Catch-22(212)

My mind flooded with verbal images. I got up in the night and walked around, just thinking about it. The next day I returned to the small ad agency where I worked, wrote the first chapter in longhand, spent the week touching it up, and then sent it to my literary agent. It took a year more to plan the book and seven years to write it, but it remained pretty much the same inspiration that came to me that night.

I don’t know where it came from. I know that it was a conscious assembling of factors, but the unconscious element was very strong, too. Almost immediately I invented the phrase “Catch-18,” which would later be changed to “Catch-22” when it was discovered that Leon Uris’s Mila 18 would be coming out at about the same time as my book. Initially Catch-22 required that every censoring officer put his name on every letter he censored. Then as I went on, I deliberately looked for self-contradictory situations, and artistic contrivance came in. I began to expand each application of Catch-22 to encompass more and more of the social system. Catch-22 became a law: “they” can do anything to us we can’t stop “them” from doing. The very last use is philosophical: Yossarian is convinced that there is no such thing as Catch-22, but it doesn’t matter as long as people believe there is.

Virtually none of the attitudes in the book—the suspicion and distrust of the officials in the government, the feelings of helplessness and victimization, the realization that most government agencies would lie—coincided with my experiences as a bombardier in World War II. The antiwar and antigovernment feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself.

Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat’s Cradle. I don’t think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn’t know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Pynchon and in Cat’s Cradle.

Catch-22 was more political than psychological. In the book, opposition to the war against Hitler was taken for granted. The book dealt instead with conflicts existing between a man and his own superiors, between him and his own institutions. The really difficult struggle happens when one does not even know who it is that’s threatening him, grinding him down—and yet one does know that there is a tension, an antagonist, a conflict with no conceivable end to it.

Catch-22 came to the attention of college students at about the same time that the moral corruption of the Vietnam War became evident. The treatment of the military as corrupt, ridiculous, and asinine could be applied literally to that war. Vietnam was a lucky coincidence—lucky for me, not for the people. Between the mid and late Sixties, the paperback of Catch-22 went from twelve printings to close to thirty.

There was a change in spirit, a new spirit of healthy irreverence. There was a general feeling that the platitudes of Americanism were horseshit. Number one, they didn’t work. Number two, they weren’t true. Number three, the people giving voice to them didn’t believe them either. The phrase “Catch-22” began appearing more and more frequently in a wide range of contexts. I began hearing from people who believed that I’d named the book after the phrase.

One way or another, everybody is at the mercy of some context in the novel. I move from situations in which the individual is against his own society, to those in which the society itself is the product of something impenetrable, something that either has no design or has a design which escapes the boundaries of reason.

There is a dialogue early in the book between Lieutenant Dunbar and Yossarian. They are discussing the chaplain, and Yossarian says, “Wasn’t he sweet? Maybe they should give him three votes.” Dunbar says, “Who’s they?” And a page or two later, Yossarian tells Clevinger “They’re trying to kill me,” and Clevinger wants to know “Who’s they?”

It is the anonymous “they,” the enigmatic “they,” who are in charge. Who is “they”? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even “they” themselves.

From The Sixties, ed. Lynda Rosen Obst (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1977), pp. 50, 52.