PL55 - Dipped wings

We never find our feet

In this week’s New Statesman I reviewed a novel advertised as “Catch-22 on speed”. At the review’s many edits and sanitations I kept hearing, “I won’t read this book then!” The piece is on pg43 or at this link. But here is the close:

Vulture’s blurb calls it Catch-22 on speed. But Catch-22 knew absurdity was inextricable from – and constitutive of – war’s tragedy. That book, like war, is experienced as total disorientation. We can see Vulture’s design too easily for the same to be true of it. There is never the total, harrowing incoherence you feel was sought. It is less a war novel than a novel set in a war. It can say that war is weird, but not that war is hell. In Catch-22, the project is confusion; in Vulture, the project is confused.

I was sorry readers dismissed Vulture. My point was less “Vulture is bad” than “Catch-22 is supreme”. I thought we’d today look at Joseph Heller’s 1961 masterpiece – #30 on the greatest novels graphic.

An American bomber squadron in WW2’s Italian campaign. “They’re trying to kill me” insists Captain John Yossarian. He is told “no one’s trying to kill you”. He asks “then why are they shooting at me?” He is told “they’re shooting at everyone, they’re trying to kill everyone.” He asks, “what difference does that make?”

That is the question. It comes early on; not far from Yossarian’s sudden refusal to wear clothes on the base. But neither answer nor explanation follows. Instead there comes a long parade of further absurdity and further aggression.

The famous futility is that if you ask to be excused from missions on grounds of insanity you are being sane, so must keep flying. Elsewhere a colonel rules that only people who don’t ask questions can ask questions at his sessions, then discontinues the sessions since you can’t teach people who don’t question anything. A soldier only explains why he walks around with apples in his cheeks, “because they’re better than horse chestnuts”.

Yossarian is very proud of a splendid officers’ club built on the base. It is a “sturdy and complex monument to his powers of determination” – because he did not help at all with its construction. One of the soldiers is “a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him”. Yossarian growls: “I hate that son of a bitch.”

All this is pitched, as critic John Wain wrote, “in the key of bitterly exuberant farce”. It’s a rude mad world. In old margins I have “so weird and unfamiliar and alive”. The men quarrel and whore in extravagant copious prose. “Yossarian missed Nurse Duckett so much that he went searching hungrily through the streets for Luciana, whose laugh and invisible scar he had never forgotten, or the boozy, blowzy, bleary-eyed floozy in the overloaded white brassiere and unbuttoned orange satin blouse whose naughty salmon-colored cameo ring Aarfy had thrown away so callously through the window of her car.”

There is so much amazing bombastic excess that if it were at all possible to miss the tragedy you would. Heller’s gamble is that it will strike you through the noise, because he believes it is so striking. He is right. Not much time elapses, but we see the pain. As he tries to sleep Yossarian sees the people he knew who have died. We learn the reason he refuses to wear clothes is that his uniform got drenched in his dying friend’s blood. “It made sense to cry out in pain every night.” The moment that pains me most, when a plane flies too low at the beach:

Pale Kid Sampson, his naked sides scrawny even from so far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrary gust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt’s senses dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away. Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next. There was the briefest, softest tsst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips,

…

Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They scampered for their things in panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water were struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind. Kid Sampson had rained all over. Those who spied drops of him on their limbs or torsos drew back with terror and revulsion, as though trying to shrink away from their own odious skins.

…

Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn’t jump, and went running uncontrollably down the whole length of the squadron after McWatt’s plane, waving his arms and shouting up at him imploringly to come down, McWatt, come down; but no one seemed to hear, certainly not McWatt, and a great, choking moan tore from Yossarian’s throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain.

The question was whether they are trying to kill Yossarian or are trying to kill everyone. It’s the difference in dignity Stalin knew when he said that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.

We know what we want to be true. In his last song before suicide, Chester Bennington asks “Who cares if one more light goes out in a sky of a million stars? I do.”

Yossarian wants the hope too. Willing to be the victim of “anything but circumstance”, he rages on behalf of himself. But he never escapes incoherence. He sees a dog beaten in the street squealing “in brute, dumbfounded hysteria”. Yossarian tries not to hear, “but the man beat it and beat it anyway”.

So we never find our feet. Yossarian asks a man whose face is an “inscrutable mask of contradictory emotions” if he is trying to tell him something. The mad friend only says “tee-hee-hee-hee”. In sex is “an incoherent oblivion”. A soldier in an argument “cried heatedly, growing more emphatic as he grew more confused”. That’s how the book builds too. It snaps shut, in an infinite confusion, infinitely emphatic.

GM