AUTHOR: JOSEPH HELLER
DATE: 1961
Catch-22 is a novel of comic satire with a dark underbelly. Set during the Second World War, it traces the frequently absurd and surreal experiences of US Air Force captain, John Yossarian – an anti-hero for the ages – and his companions. Published at the beginning of the 1960s at a time when US involvement was increasing in the Vietnam War, the book established itself not only as arguably the greatest anti-war novel of the century but also as a beacon of the nascent counter-culture. It signalled the coming of a new age in which the decision-making of authority was increasingly challenged and deference receded.
Heller was born in New York in 1923 and himself served in the Air Force during the Second World War as a bombardier on a B-52. A teacher and then an advertising copywriter, he only began to write about his wartime experiences, which included some sixty bombing raids, in the 1950s. It was one particular mission in August 1944, when Heller faced the real prospect of death as his aircraft flew over Avignon in France, that fundamentally shaped those attitudes to war that fuelled his most famous book. He was in part inspired to write it after reading The Good Soldier Švejk, an early example of an explicitly anti-war novel published in the 1920s by Czech author, Jaroslav Hašek.
Catch-22 is a study in how one may (or may not) hold on to one’s individuality and humanity in the face of an all-powerful, impersonal military bureaucracy. In the very simplest terms, it is a novel about the madness of war. Told through a series of non-chronological and often tangential episodes incorporating the points of view of multiple characters, a sense of strangeness and dislocation permeates the text. Heller himself claimed that he wrote it with the Korean War, which raged in the 1950s, more prominent in his mind than the Second World War. Yossarian’s challenge is to complete the necessary number of missions to secure his passage back home without losing his mind in the process.
‘Catch-22’ is a term that has now entered the popular lexicon to describe a particularly absurd, circular problem whose solution is denied by the terms of the problem itself. For example, you need to fill out a form to order new ink for the printer, but you can’t print the form because the printer has run out of ink.
MAKING THE TITLE COUNT
Catch-22 was never intended to have that title. Heller submitted the first chapter of the book to a magazine, which published it under the title of Catch-18. However, his agent asked for a retitling, fearing confusion with another novel published around the same time, Mila 18 by Leon Uris. Catch-11 was considered but was thought to be too close to the popular movie, Ocean’s 11, while Catch-17 was too close to Stalag 17. Catch-14 was apparently rejected on the grounds that it was inherently not a funny enough number. So, it was Catch-22, with its sense of repetition and circularity, that eventually won the day.
Within the context of the novel, ‘Catch-22’ is never directly stated but is repeatedly referenced as proof of the ludicrous nature of the authorities’ bureaucratic processes, trapping the characters in a Kafka-like nightmare. Most famously, it refers to a condition that allows for crew of unfit mind to be excused from flying missions. All one had to do was to apply to be excused. But as Yossarian states, the act of having concern for your safety in the face of the real and immediate dangers the flying crew faced indicated a rational mind at work. By the very action of applying, the applicant demonstrated their sanity and so would be refused. In blunt terms, you had to be crazy to want to fly and sane not to want to, but if you were sane you had to fly.
As the book progresses, the full horror of the characters’ experiences come to light. Yossarian comes to regard his own commanding officers as being as much a threat to him as the enemy. The novel riffs on all manner of themes, from the dangers of unfettered capitalism (as epitomized by the ‘Syndicate’ run by the Base’s amoral entrepreneur, Milo Minderbinder) to the nature of God (Yossarian describes the God that he doesn’t believe in as a ‘colossal, immortal blunderer’).
When the book first came out, many critics did not know what to make of it. The New Yorker, for example, noted that it ‘doesn’t even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper’. The New York Times said it was ‘not even a good novel’ but nonetheless qualified the statement by claiming it was ‘wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome … a dazzling performance’.
Even as the critics fumbled to assess it, the book began to garner a cult following, especially among the young. It chimed perfectly with the anti-authoritarian vibe of the time and took hold in the popular imagination as the anti-Vietnam War movement gathered pace. While Catch-22’s anti-war message is indeed potent, it also speaks more broadly of the human condition but in a way that allows readers to laugh out loud. A triumph of both form and content, it won no major literary awards but within a few years was established as a modern classic. Years later, Heller would say that when, as frequently happened, some critic or another pointed out that he’d never done anything as good as Catch-22, he was tempted to reply, ‘Who has?’
At once comically playful, horrific and tragic, Catch-22 is a book that hit its moment in history, holding up a mirror to a world that found its reflection unflattering. A world where war is industrialized, commerce conquers all and individuals find themselves as unwitting collateral damage. A world that felt itself going slowly mad, caught up in unbreakable cycles of self-destruction. It was always much more than just another war novel. Heller himself said that he was less interested in writing about war than in examining ‘the personal relationships in bureaucratic authority’. We all instinctively understand how it feels to be caught in a catch-22 but it fell to Heller to give voice to it. ‘Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy,’ he once said. ‘Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts – and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?’