It is official. I am halfway through Catch-22 and find myself quite happy about this. Two books in a row now I've been less than interested in the listed novel and it has been wearing on me. Naturally my wife has been casting me funny looks and shaking her head.
"Why are you doing this to yourself?" she asks.
I've asked myself that for months now. The answers have wavered very little. Because it is there. Because it is a challenge. Because not everyone does this. It is something I can take a bit of pride in. I'll have a shelf full of books that I didn't have before.
Above all, however, stands one particular reason; Because they have lasted the test of time, centuries some of them. I want to know why they endure. I want to dig into them and find the redeeming value. Catch-22 however is the product of the 1960s remembrances of World War II and written for a disaffected generation. Will it stand the test of time?
Nelson Algren said of it, "This novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II, it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years."
So...why?
As the title suggests I may have been a bit hasty in my previous assessment. Oh sure, the post modern snobbery is still there going "Validate me! I don't need you to validate me but...Tell me I'm clever!". The format of this blog lends itself to mistaken impressions, however. I write as I'm reading it. There have been slews of books that have changed my mind mid-course. (Wondered where "slew" came from as I was writing this. From the Irish "sluagh" which means "a large quantity". #WordNerd)
You'll be ambivalent to learn that I'm coming around to not liking but at least understanding Yossarian. I have a hope that this will turn into something worthwhile reading after all.
The first few chapters are very much in the same vein as the previous nine. The dead man in Yossarian's tent who wasn't there was finally explained as a replacement pilot who arrived at the base, set his stuff in his assigned tent, but went on a mission immediately and was shot down. "Because he had never officially gotten into the squadron, he could never officially be gotten out..." which enhances the strange limbo quality of the novel.
The Bologna mission is mentioned and addressed with more frequency. All of the characters, save the officers, live in fear of the mission and keep coming up with excuses and stratagems to delay or call off the mission. It rains for days straight keeping the squadron grounded. "When it did stop raining in Pianosa (where the squadron is) it rained in Bologna. When it stopped raining in Bologna, it began again in Pianosa. If there was no rain at all, there were freakish, inexplicable phenomena like an epidemic of diarrhea or the bomb line had moved. Four times during the first six days they were assembled and briefed and then sent back."
Come to find out Yossarian bribed the cook to put soap flakes in the mashed potatoes to cause the diarrhea, and he was also responsible for moving the bomb line (the line on the map showing how far ground forces had advanced and therefore where the squadron should bomb). This proves potentially tragic when Major de Coverly wakes one morning to find, according to the map, ground troops had taken Bologna.
Major de Coverly is written of in particularly glowing terms. Well, I say particularly glowing but remember the kind of book we are talking about. According to the book every military man appears to be a coward, self serving, conceited, or outright incompetent. Major de Coverly has the distinction of being a man who gives a proverbial poop. He cares about his job, and he cares about his men. He cares about his men so much that in chapter 13, when he sees that Bologna has been secured not knowing Yossarian moved the line, he does was he always does when a new major city has been liberated. Without a word he gets in his plane, flies to the city and secures lavish apartments complete with cooking staff, maids, and laundry so his men can be pampered during their days and weeks of leave. Because of Yossarian's antics he is heading straight into dangerous enemy territory believing it to be secure. No good deed goes unpunished. And so it goes...
Because of the odd nature of the novel we get chapters out of sequence. When the reader comes to chapter 14 it shows Yossarian's side of the Bologna mission which ends quickly for him when he fakes not being able to hear anything over the intercom and in the confusion the pilot turns back thinking those were the orders. They return to the squadron base and the writer gives this beautiful otherworldly scene of Yossarian stripping off his parachute and flight suit, and walking through the camp, down to the beach. Throughout you get the feeling that Yossarian is taking in the beauty of the world as only a man who came near death can. At the same time the beauty seems pointless. In Yossarian's head they had done the bombing run and all was well. In reality, the mission was still ahead. It is at this point you realize that Yossarian is the least reliable of all possible narrators.
The next chapter both gives reason to Yossarian's mentality and further expands on his unreliability as a narrator. Chapter 15 is a nightmare of war. The reader can really get inside Yossarian's head as he relates the scene of the moment he snaps while on a mission. This is where I got a real sympathy for the character. High above the earth in a bomber amid the exploding flak, bullets ripping into the hull, confusion over the intercom the pressure mounts and suddenly Yossarian is scared for his life. It's a real PTSD inducing kind of experience for him. Suddenly he realizes that people he doesn't know want to kill him and he's being told to kill people he doesn't even know. Fearing for his own life blends into some sort of mystic personal experience where he superimposes his plight on the plight of soldiers on the other side. He doesn't want to die and neither do they but they are being puppeteered by people who are far away encouraging them to kill.
Chapter 18 opens with, "Yossarian owed his good health to exercise, fresh air, teamwork, and good sportsmanship; it was to get away from them all that he had first discovered the hospital." After the above mission (two chapters later that involves him falling in love with a whore and then spending time with the commander's wife in the same capacity) Yossarian instead of going as ordered to morning calisthenics he, while in emotional turmoil from the bombing run that made him snap, went to the dispensary with a fake pain in his side. It's there that the doctors began to, some blatantly others unintentionally, train him on how to fake a liver complaint and get to stay in the hospital for 10 days at a time. This facilitates his desire to never experience a bombing run again. The doctors, clearly tired of watching good men die, start bargaining with him even to the point of promising him more hospital time if he pretends to have a different ailment for the records so that they can prove some hypothesis, or pretend to be someone's dying son.
Somewhere in all the dark comedy the book reached up and grabbed me by the feels in much the same way the ending of Catcher in the Rye did. Suddenly I could relate to the character I despised not having known his story. Fear of death makes "cowards" of us all at some point or another. I've never been in the military. I've never even been in much of a life threatening situation before. As a result my understanding is very limited. That is one of the wonders of novels, though. It may be fiction and therefore an imperfect representation, but it can begin to weave in some threads of sympathy into our world view.
That may very well be why this novel endures.
Pax,
W
