lustrous with a mixture of sweat and insect repellent’ (p. 251). Milo provides a perfect compliment to the unjust persecution of the chaplain in the immediately
preceding chapter where he and the colonels devise a perfect rationalisation for his never having to fly combat missions, since his deals are so important to the war
effort. The consequence, of course, is that someone else’s life will be put more at risk.
It is easy to recall Catch-22 (especially as refracted through the film version) largely as black humour and to forget what a profound morality it is. It could be said
that the whole book is constructed around the languid unravelling of the agony of Snowden’s death over Avignon, the final description of which reminds one of the
unbearable scene in the bomb crater in All Quiet on the Western Front, where one soldier watches another die. The story unfolds in small revelations throughout the
text, and we are not really clear about it until the penultimate chapter. The quality of these passages is dream-like, and Snowden’s death is at the heart of Yossarian’s
relationship to the war. In early chapters we learn that Yossarian takes the war very personally and insists that people are trying to kill him. This is an enduring feature
of his world view. In the sequel, Closing Time, the narrator, reflecting on the events in Catch-22, recalls him as that crazy bombardier who used to say that ‘he
would rather die than be killed… and had made up his mind to live forever, or at least die trying’ (Heller, 1993. p. 20). He also takes personally God’s creation of
pain, phlegm, tooth decay, and the incontinence of the old (p. 178). This brings to mind a similar passage in The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan gives this sort
of mundane, gratuitous personal suffering as part of his reason for turning in his ticket to God.
Indeed, this is one facet of ‘the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to Avignon – they were out to get him; and Snowden had spilled it all over the back
of the plane’ (pp. 170-71). In spite of his being wounded, Yossarian’s most intimate experience of death is Snowden’s demise on the way back from Avignon. At
first it is thought that Yossarian has been hit and people call though the intercom to help the bombardier. Yossarian asks many questions about the war, but they all
boil down to one ‘which had no answer’: ‘Where are the Snowdens of Yesteryear?’ (pp. 34-5). Snowden keeps saying he is cold, and Yossarian does all he can to
help by making him comfortable and putting a tourniquet on the shrapnel wound in his leg. In one of the most touching passages in the book we are with Yossarian
when he finally discovers that there is another wound. ‘Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped opened the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and
heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. Another chunk of flak more than three inches
big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way thorough, drawing mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in
his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to
look again. Here was God’s plenty all right, he thought bitterly as he stared – liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten
that day for lunch’ (429)
Snowden said again that he was cold, and Yossarian said again ‘There, there.’
‘Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had
spilled all over the messy floor. 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’ (pp.
429-30).
There are two other passages written at this level of rhetorical power. One conveys great tenderness and is about Yossarian’s loving Nurse Duckett as they lie by
the seaside. This flows into his reflections on people who die under water, his missing friends and his first sight of a corpse, and it ends with an account of the
gratuitous death of Kid Sampson, as McWatt buzzes the swimming raft and makes a tiny miscalculation ‘which slices the boy half away’, followed by a sound, ‘tsst’,
and the legs and hips toppled backwards, and then it rained Kid Sampson on all of them (pp. 331-2). This is but one of many deaths which take us completely by
surprise. They appear in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes in a subordinate clause, almost by the way, and convey an awful contingency, a callousness of God,
nature and human depravity. Two of the most amusing minor characters – Nately and Hungry Joe – die in this off-hand way. Similarly, the frat-man Aarfy rapes a
woman and throws her out a window, blandly, and gets away with it in the teeth of Yossarian’s shouting that it is wrong, and he will be punished (p.409).
This comes at the end of a sustained walk through the streets of Rome, where he sees tableau after tableau of cruelty, rape, gang rape, beating of children and a dog
(which reminds him of the beating of the horse in Raskolnikov’s dream (p. 405), thus evoking the ubiquity of the theme of pointless suffering and murder. There is a
long passage on hypocrisy and the perverse inversion of values: ‘What a lousy earth! …How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How
many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how
many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How
many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added
them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere’ (p. 403). He is
here at the brink of cynicism, experiencing life as a nightmare, and is sorely in need of redemption: ‘The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how
Christ might have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome
sight a leper must have been!’ (p. 405).
I have, of course, had in mind contemporary events as I have written this essay. I have, that is, returned to Catch-22, because present events in the world have
revived the sense that wanton destructiveness lies very near the surface of human nature and can break through at any time in any place. In recent public discussions,
the author has been heard to say that now is a good time to be old, since it is so hard to maintain hope in the face of the current manifestations of cruelty and the
moral maze of the times. For his generation the axis of good and evil had – or was thought to have – a single fulcrum. Now the debate among competing goods and
evils is bewildering and easily leads to despair. This novel – one of the century’s greatest and one whose subtleties I have only begun to convey – turns on what
happens at the intersection of character and the institutionalised reifications and cruelties of debased societies and societies at war, internally and with nominally
external enemies. There is a fine line, a thin veneer, represented in the book by Yossarian and the chaplain, Captain R. O. Shipman, one an Assyrian, the other an
Anabaptist. I take this to mean that Joseph Heller believes that insofar as decency is being husbanded and cultured, it is not in the mainstream of the society. This
was undoubtedly true in the period when he was a young man in the 1930s and 1940s, as he recalled in a recent television interview: the left was marginalised but
had morality on its side.
The line between integrity and selling out and entering the morass of moral relativism is easily crossed. When they had the chaplain cornered, he dreamed up a
disease for himself. He lied. ‘The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other
hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically
that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization,
and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into
abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody
could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character’ (p. 356). Hannah Arendt has essayed soberly on the most alarming point about this in her
study of Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). I wonder how she would have responded to the Kleinian psychoanalytic
notions of the ubiquity of psychotic anxieties and the idea of the inhumanity of groups and bureaucracies as an institutional defence against them (Bion, 1961; Jaques,
1955; Lyth, 1959; Young, 1992, in press).
Yossarian bears it all, contains it all and lives a life ruled by psychotic anxieties, and in defence against the terror of disintegration, all the rules make group relations
sense, i.e., they are mad. He and his tentmate Orr survive – he through psychical distress and insight and knowing when to stand and when to run (p. 440), Orr
through rigorous training in physical hardship, won through repeated crashes, the cunning point of which Yossarian only grasps at the very end when Orr turns out to
have rowed all the way to Sweden and freedom. Unlike my other two favourite anti-authoritarian hard cases – Randle McMurtry of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest and Cool Hand Luke – Yossarian stops short of provoking the system into destroying him. He knows when to take off on his own path to redemption – ‘to
split’ in the depressive sense.
It is ultimately a book about ideals, about the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and about how hard it is for people to behave well, especially in groups and
institutions under duress. ‘That’s my trouble, you know,’ Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. ‘Between me and every ideal I always find
Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal.’
‘You must try not to think of them,’ Major Danby advised affirmatively, ‘And you must never let them change your values. Ideals are good, but people are
sometimes not so good. You must try to look up at the big picture.’
Yossarian rejected the advice with a sceptical shake of his head. ‘When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people
cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.’ (435)
…’From now on I’m thinking only of me.’
‘But Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’
‘Then I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’ (p. 436, cf. pp. 58, 102)