Re-reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22
If this isn't about the future of war then I'm Washington Irving...
Joseph Heller: Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011 [1961].
It’s time for a short Monday edition of Silent Friends, on a long and beloved book.
Around halfway into Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, maybe the #1 American comic novel, a conversation takes place between our hero Yossarian (a B-25 bombardier, like the author was) and the opportunistic huckster Milo Minderbinder. They are conversing in a treetop, and Yossarian is buck naked. The chaplain witnesses this scene from a distance, mistaking it for a holy vision.
“This is a pretty good tree,” [Milo] observed admiringly with proprietary gratitude.
“It’s the tree of life,” Yossarian answered, waggling his toes, “and of knowledge and of good and evil, too.”
Milo squinted closely at the bark and branches. “No it isn’t,” he replied. “It’s a chestnut tree. I ought to know. I sell chestnuts.”
“Have it your way.”
It’s like the setting for Waiting For Godot, except in the tree instead of under it.
It underscores how these post-50s counterculture writers like Heller, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and the rest were blowing out the absurd and satirical elements in their work so much in part because, after Beckett, there didn’t seem to be much else to do.
Catch-22 was not that well received when it first came out in 1961. It’s bewildering, reiterative, pitch black in its humor. Why does this long novel read like stand-up, a sour laugh-a-minute experience? Harold Bloom in particular seemed genuinely offended by writing a satire of a war that had a democratic anti-fascist character. How meanspirited it is to put words like these in an American’s mouth:
“Captain Black knew [the corporal in eyeglasses] was a subversive because he wore eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating un-American activities in Germany.”
These critics just didn’t know how good they had it in the 60s! Catch-22 is an enthralling comic opera of homicidal lunacy. And the madness rolls on and on in an easygoing prose style, where temporal transitions happen instantly mid-paragraph.
Whatever questions the moralizing critics had about representing World War II with an ensemble of corrupt, boorish, and self-centered army professionals, Catch-22 became a sleeper bestseller and a cult favorite. These readers didn’t see a critique of the old war, but a protest against the Vietnam war!
But regarding the novel’s actual situation: the action spans from the 1944 to early 1945, the tail end of the war; and we are mostly on the island of Pianosa, Italy, a ways from the busier war theaters. The first chapter, with the hospital antics, takes place in late summer of ‘44 — and the singularly terrible trauma that Yossarian experiences has already happened.
We proceed non-chronologically, looping around wherever the narrator feels like moving while tracking all of these satirical types.
Here, the armed forces is corruption, complacency, decadence, incompetence — it’s hard to go on describing what happens in this novel without throwing a verbal tantrum.
Corporal Whitcomb was incensed. “I’m the best friend you’ve got and you don’t even know it,” he asserted belligerently, and walked out of the chaplain’s tent. He walked back in. “I’m on your side and you don’t even realize it. Don’t you know what serious trouble you’re in? That C.I.D. man has gone rushing back to the hospital to write a brand-new report on you about that tomato.”
“What tomato?” the chaplain asked, blinking.
“The plum tomato you were hiding in your hand when you first showed up here. There it is. The tomato you’re still holding in your hand right this very minute!”
Why would the chaplain steal a plum tomato? That’s just what the MPs are trying to find out!
The first time I read this book, in high school, the scrambled chronology was difficult going. In fact it’s not so bad: the clearest indicator for keeping track of events is the quota of bombing missions that keeps rising thanks to Colonel Cathcart: 25, 30, 35, 40….
We read about this whole menagerie of satirical types, bumbling and crashing into each other: Doc Daneeka the non-hipaa-compliant surgeon; Orr, Yossarian’s tent mate and a pilot who’s always crashing; the infuriatingly dogged and evil navigator Aarfy; Major(x4), who was victimized by an IBM machine “with a sense of humor”; the principled yet overcalculating Clevinger; Hungry Joe the peeping tom soldier; and Major ___ de Coverley who in an early episode disrupts the army’s craze for loyalty oaths even for using the mess hall:
Glancing neither left nor right, he strode indomitably up to the steam counter and, in a clear, full-bodied voice that was gruff with age and resonant with ancient eminence and authority, said,
“Gimme eat.”
Instead of eat, Corporal Snark gave Major ___ de Coverly a loyalty oath to sign. Major ___ de Coverly swept it away with mighty displeasure the moment he recognized what it was, his good eye flaring up blindingly with fiery disdain and his enormous old corrugated face darkening in mountainous wrath.
“Gimme eat, I said,” he ordered loudly in harsh tones that rumbled ominously through the silent tent like claps of distant thunder.
Then there’s First Lieutenant Milo.
Milo started out as the mess officer, but grows his food service operation into a veritable cartel called “M&M Enterprises” that traverses the enemy lines. He starts chartering German planes, his logo covering the swastikas, and eventually starts contracting bomb runs on both sides, including a deadly attack on an American base.
The arrangements were fair to both sides. Since Milo did have freedom of passage everywhere, his planes were able to steal over in a sneak attack without alerting the German antiaircraft gunners; and since Milo knew about the attack, he was able to alert the German antiaircraft gunners in sufficient time for them to begin firing accurately the moment the planes came into range. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone but the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, who was killed over the target the day he arrived.
But who are we to judge an American entrepreneur?
Milo’s scams include buying all the cotton in Egypt, but without a market for cotton he dips the stuff in chocolate and sells it as candy. He’s given a hero’s welcome in every colonial and semi-colonial country connected to the syndicate. He buys eggs in Sicily for one cent, sells them to Malta for four and a half, buys them for seven, and sells them to his mess hall for five.
Always on the lookout for the next profitable dirty commodity, Milo breaks off a rescue mission with Yossarian in Rome (in the most harrowing chapter) as soon as he hears about the traffic in illegal tobacco.
“Let me go, I’ve got to smuggle illegal tobacco.”
“You can smuggle illegal tobacco tomorrow,” Yossarian pleads.
But Milo was deaf and kept pushing forward, nonviolently but irresistibly, sweating, his eyes, as though he were in the grip of a blind fixation, burning feverishly, and his twitching mouth slavering.
Pushing forward, nonviolently but irresistibly.
This line struck me as the key to making sense of this whole insane book. Everyone is a mechanism, everyone is overdetermined, carrying on the same way over the same “bits” and preoccupations. Like the young “tail-gunner who kept falling back into a dead faint each time he opened his eyes and saw Snowden dying.”
But that’s just how our systems work these days. No coercion or rending of people’s flesh by people — only the planes and war machines do that. All along Catch-22 was more than just a proviso in the US Air Force, but pointing to the total experience of administration.
