This is the skin of the reaction. If I were a major critic, it would be a virtuoso performance to write a definitive piece on Catch-22. It would take ten thousand words or more. Because Heller is carrying his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him (except Burroughs who has already made the trip and now sells choice seats in the auditorium), and so the analysis of Joseph H.’s Hell would require a discussion of other varieties of inferno and whether they do more than this author’s tour.
Catch-22 is a nightmare about an American bomber squadron on a made-up island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian who has flown fifty missions and wants out. On this premise is tattooed the events of the novel, fifty characters, two thousand frustrations (an average of four or five to the page) and one simple motif: more frustration. Yossarian’s colonel wants to impress his general and so raises the number of missions to fifty-five. When the pilots have fifty-four, the figure is lifted to sixty. They are going for eighty by the time the book has been done. On the way every character goes through a routine on every page which is as formal as a little peasant figure in a folk dance. Back in school, we had a joke we used to repeat. It went:
“Whom are you talking about?”
“Herbert Hoover.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Never heard of whom?”
“Herbert Hoover.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the man you mentioned.”
“Never heard of Herbert Hoover.”
So it went. So goes Catch-22. It’s the rock and roll of novels. One finds its ancestor in Basic Training. We were ordered to have clean sheets for Saturday inspection. But one week we were given no clean sheets from the Post laundry so we slept on mattress covers, which got dirty. After inspection, the platoon was restricted to quarters. “You didn’t have clean sheets,” our sergeant said.
“How could we have clean sheets if the clean sheets didn’t come?”
“How do I know?” said the sergeant. “The regulation says you gotta have clean sheets.”
“But we can’t have clean sheets if there are no clean sheets.”
“That,” said the sergeant, “is tough shit.”
Which is what Catch-22 should have been called. The army is a village of colliding bureaucracies whose colliding orders cook up impossibilities. Heller takes this one good joke and exploits it into two thousand variations of the same good joke, but in the act he somehow creates a rational vision of the modern world. Yet the crisis of reason is that it can no longer comprehend the modern world. Heller demonstrates that a rational man devoted to reason must arrive at the conclusion that either the world is mad and he is the only sane man in it, or (and this is the weakness of Catch-22—it never explores this possibility) the sane man is not really sane because his rational propositions are without existential reason.
On page 179, there is a discussion about 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 . . . 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.”
. . . “Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead, to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs?”
Right there is planted the farthest advance of the flag of reason in his cosmology. Heller does not look for any answer, but there is an answer which might go that God gave us pain for the same reason the discovery of tranquilizers was undertaken by the Devil: if we have an immortal soul some of us come close to it only through pain. A season of sickness can be preferable to a flight from disease for it discourages the onrush of a death which begins in the center of oneself.
Give talent its due. Catch-22 is the debut of a writer with merry gifts. Heller may yet become Gogol. But what makes one hesitate to call his first novel great or even major is that he has only grasped the inferior aspect of Hell. What is most unendurable is not the military world of total frustration so much as the midnight frustration of the half-world, Baldwin’s other country, where a man may have time to hear his soul, and time to go deaf, even be forced to contemplate himself as he becomes deadened before his death. (Much as Hemingway may have been.) That is when one becomes aware of the anguish, the existential angst, which wars enable one to forget. It is that other death—without war—where one dies by a failure of nerve, which opens the bloodiest vents of Hell. And that is a novel none of us has yet come back alive to write.