"Catch-22": Winning With Words
On Joseph Heller's chaotic comedy, "Catch-22", and how language can be a cage or a key.
“It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
So opens Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, with a declaration of love that ultimately goes nowhere and has, seemingly, nothing to do with anything. The fact that these are the first lines of the novel imbues the announcement with no small amount of significance — yet it’s never brought up again.
Perhaps Heller is making fun of how we bestow meaning on that which we assume ought to have meaning, things like the opening lines in a novel. So much is made of the first words an author places on the page that you’d think any good novel is, in its value, weighted as 60% opening lines and 30% the final words, while everything in between is filler.
It’s not only the placement of these lines at the start of the novel that tricks the reader into believing these words are lifting more weight than they are. The romantic mind assumes that the announcement of a pending passion is intended to set up some great drama. It’s difficult to shake off the presumption that a person’s falling in love, especially when that person is our protagonist, will matter to the story. It cannot come as anything less than a surprise to find that it will be treated trivially — or, indeed, not treated at all.
It’s true (Heller might be saying) that Yossarian has fallen in love, but is it relevant? People fall in love every day. There’s a certain mischievous chaos to this authorial inclusion and subtraction, the dangled carrot tossed casually aside, as if Heller is shrugging at us, saying, This is life: full of things that sometimes matter and sometimes don’t.
There is, technically, another first line in this book, a first line that really does come first. Heller’s own epigraph for the novel is:
The island of Pianosa lies
in the Mediterranean Sea eight
miles south of Elba. It is very small
and obviously could not accommodate all of
the actions described. Like the setting
of this novel, the characters, too,
are fictitious.
Here is Heller, the naked emperor pointing out the imaginary nature of his own non-existent garments, confessing to the reader that which we already know (well, of course it’s all fiction) and yet forget every time we lose ourselves in a story. This is rendered most concisely in the first line of the epigraph: The island of Pianosa lies — and so does the novel.
The characters of Catch-22 are equally fast and joyfully loose with the truth. Here’s Yossarian amusing himself from a hospital bed, recovering from a feigned illness:
“All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers.
[...]
Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, “Washington Irving”. When that grew monotonous he wrote, “Irving Washington”.
What’s fascinating about Yossarian’s lying is how utterly unpragmatic it is; there’s rarely a clear benefit to his distortions of truth. Granted, the original lie on which the novel’s opening scene relies — that he’s unwell when, in fact, he’s perfectly fine — allows Yossarian to abscond from his military duties. Once here, however, his lies take on an increasingly, and absurdly, “useless” dimension. In one of the censored letters, Yossarian informs its recipient that the letter comes from one R. O. Shipman (it doesn’t) who “yearn[s] for you tragically” (he doesn’t). Despite a complete lack of any apparent gain, Yossarian piles lies upon lies.
The reader can’t help but wonder what schemes are at hand, what set-up is being set up, a payoff undoubtedly in the offing. But the book gives us none of these, and while many trails that appear to immediately vanish into brush are happily picked up much later, there are just as many absurdities that confound our readerly expectations of narrative logic.
Yossarian’s inexplicable lies are just one kind of the many reversals and non-sequiturs in Catch-22 that, in their broken or absent chains of causality, imply a hidden deeper meaning and yet deliver nothing of the kind. Yossarian quits playing chess with the artillery captain because “the games were so interesting as to be foolish”; the Texan who takes a nearby bed in the hospital ward is “good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him”. Searching for meaning in the meaningless is an exercise in self-induced madness.
Yet madness might just be the point. In Catch-22, lies and miscommunications offer a taste of the absurdity of war. By the end of the opening chapter, language itself is revealed as a convoluted construct that constantly capitulates to the circumstances of its conception — words are adapted and fudged to fit their current usage. This often leads to outright failure.
Take, for example, the colonel who dwells in a “vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him”. We’re told that the colonel has “a pathologist for his pathos”, a “cystologist for his cysts” (cystologists don’t exist — this is a misspelling of cytologist), and a “cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard” who’s roped into this by a fault in the machine allocating jobs. This misplaced expert of dolphins spends his sessions with the colonel uselessly “trying to discuss Moby Dick with him”.
Language is the great Catch-22 of the human condition: it’s the very possibility of communicating with others that creates the desire to do so — after all, who would (or could) want what it doesn’t even know it could have? Granted this desire by language, language then fails our every effort to scratch that itch. The band Protest The Hero describes our linguistic situation in the song ‘Spoils’:
“Language is the heart’s lament,
a weak attempt to circumvent
the loneliness inherent
in the search for permanence.”
We humans — “future ghosts who scratch their names in wet cement” — reach out across the existential void separating each person from every other person, using language to compose rough drafts of abstract ideas from feelings to thoughts. We attempt to communicate abstractions via language, which turns concepts into words and ideas into sentences. But words are only ever approximations of that which they’re supposed to represent. Language is like Plato’s conception of art — a poor simulacrum of the shadows that are our own understanding of what’s going on within the cave of the self.
Language isn’t just a faulty invention in Catch-22; it’s also a zero-sum game, a conversational competition, that each player attempts to win by cheating. Language and logic become things to beat the other player over the head with. Nowhere is this more obvious, nor ridiculous, than in the concept of a Catch-22.
There’s no single Catch-22 in Heller’s novel. First, there’s the most famous articulation: if you’re crazy, you can be excused from flying missions, and all you have to do is ask; of course, asking not to fly life-threatening missions is a sane thing to request, meaning you’re not crazy and thus have to fly the missions. Then there’s the statement that “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”. In light of this, a decent reduction of Catch-22 to a first principle might be that it’s an ironclad law that changes with the whims and needs of authority.
Given the utility of a good Catch-22 for malevolent power, what tyrant wouldn’t make use of the Catch-22 that is language? What would-be dictator wouldn’t wrangle words to suit his needs, twisting syntax and garbling grammar to mask his malicious machinations? Orwell described this kind of political language as “the defence of the indefensible”, achieved through the use of “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”.
Add this deliberate misuse to the detriments bleeding out of the wounds caused by sloppy speech, and the gift of language looks more like a curse. Lies and miscommunications are more than mere errors of logic; failures of language are failures of meaning. This, in the end, might be what Catch-22 is all about — assuming it’s about anything at all.