Yet the impressive emotion in Catch-22 is not “black humor,” the “totally absurd,” those current articles of liberal politics, but horror. Whenever the book veers back to its primal scene, a bombardier’s evisceration in a plane being smashed by flak, a scene given us directly and piteously, we recognize what makes Catch-22 disturbing. The gags are a strained effort to articulate the imminence of anyone’s death now by violence, and it is just this that makes it impossible to “describe war” in traditional literary ways. Despite the running gags, the telltale quality of Catch-22 is that it doesn’t move, it can’t. The buried-alive feeling of being caught in a plane under attack, of seeing one’s partner eviscerated, produces the total impotence of being unable to move, to escape. And this horror-cold immobility is reproduced not in the static, self-conscious distortion of the gags but in the violence of the straight “serious” passages:
The forward bombardier would have liked to be a ball turret gunner. That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddamned cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire.
The urgent emotion in Heller’s book is thus every individual’s sense today of being directly in the line of fire, of being trapped, of war not as an affair of groups in which we may escape, but as my and your nemesis. The psychology in Catch-22 is that of a man being led to execution, of a gallows humor in which the rope around one’s neck feels all too real (and is plainly stamped General Issue). This sense of oneself not as a soldier in a large protective group but as an isolated wretch doomed to die unaccountably is more and more a feature of literature about World War II. It haunts all fiction by Jews since the war, even novels which do not deal with the war, like Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman. As the Holocaust becomes more and more unreal to every new generation, Jewish writers who were stamped by it turn it into the only Jewish version of Original Sin—evil unredeemed, unexplained, unpunished, even unbelieved by most of mankind. So every account of it by Jewish writers, no matter how dim and remote from 1933–1945 the attempt to pass the story on, turns into one man’s account of insupportable and inexplicable evil—into the seeming fantasy of a “world” coming down on the single and often insignificant witness who is telling the story. Just as traditional Christian poetry and epic helped to create a postclassical literature founded on the individual’s relation to original sin, so much of contemporary fiction is founded on a struggle with evil “intolerable” because of the inability of liberal politics to explain and of the liberal imagination to represent. There is no politics in our contemporary war novels, for it is impossible to posit any aim to destruction on such a scale as the thirty million who died in World War II. Destruction was committed at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden because the weapons for it were available, because these cities were on the timetable.
JOHN W. ALDRIDGE (1922–2007) was considered by many postwar writers to be the most insightful scholarly critic of midcentury American fiction. His seminal 1951 study, After the Lost Generation, was reissued in 1985, and was soon followed by his twenty-fifth-anniversary assessment of Catch-22, reprinted here from the October 26, 1986, New York Times Book Review.
The Loony Horror of It All— ‘Catch-22’ Turns 25
by John W. Aldridge
Looking back today at Catch-22—which was published twenty-five years ago this month—we are able to see that it has had a remarkable, if not altogether unclouded, literary history. It has passed from relatively modest initial success with readers and critics—many of whom liked the book for just the reasons that caused others to hate it—through massive best-sellerdom and early canonization as a youth-cult sacred text to its current status as a monumental artifact of contemporary American literature, almost as assured of longevity as the statues on Easter Island.
Yet it is only in recent years that we have begun to learn how to read this curious book and, as is the case with those statues, to understand how and why it got here and became what it is instead of what we may once have believed it to be. The history of Catch-22 is, in effect, also a significant chapter in the history of contemporary criticism—its steady growth in sophistication, its evolving archeological intelligence, above all its realization that not only is the medium of fiction the message but that the medium is a fiction capable of sending a fair number of frequently discrete but interlocking messages, depending of course on the complexity of the imagination behind it and the sensibility of the receiver.