“And don’t tell me God works in a mysterious way,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, 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? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?”
“Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”
“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded.
But it is death itself which is the principal target of this book, the principal object of Mr. Heller’s horrified resentment. Unlike that old philistine, Carlyle, he does not find it necessary to accept the universe. This comparatively early passage is confirmed in the magnificent sustained horror of Yossarian’s nightmare peregrination of the streets of Rome. And this is placed near enough the end of the book to act as a peroration.
Yet it can hardly be too much insisted that Catch-22 is a very, very funny book and by no means a depressing one. To counter his horror of death Mr. Heller celebrates sexuality in a richly comic tone which is blessedly unLawrentian. What is so remarkable, and perhaps unique, is that Mr. Heller can move us from farce into tragedy within a page or two, and that we accept the transition without demur.
In Candide the hero suffers the most drastic physical injuries, yet we are never tempted to take them seriously. Candide’s mutilations are a convention of the satirical genre, and nothing more. But when, for example, Kid Sampson is suddenly cut in two while bathing we share the horror and shock of the onlookers.
Subversive
I suppose the book has faults. It is a little too long and repetitive. Very occasionally the humor turns into a rather brittle and slick form of verbal wit. (“He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down.”) There is rather too much Lewis Carroll nonsense humour, and sometimes the passages of “straight” horror or pity sound a little raucous. If anything Mr. Heller tends to be over-explanatory, and to ram home his messages beyond the point where they have been well taken. But I mean these complaints to be trivial, for this is a book that I could wish everyone to read. It is a genuinely subversive book in the best sense—written, incidentally, by a thirty-nine-year-old New York “promotion executive,” whatever that may be—but it sounds deplorable. It is a book which should really help us to feel more clearly.
And Catch-22?
Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. “Is Orr crazy?”
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”
“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy. . . .”
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” Yossarian observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
NORMAN MAILER (1923–2007) included a significant assessment of Heller and Catch-22 in “Some Children of the Goddess—Norman Mailer Vs. Nine Writers,” a controversial essay intended as an emotional response to the work of selected contemporaries rather than a conventional piece of literary criticism. Heller, along with Saul Bellow and William S. Burroughs, received higher marks than other authors; the Heller section is extracted in its entirety from the July 1963 issue of Esquire.
An excerpt from
“Some Children of the Goddess— Norman Mailer Vs. Nine Writers”
by Norman Mailer
Now beyond a doubt, of all the books discussed here, the one which most cheats evaluation is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It was the book which took me longest to finish, and I almost gave it up. Yet I think that a year from now I may remember it more vividly than The Thin Red Line. Because it is an original. There’s no book like it anyone has read. Yet it’s maddening. It reminds one of a Jackson Pollock painting, eight feet high, twenty feet long. Like yard goods, one could cut it anywhere. One could take out a hundred pages anywhere from the middle of Catch-22, and not even the author could be certain they were gone. Yet the length and similarity of one page to another gives a curious meat-and-potatoes to the madness; building upon itself the book becomes substantial until the last fifty pages grow suddenly and surprisingly powerful, only to be marred by an ending over the last five pages which is hysterical, sentimental and wall-eyed for Hollywood.