this culture from those that had shaped me. How, for example, authority operates in an institution in which the participants actually wear their status on their shoulders: “That was clever,” exclaims a naked general on being informed that his uniform has been thrown out a hotel-room window by Yossarian, Heller’s stubborn protagonist, and his pals. “We’ll never be able to convince anyone we’re superior without our uniforms. … That was a splendid tactic.”
Alone in my hotel room, grinning like Orr, the pilot whose “deranged and galvanic giggle” infuriates Yossarian, I thought Catch-22 was just about the funniest, most outrageous thing I’d ever read. But until last week I had never been able to bring myself to read it again. Over the years, I returned to favorite passages and continued to refer to people who were never in their offices when I went looking for them as “Major Major,” but whenever I tried to read the novel through to the end, I was stopped short by Snowden, the gunner who dies in Yossarian’s arms from a shrapnel wound. The story of Snowden’s death recurs throughout the novel; each iteration reveals a bit more until in the book’s penultimate chapter we are confronted by the entire violent, abject mess of it.
Snowden’s death is arguably the one wholly non-parodic episode in the book, and it was the element to which I had paid the least attention the first time through. Somehow, in the intervening years, it had become the insistent core of the book, and that recognition confused my relationship with the rest of the novel. Perhaps I was too slow to realize the degree to which internal and external events had combined to remake me as a reader: I was no longer a stranger to the culture the book satirized and no longer a peacetime but a wartime consumer of the “hilarity and horror” that one early reviewer praised. And so, I put the book away until, after a decade of war and the deaths of several “Snowdens” of my own, I decided on this the fiftieth anniversary of its publication to try again.
Catch-22 is a great favorite of my friend Nick, a helicopter pilot who has served a combat tour in Iraq, and I thought he might be able to help me make a new kind of sense of Heller’s novel, especially of those elements that no longer seemed so outlandish. Take, for instance, Yossarian’s incessant complaint: “They’re trying to kill me,” introduced at the same moment we learn of Snowden’s death. “That’s what you come to understand,” Nick explained, “they are trying to kill you, and not haphazardly or sporadically. There are people who are devoted every day to the business of killing you, and they’re good at it. You can do absolutely everything right, and they can still kill you.”
There were other things that didn’t seem quite so fantastic anymore: the mess officer Milo Minderbinder’s plan to contract war out to “private industry”; the civilian discomfort with the “obligation of continuous sympathy” for the bereaved; or that warped brand of patriotism that reads anything less than total agreement as disloyalty and that rationalizes almost any action on the grounds that it is “for the good of the country.” “Morale was deteriorating,” Heller writes, “and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.” That’s Nick’s favorite passage in the book, which he read before deploying: “I think,” he told me, “more than anything else I’d read at the time, the novel prompted me to ask about a particular assignment or mission: Why are we doing this? It’s not really a question anyone prepares you to reckon with, but it is one that is critical for commanders to ask.…. Soldiers know when a leader knows why he or she is doing something as opposed to just relaying a command.”
When I closed the book—this time on the final page—what stayed with me above all else was the impotence of Yossarian in the face of the “grim secret” the dying Snowden discloses: “It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter.”
“‘I’m cold,’ Snowden said. ‘I’m cold.’
‘There, there,’ said Yossarian. ‘There, there.’”
Snowden dies, and there’s nothing Yossarian can do about it. That is the source of the outrage, the extremity, the thing against which the spectator is powerless—against which I’m powerless. That—not the naked generals, crazed colonels, and invisible majors—is the wartime heart of Heller’s book. And that’s what I didn’t understand the first time around.
Elizabeth D. Samet is a professor of English at the U.S. Military Academy and the author of Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. The opinions she expresses here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.
17 comments
I loved the book when I first read it. I loved it the way Yugo love a joke, you laugh and then you forget it. When I reread the novel, I only got half way through it, I hated it the way hate joke the second time you hear it and wonder why you thought it was so funny the first time you heard it. Catch 22 is joke gone stale. It didn't tell me anything about war. It didn't tell me anything about evil, and it didn't tell me why people would want to fight organized evil. This might have worked in a novel about WW1, but not WW2. Did Joseph Heller ever ask himself what would have happened to his family in the Bronx had the real Yosserians refused to fight the Nazis?
- arnon
July 6, 2011 at 12:20am
I never read Catch-22, arnon, but your criticisms put me in mind of another WW-II novel written by a Jewish New Yorker: Herman Wouk's Cain Mutiny. The character Keefer is a novelist who persistently ridicules the regular Navy. He eventually gets his comeuppance from the lawyer Greenwald who gets them off mutiny charges by destroying Cpt Queeg on the witness stand. Greenwald's argument is like yours: Yeah, Queeg is a jerk and half crazy, but there'll all at war with people who want to turn Greenwald's Bubbe into a bar of soap, and unlike all the hotshot mutineers Queeg was on duty, standing in the Nazis' way.
- AaronW
July 6, 2011 at 8:04am
To be fair, though, Heller himself flew 60 combat missions. And just because a war is justified doesn't make it any less absurd, especially for the individual who has to fight it.
- AaronW
July 6, 2011 at 8:12am
AaronW "To be fair, though, Heller himself flew 60 combat missions. And just because a war is justified doesn't make it any less absurd, especially for the individual who has to fight it." I was talking about the not the author. I could call war, cruel, inhumane, tragic, sometimes unnecessary, but never absurd. Even WW1, which was an unnecessary war. led to many tragedies one of them being WW2.
- arnon
July 6, 2011 at 9:35am
In any case, the novel Catch 22 isn't good enough to sustain multiple readings, methinks.
- arnon
July 6, 2011 at 9:36am
btw: Aaron, I did read Wouk's Cain Mutiny and I agree with your take on it.
- arnon
July 6, 2011 at 9:38am
Good Piece Elizabeth, and a nice take to get an Iraqii Veteran point of view. My favorite novel comes up again. I have been in a Catch-22 Mode for about a year and half now, and this 40th anniversary allows me to discuss this again. Catch-22 is not only a great read, but a story for our times, and probably the most influential book of the last 50 years. Please Allow me to retort. Today it is hard to imagine how powerful the Army was in 1961. 15 years earlier American effort secured victory to the Allied Powers. American Military might was on display not just in this victory but in the Military hardware of the Air Force, Navy and the Army, but also in the stories of the Veteran's on their return home. Stories of B-29 Tailgunners and PT Boat Captains, Machine Gunners and Radar Operators. Along with the hardware and stories, veterans had been picked to run America's great companies, IBM, GM, Ford and others. These leaders reshaped their corporations with Military Hierchery and expected effiecency. In addition the Military had held the communist in check, and were enforcing integrated school laws in the South. There was no job the American Military could not handle. Elvis was just leaving Germany and heading home from his 2 years in the Service. Teen-Agers copied Military Haircuts and the Flat Top or Brushcut was the style. When Heller took his pen to the Military and carved it up, this was sacrilege. Conservative America still points to this book publication as the beginning of the end of respect for authority. And what's important here is that Heller was not making fun of the Military per se. He was poking fun at the frankenstein aspects of the institution where people and organizations took on new life in strange ways. In addition, he took on history. The Italian Campaign was one of the few battles of WW2 that could have been avoided. The Italians surrendered before the first American boot stepped on the pennisula, after the battle of Sicily was decisively won. The humor when the Italians complained about the bombing of Rome because they had already surrendered. The sadness of so many Italians being shot in the back by Germans forcing them into battle. This ws Churchill's battle to open the underbelly of Europe and squeeze the Nazis. No war was less necessary or more tragic than the Italian Campaign. But the masterpiece of the book is Heller's literary structure. One of the first books to use the Anti-Hero to effect, and his free form narrative. Snowden's recurring death scene is one reference point, but Yossarian's malingering and the Chaplain experiencing everything twice. Heller is giving us reference points to his timeline and creating a setting for these crazy happenings. Catch-22 is just one of the doozies he develops. When Yossarian is asked what would happen if everyone felt the way he did, how would that work out. "'Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?' Yossarian sat up straighter with a quizzical expression. 'You know, I have a queer feeling that I've been through this exact conversation before with someone. It's just like the chaplain's sensation of having experienced everything twice.'' Catch-22 was so great the catch phrase has been enshrined in culture and passed on to the younger generations. Corporal Klinger was a walking homage to the idea in one of the longest running TV Shows, M*A*S*H in the 1970's. Klinger's dodge to act crazy to get out of the Army is exposed by his sanity in wanting to get out. Lastly I want to point out here another forgotten point. Robert Brustein's review of the novel from November 13, 1961 in The New Republic is generally credited with recognizing this novel when it came out and his support was crucial in it's acceptance and success. I have the PDF of this review on my computer and go back to it regularly. Brustein's observation that Yossarian's desperate desire to avoid becoming a victim of fate is dead on, and what drives the story. It's in the archives, Nov 13, 1961 in the Fall Book Review. Wikipedia, Catch-22 and a few lost weekends. Nothing better. Thanks for recognizing this great book this year. Let me know if there are any books this year that we'll be discussing in 2051.
- CRS9TNR
July 6, 2011 at 8:48pm
I am not nearly skilled enough in literary criticism to defend Catch-22 or respond to criticism of it. But I have read it three times and it remains the most important work of literature in my life. The first time was about 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War, when I was facing the prospect of the draft. What I took from it then was that authority cannot be relied upon, ever, to be authoritative without serious examination and that I was therefore morally bound to make my own choice as to how to respond to the draft and the war. Yes, it is a fantastically subversive work. If there are those who think that it was the seed of the unwinding of our collective respect for authority, so much the better.
- roidubouloi
July 6, 2011 at 9:50pm
War can never be called absurd? What a strange assertion. It seems to me that when a young man can be sitting in an airplane and know that any moment might be his last and that his fate will be determined by nothing more than pure dumb luck, that that is the very definition of absurdity. I used to work with a Lebanese doctor, a very good doctor, I might add. One Friday evening a bunch of us were having drinks on the patio of a Mexican restaurant in North Carolina. It was a stunningly beautiful day. I started to ask my colleague about his childhood in Beirut in the 80s. He told me several stories. One of them went like this: "One time, my family and I had to go from where we were staying because it was no longer safe. Our building was being shelled. We just had to go--bam!--right then. We could take none of our things. We jumped in our car and went and my father had to drive so, so fast. Shells were falling all around us, and then a shell hit the car behind ours carrying another family from our building. The car burst into flames and you could see them in there dying." He told me this, and then he laughed. I think I know why he laughed too. That had been his life racing through Beirut with bombs falling all around, and now here he was in North Carolina on a gorgeous evening in May getting drunk. He might easily have died then like the other family, but he didn't. Why didn't he? No reason whatsoever. Pure chance. And now here he was a budding endocrinologist in America. This is absurdity defined. Nothing to do but laugh and enjoy the sunset and a pitcher of ice cold beer.
- AaronW
July 6, 2011 at 11:19pm
Thank you AaronW. "The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence is moraily dead, because he's prepared to sacrifice all other values which give life its meaning." -Sidney Hook -via Robert Brustein @ TNR.
- CRS9TNR
July 7, 2011 at 6:51am
“But the masterpiece of the book is Heller's literary structure. One of the first books to use the Anti-Hero to effect, and his free form narrative.” CRS9TNR, this is laughably false. Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk brought out the nonsense a soldier had to face in WW1 much more effectively. Sveyk was certainly an antihero, and although the book was written many decades before the overrated Catch-22 he was also not the first “anti-hero” in literature. If you enjoyed Heller’s novel, fine. But that doesn’t make it a masterpiece.
- arnon
July 7, 2011 at 8:01am
AaronW “War can never be called absurd? What a strange assertion. It seems to me that when a young man can be sitting in an airplane and know that any moment might be his last and that his fate will be determined by nothing more than pure dumb luck, that that is the very definition of absurdity.” By that definition, Aaron, merely living with say a deadly form of cancer is an absurd condition since any day could be your last. But whether you consider absurd in its dictionary definition of say “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous,” or its philosophical meaning of a search for “meaning in a universe without meaning” war is not necessarily unreasonable nor can it be said to be inherently without meaning. If anything war often has too much meaning. This precisely is the problem with Catch 22. While it tells us that war is absurd the narrative offers a comic meaning to war. The phrase Catch 22 is inherently meaningful. You can also ask war is absurd (meaningless) to whom: the reader, the protagonist, the surviving member of a soldier who was killed? From a certain point of view life is absurd: we are born by chance and then we die. What is the purpose of such a predictable trajectory? Yet, it’s what happens in between that gives life meaning, methinks. Even is war there is much that happens that is meaningful. Even the soldier, who dies in a ridiculous accident, or is killed by chance, may have kept a journal of his life as a soldier making his existence in the military meaningful. I think it’s a literary conceit borrowed from the modern philosophical view that there is no inherent meaning in life (existentialism) and which gave “the theater of the absurd” that moved Heller to write his novel Catch 22.
- arnon
July 7, 2011 at 8:27am
As for anti heroes in literature: Shakespeare's Falstaff surely ranks as one of the earliest and the plays in which he is a major figure Henry IV parts 1 and 2 can also be seen/read as anti-war plays. Cervantes' Don Quixote written in the same historical period is also an anti-hero.
- arnon
July 7, 2011 at 8:43am
Yes, arnon, disease and natural death CAN be reflections of the absurd insomuch as they can represent momentous events in a persons life that occur without meaning. In reference to Catch-22 you're conflating a global, historical perspective with that of the individual. Viewed globally WW-II was not absurd. It had a meaning and a purpose: the defeat of Nazi evil. However from the individual's perspective the war can be rife with absurdity. Why did Snowden get eviscerated and not Yosarian? Why him and not me? No reason. No meaning. Neither of us was more or less brave or virtuous. No lessons to be learned. THAT'S absurd.
- AaronW
July 7, 2011 at 5:31pm
AaronW “Yes, arnon, disease and natural death CAN be reflections of the absurd insomuch as they can represent momentous events in a persons life that occur without meaning.” It’s without meaning if you don’t believe is some sort of transcendent being. I don’t and I assume you don’t either, but it’s not true for everyone. It’s no accident that the absurd as a mode of experiencing the world is a post enlightenment phenomenon. “In reference to Catch-22 you're conflating a global, historical perspective with that of the individual. Viewed globally WW-II was not absurd. It had a meaning and a purpose: the defeat of Nazi evil. However from the individual's perspective the war can be rife with absurdity.” There is a problem with the way you state this since the reason I bring up WW2 is because that’s part of the novel’s setting. If we were talking about Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” a brilliant play about human absurdity and even though it’s a post WW2 setting its meaning is universal. Now this is the crux of the issue for me Catch 22 just doesn’t capture the absurdity of war in a universal context. Other writers had done this much more convincingly for me. The Red Badge of Courage and The Good Soldier Švejk for example. There are sections in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that also deal with the absurd in war in a more convincing way. “Why did Snowden get eviscerated and not Yosarian? Why him and not me? No reason. No meaning. Neither of us was more or less brave or virtuous. No lessons to be learned. THAT'S absurd.” I’ll grant you the premise that to some soldier’s point of view war can seem absurd however, the novel fails to show the other side of WW2: the fact that the war was necessary, that it was a fight against evil. Heller also deals minimally with the enlisted men in his novel. It’s mostly about officers and their predicament. This is not the case for the other novels I mentioned. Finally I am not arguing that some people love the novel Catch 22. I liked it when I first read it. What I am questioning is the proposition that it’s a great novel.
- arnon
July 7, 2011 at 8:38pm
Arnon, It's not just my opinion, many sources consider Catch-22 to be one of the most important books of the last 100 years, just check Wikipedia. In that same Wiki article they discuss Hasek's Good Soldier as an inspiration for Heller. Yes their were previous Anti-Heros, but Heller's book started a decade long string of pieces that embraced the Anti-Hero, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Slaughterhouse 5. This literature, along with films and music were the underpinnings of a rebellious decade that changed America. Catch-22 may be over-rated, but so what? It is still a great read and speaks to people accross generations. What's Laughable is that you are treating this Blog like a Literary Journal. Most people reading this blog are aware that I am not an Englinsh Major, a Writer or qualified to comment on these subjects. But I have a lot of enthusiasm for the book. To me this is a Masterpiece. Consider the source. You remind me of Lieutenant Scheisskopf, and it seems to me that you are treating me like Clevinger. If you want to fight, go look for the wife. This blog may not be intelligent discussion, but we prefer not to pursue needless arrogance.
- CRS9TNR
July 7, 2011 at 10:28pm
“This blog may not be intelligent discussion, but we prefer not to pursue needless arrogance.” It is you are writing as if you were speaking for whole blog, which you are not. This is arrogance, CRS9TNR. As to your defense of Catch 22 in your latest post you changed some crucial points from what you said previously. So you looked at Wikipedia, congratulations. It doesn’t change anything. The list of the best 100 novels was a Random House list and it consists mostly of books published by Random House. The list is a mixed bag: some great novels there, but many like Zuleika Dobson or A” High Wind in Jamaica” while entertaining are not great works of art. In any case, these lists don’t prove that a novel is great. I also never said that people didn’t have the right to like and praise Catch 22. On the other hand you insist using half baked information to stake your claim. Here is what you first said: “One of the first books to use the Anti-Hero to effect, and his free form narrative.” I challenged that above and now you say: “In that same Wiki article they discuss Hasek's Good Soldier as an inspiration for Heller. Yes their were previous Anti-Heros, but Heller's book started a decade long string of pieces that embraced the Anti-Hero, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Slaughterhouse 5.” This too is questionable since writers like Vonnegut most certainly did not get his inspiration about the use of antiheroes from Heller. You are also wrong to say that I think that “this blog may not be intelligent discussion…” Agreeing with a view is not the same condemning it as “unintelligent.” There were many intelligent comments by many posters, too bad yours were not among them.
- arnon
July 8, 2011 at 10:47am