The Catch

On 10 November, Catch-22 turns 50. But rereading this classic still challenges sanity. So too, some of the books it seems to have inspired

Pin the blame on whatever you like. On an evolutionary screw-up, like a moth’s fetish for flames. Or on some great gender mix-up, like a weathercock’s knack for misreading masculinity in the air. Yes sir, pin it on whatever you like, but it is no longer possible to ignore this oddity of literary fiction: for a tragicomic hero in the US or UK to be truly wacky, he must get whacked by a woman.

Yossarian, struck by love at first sight in the opening line of Joseph Heller’s World War II classic Catch-22, has gone crazy: he has already been whacked by a ‘Wac’—of the Women’s Army Corp—by the time he lies heroic in hospital with a fake illness wondering about the pulse and purpose of the ‘middleman’ in white plaster from head to toe on the next bed whose only sign of life is having nurses interchange his in-feed and out-pee bottles. The world’s you-get-what-you-deserve mechanism has gone bust, every war hero in the ward agrees… including the dude who ninny-nannies all appeals anyone dares make to the divine, Dunbar, who reminds me of a gooey goodie called Bar-One for some inconceivable reason.

Anyhow, all Yossarian did to get what someone else deserved, he grumbles, was step out of his tent one fine night in Marrakech to get a bar of candy, and he caught somebody else’s clap when a Wac mistakenly ‘hissed’ him into the bushes. It’s totally unfair. His real torment, though, is something else. It is the ‘catch’ in his plan to escape the war, Catch-22: only the crazy can quit combat, but anyone who asks to be relieved of war duty cannot possibly be crazy. He cannot get away. Yossarian got hissed pointlessly.

For a whack that actually comes good, who can forget the dying war hero in John Irving’s The World According to Garp? An aircraft gunner with brain damage who slips in and out of consciousness, he seems straight out of Catch-22. His one-word vocabulary (‘Garp’) is reduced to a single syllable (‘aaa’) as he is straddled in his hospital bed in Boston by a scheming nurse with a single-shot agenda: of having herself inseminated without the fuss of any male intervention beyond what’s strictly necessary. In honour of her involuntary sperm donor, Ms Fields names the baby thus conceived Garp, who grows up tough and fatherless, and gleefully so until a civilisational crisis begins to disrupt his existence.

The literary assault that outgasps other gasps, however, is what Julian Treslove suffers in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. ‘Suffers’ is the wrong word here. The lady in London who grabs him by the scruff of his neck, shatters a shop window with his nose, and makes off with his valuables, also leaves his ears buzzing with a few vaguely whispered words that give him a pychosexual rush, words that take complete and utter charge of his sense of selfhood. It’s an anti-minority taunt, Julian convinces himself, and he simply can’t get over it, especially since he’s not one. Or is he, by proxy? Could his attacker have been aiming for his buddy with more foresight than foreskin, Sam Finkler?

Whatever, Julian develops a minority craze. It’s a heroic thing, he suspects, thrown as he is into a social puzzle of repressed shame and ill-assumed guilt that threaten to surface and gain validity for no fault of anyone he knows. Some of London’s Finklers—Julian’s chosen term for them all—squirm over Israel’s Gaza massacre even though they are not Israelis; other Londoners squirm over the Nazi Holocaust even though they are not Nazis; and everyone shuffles around irascibly over an ancient question of innocence versus guilt, even though they are clearly not prisoners of the past.

Okay, put the shuffling down to my over-reading faculties working overtime. As you can guess, the rewards of brain damage in Delhi (damn that nuclear deal) are not much fun. But the puzzling around is real. Julian gets mugged by a stranger but ends up hugged by Finklerhood. It’s exasperating, his adoptive identity. Any earnest attempt to understand minorityhood, as Julian discovers, involves a catch. Only the empathetic can possibly get it, but anyone who really really gets it cannot be empathetic—he’d be a minority himself. Huh? Catch-22.

Half a century after Joseph Heller’s book was first published, it remains as hypnotic as ever.

Catch-22Joseph HellerWorld War II classic