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This is a work-in-progress page for a Critical Anylasis of Joesph Heller's Catch-22.
Good Sources:
http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/heller -- Article
http://www.ipl.org.ar/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?ti=cat-860 -- Listing of articles
http://www.noodletools.com/noodlelinks/links/5z1c3xkd_f128cb257453c9c47003d4054bbb5d83 -- Listing of academic sources (mostly hard-paper)
Possible Source:
http://www.geocities.com/209catch22/paper.htm (blocked by public computer's filter...curse thee CSEA)
BBC Interveiw of J. Heller http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/hellerj1.shtml
Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties
Critic: Morris Dickstein
Source: Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, 1977. Reprint by Penguin
Books, 1989, pp. 91-127. Reproduced by permission
Criticism about: Joseph Heller (1923-)
Nationality: American
To try to relate the social atmosphere of the early sixties to the key novels of the period would seem to be
a thankless task. We all know that there is no easy correspondence between the arts and society, and that
all due allowance must be made for individual genius working out its own salvation. Moreover, since
books like The Sot-Weed Factor, Catch-22, and V. are long and complex, they were also long in
gestating; it's difficult to say in what sense they belong to their moment of publication. But the cultural
climate of the period was also ... long in gestating, and the solitary labors of these very writers were surely
among the points of gestation. The new sensibility of the sixties was unusually pervasive; in retrospect we
can see how it touched every corner of our culture, any one of which, examined closely, helps illuminate
the general ferment, the movement of change. Without abridging the distinctive claims of individual genius
we can't help but notice a similarity of purpose and form, a common breakthrough, in many of the new
novels. This in turn was followed by a loss of verve and a diminution of force among several of the older
writers, as the cultural center seemed to make one of its periodic (and rather cruel) shifts. (p. 96)
Fictional characters in the fifties can still subject life to a degree of personal control, can grow and change
within the limits of their personality. But the zany, two-dimensional characters in Vonnegut, Barth,
Pynchon, and Heller declare not simply their authors' departure from realism but also their brooding sense
that life is increasingly controlled by impersonal forces. For the realist of the fifties character is destiny; for
the comic-apocalyptic writer destiny turns character into a joke. For the fifties writer history is remote and
irrelevant compared to private people and their minute concerns; for the sixties writer history is absurd
but it can kill you. Books like Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 do not slowly gravitate toward death
like straightforward novels with unhappy endings. Because of their peculiar structurein which everything
is foreshadowed, everything happens at oncethey are drenched in death on all sides, like an epidemic
that breaks out everywhere at the same time. Thanks to the time scheme of Heller's book, characters seem
perpetually a-dying and reappearingquite a jokeso that we're shocked when they finally do disappear,
one by one, each with his own mock individuality, each to his utterly depersonalizing fate. And the Army
stands for fate or necessity itself; it's a machine not for fighting or killing but solely for devouring its own.
Contradicting this pessimism, however, which sees individual life as manipulated and controlled from
without, is the high degree of artistic power and license that goes into accomplishing this effect. If the sense
of impotence and fatality in these novels expresses one side of the sensibility of the sixties, their creative
exuberance and originality points to another; something that's also crucial to the radicalism of the period,
the belief that old molds can be broken and recast, a sense that reality can be reshaped by the creative
will. In their inventiveness and plasticity these books are the fictional equivalent of utopian thinking. This is
why we must distinguish between verbal black humorists, such as Terry Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman,
and even Philip Roth, whose basic unit is the sick joke or the stand-up monologue, and what I would call
structural black humorists, such as Heller, Pynchon, and Vonnegut. The former take apart the well-made
novel and substitute nothing but the absurdist joke, the formless tirade, the cry in the dark; the latter tend
toward over-articulated forms, insanely comprehensive plots (the paradox that is more than verbal, that
seems inherent in the nature of things). Both kinds of black humorists are making an intense assertion of
selfthe former directly, the latter in vast structures of self-projectionthat flies in the face of the prevailing
depersonalization and external control. (pp. 99-100)
In the pages that follow I'd like to look more closely at three representative black humor novels of the
early sixties, Mother Night, Catch-22, and The Crying of Lot 49. These books are neither antiquarian
nor excessively literary; in a complex way they develop a striking and unusual sense of history that in the
end tells us less about history than about the cultural tone of the period when they were written. Vonnegut
and Heller return to World War II not for purposes of historical recreation, not simply because it was their
own great formative experience, and certainly not to provide the vicarious thrills of the conventional war
novel. Rather, it's because the unsolved moral enigma of that period and that experience most closely
expresses the conundrum of contemporary life fifteen years later. Earlier writers had been able to approach
World War II with a certain moral simplicity; here after all was a just war if there ever was one. But
after fifteen more years of continuous cold war and the shadow of thermonuclear war, all war seemed
morally ambiguous if not outright insane; in the prolonged state of siege the whole culture seemed edged
with insanity. With that special prescience that novelists sometimes have, Catch-22, though published in
1961, anticipates the moral nausea of the Vietnam war, even famously anticipates the flight of deserters to
neutral Sweden. Similarly Vonnegut in Mother Night chooses a morally ambiguous double agent as his
hero, just as he writes about the problematic Allied bombing of Dresden rather than a Nazi atrocity in
Slaughterhouse-Five.
Like Pynchon, but in a different way, both Vonnegut and Heller are interested in international intrigue; they
marvel at the zany and unpredictable personal element at work or play within the lumbering forces of
history. Heller's Milo Minderbinder is a satire not simply on the American capitalist entrepreneur but also
on the international wheeler-dealer, whose amoral machinations, so hilarious at first, become increasingly
somber, ugly, and deadlylike so much else in the bookso that we readers become implicated in our
own earlier laughter. Yet Milo is particularly close to the book's hero, Yossarian: the two understand each
other. They share an ethic of self-interest that in Yossarian comes close to providing the book's moral: as
in Celine, it's all a crock, look out for Number One. In the figure of Milo the book and its protagonist
confront their seamy underside, a hideous caricature of their own values. (pp. 106-07)
I said earlier that characters in black humor novels tend to be cartoon-like and two-dimensional, without
the capacity to grow or change. To this we must add the qualification that the protagonist is usually
different: he doesn't completely belong to this mode of reality or system of representation. As Richard
Poirier has suggested apropos of Pynchon, the central character of these novels often moves on a different
plane: he shows at least the capacity to become a fuller, more sentient human being, a character in a
realistic novel. In the first part of the book the hero is typically enmeshed in a system of comic repetition:
tics of speech and behavior, entanglements of plot, all the routines of verbal black humor, life imitating
vaudeville. Heller, for example, like Dickens, knows how to make his own comic technique approximate
poignant human realities. And as the comedy in Catch-22 darkens, the system of dehumanization becomes
clearer, and the central character becomes increasingly isolated in his impulse to challenge and step outside
it.
In Yossarian Heller introduces a new figure into postwar American fiction, descended from the schlemiel
of the Jewish novel but finally an inversion of that passive and unhappy figure. Heller tells us he's an
Assyrian, but only because (as he said to an interviewer) I wanted to get an extinct culture.... [M]y
purpose in doing so was to get an outsider, a man who was intrinsically an outsider. The typical schlemiel
is certainly no hero, but like Yossarian has a real instinct for survival. In earlier days Yossarian had really
tried to bomb the targets, as he was supposed to do. Now his only goal is to avoid flak, to keep alive.
Yossarian was the best man in the group at evasive action. This Yossarian is concerned only with saving
his skin, obsessed by the things that threaten his life. There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep
track of. And Heller gives us a wonderful catalogue of them, from Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo (they all
wanted him dead) to all the insane and fanatical people in his own army (they wanted to kill him, too) to
all the organs of his body, with their arsenal of fatal diseases:
There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the
stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases
of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There
were even diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating
away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and
healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it
took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did.
Yossarian seems perilously close to the Sterling Hayden character in Dr. Strangelove, the general who
fears that women are sapping his vital bodily fluids. The insanity of the system, in this case the army, breeds
a defensive counter-insanity, a mentality of organized survival that mirrors the whole system of rationalized
human waste and devaluation. The self itself becomes an army, a totalitarian body politic, demanding total
vigilance against the threat of betrayal and insurrection. Each individual organ, each cell, becomes an
object of paranoid anxiety. I remember as a child being afraid I might forget to breathe, holding my breath
as long as I could, to be reassured it would still happen without me. Yossarian too has the childish wish
to assert the sort of outside control that he himself feels gripped by.
The pattern of Catch-22 is similar to that of Mother Night: a world gone mad, a protagonist caught up in
the madness, who eventually steps outside it in a slightly mad way. The Sweden to which Yossarian flees
at the end of the book is something of a pipe dream, a pure elsewhere. Yossarian's friend Orr has made it
there (from the Mediterranean in a rowboat!), but Orr is Yossarian's opposite, utterly at home in the
world, as idiotically free of anxiety as Yossarian is dominated by it. Orr is the unkillable imp, the
irrepressible innocent, a likeable dwarf with a smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep
him in a low income group all his life. Orr is the gentile Crusoe to Yossarian's Jewish neurotic; along with
the diabolical Milo they form a spectrum of the possibilities of survival in extreme situations, which include
not only wartime but just about all of modern life, indeed the whole human condition, for which the war is
ultimately a metaphor.
But Yossarian goes through a second change before the book ends: he becomes a troublemaker and,
worse still, the unwilling keeper of the book's conscience, just as Nately's whore becomes the figure of
Nemesis, the haunting, surreal spirit of female revenge for the callous inhumanity of a man-made world.
The earlier Yossarian saw through the no-win bind of Catch-22 and set out monomaniacally to survive.
But as each of the others goes separately, uncomplainingly, to his predictable fate, Yossarian becomes
more and more the somber registrar of their deaths and exits:
Nately's whore was on his mind, as were Kraft and Orr and Nately and Dunbar, and Kid
Sampson and McWatt, and all the poor and stupid and diseased people he had seen in Italy,
Egypt and North Africa and knew about in other areas of the world, and Snowden and
Nately's whore's kid sister were on his conscience, too.
Yossarian has come willy-nilly to brood about more than his own inner organs. Other people have become
a desperate reality to him, and with it has come a sense of their common fate, their mutual essence. The
secret of Snowden, who spills his guts in the tail of a plane, is revealed to Yossarian alone:
His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty,
all right, he thought bitterly as he staredliver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the
stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes....
He wondered how in the world to begin to save him.
I'm cold, Snowden whispered. I'm cold.
There, there, Yossarian mumbled in a voice too low to be heard. There, there.
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in
his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll
fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The
spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
Impelled perhaps by the unconscious Jewish identification, Heller paraphrases the famous humanizing
speech of Shylock (If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us,
do we not die?). But the final allusion to Lear is breathtaking: an impertinence to do it, the height of
chutzpah to bring it off. The scene must be read as a whole to see how well it worksit's the penultimate
moment of the bookbut even the delicate texture of these pages of prose would be nothing had not the
secret of Snowden been such an important leitmotif throughout the book. (Snowden's death had taken
place before the book opened, but it's fully remembered and decoded as he lies in the hospital in the
next-to-last chapter, as if its meaning, which underlies the whole book, had taken that long to be reduced
to its terrifying simplicity and finality.) The somber tone of this passagedespite the necessary farcical
touch of Yossarian's dislike of stewed tomatoesis something that's not available to verbal black humor,
which aims for wild incongruities at every turn, which is more at home with disgust and humiliation and
absurdity than with the simple terror of the world as it is; such a poignant effect requires a more fully human
respondent, which Yossarian has by now become. Heller's structural use of the secret of Snowden
makes it a time bomb of ineluctable tragic fact ticking away beneath the book's surface of farce and
rollicking insanity; except that the secret unfolds its revelations gradually, alongside the story, until it finally
becomes the story.
When I first read Catch-22 I felt strongly that except for the Snowden chapter the book's final shift in tone
in the last seventy-five pages didn't work, that after doing an amazing comic adaptation of Kafka and
Dostoevsky most of the way, Heller unaccountably switched to imitating them directly in the finale, a
contest he couldn't win. Rereading the book I can see why I felt that waywe miss the sheer gratuitous
pleasure of the comedybut I also see how much the somber and even ugly side was present from the
beginning and how gradually the book modulates into it: for such laughter we have the devil to pay. The
Mr. Roberts element won't carry us all the way through. I'm now sure the last section works and makes
the whole book work; up against a wall, I'd have to call Catch-22 the best novel of the sixties.
But what can we learn about the sixties from Catch-22? I think the popular success of the book can be
attributed to the widespread spiritual revulsion in the sixties against many of our most sacrosanct
institutions, including the army; to which our leaders replied by heightening just those things that had caused
the disgust in the first place, especially the quality of fraud, illusion, and manipulation in our public life. Just
as the response to war-protest was escalation and the solution to the failures of the bombing was more
bombing, so the push for more honesty in public debate was met by more public relations and bigger lies.
The Johnson administration's unshakable insistence that black was white, that escalation was really the
search for peace, and that the war was being won was a perfect realization of the structure of unreality and
insanity that runs as a theme through both Mother Night and Catch-22. One typical and well-deserved
victim is Doc Daneeka, who collaborates with the insanity of Catch-22 until it creates the general illusion
that he himself is dead (which, morally speaking, he is). Daneeka's merely physical presence is inadequate
to contradict his official demise; he is destroyed as much by his own demented survival ethic as by the
structure of unreality that is the army. We're all in this business of illusion together, says another doctor
when he asks Yossarian to substitute for a dead soldier whose parents are coming to see him die. As far
as we're concerned, the doctor says, one dying boy is just as good as any other, or just as bad.
Giuseppe.
It's not Giuseppe, Ma. It's Yossarian.
What difference does it make? the mother answered in the same mourning tone, without
looking up. He's dying.
When the whole family starts crying, Yossarian cries too. It's not a show anymore. Somehow they're right,
the doctor's right, they are dying; in some sense it doesn't matter. A piece of ghoulish humor has turned
into something exceptionally moving. The same point is made with the Soldier in White, a mummy in
bandages whose only sign of life is an interchange of fluids. What is a man, anyway, when things have
come to this extremity? The ground is being readied for revealing Snowden's secret. The Lear theme is at
the heart of the book, no mere device for concluding it.
Unlike the realistic novelists of the fifties, the black humorists suggest that besides our personal dilemmas,
which often loom so large in our imagination, we all share features of a common fate, enforced by society
and the general human condition. Though the quest for identity must inevitably be personal, in some sense
we are interchangeable. Furthermore, the quest will surely be thwarted if society becomes a vast structure
of illusion and duplicity, and hence treats us as even more interchangeable and manipulable than we
necessarily are. One effect of Vietnam and Watergate was that the official organs of our society lost much
of the respect and credence they had commanded. Even middle Americans began to live with less of a
mystified and paternalistic sense of Authority. The disillusionment and ruthless skepticismreally, spoiled
idealismof Catch-22, outlived the sixties to become a pervasive national mood. (pp. 112-19)
Source: Morris Dickstein, Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties, in his Gates of Eden:
American Culture in the Sixties, 1977. Reprint by Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 91-127. Reproduced by
permission.
Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
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