I read 'Catch-22' when I was a senior in high school, in a rare deviation from my policy of never reading anything on the 'recommended' list the English teachers had put together.
I bullshitted my way through papers on books I never cracked open while acing an advanced placement honor's course that I got college credit for. Don't tell the teacher, he can't take back the great grades, but I like the guy. He was a Rhodes Scholar, so I was pretty stunned at some of the things I got away with. I'm not someone with a great gift for reading people, but I understood enough to know that if you paraphrase someone's ideas, when they read it they're prone to think it's brilliant.
But I did read 'Catch-22.' I almost didn't. The teacher of this class didn't often allow us class time to read in, it was more fun to tell us what he thought so I could paraphrase it to ace a term paper. Everyone has a bad day, and maybe he was having one, because I think he gave us most of the period this one day as time to read.
I'd picked 'Catch-22' for a term paper because I knew there were enough opinions about it that I could pick up by osmosis. It wasn't an assigned book, so I wouldn't have the luxury of actual lectures and led discussions to crib from, and I've never used Cliff's Notes (mainly because I figured that was what teachers look for first and foremost, stuff that smacks of Cliff). Still, I figured I could find a couple of pieces of literary criticism that could be read with dramatically less effort and time. Keep in mind, this was only a few years after Moby Dick sunk my interest in anything an English teacher would recommend. And almost a decade before Ken Kesey and John Steinbeck won me back to the classics (and 'contemporary classics,' whatever that term means).
I started reading the book to look busy. I planned to spend the time meditating on the breasts of the girl who sat a row ahead and an aisle over. I'm sure if I saw her today (not her 36 year old version, the 18 year old one), I'd think she was a kid, but at the time she looked like a woman in full.
By the middle of the second page, the teacher cautioned me that I should pipe down. I'd forgotten about the boobs for a few minutes and was laughing to tears. Hooked.
You couldn't have prevented me from reading that book at that point.
I tried to read it again a few years later but I remembered too much, and so much of comedy is surprise, it didn't work. I even wondered if the book was worth a shit or if it just caught me in a weak moment.
I've been listening to the audio book of 'Catch-22' at work this week, and I can say the book was worth a shit. More than one shit even.
Of course I remember Major Major Major Major, and the bit about how you were crazy if you didn't ask to be grounded, but sane if you asked and thus required to fly. I vaguely remembered Milo's syndicate, though I'd forgotten that he contracted with the Germans to bomb his own base.
And I remembered the chaplain was an Anabaptist, but I never looked that up when I was 18. Didn't know what an Anabaptist was, and despite my natural curiosity, I didn't bother finding out.
I could do a whole term paper just on the chaplain if I'd have known. Anabaptists, for starters, would be conscientious objectors even by WWII standards. I knew a Quaker who did two years in prison rather than fight in that war. But Anabaptists have German/Bohemian roots (which would make them unlikely targets for the U.S. military recruiting in WWII) and mainly exist in America as Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites. All of which are pacifist sects that enjoyed some protection from Uncle Sam in World War II on account of their senseless persecution in the prequel (The Great War).
Since there aren't enough Anabaptist-related faithful to staff a meaningful regiment of soldiers, Uncle Same quit pestering them even quicker than he quit pestering Quakers and out-of-the-closet homosexuals.
Anyway, I'm glad Heller didn't go the obvious route and give them a Quaker chaplain. Since there are no clergy in the Society of Friends, it might be a good joke but it'd still be an obvious one on its face. The Anabaptists of various stripes have some clergy, though with less of a 'if you do this then you are that' approach. They approach it more like becoming a spiritual lawyer: you can go through seminary or whatever religious study, but you still have to pass the bar. Metaphorically anyway.
And if you'll join the army and sign loyalty oaths and all that shit, you're unlikely to pass any Anabaptist bar from what I can tell. If anything, it'd make you anathema, the Anabaptist analog to excommunication...
4 comments:
I am usually considered a heathen; I actually believe that Heller's "Something Happened" is far superior to "Catch 22". That's not to say I don't like Catch 22, I just think Something Happened is far superior.
As for the Anabaptists, an interesting side note to them is what happened in the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For a long time it was the most religiously tolerant country in Europe, arguably the world. That's why at one point almost 90% of the world's Jews lived there. In Poland-Lithuania an offshoot of the Anabaptists developed called the Arians, Socians or Anti-trinatarians.
They believed that person could not both serve the state and god, thus they refused to participate in the army. They also believed that all property should be held in common and abolished private property amongst their members, and that everybody had to share all the work equally. Unfortunately in the 17th Century Catholic fundementalism reared it's head in Poland-Lithuania and they were suppressed.
Indeed there is some funny stuff within _Catch-22_, but I never considered it holding up as a “novel”.
And it continually makes ‘top 100’lists.
I love the idea of a bunch of guys signings, say, “Washington Irving” (and vice versa) to official forms and censoring letters without readings them, but overall the “novel” lacks a story. A bit like a Marx Brothers’ (whom I adore) film isn’t necessarily a great plot-moving script, but moreso a setting to have a bunch of sketches.
I loathe the audio book format, as I can’t stand hearing the words in someone else’s voice/pace, I can picture, for those that like them, it working in this medium.
The narrator sometimes matters with audiobooks. I've already forgotten who read 'Catch 22,' so he must not have made much of an impression.
Frank Muller and Richard Poe are guys that can take mediocre texts and read some life into them. Even Pat Conroy is tolerable when Frank Muller is the reader. He's the narrator who makes 'Motherless Brooklyn' (a good book) the best audio book of all time in my opinion.
Today I was listening to some shorts by Harlan Ellison read by the author, which is typically the only narrator who comes close to a Muller or Poe. He's good at it, and I enjoyed the stories.
Emore Leonard, on the other hand, has a voice made for the printed page. I've heard interviews, and a 'read by author' audiobook would be an actor of terrorism.
'Catch-22' is in part, I think, a work of genius for the recognition that the plot is already known. We know who wins the war, so Yossarian's assumptions that his job is done are already sold.
The skits, vignettes, whatever you call them, are all not only revealing of the nature of the war, but of a lot of postwar behavior by the U.S. M&M Enterprises is the military industrial compex. The Anabaptist Chaplain is the victim of McCarthy's wrath. The raid on his own base is Milo doing a reductio ad absurdum about the nature of following profits without regard for the investment costs, a negative ROI. Ditto the Egyptian cotton.
The guy who rapes and defenstrates an innocent Italian girl who has been 'liberated' by American forces, he's doomed to arrest, except Yossarian who just wants to quit killing masses of people is a more important threat to the systme.
There's a lot going on in the book, and it doesn't plot like an Elmore Leonard crime novel, but I don't know what I'd cut if I was given the Edtior's Chair.
Frank Muller and Richard Poe are guys that can take mediocre texts and read some life into them.
Seems strange. It’s original intent is to be a book. If it’s a bad book, it’s a bad book. Unlike the fact that some plays are difficult or unenjoyable to read, as their original intention is to be acted.
Today I was listening to some shorts by Harlan Ellison read by the author, which is typically the only narrator who comes close to a Muller or Poe. He's good at it, and I enjoyed the stories.
I agree. I as much a problem with it (the audio thing) when it’s the author reading it (although I still dislike it most of the time). And Ellison, whom I’ve seen read (and he does a hell of a lot more than read at his “readings”), is indeed the finest ‘presenter’ I’ve ever witnessed.
We know who wins the war, so Yossarian's assumptions that his job is done are already sold.
Could be but 1) the war isn’t a vital part of the novel, it’s moreso just the setting 2) what percentage of people is “we”? I’m betting –I was never assigned this book, and I don’t recall (and am too lazy/pre-occupied to look back) at what age you read this- that less than 70% (I’m feeling generous) of the kids assigned this text know who won the war.
But yes, the skits are good and revealing, and some are bloody funny, but for a variety of reasons it lacks something that makes a Great work.
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