Catch-22: Book Review and Review

Catch-22: Book Review and Review of the Concept of 'Catch 22' Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is particularly interesting to read today, in light of the recent presidential campaign of 2004. The Bush vs. Kerry campaign was waged against a backdrop of war, and its rhetorical terms centered on the concepts of just vs. unjust wars.

But Joseph Heller would not doubt ask, what is a just war? Is not the very concept of conflict, at its core exercise, a state of continual injustice, of subjecting the human individual to a constant threat of death and spirit-eviscerating destruction? The text of Heller's novel suggests that it is, on its surface, insane to want to die fighting a war.

Its title refers to a code of military ethics that states that one does not have to fight if one is crazy, but one must not be crazy if one does not want to fight. Hence, the title also refers to the inherent contradiction of this code, and the contradictions of war itself. Yet the fates of entire nations still rest upon this collective insanity, the insanity of war.

Today, individuals are still intent upon sustaining the myth that to fight for honor and one's country and to die for it is a great gift, rather than something horrific. Yoassarin, the paranoid hero of the novel desires to leave service, especially after dealing with the death of one of the men of his unit.

He too, he finds, is subject to the Catch-22 clause that to be excused from military duty by reason of insanity, one must be insane enough to want to fight on, rather than to live and opt out of armed conflict.

Thus, the central problem of the novel is not only the insanity of war, but also how to opt out of a system that demands a clear yes or no -- either one must validate the war and insanely agree to armed combat to be excused, or one must validate the war by continuing to fight on, while sanely refusing and saying that war is death, thereby proving one's own sanity and proving one's fitness to fight.

To apply this to contemporary military terms, one could say that a similar Catch-22 is evident in the rhetoric of leaders that would justify the need to stay in Iraq to sustain the peace, even while the American military presence creates more conflict. Although more conflict might be generated following a sudden withdrawal, if America had not intervened in the first place, the nation might not be nearly so unstable.

Although not quite as all-inclusive in its tautological logic as Catch-22 in the novel, again this real-life scenario highlights the illogic that the heightened climate and culture of the military promotes to this day. Against the supposedly just war of World War II, Heller highlights the inclusive philosophy of wartime that locks commanders and combatants into a certain, fixed way of thinking -- even by resisting the common cultural tropes and norms of military society, one finds one's self subject to the military's terms.

But this is not true only of engaged conflict. For instance, one can refuse to enter the world of business, but by doing so, one must, in one's resistance, resist in the common cultural language that is particular to the corporate language of business.

To take just one example, if one refuses to become a corporate IBM drone, to make one's language comprehensible to 'the man,' one must adopt the alternate language of the counterculture, by growing one's hair long on one's head, if one is male, or on one's legs if one is female, and resist by actively refusing to participate in the dominant cultural status symbols of having a fancy car and placing a high degree of emphasis on a pricey degree and place of residence.

If one states one is anti-capitalist, yet still attempts to make money and purchase comfortable accessories to one's lifestyle, one is accused of being a hypocrite and holding up the cultural values of society even more than one who tries to 'live the life' of the ideal executive apprentice.

Similarly, in the novel, Yossarin finds that resistance is futile over the course of the conflict he suffers, for in the language of the military and because he is already locked within the system after being conscripted, all of his intellectual resistance is interpreted with a language that encourages him to sacrifice his life for the goal of the wartime cause, at all costs.

When he resists, he helps the enemy, he does not help the cause of humanity, when he fights he kills human beings, but this is supposed to be good for the cause of humanity, because it serves the army cause. Thus, war in essence, sheds one of one's private language and life, to create one's own system of values.

But this aspect of the military is similar to many other spheres and facets of society that create insular cultures of their own devising, and lock participants in, once entrapped, within a particular system of meaning from which they cannot escape.

Much like gender, as well as the corporate climate of business, where an individual can supposedly resist gender dichotomies by dressing in 'drag,' he or she is always speaking the language of gender, either by dressing up as a woman or as a man, because one has to use the terms of gender that are comprehensible to one's particular culture. Even by acting out against the culture, one is subject to it.