Catch-22

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”

“It’s the best there is.”

All sorts of institutes and critical bodies have named Catch-22 one of the finest novels of the 20th century. The distinction is well-deserved, and even more impressive considering that, for the majority of it, this is a funny book that makes no apologies for being one. But the comedy is serrated, and Catch-22 uses its satire like a knife, painful and precise, condemning bureaucracies and war.

I first read the book years and years ago, probably when I was 13 or so. What I remember from that first read through: Major Major leaping out the window; Yossarian marching backwards, hand on his gun; something I had to look up called ‘the clap’; and of course Snowden, because who could forget Snowden?

I can’t imagine I got much out of it back then, because as I read it through this time, all I could think about was entrapment. Catch-22 is an oppressive, oftentimes hopeless, book. Throughout the book Yossarian loses more and more personal agency as the bureaucracies grow more and more powerful. He starts the book happily installed in the hospital with an untreatable liver ailment. Then, by page 40, the perverse logic proof that is Catch-22 rears its head.

Givens:

1. If you’re crazy, you can’t fly combat missions.
2. Sane people must fly combat missions.

So:

1. You’d have to be crazy to risk your life in a combat mission.
2. Asking to be grounded exhibits a sense of self-preservation, which means you’re sane.

Therefore, you must continue to fly missions.

It’s elegant and inescapable. But here’s another proof:

1. All men are mortal
2. Yossarian is a man

Therefore, Yossarian is mortal.

Yossarian takes issue with that first claim.

“There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that… more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday. Yossarian had not resigned himself to that idea…”

Yet even though he’s doing what any reasonable person would do: saving his own skin, Yossarian is deemed a maniac by just about everybody in the squadron. They are all obsessed with deciding who’s crazy and who isn’t, and this guy’s crazy because he won’t fly any more missions, and this one’s crazy because he’s driving drunk without headlights, and that one’s nuts because he screams in his sleep. But really, they’re all goddamned insane, it’s just that some of their insanities are congenial to society – like the gung-ho patriotism of Appleby or Havermeyer. But Yossarian’s self-interested paranoia is dangerous to society. What if his guiding principle, “Save yourself,” became a universal categorical imperative, Kant-style? Suppose everybody on our side felt that way.

“Then I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way.”

If you’re an asylum and a patient calls you nuts, that probably means you’re sane. The lunacy of the war grows daily, and there’s nothing more outrageous than Milo Minderbinder, capitalist extraordinaire. Milo wheels and deals recklessly, buying whatever he can whenever he can and selling it to whoever will buy it. If this means selling materiel to the Germans, orchestrating battles to drive up demand on his goods, or bombing his own squadron, Milo’s all for it, because what’s good for the syndicate is good for everybody, since everyone has a share.

Of course, when one man asks for a share, Milo writes “One Share” on a piece of paper and gives it to him. Milo is perhaps the most frustrating character in the book, but Yossarian is inexplicably friendly with him. The humanitarian Yossarian is sickened by all the exploitation: “I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

And Yossarian has plenty of decent impulses. He grieves for poor children, risks his freedom to save one in a hellish Rome, only hits women when they’re trying to knife him, forgives McWatt, even as its too late, and consoles Snowden. And he gets negative reinforcement for every attempted good deed – like when he searches Rome for Nately’s whore’s sister, and bumps into the amoral monstrosity Aarfy, who has raped and murdered a maid. Both men hear the approach of MPs:

“‘Aarfy, they’re coming for you,’ he said in a flood of compassion, shouting to be heard above the noise. ‘They’re coming to arrest you. Aarfy, don’t you understand? You can’t take the life of another human being and get away with it, even if she is just a poor servant girl. Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?’

…

They arrested Yossarian for beingin Rome without a pass.”

The chronology of the story is just as insane as the action. The narrative leaps forward and back, and what you think was the prime instance of something actually proves to be only an echo, something like deja vu. Chief White Halfoat swears he’ll die of pneumonia. When asked why, he says, “Why not?”

But that’s not the first time he says that. It’s after they’ve flipped the jeep and Halfoat lays in a puddle cuddling with his booze, that the idea first occurs to him.

These moves cut the legs out of scenes, reduce them to ripples and echoes, insignificant. The reader doesn’t know where to place weight, because any scene can and will do this. Deja vu fittingly appears again and again. I’ve never seen anything like it, textual deja vu, but Heller has accomplished it. Characters will repeat things, but no special attention is given to this repetition, so you’re left with this nagging idea that you’ve read this before. It’s been absolute hell going through the book and picking out these quotes, let me tell you.

On two occasions Colonel Korn tells Yossarian to “exit smiling”. Sometimes Yossarian will say, “I’ve got the feeling I’ve had this conversation before.” And he has, you just know it – you can’t remember either, though. It’s frustrating and another Catch-22, this one of memory and experience.

This breathless entrapment is what drove the book for me this time around. As funny as it is, the writing can slip into beautiful lyricism.

“The jeep started up again softly. Kid Sampson, Nately and the others wandered apart in a noiseless eddy of motion and were sucked away into the cloying yellow stillness. The jeep vanished with a cough. Yossarian was alone in a ponderous, primeval lull in which everything green looked black and everything else was imbued with the color of pus. The breeze rustled leaves in a dry and diaphanous distance. He was restless, scared and sleepy. The sockets of his eyes felt grimy with exhaustion. Wearily he moved inside the parachute tent with its long table of smoothed wood, a nagging bitch of a doubt burrowing painlessly inside a conscience that felt perfectly clear.”

And the book is never flippant about death or love. The Snowden scene (“I’m cold.” “There there.”) tears at Yossarian’s (and by extension, our) heart, and the interlude with Luciana cracks it. Nobody seems as interested in this scene with Luciana as I am. Luciana is a whore with a scar that she never lets Yossarian see, and the two get ensnared in a Catch-22. Yossarian wants to marry her, but she can’t, because he’s crazy, and he’s crazy because he wants to marry her.

And when she gives him her name and address, she doesn’t want to, because he’ll just tear it up into little pieces as soon as she leaves. Yossarian swears he won’t… and then does exactly that. It’s devastating, foolish, and an incredible character moment.

Tenderhearted gravity combines with plenty of great jokes to make Catch-22 astounding. It’s some book.