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
Showing posts with label Post Modernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post Modernism. Show all posts
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Post Modern War (Catch 22 chapters 1-9)
First off...I'm going to start by being honest. I already don't like this book. It is going to take a major emotional shift near the end (much like the one that happens at the end of Catcher in the Rye which no one pays attention to anyway for how to interpret the book) for me to agree that this is one of the 100 Books You Should Read Before You Die.
From the very first chapter it has all the flavor of the play "Waiting for Godot" which is a play best summed up in the review "Ninety minutes, nothing happens, and nobody learned anything".
The first nine chapters are some fairly decent character studies on different people that the main character, Yossarian, has come into contact with both in his flight group and at the hospital. Yossarian has a naturally high temperature and he complains of pain in his liver which gets him out of having to go back to war. Since he is an officer he spends his hospital time, when not annoying or being annoyed by his fellow patients, with the job of redacting letters. He doesn't follow any specific protocols in redacting said letters. Sometimes he has a ban on adverbs, other times he blacks out everything in the body of the letter leaving only the closing. Why? Because it entertains him to do so.
Every officer who does the redacting must sign the redacted document. He signs not his name but instead Irving Washington, or Washington Irving so that they can't trace it back to him.
And it's about this time that I realize this is a book of Post Modernism. It isn't labeled as such. Some people call it Black Humor, others Absurdist Fiction, but ultimately it has the saccharine likability of Post Modernism. It screams from every page, "Ooooh, I'm clever. Look at me!! I'm Clever! Wasn't that writing clever? Here, I'll even spin round and do the same joke with different words because I'm so effing Clever. That's right. I'm clever with a capital "c"! That's how clever I am."
Imagine Abbott and Costello performing "Who's on First" except with knowing "didja get it" nods to the audience, and then if there was even an iota of doubt they would repeat the whole line again, stomp after the punchline, and hold out a hand to signal that the audience should laugh.
Yossarian is not at all a likable character in my estimation. Like many in Post Modernist fiction, the man has no heart or consideration beyond himself. He is not a passive observer so much as a vindictive observer. Each good thing he sees he pours his derision on. And this is my issue with Post Modernism in general. It says, "Let's tear down and destroy anything good and noble...and then not replace it with anything." It is vanity.
For instance when Yossarian describes the, "Texan who was from Texas." Ok, I will admit happily that it was the one line that actually got a laugh from me. I mean, who hasn't met a Texan who would happily tell you with overpride "I'm a Texan from Texas"? However the line later follows, "The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous, and likable. In three days no one could stand him." In speaking of Clevinger, another patient who seemed nice enough, "The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with." These other guys are decent men who simply aren't in on the joke, so let's deride and mock them. Why? Cause we're bored and there's a war on that we are trying to avoid going back to.
In the aspect of criticism of war I do have to give it props. It echoes much of my own sentiment as a pacifist. The military sends a C.I.D. man to catch Washington Irving or Irving Washington in the hospital and in chapter two it begins, "In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their lives."
All sorts of horrible things happen in war that are against all rationality. I could never volunteer for such a thing. If I was drafted I would be more of a liability than anything because of certain sensibilities like not being able to put away rationality and that would cause me to hesitate. I tend to over think especially when the pressure is on. However, the difference between myself and Yossarian is the fact that when called upon I would go, and once there I would do my best to protect the one on my left and my right. I would fight with everything rather than sit in a hospital criticizing others and childishly redacting love letters with no thought to those on the other side of them.
"Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who belived in God, Motherhood, and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him. 'I hate that son of a bitch,' Yossarian growled."
A few back and forths later Yossarian reveals his "Rebel Without a Cause" style philosophy.
"What son of a bitch do you hate, then?"
"What son of a bitch is there?"
Many of the men got together to build a sort of Officer's Club that ended up taking a lot of work which Yossarian never went to help at until it was already finished. "It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his."
In the world of Catch 22 everyone hates someone, everyone is trying to scam everyone else, there is nothing to live for, nothing to die for, and nothing worth anything. Every hero is torn down, every man with any value despised and held in contempt. It's very much the world we live in now fifty five years later. This mentality has spread everywhere to the point that schools are stopping teaching the founders of this country as "Great Men". They are being taught as average guys who didn't really do anything special. We tear down our heroes, eviscerate virtues, call truth a lie. We are swinging a sledgehammer at anything solid in a two story house and expecting it to magically stay in tact.
I don't believe war to be a virtue, or even something glorious. War is, as has been famously said, hell. War is madness. But it is sometimes a necessary madness. Even I, pacifist I am, have to admit that.
In these first one hundred pages the only real thing I got from any of this were brief moments where PTSD shown through the murk. Chapter 6 on Hungry Joe had a lot of really good moments where the damage of war was clear and made me think differently about those coming home. Naturally Doc Daneeka ruins plenty of moments by bemoaning how he had to go to war and left behind a 50k a year medical practice with plenty of tax free income on the side. "I gotta laugh when I hear someone like Hungry Joe screaming his brains out every night. I really gotta laugh. He's sick? How doesn't he think I feel."
Consumed with self, zero empathy, null compassion is what characterizes much of this novel. The book casts a microscopic lens on the cracks in any seemingly good individual while neglecting to cast it upon those deriding such individuals. It casts promiscuous wives of higher ups as blessed saints. Literally says "He had sinned, and it was good..." "Major Major had lied, and it was good" in a bit of mockery of God declaring the different phases of creation "and it was good".
I don't hold out much hope for my enjoyment of this novel. It tears down everything and affirms nothing which is pretty much the opposite of the novels I've loved in this series.
Well...I do have to admit it taught me what the word "furgle" means so...that's something.
Pax.
W
From the very first chapter it has all the flavor of the play "Waiting for Godot" which is a play best summed up in the review "Ninety minutes, nothing happens, and nobody learned anything".
The first nine chapters are some fairly decent character studies on different people that the main character, Yossarian, has come into contact with both in his flight group and at the hospital. Yossarian has a naturally high temperature and he complains of pain in his liver which gets him out of having to go back to war. Since he is an officer he spends his hospital time, when not annoying or being annoyed by his fellow patients, with the job of redacting letters. He doesn't follow any specific protocols in redacting said letters. Sometimes he has a ban on adverbs, other times he blacks out everything in the body of the letter leaving only the closing. Why? Because it entertains him to do so.
Every officer who does the redacting must sign the redacted document. He signs not his name but instead Irving Washington, or Washington Irving so that they can't trace it back to him.
And it's about this time that I realize this is a book of Post Modernism. It isn't labeled as such. Some people call it Black Humor, others Absurdist Fiction, but ultimately it has the saccharine likability of Post Modernism. It screams from every page, "Ooooh, I'm clever. Look at me!! I'm Clever! Wasn't that writing clever? Here, I'll even spin round and do the same joke with different words because I'm so effing Clever. That's right. I'm clever with a capital "c"! That's how clever I am."
Imagine Abbott and Costello performing "Who's on First" except with knowing "didja get it" nods to the audience, and then if there was even an iota of doubt they would repeat the whole line again, stomp after the punchline, and hold out a hand to signal that the audience should laugh.
Yossarian is not at all a likable character in my estimation. Like many in Post Modernist fiction, the man has no heart or consideration beyond himself. He is not a passive observer so much as a vindictive observer. Each good thing he sees he pours his derision on. And this is my issue with Post Modernism in general. It says, "Let's tear down and destroy anything good and noble...and then not replace it with anything." It is vanity.
For instance when Yossarian describes the, "Texan who was from Texas." Ok, I will admit happily that it was the one line that actually got a laugh from me. I mean, who hasn't met a Texan who would happily tell you with overpride "I'm a Texan from Texas"? However the line later follows, "The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous, and likable. In three days no one could stand him." In speaking of Clevinger, another patient who seemed nice enough, "The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with." These other guys are decent men who simply aren't in on the joke, so let's deride and mock them. Why? Cause we're bored and there's a war on that we are trying to avoid going back to.
In the aspect of criticism of war I do have to give it props. It echoes much of my own sentiment as a pacifist. The military sends a C.I.D. man to catch Washington Irving or Irving Washington in the hospital and in chapter two it begins, "In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their lives."
All sorts of horrible things happen in war that are against all rationality. I could never volunteer for such a thing. If I was drafted I would be more of a liability than anything because of certain sensibilities like not being able to put away rationality and that would cause me to hesitate. I tend to over think especially when the pressure is on. However, the difference between myself and Yossarian is the fact that when called upon I would go, and once there I would do my best to protect the one on my left and my right. I would fight with everything rather than sit in a hospital criticizing others and childishly redacting love letters with no thought to those on the other side of them.
"Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who belived in God, Motherhood, and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him. 'I hate that son of a bitch,' Yossarian growled."
A few back and forths later Yossarian reveals his "Rebel Without a Cause" style philosophy.
"What son of a bitch do you hate, then?"
"What son of a bitch is there?"
Many of the men got together to build a sort of Officer's Club that ended up taking a lot of work which Yossarian never went to help at until it was already finished. "It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his."
In the world of Catch 22 everyone hates someone, everyone is trying to scam everyone else, there is nothing to live for, nothing to die for, and nothing worth anything. Every hero is torn down, every man with any value despised and held in contempt. It's very much the world we live in now fifty five years later. This mentality has spread everywhere to the point that schools are stopping teaching the founders of this country as "Great Men". They are being taught as average guys who didn't really do anything special. We tear down our heroes, eviscerate virtues, call truth a lie. We are swinging a sledgehammer at anything solid in a two story house and expecting it to magically stay in tact.
I don't believe war to be a virtue, or even something glorious. War is, as has been famously said, hell. War is madness. But it is sometimes a necessary madness. Even I, pacifist I am, have to admit that.
In these first one hundred pages the only real thing I got from any of this were brief moments where PTSD shown through the murk. Chapter 6 on Hungry Joe had a lot of really good moments where the damage of war was clear and made me think differently about those coming home. Naturally Doc Daneeka ruins plenty of moments by bemoaning how he had to go to war and left behind a 50k a year medical practice with plenty of tax free income on the side. "I gotta laugh when I hear someone like Hungry Joe screaming his brains out every night. I really gotta laugh. He's sick? How doesn't he think I feel."
Consumed with self, zero empathy, null compassion is what characterizes much of this novel. The book casts a microscopic lens on the cracks in any seemingly good individual while neglecting to cast it upon those deriding such individuals. It casts promiscuous wives of higher ups as blessed saints. Literally says "He had sinned, and it was good..." "Major Major had lied, and it was good" in a bit of mockery of God declaring the different phases of creation "and it was good".
I don't hold out much hope for my enjoyment of this novel. It tears down everything and affirms nothing which is pretty much the opposite of the novels I've loved in this series.
Well...I do have to admit it taught me what the word "furgle" means so...that's something.
Pax.
W
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