Sunday, July 25, 2010

Catch-22's subversive attack on authority

As much as I liked listening to Catch-22 on an audio book, there was something significant about the book that bothered me.

In the book, anybody with authority was depicted as a self-aggrandizing buffoon. The officers who commanded the lives of the men in Yossarian's group were stupid, self-serving incompetents. They enforced their control over the men with the Army's rules and punishments. Their real mission was their own advancement. They were impossibly (and hilariously) greedy, egotistical, and ambitious.

But eventually the officers became more than just funny caricatures. They were evil. They blithely sent their men to their deaths. They threatened and persecuted the kind-hearted ineffectual chaplain. They ignored the crimes of a murderer and rapist, but arrested Yossarian for going AWOL and becoming a malcontent.

Heller seemed to say that authority itself was evil, at least, all authority in the fictional world of the novel. At some point, the endless satire became too much for me. I didn't like the book's relentless attack on all authority.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Catch-22 is still fresh thirty years after my first reading

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1961)

I last read this novel about thirty years ago and recently listened to it again, this time on CDs while driving to work. Heller made me laugh over and over again. The main "catch" of course, is that Yossarian, the main character, (a World War II bombardier with lots of missions) wants to be declared insane so that he can be sent home from the war, but anyone who would want to be sent home from flying dangerous missions in which people are trying to kill him obviously cannot be insane, so he must keep flying missions.

The repetitiveness of the book surprised me. Some of the gags, such as those involving Milo Minderbinder's schemes, are repeated over and over until they lose their ability to make you laugh. Some of it got tiresome.

The book is not so much a plotted narrative as it is a series of scenes that magnify and detail the characters trapped in the war: Yossarian and his increasingly desperate attempts to get out; Major Major's forlorn humiliation as he struggles to avoid any decision-making or conflict; the sensitive chaplain Tappman's futile attempts to make his beliefs and moral arguments meaningful; the surprisingly courageous hypochondriac, Doc Daneeka; the screamingly funny and incompetent commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart. They all attempt to either escape the war, change the circumstances of it (with no luck), or exploit it.

Or rather, it is not the war, but the army. I have read about Catch-22 described as being anti-war. It of course depicts the terrifying absurdity of the war. There is a lot of pain and grief. A number of the characters that we come to laugh at and like, die. But mostly it is an anti-organization book. The organization -- the system -- is what makes possible and encourages the absurd behaviors. It is the army that promotes and protects the incompetent Colonel Cathcarts and Scheisskopfs of the world with their crazy drive for promotion masked by raving patriotism. It is the army that enforces their orders and behavior, no matter how petty and insane. It is the army that makes possible Milo's impossible capitalist schemes to make money on the black market in the middle of huge suffering. It is other officers that interpret and give absurd orders, usually for their self-protection, or reward. While it is people and characters who act out the story, you feel that it is truly the army itself that is Yossarian's tormenter.