Catch 22, and the quest for sanity

GJV Prasad

Groucho Marx is credited as saying that he refused to join any club which would admit him as a member, implying that he only wanted to join a club that wouldn’t admit him! Rule one that could generate from this is that you can only join a club which would admit you, but a club that would admit you isn’t a good enough club to join! That is a typical Catch 22. Almost like a rule that states that the government can change only if you vote, but you can vote only if you support the government. I am sure all of us can come up with rules like this, being governed by bureaucracies, whose only work seems to be to put up such obstacles for everything. You can only apply for benefits for the homeless if you have an identity card with an address. But if you have an address, you are not homeless and you cannot avail of the benefits.

The inspiration for this column is not any maze of bureaucratic rules but a book (which was made into a film later), a cult classic, called ‘Catch 22’. Its writer Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, 101 years ago. Like others of his generation, he took part in World War-II. He joined the US Army Air Corps in 1942, when he was 19. He served in Italy and flew about 60 combat missions. This experience of war went into writing ‘Catch 22’ (1962). If I were to choose two books about WW-II, I would select this one and Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death’ (1969). As you can see, it always takes time to think and write about traumatic cataclysmic events.

Heller actually began writing the novel in 1953, much after the war. He has said that what he thought of first were a couple of lines about the main character Yossarian and the chaplain. He thought of writing a very short novel and began to think of other characters and the plot. He finished one chapter within a week and it was published as a standalone story a couple of years later, in 1955, when he had not progressed much with the book. The story was published as ‘Catch-18’. However, when it eventually became a novel, the title was changed to ‘Catch 22’, which certainly sounds better!

The novel is about the war experiences of Yossarian, who is in the Army Air Corps (as Heller himself was). Yossarian tries to escape combat missions (we see him faking an illness to escape the insane war), but he is forced by the military administration to stay on. His officer in command keeps raising the number of missions you have to fly in order to complete a tour of duty and return home. So, the airmen in his unit can never get a break. Only a mental breakdown can allow the medical staff to certify that an officer is in no condition to fly. An army psychiatrist explains that the catch in the rule that allows a pilot to be certified as not being mentally fit to fly combat missions is that it also states that the pilot has to request mental evaluation first. However, such a request demonstrates that the officer is sane! This then is Catch 22, a term that has taken on a life of its own outside the book. It is a crazy world after all.

This bureaucratic world that enmeshes us with rules which we sometimes admire — it takes such a wicked and smart brain to think them up — is part of all varieties of ideological systems. This is the stuff of Jaspal Bhatti’s comedies (and think how easily this world could become tragic in its absurdity). However, what the novel and the term bring out is the way in which the lives of ordinary people do not matter at all to the powers that be. Our lives are theirs to be sacrificed at the altars of power and greed, whatever way they choose to sacrifice us. Sometimes, I think novels like ‘Catch 22’ and ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ should be compulsory reading for all, both the leaders and the ordinary populace. More and more of us need to be sane in this insane world.

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