It would be hard to imagine an institution with less reason to celebrate the 25th anniversary of ”Catch-22” than the U.S. Air Force. With his seditious humor and anarchic vision, Joseph Heller managed to turn World War II into a bloody ”Duck Soup,” devastating the military and its leadership as effectively as the Marx Brothers demolished Fredonia.
By all the rules of logic, a novel of such cosmic insubordination ought to be banished from Air Force bases around the world. But as the book`s silver anniversary approaches, the loudest salute will come from the U.S. Air Force Academy, where scholars will descend for a seminar Friday and Saturday on the political, ideological, cultural, theological and, of course, the military implications of ”Catch-22.”
”We think it`s healthy to address the issues that `Catch-22` raises directly,” says Maj. Thomas Coakley, an assistant professor of English at the academy, who notes that the book became required reading in literature courses shortly after it was published, on Oct. 10, 1961. ”We were anticipating some resistance to the seminar, however, and were a bit relieved when there wasn`t any.”
In many respects, it seems like an irony only Joseph Heller might fully appreciate, a confirmation that the zany illogic of ”Catch-22” has not only endured but prevailed for the last quarter of a century, if not since the Creation. Yet if there is a paradox, it escapes Heller, who plans to be on hand for the ceremonies, informally talking to cadets, faculty and visiting academicians.
Heller sees nothing contradictory about his mission to the Air Force Academy, where as the author of ”Catch-22” he would seem to be leaping into enemy territory, an intruder only slightly less unwelcome than Moammar Gadhafi. ”I don`t think there was any reason for the military to be offended by `Catch-22,”` Heller insists. ”I don`t think anybody`s been offended by the book except for a couple of reviewers.”
Heller has made one other expedition to the Colorado academy, where he was was pleased to encounter ”intelligent, professional military men with a code of ethics and morality. . . .”
Even so, as most of the civilized world knows, ”Catch-22” did not earn its high rank among contemporary classics (having reportedly sold more than 10 million copies in hardcover and paperback) by polishing the Air Force brass. Alternately absurd and horrifying, funny and gory, the novel haphazardly follows the misfortunes of an Army Air Corps squadron based on the fictional isle of Pianosa, off the coast of Italy, during the closing days of World War II.
Prominent among Heller`s enormous cast of caricatures, misfits and malcontents are Captain Yossarian, the fearful hero who marches backward, refuses to fly more missions, and performs his most heroic act by deserting to Sweden; the sadistic Colonel Cathcart, who`s so eager for promotion to general that he keeps raising the number of bombing missions his men are required to fly; Milo Minderbinder, a mercenary mess officer who makes his biggest profit by contracting with the Germans to bomb his own squadron; and such assorted grotesques as Colonel Korn, Nurse Duckett, General Dreedle, Major Major Major Major, and pilots who have flies in their eyes, crab apples in their cheeks, and see everything twice.
Considering the book`s subversive nature, it`s no wonder that ”Catch-22” has replaced ”snafu” as the operative term for military incompetence, even lunacy; that it`s regarded as a milestone of World War II black humor
(along with such less-celebrated but equally phantasmagorial works as George Mandel`s ”The Wax Boom” and William Eastlake`s ”Castle Keep”); or that it`s universally considered, in the words of one critic, speaking for the majority, ”an agonizing satire on the mindlessness of the military.”
Except there`s a catch. According to Heller, that`s not what his ”Catch- 22” is all about. ”Listen, you can`t hold me responsible for that because I don`t even know what a military mind is. My experience has been that the military mentality is not much different than the civilian. It`s not an anti- military book,” says Heller, who flew more than 60 missions during World War II and remembers his Air Corps experience as ”one of the best times in my life. My income had never been higher and it was a good deal of fun–when we weren`t fighting.”
”Almost everyone in the book has a civilian mentality,” Heller says.
”Maybe I didn`t make the point clearly enough, but it`s a civilian world in uniform–there are a variety of personalities in `Catch-22` that cover almost the entire human spectrum, rather than being cast in one ideology. . . .You could take these Wall Street mentalities, the people who are being indicted now, and put them in the military, and they would be equally successful and equally reprehensible. The shame is when people like Milo Minderbinder become acceptable.”
Yet Heller wouldn`t go so far as to suggest that his book has been completely misunderstood. ”I`m not disowning the military satire,” he says. ”But it`s also a political satire, social satire, economic satire. . . . By the time the book was published, it was very much in the spirit of the times, and I think that`s accounted for its acceptance.”
Heller`s interpretation of ”Catch-22,” in which the military serves as a microcosm for McCarthyism and other depravities of contemporary life, is one that the more perceptive critics and readers picked up on early. In a paper prepared for the symposium,, John W. Aldridge, English professor at the University of Michigan and author of ”The Devil in the Fire,” among other works of criticism, maintains that ”beneath the comic surfaces . . . Heller was saying something outrageous, unforgivably outrageous, not just about the idiocy of war but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it is based.
”The horror he exposed was not confined to the battlefield or the bombing mission but permeated the entire labyrinthine structure of
establishment power. It found expression in the most completely inhumane exploitation of the individual for trivial, self-serving ends and the most extreme indifference to the official objectives that supposedly justified the use of power.”
As Aldridge further notes, ”Catch-22” was not only revolutionary in its treatment of a ”good” war, it anticipated the more extreme derangement of an ”evil” one. ”For with the seemingly eternal and mindless escalation of the war in Vietnam, history had at last caught up with the book and caused it to be more and more widely recognized as a deadly accurate metaphorical portrait of the nightmarish conditions in which the country appeared to be engulfed.”
Heller himself says that the book has brought him plenty of personal feedback on Vietnam. ”I`ve been told more times than I can recall,” he relates, ”that during the Vietnam War, when sales of the book really soared, officers and enlisted men gave the men replacing them paperback copies of
`Catch-22,` and said, `If you want to know what the war is really about, read this.` ”
But ”Catch-22” also enjoys cult status in demilitarized zones, especially on college campuses–the Air Force Academy included. Explains Maj. Thomas Coakley, who helped organize the seminar: ”It`s become a very popular book among Air Force officers. It`s a fun book to read, and at the same time it dramatizes the dehumanizing factors within our particular bureaucracy that we can recognize as valid. We think we owe it to our cadets to make them aware of them.”
So does Joseph Heller, who will lend his commanding presence to the Air Force ceremonies, also known as ”Yossarian at the Academy,” with far more militant enthusiasm than anyone might have anticipated from the author of
”Catch-22.” ”I wouldn`t miss them,” Heller says.
