The Big Catch

I have been thinking a lot lately about the co-existence of comedy and tragedy, of the serious and the surreal.  Of course both things exist in the larger landscape of art, but to bring the two elements together under one cover is no mean feat.  The Coen Brothers’ Fargo is an excellent example of a work of art that provides gut-wrenching drama with side-splitting laughter so that you don’t know whether you want to laugh or cry.  There is something so satisfying for me to be able to invest emotionally and intellectually in a dramatic world while at the same time being allowed to ponder over and laugh at the absurdities that fuel that world.  It’s really, in the end, a greedy desire to ask for a single work of art to do all that.

Such a coming together of the serious and the comic can be found in Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic, Catch-22, though it achieves such a coming together in a way far different from Fargo.  Fargo treats its world very seriously, even as the characters are held up for our amusement.  The world of Catch-22 is a source of amusement from the opening chapter.  In fact, even though the book takes place in the theater of war, the tone is unrelentingly comic.  Heller doesn’t miss a single opportunity to turn lines in on themselves to create comedy from nothing.  There are of course a million examples, so I’ll just throw out a few.  On one of his missions with Kid Sampson, Yossarian creates trouble in order to get the plane turned around.  Kid Sampson assures Yossarian that everything is alright, to which Yossarian worries: “Something was terribly wrong if everything was alright.”  Nately’s childhood is described like so: “He got on well with his brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though they had both been very good to him.”  The expected is always subverted by Heller to create unexpected humor.

The humor is of course a court jester’s humor, the art of turning things on their head that seems simultaneously playful and rife with meaning.  On the one hand, the jokes seem like linguistic playthings, but they have punch because they seem to reveal an upside-down truth about the world that makes sense when you unravel it.  Like Kent in King Lear’s court, Heller makes us laugh while merely reporting a twisted truth.  And part of the point is obviously that in the world of war and the bureaucratic system of the military all things normal are crazy and all things crazy become normal.  And this is where the first tension between comedy and drama are at play in the novel, because the comedy points to the fact that there is nothing funny in forcing young men to risk their lives going on 30 extra missions to glorify a colonel who wants to be a general.

I found this opening and first two-thirds of the novel to be incredibly enjoyable.  The characters and their exchanges are crazy and clever and insightful, and I found myself wanting to write down lines from every page and often entire pages of dialogue and narration.  Had the book been nothing more than this set of jokes and subversions, I would have been very happy.  But the true power of the book comes from where Heller goes in the last portion of it.

At some point, it seems to me, the kid gloves come off quietly, and the comedy gets darker and darker.  I trace it to about the time that McWatt accidently bisects Kid Sampson on the raft and then spirals up and flies purposefully into a mountain.  Doc Daneeka is the next casualty.  He is reported dead because McWatt put him on the flight manifesto as a courtesy to the doctor so that he could meet his required flight time.  The wheels of bureaucracy grind the doctor into a ghostly pulp when everyone refuses to believe he is alive even though he is standing right before them.  Up to this point in the novel, the humor seems pretty victimless.  Characters have hard times, and nameless soldiers die (especially in Milo’s attack on the camp, say), but we as readers are kept a safe distance from having to deal with any of the actual fallout.  Heller keeps the focus on the humor and not on the dangers.  The humor turns sickly sweet in our mouths as we watch Doc Daneeka’s life crumble away beneath him and the deaths pile up.  In fact, the refusal to acknowledge Doc Daneeka’s existence is the first point where there appears to be real hostility behind the wielding of the bureaucratic machine.  The upper brass is only too happy to have the doctor out of their way, and if doing so costs the doctor his life and livelihood, they are only too happy to live with that.

It’s at this point that the novel races to its conclusion, and the humor gets stickier and the stakes get higher.  Chaplain Tappman’s interrogation, while ending harmlessly enough, is genuinely terrifying.  The comedy of misunderstanding has real threat and power behind it and we as readers are not allowed to simply enjoy the zany actions without consequence.  Aarfy’s rape and killing in Rome is every bit as bizarre as earlier portions of the novel, but we are now with a broken Yossarian who is too in touch with the imbalances of power to see anything enjoyable in the humor.  The comedy is still there in both these scenes, but the drama itself is increased, and that is the real act of greatness that makes Catch-22 a fantastic novel. 

My edition of the novel comes with a set of essays and remembrances, and I was struck by Bob Gottlieb’s comment that he made in 1958 as an editor assigned to the novel:  “I still love this crazy book and very much want to do it.  It is a very rare approach to war—humor that slowly turns to horror.”  My thoughts exactly.

It is wonderful to finally have gotten to read this giant of American literature.  It has met and surpassed all my expectations.