Catching Yossarian
The blasphemies of Joseph Hellers masterpiece,50 years on
Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle,a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself — W.B. Yeats
Commemorating a literary anniversary is easier done than tracing the history of a book. Although,at the heart of the former exercise lies a moral dilemma. Choosing one book’s anniversary over another’s is an instance of the relativity of all judgement. This is the 60th year of The Catcher in the Rye. It also happens to be the half-century crossover for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,with only 12 years to go for the century-marker of the good book it came out of,Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk,the pioneering,unfinished anti-war novel.
The success of Hasek and Heller lies in the impossibility of the situations,or of the anti-heroes’ actions,that drive the plots. Do soldiers not rebel,or run away? Aren’t they at least instinctive shirkers? Yes. But as soldiers would say,Yossarian could never be one of them,certainly not in his entirety,because he could not have been. Yet,many a soldier had become an instant fan (that is,immediate to their reading,not the publication) of Heller’s 1961 novel,grateful for how accurately and empathetically it caught their predicament. So,in a remarkable tribute to the spurious syllogisms in the novel,Catch-22 turned an unlikely farce into a defining fictional contribution to anti-war thought and activism.
Celebrated as such,through 10 million copies sold,the book was equally denounced (its reviews were mostly very,very dismissive) for lampooning World War II,the “good war”,because this was the one war — unlike World War I,Korea or Vietnam — where the moral axis was clearly defined,the cause hammered home beyond any doubt. This was the Norman Podhoretz line,hit upon again and again in the early days of Catch-22,which later retrospectively analysed how counter-culture and Vietnam (the bad war) clouded judgement and enabled the collapsing of Hitler and Ho Chi Minh. However,every return to Catch-22 makes the novel appear less and less funny. That apart from the pronounced darkening of tone and matter as the half-way line is crossed. So where does the farce progressively disappear with each reading? It doesn’t. We become used to it,and not because of any lacuna in Heller’s imagination or craft but because of our increasing awareness of the other things Heller was doing. For one,the “idiot” Svejk,through his absurd comicality,judges authority as stupid and becomes thereby the good soldier. Yossarian,through the defiantly comic,underscores the absurdity of authority but problematises Heller’s own (and our) judgement on him. Oh yes,he is the focus of Heller’s empathy. But does Heller privilege pacifism over his smashing of other idols?
The trick is to never lose sight of Yossarian — not the name on the printed page but his embodiment of the thematic and rhetorical axes of the novel. What else does he explosively denounce? In a recent essay,Ron Rosenbaum,author of Explaining Hitler (1998) and The Shakespeare Wars (2006),rejects the decades-old,lazily assumed anti-war premise of Catch-22 and argues for the book as anti-theodicy (theodicy bridges the logical gap between human ills,evil and an omnipotent god),a “tour de force of anti-Deism”. His clinching evidence is Yossarian’s attack on god (“a country bumpkin,a clumsy,bungling,brainless,conceited,uncouth hayseed”) which forms the “blasphemous heart” of Catch-22. Now Rosenbaum,a “New Agnostic” pitted against “New Atheists”,should be taken with a pinch of salt on theo-anything. He isn’t discovering for us the bile in Yossarian’s denunciation of god,but his claim that this transcends the denunciation of war and death,making the book an indictment of the “evil of existence… and the creator of that existence” is one of the definitive interpretations of this over-read and over-interpreted book,which ironically pushes it back in history. The abyss within Yossarian is the abyss of life,opened up by a writer who,as Howard Jacobson said in a 2004 essay included in one of the 50th anniversary editions,belonged to the Rabelaisian school of “inexhaustibility”,who gave the impression of never minding his words.
For a book that bequeathed to the English language a name for the inherently illogical,Catch-22,we know,would have been named “Catch-18” had it not been for Leon Uris’s Mila 18. But despite Rosenbaum’s forcefulness on an old idea,the biggest idol that Heller broke was the sanctity,or untouchability,of certain things beyond the realm of the comic imagination. Not even the good war could escape it,announced with perhaps the most contextually absurd opening line of a war/ anti-war novel — “It was love at first sight.” If every narrative has its element of discourse which shapes history (even of reading and writing),then we,millions of Catch-22 readers unknown to each other,are Heller’s imagined community who have had 50 good years. Let us now await the release later this month of Erica Heller’s memoir: Yossarian Slept Here.
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
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