Disjunctive narrative can be fun and in ‘Catch-22’ it certainly is – partially because it doesn’t demand quite so much attention as some other bigger, fatter pomo books do. Less onanistic, less impressed with itself maybe (and as a result less virtuosic) but still impressive in parts, and surprisingly moving despite the absurdity. In between the crazy bits there are scattered breaths of poignancy.
In parts of Africa little boys were still stolen away by adult slave traders and sold for money to men who disembowelled them and ate them. Yossarian marvelled that children could suffer such barbaric sacrifice without evincing the slightest hint of fear or pain. He took it for granted that they did submit so stoically. If not, he reasoned, the custom would certainly have died, for no craving for wealth or immortality could be so great, he felt, as to subsist on the sorrow of children.
The novel grows in seriousness as it progresses, before ending unexpectedly and very appropriately.
Major Major and the Chaplain stand out as characters (other than big-Y himself) due to their helplessness in the face of the bullying idiocy of the rest of them all.
Regarding Major Major, Heller summarises the most salient feature of his character as follows:
Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one.
The chapter surrounding this quote is delicious in its exploration of the young Major M.’s childhood/adulthood/lifehood woes. The reasons for his suffering are all a bit stupid at the end of the day – why won’t the soldiers play basketball with him? why his name, why his rank, why the persecution by C.I.A. stand-ins C.I.D.? Silly, stupid life.
The chaplain is an innocent in among the wolves of the world. No lampooning of faith – too easy a target maybe. He is a tragic, appealing figure, a man trying to keep faith – in his God and in humanity – and ends up doing a decent job of it in spite of personal weaknesses.
He made so many people uneasy. Everyone was always very friendly towards him, and no-one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no-one ever said anything.
The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalisation, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he say, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honour, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
The chaplain felt most deceitful presiding at funerals, and it would not have astonished him to learn that the apparition in the tree that day was a manifestation of the Almighty’s censure for the blasphemy and pride inherent in his function. To simulate gravity, feign grief and pretend supernatural intelligence of the hereafter in so fearsome and arcane a circumstance as death seemed the most criminal of offences.
The last quote above is one that resonated in particular – and is a feeling that I’m sure anyone who has lived through suffering and loss as comforter rather than afflicted knows to be the truth.
Characters were pleasantly complete humans. They are broadly drawn, cartoonish, but rendered in a way that complements the insanity of the setting.
Orr was an eccentric midget, a freakish, likeable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep him in a low income group all his life.
Yossarian’s introspection and contempt for the war and the flying of planes and the dying resonates – as I think it would – with anyone that has ever felt trapped and a part of the impartial bureaucratic machine. There are moments of frustration expressed against those wheels which are more content in their lack of squeakiness:
He could not make them understand that he was a crotchety old fogey of twenty-eight, that he belonged to another generation, another era, another world, that having a good time bored him and was not worth the effort, and that they bored him, too. He could not make them shut up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.
That frustration, that rage and that impotence combined:
Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticise, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.
The man is always keeping you down.
There is a chapter, very near to the end of a book, when Yossarian walks through the streets of Rome, and it feels like life and war and suffering finally touch the character in a real way. That chapter and those surrounding it – the horror of Aarfy, the absurdity of Yossarian’s arrest, the children and women and cows in the raining street – give gravitas to the ridiculousness that seeps through the rest of the novel. Silly stuff is serious business, sometimes.
The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain, puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.
This is something that weaves its way through the whole book – the silliness of it, the meanness of people and the vaingloriousness of glory. Everything is stupid, shallow, vacuous, and people do silly people things for silly people reasons.
Under Colonel Korn’s rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and the sessions were discontinued altogether, since Clevinger, the corporal and Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
And it reaches its culmination with the revelation of Snowden’s secret. A secret that is telegraphed from the beginning of the novel and is nestled in various places throughout the text until finally:
It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.
I particularly enjoyed the interactions with doctors and nurses throughout the book. The spirit of the writing – if not necessarily the details – was true to everything that I’ve seen in medicine behind closed doors.
If your appendix goes wrong, we can take it out and have you back on active duty in almost no time at all. But come to us with a liver complaint and you can fool us for weeks. The liver, you see, is a large, ugly mystery to us. If you’ve ever eaten liver you know what I mean. We’re pretty sure today that the liver exists, and we have a fairly good idea of what it does whenever it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Beyond that, we’re really in the dark. After all, what is a liver? My father, for example, died of cancer of the liver and was never sick a day of his life right up till the moment it killed him. Never felt a twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I hated my father. Lust for my mother, you know.
But it’s not all an indictment of the medical establishment:
Doc Daneeka had lost his head during Milo’s bombardment; instead of running for cover, he had remained out in the open and performed his duty, slithering along the ground through shrapnel, strafing incendiary bombs like a furtive, wily lizard from casualty to casualty…
I say that I like the medical bits of the book, but I almost put it down after the first couple of pages due to the following passage, which suggests that Yossarian feels
…a pain in his liver that fell just short of being called jaundice.
The outrage! felt at the suggestion that ‘jaundice’ and ‘pain’ are somehow qualititatively related – that ‘jaundice’ and hepatic ‘pain’ are both the points on the same scale of nociceptor activation. Jaundice is yellow(ish) discolouration of the skin, due to the retention of bilirubin (either from excess production, or decreased excretion). Bilirubin (in it’s unconjugated form) is a byproduct of haemoglobin breakdown, and is associated with scleral icterus and pruritis etc etc – but not and never pain. I’m as disgusted at my own pedantry as you are.
My favourite passage involving medicine is a series of interviews between Yossarian and Major Anderson, the psychiatrist assigned to Pianosa base.
‘You do understand!’ he exclaimed, wringing his hands together ecstatically. ‘Oh, you can’t imagine how lonely it’s been for me, talking day after day to patients who haven’t the slightest knowledge of psychiatry, trying to cure people who have no real interest in me or my work! It’s given me such a terrible feeling of inadequacy.’ A shadow of anxiety crossed his face. ‘I can’t seem to shake it.’
‘Really?’ asked Yossarian, wondering what else to say. ‘Why do you blame yourself for gaps in the education of others?
Not all psychiatrists are this bad – but it’s terrifying how close to reality the depiction of Major Anderson successfully skirts.
I suppose at this point in its literary career ‘Catch-22’ doesn’t really need my endorsement, but for what it’s worth, I most certainly give it.
Fruit Thief 