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It has also been demonstrated that the tangled, excessively repetitive structure is a perfectly convincing formal statement of the novel’s theme, even of the reiterated double bind of the central symbol, Catch-22. The opening figure of the soldier in white, whose bodily fluids are endlessly drained back into him, the soldier who sees everything twice, the constant raising of the required number of bombing missions, the massive incremental enumeration of detail—all these come together to suggest a world based upon a principle of quantitative evaluation in which more is better and most is best. Yet it is a world in which the accumulated excess of any one element may at any moment be neutralized by the greater accumulated excess of an antithetical element, as the comedy is finally neutralized by the weightier force of terror and death, as the fateful ubiquity of Catch-22 finally eclipses all demands for logic and sanity.
As is the case with many original works of art, Catch-22 is a novel that reminds us once again of all that we have taken for granted in our world and should not, the madness we try not to bother to notice, the deceptions and falsehoods we lack the will to try to distinguish from truth. Twenty-five years later, we can see that the situation Mr. Heller describes has, during those years, if anything grown more complicated, deranging and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961. The comic fable that ends in horror has become more and more clearly a reflection of the altogether uncomic and horrifying realities of the world in which we live and hope to survive.
ANTHONY BURGESS (1917–1993) was immediately attracted by the full-throttle satire of Catch-22 and proclaimed it a “brilliantly contrived book” in his June 28, 1962, review for the Yorkshire Evening Post. In 1972, he held a distinguished visiting professorship at City College of New York, where he began a close friendship with his colleague Joseph Heller. Burgess prepared the following twenty-fifth-anniversary introduction for the British trade paperback reissue of Catch-22 (London: Transworld, 1986).
An Introduction
by Anthony Burgess
The Second World War was a long, painful and debilitating experience for the British, and one consolation should have been the eventual emergence of a literary masterpiece about it. But all we have is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, a brilliant and witty performance with a severely limited point of view, presenting the military odyssey of a man of Waugh’s own class and religious faith. We read about a war fought by patricians, in which the British lower orders are permitted to intrude and die on sufferance. To the Americans, World War II was a more democratic experience. It also represented a release of energy which was to ensure American domination of the West when the struggle was over, while the British were to accept complacently the loss of an empire and a world role and pretend that there was a certain virtue in exhaustion.
It is not surprising that the democratic energy of America was to find literary expression and produce the really important fictional writings about the war. This has to be a source of chagrin to the British, who fought longer and endured more, but the muses have no true sense of justice. Whether we like it or not, the novels which really tell us what the war was like for ordinary people, as opposed to upper-class Catholics, are Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It may or may not be significant that all these authors are Jews, though not one of them limited himself to the experience of Jewish serving men.
We can take the matter beyond the recording of a particular war and affirm that the masterpieces which state what twentieth-century war in general is about—in, at least, its impact on the ordinary participant—have come from America, a traditionally most unwarlike nation. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow has as much to say about the First World War as the Second, and it found its technique of expression in a region which was not historically denied to the literary recorders who served in what we may still term the Great War, but was antipathetic to their literary temperaments. Pynchon employs symbolism, surrealism and, above all, obscenity of language and image to express the madness of the conflict—something that Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and R. C. Sheriff were unable to do. Catch-22, which is about World War II but is prophetic about Korea and Vietnam, uses a special technique of satire which finds in the breakdown of language an analog to the breakdown of reason and ordinary human decency.
We’re aware in the very first chapter that words are no longer adequate to express the dementia which has overtaken the organization of American civilians into faceless elements of the military machine. Yossarian is censoring soldiers’ letters, and to break the monotony of the task he invents games. “Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blocked out everything in the letters but a, and and the.” Personal names lose their meanings: “What kind of a name is Yossarian?” a high-ranking officer wants to know. But the real madness is expressed in the very title, where logic becomes circular and A equals not-A. The term “Catch-22” has passed into the language and is used by people who have never read the book.