Joseph Heller’s One-Hit Masterpiece

How come Joseph Heller could only do it once? His debut novel, Catch-22, is one of the funniest pieces of sustained satire in modern literature. It practically hollers at you about Heller’s talent, even when his experiments in different styles turn out clumsily. Heller can be lyrical, portentous: “The Great Siege of Bologna, when tongueless dead men peopled the night hours like living ghosts.” He can write stripped-down philosophical noir: “The question upset them, because Snowdon had been killed over Avignon.” He can write head-scratching bits of Thomas Wolfe yawp: “The whites of his moony eyes grew large and misty as his mouth struggled yearningly and lost against the familiar, impregnable loneliness drifting in around him again like suffocating fog.” He's also very funny: “Doc Daneeka was Yossarian’s friend, and he did just about nothing in his power to help him.”

Heller will juxtapose fake ad copy, and a paragraph of serious anti-war polemics, on a single page. It’s impressive. It’s also the reason why he never wrote anything close to Catch-22 again. The writing is tentative, stylistically; Heller frequently wastes time on clever impressions, afraid to sound like himself. It wouldn’t be right, however, to accuse him of having no authentic voice. His voice is the way Heller treats culture: like cheap, lousy fuel. The basic conflict in the novel, “man versus society,” has become a totalizing nightmare. According to Heller, Western society is so corrupt, delusional, and bloodthirsty that his protagonist, Yossarian, keeps himself sane and alive by always being “wrong” for whatever scene they’re in. Yossarian knows poems by Matthew Arnold and Francois Villon, and has some kind of training in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Plato. Yet he’s skeptical of every thinker he meets. He can’t bear to pursue knowledge straight; he prefers to have it, ready to hand, for the precise moment when it is needed least.

Yossarian is alienated from life in the Air Force camp where he’s stationed—he’s a social outcast, bitterly critical of the entire operation, and he keeps changing his own survival tactics. But he’s also alienated on levels that are almost microscopic. He stops playing chess with a bunkmate because “the games got so interesting they were foolish.” He helps out Doc Daneeka because Daneeka is selfish, and there will be no reciprocity. Yossarian’s sometimes in favor of spectacle, and cheers on an emotional fight between a fellow officer and a woman at a brothel. At other times, he’s against it: cf. Yossarian on the subject of Lieutenant Schweisskopf, an idiot who throws marvelously picturesque parades, and who Yossarian considers to be… merely an idiot, with nothing about him that one might aestheticize, or suddenly and whimsically defend.

Yossarian doesn’t hold himself above the common people. After quoting Matthew Arnold, Yossarian then identifies with the Philistines: he’s part of a big group of soldiers who willingly ate potatoes mixed with soap, because they had no palate, and couldn’t taste the difference. On the other hand, he’s miserable in the face of mediocrity, and his final judgment about undereducated people is that they turn out mediocre. It’s Yossarian’s strange duty, since he’s not busy defending an elite, to walk around explaining that he also doesn’t like parades, thinks woolen suits look cheap, and can’t abide people who come from small towns. This is in addition to hating anybody snooty, ambitious, or pompous and obscure.

Granted, this line of argument seems to lead right to Groucho Marx, who (like Yossarian) wouldn’t want to join any club that would admit him. Groucho also sings “I’m Agin’ It,” in Duck Soup, an entire song about being spuriously, totally negative, like Yossarian can be. It might also seem like I’m about to accuse Yossarian, or Joseph Heller, of being some kind of immature, overweening rebel—like some hater, describing Holden Caulfield, from The Catcher in the Rye. But I admire Yossarian. He hasn’t miscalculated where mediocrity shall be found, or what’s secret and deadly about the math in modern wars. Heller isn’t wrong about parades or academics. Life is really that bad, everywhere.

There’s a life-giving quality to Yossarian’s ability to keep himself at a very sharp angle to everything that happens. He’s often a breath of fresh air, blowing the top off some new piece of regulation BS. He’s capable of getting silent people to talk. Yossarian becomes, merely by not being allergic to history, the living memory of his harried, endangered regiment. He’s the only one who pauses to remember casualties that other soldiers have put out of their minds. In a sense, Yossarian’s part of a holy order, a counter-history of people doing and speaking things in a way that’s aslant to the norm. They rely on mobile, self-deprecating strings of revolts. These double as works of temporary art; each rebellion must self-destruct before “living long enough to become the villain.” I’m talking about everything from protest marches, to needle exchanges, to cultural landmarks like the Burning Man festival or Coachella. They’ve all become sad celebrations of “impermanence.” They’re all designed to burn.

This creates a literary problem. The lens of WWII gave Heller a perfect miniature society to use for his little dioramas. Heller took on the entire world by elaborating on, and exaggerating, the injustices a recruit like Yossarian might expect to face. But, from a logical and philosophical standpoint, if society’s beyond saving, then all we can do is blunt the force of the evils it perpetrates. There’s only one kind of person who has the ingenuity, stubbornness, and moral dexterity required to hop around, doing this all the time: somebody like Yossarian. He’s not a pacifist, but he is the Air Force’s most conscientious objector. Joseph Heller wasn’t just trapped by the scope of his social critiques; he was ruined by the fear of endlessly recreating an identical rebel.

When Heller stoops to making stupid jokes in Catch-22, there’s a kind of implicit comedic license that protects him. All’s fair in love, war, and comedy; sometimes the best joke you can make about a guy is simply that his name is weird. But Heller’s willingness to confuse real critiques with barrages of zingers is dwarfed by the courage he displayed later on. He wouldn’t give up writing, the coward’s way out, or imitate himself, the salesman’s way out. Heller created, in his first novel, a kind of conglomerate style that’s everywhere today, wherever desperate people run off toward the horizon. He had nothing left to give after that. His lifetime after Catch-22 was, artistically, an inevitable waste.

Yossarian is the reason Beck’s albums grew flat and same-y. Yossarian’s the reason that nobody can make sense of the totality of The Simpsons. Yossarian is why Drake—the most politically-neutral entity in North America—can get away with calling Kendrick Lamar’s politics “all make-believe,” and questioning Lamar’s activism. Drake makes fun of Lamar’s shattered attention span, and inchoate complaining, as if something realer is coming along soon. Nothing is coming. Yossarian, and the cultural figures (like Lamar) that he brings to mind, are rare enough themselves. Getting past them, if we even can get past them, will be a two-fold endeavor.

First, our social criticism has to go farther. A good explanation of society is driven towards hypothetical futures, and all kinds of unlikely revolutionary change. If you stop believing in those things, you’re left, like Yossarian, playing vain pranks on all the Elmer Fudds in this world. Calling that freedom.

Second, in the world of letters, we have to reinvent our depictions of resistance and the hero’s journey. Yossarian’s not a roadblock; he’s an endpoint. He slinks along the margins of his stage like one of those anti-heroes who’ve never opened a bottle of champagne. But it’s an act. He’s the perfect bourgeois; he gives everything the finger from a comfortable spot inside big panel doors. Even Yossarian’s vendetta against bureaucracy is lame and expected. Anyone can scream in pain, nowadays, about some new kind of mediocrity that’s killing them. They’re always right. But they always say the same things.