Some opinions; some beliefs, just beg for an explanation, such as the following two comments. They’re from the pair of book reviews that taken together were the impetus for the eventual literary success and continuing cultural influence of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22:
Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.
…this novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II;
it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.
– Nelson Algren
__________
…Yossarian’s obsessive concern for survival makes him not only not morally dead,
but one of the most morally vibrant figures in recent literature –
and a giant of the will beside those weary, wise and wistful prodigals in contemporary novels
who always accommodate sadly to American life.
– Robert S. Brustein
Catch-22’s “fate” was in stark contrast to the that of its inadvertent and earlier counterpart, Louis Falstein’s Face of a Hero, which largely vanished from the literary and cultural limelight subsequent to its 1950 publication until its reissue by Steerforth Press 1999 Steerforth Press.
Having touched upon that topic previously, I want to delve into it a little more deeply.
First, though we’re talking about words, the disparity in the fates of the two novels can be better understood through math. Let’s run some numbers, and then run by those numbers. (Don’t worry, I’ll be light with the math!)
First, we’ll look at ratings and reviews for Catch-22.
At GoodReads as of August 31, 2022, Catch-22 had received 786,151 ratings and 20,930 reviews, the latter ranging from 1-star (lowest) to 5-stars (highest). The totals for the ratings are:
5 stars – 40% – 316,266 ratings
4 stars – 31% – 249,301 ratings
3 stars – 17% – 141,240 ratings
2 stars – 6% – 51,171 ratings
1 star – 3% – 28,173 ratings
At Mr.Bezos’Store (a.k.a. Amazon.com) on the same date, the 50th Anniversary Edition Paperback (April 5, 2011) edition of Catch 22 had received 7,733 reviews, again using a 1-star to 5-star system. The totals for ratings, and reviews within ratings, are:
5 stars – 72% – 5,148 ratings (1,429 with reviews)
4 stars – 14% 1,277 ratings (410 with reviews)
3 stars – 6% – 564 ratings (184 with reviews)
2 stars – 3% – 303 ratings (139 with reviews)
1 star – 5% – 404 ratings (236 with reviews)
Notice especially the marked difference in 5-star reviews between the two platforms, with GoodReads at 40% to Mr.Bezos’Store at 72% (nearly twice as many) while 1- and 2-star reviews are roughly similar, at 3% to 5%, and 6% to 3%, respectively. Well, the purpose and ethos of the two sites is (I suppose?) a little antithetical. One wants to tell you about stuff (as an impetus for getting you to buy or borrow stuff), and the other wants you just to buy. (Stuff.) I think explains the huge disparity in positive ratings between these two sites.
Next, we’ll look at the ratings and reviews for Face of a Hero.
At GoodReads as of August 31, 2022, Face of a Hero had received 16 (yeah, sixteen) ratings and 4 (yep, four) reviews, ranging from 2-star (lowest) to 5-stars (highest). The totals for the ratings are:
5 stars – 18% – 3 ratings
4 stars – 43% – 7 ratings
3 stars – 31% – 5 ratings
2 stars – 6% – 1 rating
At Mr.Bezos-land on the same date, the Steerforth edition of Face of a Hero had received 7 (uh-huh, seven) 1-star to 5-star ratings, with a parallel number of reviews. The totals are:
5 stars – 44% – 3 ratings (3 reviews)
4 stars – 24% – 2 ratings (2 reviews)
3 stars – 22% – 1 rating (1 review)
1 star – 10% – 1 rating (1 review)
The difference in the total number of ratings and reviews for the two books – by four to five orders of magnitude – is staggering.
__________
Next, we’ll look at the number of Oogle “hits” on August 11, 2022, for phrases relevant for the two authors and their books. In each case, I’ll list the text phrase with the smaller number of hits at the bottom of each pair. As you can see, in each case, that smaller number pertains to Louis Falstein or Face of a Hero. Here are the numbers:
__________
First, title of book and author’s surname:
““Catch-22” Heller”: 5,640,000
“”Face of a Hero” Falstein”: 79,000
That’s a ratio of 71 to 1, in favor of ““Catch-22” Heller” (Oh my!)
__________
Second, “author” and authors’ names:
“Author “Joseph Heller””: 2,920,000
“Author “Louis Falstein””: 39,400
Another ultra-lopsided ratio: 74 to 1, in favor of “Author “Joseph Heller”” (What gives?!)
__________
Third, “novelist” and authors’ names:
“Novelist “Joseph Heller””: 5,840,000
“Novelist “Louis Falstein””: 54,800
A ratio of 100 to 1, in favor or “Novelist “Joseph Heller”” (Gadzooks!!)
__________
Next, let’s use Oogle’s n-gram viewer, which “…charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2019 in Google’s text corpora in English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, or Spanish.”
For this, I used the phrases “catch-22” and “face of a hero”
Here’s the ngram for “catch-22”. The viewer doesn’t distinguish between the phrase as used as the book title, or, the phrase as a figure of speech or writing entirely unrelated to the novel. Here’s the graph:
Taking a look, some things here just “pop out”.
First, keep in mind that though Heller’s novel was published on November 10, 1961, the ngram curve for catch-22, already stable and “flat” as far back as 1950, remains stable, until it rises commencing in 1967.
It remains at a small plateau until 1970. Then, the curve shows a steeper rise, which I think reflects the release of Mike Nichols’ film Catch-22 on June 24 of that year.
The curve rose at this same rate until 1974.
Then, a year or more before the Vietnam War’s end on April 30, 1975, the curve absolutely skyrockets. It continues at the same rate for about a decade, plateauing from 1984 through 1985, after which – starting in 1986 – it jumps even higher.
The curve fluctuates from that year through 2015, but it’s nevertheless remained at the same general level. I think this post-1985 part of the curve shows how the phrase “catch-22”, whether as a book title or phrase, or both (but probably simply the phrase) had by then become irrevocably cemented into the English language as a concept derived from but now separate from the novel.
By 2020, the curve had levelled off at about 0.0000070. And there we are.
What about “face of a hero”?
The ngram curve, commencing in 1945, sharply peaks in 1950 at about 0.000000120, and by 1952 or 1953 drops just as abruptly. There appears to be a plateau in 1999, but this is probably a random fluctuation, and as such, is unrelated to the book’s reissue by Steerforth.
If we’re comparing numbers, mimicking the ratios in the above three Oogle text searches, the ratio of the high values in the two ngram curves, 0.00000800 (“catch-22”) to 0.000000120 (“face of a hero”), is about 66 to 1, in favor of “catch-22” (Yoiks!)
Stepping back from this melange of mathematics, what these ratios and graphs do is validate a conclusion that’s as intuitive as it is obvious; apparent from the fleeting Catch-22 / Face of a Hero “controversy” of 1998, and even the most cursory observations of literature, film, and popular culture: Catch-22 had an absolutely enormous impact, one which has persisted since the mid-1970s, while Face of a Hero faded into literary obscurity (as do the overwhelming majority of books) all too quickly.
What Catch-22 was, then, was not simply “a book”, though it is a book.
It was; it represented, an idea.
But, what first catapulted Heller’s novel into literary, and then cultural, fame? The answer to that question can be found in the opening paragraph of Alec Solomita’s March, 2008 article in The New Criterion (“Yossarian Section“). Namely, “…after an initial smattering of mostly negative notices, the novel – helped by a canonizing New Republic piece by Robert Brustein, a fawning review by Nelson Algren in The Nation, and an expensive advertising campaign – became a success and then a phenomenon, eventually selling millions of copies around the world.”
In that light, here are the full texts of Algren’s and Brustein’s reviews, the former published just before, and the latter appearing only a few days after, the novel’s 1961 release.
You can “jump” to them directly via:
November 4, 1961, The Nation, Nelson Algren, “The Catch“
November 13, 1961, The New Republic, Robert Brustein, “The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World“
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Algren’s review – if one can deem it such – follows. What’s more startling than its brevity, lack of substance, and absence of any genuine criticism of the novel as literature, is the nature of his endorsement of the book: For Algren, Heller’s novel is to be praised not for its merits as a written work, but for purely ideological purposes: It serves as “the strongest repudiation of our civilization,” to emerge from the Second World War, concluding with the astonishing assertion that, “…it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.”
For the purposes of this post, my familiarity with Nelson Algren (actually, Nelson A. Abraham) is limited to his biography in Wikipedia, and, contemporary newspaper articles available via FultonHistory. From these sources, I can’t help but wonder how much the turbulent nature of the man’s life, given his general affinity for outcasts, the downtrodden (regardless of the origin of their situation), and transgressors of conventionality (the demimonde) – with his effectively lifelong near-adolescent opposition to most any prevailing political and social norm – affected his judgement of Catch-22, even as it molded his own works of fiction, and, the course of his life. In this, one is reminded of Émile Augier’s phrase “nostalgie de la boue“, roughly translating as “yearning for the mud” … a drive not unprecedented in human nature to deliberately subject oneself to a degree of self-degradation and transgression, characteristic of the protagonists of Algren’s novels. Intentionally or not, Catch-22, because of its unconventionality and very opposition to the conventional, may have simply been a literary prism through which Algren perceived and found validation for his way of seeing and living in the world
____________________
The Catch
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.
*****
Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts,
Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.
The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity are lost within it.
That the horror and the hypocrisy, the greed and the complacency,
the endless cunning and the endless stupidity which now go to constitute what we term Christianity
are dealt with here in absolutes,
does not lessen the truth of its repudiation.
*****
To compare Catch-22 favorably with The Good Soldier Schweik would be an injustice,
because this novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II;
it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.
The Nation
Nelson Algren
November 4, 1961
(MARCH 30, 2010)
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. He would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause and let out a respectful whistle:
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian was moved deeply day and night and what moved him more deeply than anything else was the fact that they were trying to murder him.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Clevenger wanted to know. “Who, specifically, is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, so it was of no use for Clevenger to say “No one is trying to kill you.”
“Then why are they shooting at me?”
“They’re shooting at everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Clevenger decided, “you don’t know who you hate.”
“Whoever is trying to poison me.”
“Nobody is trying to poison you.”
“They poisoned my food twice, didn’t they? Didn’t they put poison in my food at Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?”
“They put poison in everybody’s food,” Clevenger explained.
“And what difference does that make?”
There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that. He bolted wildly for his life on each mission the instant his bombs were away. When he fufilled the thirty-five missions required of each man of his group, he asked to be sent home.
Colonel Cathcart had by then raised the missions required to forty. When Yossarian had flown forty he asked to be sent home. Colonel Cathcart had raised the missions required to forty-five – there did seem to be a catch somewhere. Yossarian went into the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. If it became jaundice the doctors could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. Yossarian decided to spend the rest of the war in bed by running a daily temperature of 101. He had found a catch of his own.
To preserve his sanity against the formalized lunacy of the military mind in action, Yossarian had to turn madman. Yet even Yossarian is more the patriot than Sgt. Minderbinder, the business mind in action. Even Yossarian has to protest when Minderbinder arranges with the Germans to let them knock American planes down at a thousand dollars per plane. Minderbinder is horrified – “Have you no respect for the sanctity of a business contract?” he demands of Yossarian, and Yossarian feels ashamed of himself.
Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II. The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity are lost within it. That the horror and the hypocrisy, the greed and the complacency, the endless cunning and the endless stupidity which now go to constitute what we term Christianity are dealt with here in absolutes, does not lessen the truth of its repudiation. Those happy few who hit upon Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian will find that, what Southern said with some self-doubt, Heller says with no doubt whatsoever. To compare Catch-22 favorably with The Good Soldier Schweik would be an injustice, because this novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years. – Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950 for The Man With the Golden Arm.
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Well, you’ve got to hand it to The New Republic: Whatever was lacking – in terms of length and substance – in Nelson Algren’s Nation review is more than abundant in that of Robert Brustein. This comprises laying down the novel’s plot, thoroughly recapitulating the events of the story, presenting the characters therein, and, making a comparison of Heller’s work to luminaries in the worlds of entertainment, cinema, and literature such as the Marx Brothers, Max Schulman, Kingsley Amis, Al Capp, S.J. Perelman, and Nathanael West. Brustein concludes by juxtaposing Heller’s literary skill against that of his contemporaries – Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and J.D. Salinger – albeit the reviewer illustrates how Heller’s work manifests the very best of each of that trio’s talents, even while transcending lacuna in the skills of Mailer and Salinger. Here, Alec Solomita is correct in deeming Brustein’s review as “canonizing”, for it is entirely, unreservedly, uniformly – nay, eagerly; nay, exultantly? – positive, reveling in more than reviewing Catch-22.
As you read Brustein’s review, one passage here; another there; even another elsewhere and so on throughout, it becomes apparent that his review of Heller’s book is as ideologically loaded and divorced from contemplating Heller’s novel as literature, per se, than is Algren’s. Taking all aspects of his review into consideration (there’s lots of sycophancy running around here!) it seems that the animating aspects of Catch-22 most admired by Brustein are the novel’s indictment and condemnation of the accepted norms of conventionality, logic, and moral discernment that undergird society (any society), and, the book’s corresponding exaltation of irrationality in the service of moral solipsism, cutely deemed “Falstaffian irresponsibility.” This is best exemplified by the following quotes:
“… the most lunatic are the most logical …”
“… Yossarian is surrounded on all sides by hostile forces: his enemies are distinguished less by their nationality than by their ability to get him killed.”
Certainly I can’t venture as to specifically why Brustein would have viewed Heller’s novel so positively, unless he saw (and rightly so) that it reflected currents of dionysian thought that had by then – the early 1960s, if not in reality many decades earlier – come to permeate, be accepted in, and promulgated by the worlds of academia, publishing, media, and entertainment. (Why? I have an idea, but that answer’s beyond the scope of this post.) Again, quoting Brustein, “For the author … has been nourishing his grudges for so long that they have expanded to include the post-war American world. Through the agency of grotesque comedy, Heller has found a way to confront the humbug, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sheer stupidity of our mass society.” Through this, and the remark about the, “…whole mystique of corporation capitalism,” one gets the impression that his review reveals far less about the novel then it does about his view of contemporary society, if not any society.
And so:
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The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World
For the author (apparently sharing the Italian belief that vengeance is a dish which tastes best cold)
has been nourishing his grudges for so long that they have expanded to include the post-war American world.
*****
Considering his indifference to surface reality,
it is absurd to judge Heller by standards of psychological realism
(or, for that matter, by conventional artistic standards at all, since his book is as formless as any picaresque epic).
He is concerned entirely with that thin boundary of the surreal, the borderline between hilarity and horror,
which, much like the apparent formlessness of the unconscious, has its own special integrity and coherence.
Thus, Heller will never use comedy for its own sake;
each joke has a wider significance in the intricate pattern,
so that laughter becomes a prologue for some grotesque revelation.
This gives the reader an effect of surrealistic dislocation,
intensified by a weird, rather flat, impersonal style,
full of complicated reversals, swift transitions, abrupt shifts in chronological time, and manipulated identities
(e.g. if a private named Major Major Major is promoted to Major by a faulty IBM machine,
or if a malingerer, sitting out a doomed mission, is declared dead through a bureaucratic error,
then this remains their permanent fate),
as if all mankind was determined by a mad and merciless mechanism.
*****
Yossarian’s expedient is not very flattering to our national ideals, being defeatist, selfish, cowardly, and unheroic.
On the other hand, it is one of those sublime expressions of anarchic individualism
without which all national ideals are pretty hollow anyway.
Since the mass State, whether totalitarian or democratic,
has grown increasingly hostile to Falstaffian irresponsibility,
Yossarian’s anti-heroism is, in fact, a kind of inverted heroism which we would do well to ponder.
For, contrary to the armchair pronouncements of patriotic ideologues,
Yossarian’s obsessive concern for survival makes him not only not morally dead,
but one of the most morally vibrant figures in recent literature—
and a giant of the will beside those weary, wise and wistful prodigals in contemporary novels
who always accommodate sadly to American life.
The New Republic
Robert Brustein
November 13, 1961
(September 23, 2013)
(In honor of Banned Books Week, we’ll be publishing our original reviews of frequently banned books. First up is Robert Brustein on Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, “a bitter, brilliant, subversive book.”)
Like all superlative works of comedy—and I am ready to argue that this is one of the most bitterly funny works in the language—Catch-22 is based on an unconventional but utterly convincing internal logic. In the very opening pages, when we come upon a number of Air Force officers malingering in a hospital—one censoring all the modifiers out of enlisted men’s letters and signing the censor’s name “Washington Irving,” another pursuing tedious conversations with boring Texans in order to increase his life span by making time pass slowly, still another storing horse chestnuts in his cheeks to give himself a look of innocence—it seems obvious that an inordinate number of Joseph Heller’s characters are, by all conventional standards, mad. It is a triumph of Mr. Heller’s skill that he is so quickly able to persuade us 1) that the most lunatic are the most logical, and 2) that it is our conventional standards which lack any logical consistency. The sanest looney of them all is the apparently harebrained central character, an American bombardier of Syrian extraction named Captain John Yossarian, who is based on a mythical Italian island (Pianosa) during World War II. For while many of his fellow officers seem indifferent to their own survival, and most of his superior officers are overtly hostile to his, Yossarian is animated solely by a desperate determination to stay alive:
“It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it—lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them…That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.”
The single narrative thread in this crazy patchwork of anecdotes, episodes, and character portraits traces Yossarian’s herculean efforts—through caution, cowardice, defiance, subterfuge, strategem, and subversion, through feigning illness, goofing off, and poisoning the company’s food with laundry soap—to avoid being victimized by circumstance, a force represented in the book as Catch-22. For Catch-22 is the unwritten loophole in every written law which empowers the authorities to revoke your rights whenever it suits their cruel whims; it is, in short, the principle of absolute evil in a malevolent, mechanical, and incompetent world. Because of Catch-22, justice is mocked, the innocent are victimized, and Yossarian’s squadron is forced to fly more than double the number of missions prescribed by Air Force code. Dogged by Catch-22, Yossarian becomes the anguished witness to the ghoulish slaughter of his crew members and the destruction of all his closest friends, until finally his fear of death becomes so intense that he refuses to wear a uniform, after his own has been besplattered with the guts of his dying gunner, and receives a medal standing naked in formation. From this point on, Yossarian’s logic becomes so pure that everyone thinks him mad, for it is the logic of sheer survival, dedicated to keeping him alive in a world noisily clamoring for his annihilation.
According to this logic, Yossarian is surrounded on all sides by hostile forces: his enemies are distinguished less by their nationality than by their ability to get him killed. Thus, Yossarian feels a blind, electric rage against the Germans whenever they hurl flak at his easily penetrated plane; but he feels an equally profound hatred for those of his own countrymen who exercise an arbitrary power over his life and well-being. Heller’s huge cast of characters, therefore, is dominated by a large number of comic malignities, genus Americanus, drawn with a grotesqueness so audacious that they somehow transcend caricature entirely and become vividly authentic. These include: Colonel Cathcart, Yossarian’s commanding officer, whose consuming ambition to get his picture in the Saturday Evening Post motivates him to volunteer his command for every dangerous command, and to initiate prayers during briefing sessions (“I don’t want any of this Kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff. That’s all too negative… Couldn’t we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?”), an idea he abandons only when he learns enlisted men pray to the same God; General Peckem, head of Special Services, whose strategic objective is to replace General Dreedle, the wing commander, capturing every bomber group in the US Air Force (“If dropping bombs on the enemy isn’t a special service, I wonder what in the world is”); Captain Black, the squadron intelligence officer, who inaugurates the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade in order to discomfort a rival, forcing all officers (except the rival, who is thereupon declared a Communist) to sign a new oath whenever they get their flak suits, their pay checks, or their haircuts; Lieutenant Scheisskopf, paragon of the parade ground, whose admiration for efficient formations makes him scheme to screw nickel-alloy swivels into every cadet’s back for perfect ninety degree turns; and cadres of sadistic officers, club-happy MPs, and muddleheaded agents of the CID, two of whom, popping in and out of rooms like farcical private eyes, look for Washington Irving throughout the action, finally pinning the rap on the innocent chaplain.
These are Yossarian’s antagonists, all of them reduced to a single exaggerated humor, and all identified by their totally mechanical attitude toward human life. Heller has a profound hatred for this kind of military mind, further anatomized in a wacky scene before the Action Board which displays his (and their) animosity in a manner both hilarious and scarifying. But Heller, at war with much larger forces than the army, has provided his book with much wider implications than a war novel. For the author (apparently sharing the Italian belief that vengeance is a dish which tastes best cold) has been nourishing his grudges for so long that they have expanded to include the post-war American world. Through the agency of grotesque comedy, Heller has found a way to confront the humbug, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sheer stupidity of our mass society—qualities which have made the few other Americans who care almost speechless with baffled rage and through some miracle of prestidigitation, Pianosa has become a satirical microcosm for many of the macrocosmic idiocies of our time. Thus, the author flourishes his Juvenalian scourge at government-subsidized agriculture (and farmers, one of whom “spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not grow”); at the exploitation of American Indians, evicted from their oil-rich land; at smug psychiatrists; at bureaucrats and patriots; at acquisitive war widows; at high-spirited American boys; and especially, and most vindictively, at war profiteers.
This last satirical flourish, aimed at the whole mystique of corporation capitalism, is embodied in the fantastic adventures of Milo Minderbinder, the company mess officer, and a paradigm of good natured Jonsonian cupidity. Anxious to put the war on a business-like basis, Milo has formed a syndicate designed to corner the world market on all available foodstuffs, which he then sells to army mess halls at huge profits. Heady with success (his deals have made him Mayor of every town in Sicily, Vice-Shah of Oran, Caliph of Baghdad, Imam of Damascus, and the Sheik of Araby), Milo soon expands his activities, forming a private army which he hires out to the highest bidder. The climax of Milo’s career comes when he fulfills a contract with the Germans to bomb and strafe his own outfit, directing his planes from the Pianosa control tower and justifying the action with the stirring war cry: “What’s good for the syndicate is good for the country.” Milo has almost succeeded in his ambition to pre-empt the field of war for private enterprise when he makes a fatal mistake: he has cornered the entire Egyptian cotton market and is unable to unload it anywhere. Having failed to pass it off to his own mess hall in the form of chocolate-covered cotton, Milo is finally persuaded by Yossarian to bribe the American government to take it off his hands: “If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian cotton speculating industry.” The Minderbinder sections—in showing the basic incompatibility of idealism and economics by satirizing the patriotic cant which usually accompanies American greed—illustrate the procedure of the entire book: the ruthless ridicule of hypocrisy through a technique of farce-fantasy, beneath which the demon of satire lurks, prodding fat behinds with a red-hot pitchfork.
It should be abundantly clear, then, that Catch-22, despite some of the most outrageous sequences since A Night at the Opera, is an intensely serious work. Heller has certain technical similarities to the Marx Brothers, Max Schulman, Kingsley Amis, Al Capp, and S.J. Perelman, but his mordant intelligence, closer to that of Nathanael West, penetrates the surface of the merely funny to expose a world of ruthless self-advancement, gruesome cruelty, and flagrant disregard for human life—a world, in short, very much like our own as seen through a magnifying glass, distorted for more perfect accuracy. Considering his indifference to surface reality, it is absurd to judge Heller by standards of psychological realism (or, for that matter, by conventional artistic standards at all, since his book is as formless as any picaresque epic). He is concerned entirely with that thin boundary of the surreal, the borderline between hilarity and horror, which, much like the apparent formlessness of the unconscious, has its own special integrity and coherence. Thus, Heller will never use comedy for its own sake; each joke has a wider significance in the intricate pattern, so that laughter becomes a prologue for some grotesque revelation. This gives the reader an effect of surrealistic dislocation, intensified by a weird, rather flat, impersonal style, full of complicated reversals, swift transitions, abrupt shifts in chronological time, and manipulated identities (e.g. if a private named Major Major Major is promoted to Major by a faulty IBM machine, or if a malingerer, sitting out a doomed mission, is declared dead through a bureaucratic error, then this remains their permanent fate), as if all mankind was determined by a mad and merciless mechanism.
Thus, Heller often manages to heighten the macabre obscenity of total war much more effectively through its gruesome comic aspects than if he had written realistic descriptions. And thus, the most delicate pressure is enough to send us over the line from farce into phantasmagoria. In the climactic chapter, in fact, the book leaves comedy altogether and becomes an eerie nightmare of terror. Here, Yossarian, walking through the streets of Rome as though through an Inferno, observes soldiers molesting drunken women, fathers beating ragged children, policemen clubbing innocent bystanders until the whole world seems swallowed up in the maw of evil:
“The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward of nuts, like a victim through a prison of thieves… Mobs… mobs of policemen… Mobs with clubs were in control everywhere.”
Here, as the book leaves the war behind, it is finally apparent that Heller’s comedy is his artistic response to his vision of transcendent evil, as if the escape route of laughter were the only recourse from a malignant world.
It is this world, which cannot be divided into boundaries or ideologies, that Yossarian has determined to resist. And so when his fear and disgust have reached the breaking point, he simply refuses to fly another mission. Asked by a superior what would happen if everybody felt the same way, Yossarian exercises his definitive logic, and answers, “Then I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way.” Having concluded a separate peace, Yossarian maintains it in the face of derision, ostracism, psychological pressure, and the threat of court martial. When he is finally permitted to go home if he will only agree to a shabby deal white- washing Colonel Cathcart, however, he finds himself impaled on two impossible alternatives. But his unique logic, helped along by the precedent of an even more logical friend, makes him conclude that desertion is the better part of valor; and so (after an inspirational sequence which is the weakest thing in the book) he takes off for neutral Sweden – the only place left in the world, outside of England, where “mobs with clubs” are not in control.
Yossarian’s expedient is not very flattering to our national ideals, being defeatist, selfish, cowardly, and unheroic. On the other hand, it is one of those sublime expressions of anarchic individualism without which all national ideals are pretty hollow anyway. Since the mass State, whether totalitarian or democratic, has grown increasingly hostile to Falstaffian irresponsibility, Yossarian’s anti-heroism is, in fact, a kind of inverted heroism which we would do well to ponder. For, contrary to the armchair pronouncements of patriotic ideologues, Yossarian’s obsessive concern for survival makes him not only not morally dead, but one of the most morally vibrant figures in recent literature—and a giant of the will beside those weary, wise and wistful prodigals in contemporary novels who always accommodate sadly to American life. I believe that Joseph Heller is one of the most extraordinary talents now among us. He has Mailer’s combustible radicalism without his passion for violence and self-glorification; he has Bellow’s gusto with his compulsion to affirm the unaffirmable; and he has Salinger’s wit without his coquettish self-consciousness. Finding his absolutes in the freedom to be, in a world dominated by cruelty, carnage, inhumanity, and a rage to destroy itself, Heller has come upon a new morality based on an old ideal, the morality of refusal. Perhaps—now that Catch-22 has found its most deadly nuclear form—we have reached the point where even the logic of survival is unworkable. But at least we can still contemplate the influence of its liberating honesty on a free, rebellious spirit in this explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant book.
For Further Thought
Books
Falstein, Louis, Face of a Hero, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vt., 1999
Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, Dell Publishing, New York, N.Y., 1968
Articles
Hollander, Paul, The Resilience of the Adversary Culture, The National Interest, Summer, 2002, 101-112
Iannone, Carol, Lionel Trilling and the Barbarians at the Gate, Academic Questions, Winter, 2001-2002, 7-17
Kersten, Katherine, Adversary Culture in 2020, First Things, February, 2021, 41-46
Magnet, Myron, Defounding America, The New Criterion, May, 2021, 4-12