Catch-22 – Joseph Heller, 1961 ★½

The Catch Was I Didn’t Care

They say war is hell; maybe it just gets bad press. Catch-22 performs the feat of devising an alternate World War II even worse than the real one.

Catch-22 isn’t a novel anymore. It isn’t a movie or a miniseries, either. It’s a phrase, a catchphrase if you will, often used by people who never read the book. Many may not realize there even is a book.

They aren’t missing out. Catch-22 is still widely praised by the right sort of people, many of whom haven’t read it either. They call it a black-comedy masterpiece sending up military stupidity, while it is actually neither of those things. Author Joseph Heller is praised as a kind of 20^th-century Mark Twain, using humor to call out hypocrisy, but Heller’s approach is scratchier and more strident than even later Twain.

It hasn’t aged as well as Twain, either.

Heller was a war veteran who flew 60 missions on a B-25 over Italy. Amazingly, he claimed never to have served under a bad officer, and until his death in 1999 spoke positively in interviews of his overall military experience. But routinely putting his life on the line and witnessing ghastly carnage must have taken a toll. Catch-22 is a nasty book which becomes overwhelming long before it runs out of pages.

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. Burn him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

The beginning is amusing, if soon repetitive. We get to meet Captain Yossarian, the novel’s befuddled protagonist. A B-25 bombardier stationed on an island airbase off Italy, Yossarian is desperate to get out of the war after flying his allotted number of missions. “He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt,” Heller writes.

Joseph Heller at the time of Catch-22's publication, with an inset image of him (circled in red) with his World War II flight crew. Portrait by Inge Morath, image from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/08/heller-201108.

The problem is that allotted number keeps rising just as Yossarian is about to reach it. The commander of his air group, Colonel Cathcart, has a fetish about outdoing his fellow commanders by making his men do more than anyone else. The result may be a higher casualty rate, but as his deputy Lieutenant Colonel Korn notes, just that sort of “dramatic gesture” is needed to help Cathcart impress the higher brass.

Determined not to be another fatality, Yossarian begs Army Air Force medic Doc Daneeka to grant him a discharge. Daneeka agrees Yossarian is on the verge of a mental breakdown and qualifies for a Section 8.

That’s where the title situation, or at least the first version articulated in the novel, comes into play. “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy,” is how Doc explains Catch-22.

Several other explanations for Catch-22 pop up in other parts of the novel, each time taking on an increasingly grim and bizarre character. “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing,” an old woman reports after Yossarian shows up at the Roman apartment she kept for a band of young prostitutes who were bundled away by carabinieri in the dead of night.

Yossarian settles on Catch-22 as existential absurdity:

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, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

A scene from "Catch-22" the 2019 miniseries. From left to right, Christopher Abbott as Yossarian, Pico Alexander as Clevinger, and George Clooney as Schiesskopf. Clooney also co-directed the miniseries, which aired to middling reviews on Hulu. Image from https://mashable.com/article/catch-22-hulu-review/.

Ostensibly about World War II, Catch-22 really satirizes the decade that followed it. The 1950s saw capitalism reign supreme and America’s Red Scare response to the threat of Soviet communism. Both are sent up: the former in the person of Milo Minderbinder, a mess-hall officer transformed by opportunity into a heartless global tycoon; the latter by Captain Black, a Joseph-McCarthy stand-in, who introduces loyalty tests designed to trip up those deemed undesirable.

“What makes you so sure Major Major is a Communist?”

“You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you? And you don’t see him signing any of our loyalty oaths.”

“You aren’t letting him sign any.”

“Of course not,” Captain Black explained. “That would defeat the whole purpose of our crusade.”

This sort of paradoxical humor shows up often in Catch-22, and gives it a lot of its early charm. I was reminded a lot of “M*A*S*H,” not the movie (which came out almost at the same time as Catch-22’s own much-heralded and yet underloved film adaptation) but the sitcom, with its numbskull officers and red-tape-infused circular humor.

Alan Arkin as Yossarian trying to survive in a scene from the 1970 film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols. A tremendous cast and much pre-production fanfare did not help make this film a classic, though it does have its fans. https://progresoweekly.us/definitions-of-insanity-on-a-take-out-the-garbage-day/.

But “M*A*S*H” the sitcom always had a way of keeping things real, at least in its earlier, better seasons. Catch-22 pushes absurdity to ever-higher levels, where it tends toward exhaustion. Minderbinder strikes a deal with the Germans to bomb his own airfield, and gets away with it by pointing out what a sweet deal he made. All Yossarian’s comrades are slain in increasingly bizarre ways. Commanders keep changing, getting stupider each time:

“General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they’ll make a good impression on the enemy when they’re shot down.”

Three big problems emerged in my experience of reading Catch-22:

1.    It goes on too long. The narrative is an endless succession of increasingly bitter vignettes, driving home Yossarian’s helplessness. The circular logic that drives the comedy becomes mired in a spinning story structure wherein the same events are repeated from different characters’ points of view. I found it hard to follow and harder to care about.

2.    The characters are thin. None of them register as individual personalities so much as extensions of Yossarian/Heller’s bleak view of life. Most can be summed up as symptoms attached to bodies. The female characters all exist to fuel the lusts of various men; the senior officers as examples of blinkered stupidity and/or cupidity. When a bad end befalls them, it is hard to care.

3.    The ranting becomes overbearing. Heller’s development of Yossarian as author’s conscience leads to long passages of calling out the madness in increasingly irate terms, blaming God for his awful situation. For an atheist, he’s quite preachy: “How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?”

A lot of the book’s most memorable moments go nowhere. The novel’s famous opening, It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him, suggests a relationship of pending importance, but the chaplain never registers much after that. He befriends Yossarian, sure, and shows up at the end, but matters so little we don’t even get his name until near the end of the book.

A Mitchell B-25 medium bomber, the type flown on by Yossarian in the novel and by author Joseph Heller in the real World War II. Image from https://www.lonestarflight.org/aircraft/north-american-b-25-mitchell.

That name, Chaplain Tappman, is one of many jokey names Heller seems to enjoy overmuch. There’s also gormless Major Major Major Major, annoying Captain Aardvark, and marching enthusiast Lieutenant Scheisskopf, German for “shithead.”

Despite my issues with its drum-banging approach, Catch-22 has a rawness that commands respect. The employment of a shifting narrative makes the story hard to follow, but does work for how it introduces its shift into horror in small doses. If I cared about its characters at all, this might have had a deeper impact.

One solid use of the narrative device is the way we observe the demise of Snowdon aboard Yossarian’s plane, which is but fleetingly referenced at the ends of various chapters until he literally spills out from the pages near the very end in a flood of tissue and blood, reflecting Yossarian’s catastrophic emotional trauma finally flooding forth.

By this point, Catch-22 has morphed from comedy into a post-religious Pilgrim’s Progress, metaphors straining to be discerned on every page.

One long sequence in Rome has Yossarian walking through the city and witnessing example after example of man’s inhumanity to man. Women are beaten and raped, police drag intellectuals away for interrogation, people die in gutters ignored:

Yossarian walked in lonely torture, feeling estranged, and could not wipe from his mind the excruciating image of the barefoot boy with sickly cheeks until he turned the corner and came upon an Allied soldier having convulsions on the ground, a young lieutenant with a small, pale, boyish face.

A boyish Joseph Heller at his station as a B-25 bombardier with the 57th Bomb Wing during World War II. Image from https://www.historynet.com/book-review-joseph-heller-forgotten-heroes.htm. 

Balancing this with comedy, even black comedy, is hard. Heller doesn’t really try, pushing the darkness to the breaking point.

There is no denying Catch-22’s cultural relevance, published in a time of greater conformity. But that day is done. The sarcasm and cynicism that once made Catch-22 so bracing are now commonplace. What is left is the humor, which recedes dramatically as the novel progresses, and the philosophy, which becomes less convincing the more it repeats itself.

Some literary touchstones indeed offer amazing reading experiences; this is more of a great title connected to an often clever, ultimately frustrating disappointment.