ALFRED KAZIN (1915–1998) was one of the most influential literary historians and critics of the twentieth century. On Native Grounds (1942) established a dominant view of the fiction of the previous four decades; Kazin’s sequel, Bright Book of Life (1973), continued his assessment through the intervening decades. His evaluation of Catch-22, along with Kazin’s brief framing comments about midcentury war literature, are reprinted below from the “Decline of War” chapter of Bright Book of Life.
An excerpt from ‘Bright Book of Life’
by Alfred Kazin
World War II turned into a very different war over the twenty-five years in which we have been forced to think of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Dresden, the thirty million dead, the returning Soviet soldiers imprisoned by their own government for having been captured by the Germans, the threat of universal nuclear destruction. Of this war, opposed to the war described in A Bell for Adano, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, The Gallery—war as liberal tourism—one can only say what Whitman said of the Civil War—“the real war will never get into the books.” No individual experience, as reported in literature, can do justice to it, and the most atrocious common experiences will always seem unreal as we read about them. When the British liberated Belsen on April 15, 1945, they came upon forty thousand sick, starving and dying prisoners, over ten thousand corpses stacked in heaps. Belsen was not the worst Nazi camp, merely the first to be exposed to the world. The (London) Times correspondent began his dispatch—“It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.” This became the only serious and honest view of World War II as, by the Fifties, the liberal intellectual’s image of it was demolished by so many uncovered horrors, so many new wars on the horizon, such a continued general ominousness, that “the war” soon became War anywhere, anytime—War that has never ended. War as the continued experience of twentieth-century man.
Realism about war, observation from the literary sidelines, even one’s own unvarnished experience in a concentration camp, could no longer express “War” as they did “the war.” War as an actuality, bound by space and time, an event that literature “could do justice to,” soon yielded to an apocalyptic sense of the possible destruction of mankind, the boundlessness of its enmities. Above all, we had the sense of a world made totally the same, which it wasn’t, and “absurd,” that glib term for the rejection of society by those living tolerably in it. Albert Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe had meant by the absurd no more than what modern writers in the tradition of romantic individualism have always meant: the superiority of man to his naturally limited and frustrating existence. As D. H. Lawrence said, man has his excess always on his hands. It is natural for man to be rebellious against the terms of his life and his death, to be dissatisfied with everything but his own mind, to be an outsider and an overreacher—and thus to feel “absurd” to himself. But now society became “absurd,” an untenable term but natural to a period in which the power of the state to make war, to destroy life on the planet, seemed more and more unmanageable. “War” had come to seem the normal, omnipresent condition of daily living, dominating a whole generation by the terror of its weapons and by the visible undoing, in the preparations for war, of those human loyalties and common values in the name of which war used to be fought.
The essence of such novels as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade is that though both are ostensibly about the 1941–1945 war, in which both writers served, they are really about The Next War, and thus about a war which will be without limits and without meaning, a war that will end only when no one is alive to fight it. The theme of Catch-22 in particular is the total craziness of war, the craziness of all those who submit to it, and the struggle to survive by the one man, Yossarian, who knows the difference between his sanity and the insanity of the system. But how can one construct fictional meaning, narrative progression, out of a system in which virtually everyone but the hero assents to madness, willingly falls into the role of the madman-who-pretends-to-be-sane? The answer is that Catch-22 is about the hypothesis of a totally rejectable world, a difficult subject, perhaps impossible so long as the “world” is undifferentiated, confused with man’s angry heart itself—but expressive of the political uselessness many Americans have felt about themselves since World War II. So Heller, who combines the virtuousness of a total pacifist with the mocking pseudo-rationality of traditional Jewish humor, has to fetch up one sight gag after another. “The dead man in Yossarian’s tent was simply not easy to live with.” “General Dreedle was incensed by General Peckem’s recent directive requiring all tents in the Mediterranean theater of operations to be pitched along parallel lines with entrances facing back proudly toward the Washington monument.” The book moves by Yossarian’s asking sensible, human, logical questions about war to which the answers are madly inconsequent. Heller himself is the straight man on this lunatic stage, Yossarian the one human being in this farcically antihuman setup. The jokes are variations on the classic Yiddish story of the totally innocent recruit who pokes his head over the trench, discovers that everyone is firing away, and cries out in wonder—“One can get killed here!”