Catch-22(226)
It was undoubtedly this recognition that the book was something far broader in scope than a mere indictment of war—a recognition perhaps arrived at only subconsciously by most readers in 1961—that gave it such pertinence to readers who discovered it over the next decade. For with the seemingly eternal and mindless escalation of the war in Vietnam, history had at last caught up with the book and caused it to be more and more widely recognized as a deadly accurate metaphorical portrait of the nightmarish conditions in which the country appeared to be engulfed.
Ironically, in the same year that Catch-22 came out, Philip Roth published in Commentary his famous essay “Writing American Fiction,” in which he expressed his feelings of bafflement and frustration when confronted with the grotesque improbability of most of the events of contemporary life. In a frequently quoted paragraph he said that “the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.”
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Mr. Roth then proceeded to discuss the work of certain of his contemporaries (most notably, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, William Styron and Herbert Gold) and to find in much of it evidence of a failure to engage the American reality—an inevitable failure, he believed, because “what will be the [writer’s] subject? His landscape? It is the tug of reality, its mystery and magnetism, that leads one into the writing of fiction—what then when one is not mystified but stupefied? Not drawn but repelled? It would seem that what we might get would be a high proportion of historical novels or contemporary satire—or perhaps just nothing. No books.”
Mr. Roth was, of course, writing out of an era that was particularly notable for unbelievable and often quite repellent happenings. There had been the fiascoes of the Eisenhower Presidency, the costly Korean War, the sordid inquisitions of the McCarthy era, the Rosenberg executions, the Nixon-Kennedy debates. But then, Mr. Heller was writing out of the same era, and what makes Mr. Roth’s essay historically interesting is that nowhere in it does he show an awareness or even imagine the possibility that the effort to come to terms with the unreality of the American reality might already have begun to be made by such writers as William Gaddis and John Barth, whose first works had been published by 1961, and would continue to be made by Thomas Pynchon, whose V. came out two years later, as well as by Joseph Heller in Catch-22.
These writers were all, in their different ways, seeking to create a fiction that would assimilate the difficulties Mr. Roth described. And they achieved this by creating an essentially new kind of fiction that represented an abdication of traditional realism—a form rendered mostly ineffectual because of those very difficulties—and that made use of the techniques of black humor, surrealism and grotesque metaphor to dramatize unreality, most often by making it seem even more unreal than it actually was.
The complexity and originality of the work these and other writers have produced imposed demands upon criticism that have forced it to grow in sophistication and have obviously contributed to such growth in the criticism of Catch-22. As evidence of this, we need only observe that most of the questions that perplexed or annoyed critics of the novel in the years immediately following its publication have now been answered, and as this has occurred, the size of Mr. Heller’s achievement has been revealed to be far larger than it was first thought to be.
Recent studies have shown, for example, that two initially worrisome aspects of the novel are in fact quite adequately prepared for in the development of the action. The first is Yossarian’s decision to desert, for which Mr. Brustein’s early explanation remains the most convincing and widely shared. The second is the ostensibly sudden transition in the closing chapters from hilarious comedy to scenes of the blackest horror. The more sensitive of later critics have demonstrated—again following Mr. Brustein’s lead—that the horror has actually been present from the beginning, but its force has been blunted and, in effect, evaded by the comedy. Through a complicated process, involving countless repetitions of references and details and a looping and straightening inchworm progression, the moment is finally reached in the Walpurgisnacht “Eternal City” chapter when the humor is stripped away and the terrified obsession with death, from which the humor has been a hysterical distraction, is revealed in full nakedness.