SOURCE: "Violence in the Eternal City: Catch-22 as a Critique of American Culture," in Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 30, December, 1971, pp. 447-53.

[In the following excerpt, Frost examines Joseph Heller's depiction of urban violence in Catch-22 and discusses cultural criticism in the novel.]

Catch-22 is and yet is not a war novel. Published in 1961, it bears the distinctive imprint of civilian America during the 'fifties, an America smugly uncritical and much better prepared for entertainment than for any disturbing illumination. Assessing the literary publications of 1961, Alfred Kazin placed Joseph Heller's work in 'the new category of studiously funny war books .. . the book is an entertainment, not a novel.'¹ As now seems transparently obvious, Catch-22 entertains only so long as the sources of entertainment remain harmless. When they cease to be harmless, the reversals of expectation which had elicited laughter become more disturbing than amusing. Because the expectations reversed involve attitudes, values, and goals central to American culture,²Catch-22 is a serious critique of the total culture, not just of war.

At the fulcrum of the critique, violence operates as a touchstone for cultural crisis. In American history, according to the nation's public rhetoric, violence that is extended, deliberate, and legally sanctioned has been occasioned by wars, and it is with such violence that the novel at first seems primarily concerned. Soon it becomes apparent, however, that this is a new kind of war novel. The foreign enemy has disappeared from the scene and is present only in the inanimate forms of machines, flak or lines on maps. The enemy exists within the Army itself. For a brief moment even the normally obtuse Clevinger recognizes his real enemies as he looks into the faces of the superior officers hearing his case before the Action Board: These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Anti-aircraft Division . . . were there men who hated him more.'³ By dispensing with the foreign enemy, Heller opens up new metaphoric possibilities for the war novel. During the first half of the book the reader is rarely reminded of violence at all. The free enterprise system within a wartime setting seems to have become the non-violent equivalent of war. This in itself is a startling criticism of American culture, for Americans usually expect the activities of military and civilian life to be separate. In Catch-22 the activities interpenetrate, with varying consequences.

Early in the novel the Army turns commercial under the direction of Milo Minderbinder and the M & M—Milo and Minderbinder—syndicate in which everyone has a share. The problems monopolizing attention in Army units stationed on Pianosa are largely problems of civilian life. In the face of Colonel Cathcart's personal ambitions, for example, military objectives recede from sight. The men fly more and more bombing missions not because enemy pressure is increasing, but because the colonel wants to be a general and so keeps boosting his unit's flight record as a means of boosting his own opportunities for promotion. Colonel Cathcart might easily be a Ford dealer urging his salesmen to fill higher and higher sales quotas so that he can get a desk in the district office. The Colonel seems to feel no more anxiety when involving his men in danger, violence, and perhaps death, than he would if he were demanding that they sell more cars. Clearly Heller is deriving from Army life a metaphor for society. With civilian impulses motivating the officers, the novel is comic until violence breaks through to stifle the laughter. One initial consequence of grafting civilian business values onto a military establishment is a gourmet mess hall; a later consequence is Milo's contract to bomb his own camp. When such violence surfaces, the novel's tone alters. There comes the reminder that because the cultural rhetoric of peace-loving America makes war, however justified, an aberration, it should be impossible for a novelist to use the Army as a metaphor for the United States, especially when the country is not even at war—as was true in 1961. The metaphor is possible, however, because of the changes in traditional conceptions of both the Army and the society, and it is through the depiction of these changes that Heller develops his critique.

In the past it has been widely believed that the military performed functions dictated by the society it served. In Catch-22 the Army's goals are no longer shaped by a governing civilian society; they are predominantly internal and autonomous. The Army has become an independent society with its own goals and its own enemies. Civilian life—in the form of the M & M syndicate—is subordinated within the governing military structure. Civilian life without even the cohesion of the military structure is depicted briefly but vividly in a single chapter of concentrated nightmare during which Yossarian searches Rome for a young girl he wants to save. Within civilian society, law supposedly contains violence. In Rome, the operation of justice through laws has been replaced by the authority of physical power. This is the authority signified by the phrase, 'Catch-22'. It is the authority to determine right according to force, not cultural values: 'Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.' Any rhetoric of human rights is a sham. Yossarian recognizes with a shock that there is nothing to appeal to beyond the force itself. People who use 'Catch-22' as authority for their actions refer to no orders, no justifying documents, no law: 'Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.'

This recognition marks a significant departure from earlier explanations of destructive force in society. Late in the nineteenth century Joseph Conrad grappled with a similar question about the origins of a society's violence when he wrote Heart of Darkness. In that novel Kurtz, alone at a remote African trading station, becomes a source of power similar to the source represented by 'Catch-22'. What Conrad seems to mean when he describes Kurtz as 'hollow' is close to what Heller suggests by saying that 'Catch-22' does not exist. Both Kurtz and 'Catch-22' are beyond those socially determined patterns establishing order by means of law. Kurtz cuts himself off from other men, becomes hollow, 'his unlawful soul' beguiled 'beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.' In the end he could no longer be appealed to in any human terms, 'in the name of anything high or low.' And yet there is an important difference between being hollow and not existing. Marlow can argue with Kurtz, while Yossarian cannot argue with the 'Catch'. Because Kurtz has the physical shape of a man, Marlow's struggle with the intangible thing that is Kurtz's soul is not a struggle with the amorphous power of 'Catch-22'. And that makes all the difference. Marlow can struggle and win, however qualified may be his victory. Since Yossarian is struggling against an enemy he cannot even locate, much less confront, winning is impossible, indeed, an irrelevant concept. Yossarian can only escape, for the power of darkness now emanates from an entire culture. It is no longer localized within a man, and culture lacks the power to restrain it.

Walking through Rome, Yossarian witnesses the embodiment of 'Catch-22' in the life of a city. Physical force is the mode of human contact: people chase one another, attack, reduce humanity to its physical components. Such reduction banishes everything associated in Western culture with what traditionally has been called man's higher nature. The reader is kept aware of loss because he is responding to the brutal city through the humanitarian values inherent in Yossarian's perspective. He sees, for example, as Yossarian does, that with justice gone, Rome's law enforcement officers are in a position similar to that of the Army officers. Like their military counterparts they use force ungoverned by its original social function. This Yossarian learns after he comes upon 'a single civilian Italian with books and a slew of civilian policemen with armlocks and clubs. The screaming, struggling civilian was a dark man with a face white as flour from fear . . ."Help!" he shrieked shrilly in a voice strangling on its own emotion, as the policemen carried him to the open doors in the rear of the ambulance and threw him inside. "Police! Help! Police!" ' The scene becomes a Joycean epiphany for Yossarian. First he 'smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous cry for aid, then saw with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that they were not, perhaps, intended as a call for police but as a heroic warning from the grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman with a club and a gun and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up. "Help! Police!" the man had cried, and he could have been shouting of danger.' This epiphany gives to Yossarian the awareness that society is not organized according to humanitarian values, that its protective institutions such as laws and law-enforcement agencies are no longer subordinate to these values, and that in their place are the brute connections made by the power of physical force. Violence is the new connective bond between people.

In place of social conduct modelled on rational and humanitarian principles, Yossarian views a scene of grotesque images reminiscent of paintings by Bruegel. The source for the grotesque is suggested by the chapter's title, 'The Eternal City'. Rome has been called the 'Eternal City' since its proud days of cultural achievement when it seemed that man had built a city which would endure forever. Even after its fall from the glorious days of the Empire, Rome has remained the very symbol of Western civilization. Joseph Heller, juxtaposing that symbol against Yossarian's vision of Rome, suggests that man is cut off from the secular source of his spiritual life because the inherited culture with its humanistic ideals is no longer operative in the life of the city. The techniques of the grotesque upon which Heller relies to portray this severance are in the tradition of a painter like Bosch, whose altarpieces portray an earlier severance—that of man cut off from the religious source of his spiritual life. In such grotesque worlds, whatever the source of the grotesque, man is shown adrift without meaning in a sea of absurdity. The absence of meaning is a source of the enduring terror produced by a true grotesque. Those violent aspects of life which are ignored, assimilated, or purged in the everyday world familiar to us, catch our attention immediately in the grotesque world where attempts to contain violence—often successful in the familiar world—inevitably fail. When this happens, as it does in Heller's vision of The Eternal City', violence becomes the basic ingredient in life, both individual and social. The violence is terrifying not so much because the individual actions are of great magnitude as because there is no reason for the violence of the actions. There is no reason for anything in the 'abidingly strange'⁴ world of the grotesque.

Yossarian's journey through Rome's underworld of the doomed is to him a nightmarish revelation of a truth previously there but hidden from his sight because he had been so absorbed in himself. For the first time Yossarian has gone to Rome looking not for exploitable sex, but for a young girl he hopes to save from exploitation. Consequently, he is for the first time a spectator rather than a participant, and he sees what was there all along. He discovers that his cultural assumptions do not fit reality. This discovery creates a crisis of belief in culture, a crisis experienced by many Americans today. The magnitude of the crisis is probably accentuated by the importance attached to the belief. During the nineteenth century, as J. Hillis Miller has said,⁵ many Victorian intellectuals became convinced that God had disappeared from their world, and they tried desperately to replace their loss of His presence with aspects of their secular life. Their answer to the intellectual crisis which accompanied God's withdrawal was to substitute culture for religion. Precisely because that substitute has moulded Yossarian's assumptions about life, he is ill-fitted for existence in the world of Catch-22. Yossarian's stance as misfit is funny until the final chapters of the novel when his world is judged.

The effect of this judgment is to transform his rôle of misfit into that of victim. Heller portrays Yossarian as a man whose innate goodness withstands the pressures of exposure to a corrupting environment. Yossarian's final response is to resist by turning his back on his society. In all this, of course, he follows the old American pattern of which Huck Finn is the classic prototype. Still, Yossarian is different from his nineteenth century counterpart. Because their societies differ, the concluding attitudes to American culture differ. Huck travels through a sparsely populated, agrarian world, unsophisticated and uncomplicated by our present standards. As he floats down the river with Jim, the very sparsity of population makes it possible to identify victims and assailants. Behind the acts of violence and the threats of violence lies a bevy of deadly sins, all readily recognizable. Even in the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, which might seem to prefigure Heller's preoccupation with 'senseless' violence, the violence is fitted to a pattern and follows the predictable steps of a family feud. Twain attacks the foibles of men, the driving passions that make them weak creatures, and certainly his vision would make one doubt the possibility that culture could ever perform the functions once performed by religion, simply because one cannot depend on humanity where lofty tasks are concerned. Yet Twain does not give up hope entirely. With the territory ahead goes the hope that Huck might find some life better than society along the river. And that life would be on the American continent.

Yossarian, on the other hand, lives in a society which seems to concentrate its energies on making life an ever more impersonal experience. Victims and assailants rarely face each other. Bureaucratic organizations separate commands from the men commanded. Purveyors of abstraction manipulate language in order to manipulate reality. Language used in this fashion lacks moral aspect in any humanistic terms. It is directed not to individual men but to groups, and, more often, merely to the group's social function. Colonel Cathcart uses language in this way when he issues commands that change the number of missions to be flown. His concern in designating the number is with other numbers—those set by his rival officers at other bases—and not with the men who fly the missions, with Orr, Dunbar, Yossarian, and the rest. And as Cathcart is separated from the men he sometimes sends to their deaths, so also are the men separated from the victims on the ground who receive their bombs. Cathcart is separated from his victims by the abstract, non-human language of official notices; the men are separated from their victims by the literal distance between their aircraft and the ground. Both separations are clearly those of distance between men who are joined together as assailant and victim. In these, as well as the many other similar instances in the novel, the distance between assailant and victim makes violence decidedly easier. As distance increases, any emotional and psychological—to say nothing of moral—reaction on the part of the assailant decreases. Under such conditions, a man's responsibility to and for other men rarely influences behavior. The distance between men is convenient for violence, but not for humane life, especially in a highly organized, densely populated environment which in itself encourages impersonality.

Even when he lights out for the territory ahead of the rest, Yossarian's situation is different from Huck's on the frontier, although the impulses behind the flights have much in common. By offering Sweden as an alternative for Yossarian, Heller suggests that there is a way to escape the dehumanizing forces at work in Yossarian's own culture. By avoiding any suggestion of how life in Sweden, another urbanized Western nation, will be fundamentally different, Heller does not make the alternative convincing. Only the desire for the alternative rings true. Heller, like so many of his contemporaries, arrives at a cultural impasse. After damning the present he clings precariously to the values espoused by nineteenth century humanism. The way out of violence and out of the 'Catch' is to be humane. In a society governed by force, where authorities are ready to use violence with little, sometimes no, provocation, to be humane is to be a victim of that impersonal force. Yossarian seems to opt for the alternative provided, ironically, by the threats of Nately's whore. This is the alternative of personal, passionate violence by a woman who blames Yossarian for her lover's death because Yossarian brought her the news. Nately's whore is not deterred by the impersonality of the actual assailant; she embodies the abstract assailant in a man with whom she can contend. By making Yossarian responsible for Nately's death, she finds her own way for humanizing impersonal violence. Her way, we know, is to create an illusion, and we are left wondering whether Yossarian, too, has solved his problems by creating an illusion.

These are scarcely optimum conditions for realizing nineteenth century hopes for culture. Indeed, these are conditions running counter to humanitarian ideals. In the world of Catch-22 these conditions destroy culture. They do so because while culture may be propelled by humane impulses, War and the Army are not. The destruction is not immediately apparent within the Army, where a rigid hierarchical system of rank with power staves off chaos. In civilian society no such hierarchy exists. The cultural cornerstones removed, the fragile edifice topples. When Yossarian wanders the streets of Rome looking for a particular girl, he finds instead a barrage of people without names or faces. These people have only the impersonality of violent physical actions, actions which have no explanations, no motives, not even the greed of Huck's notorious companions, the King and the Duke. Yossarian sees a city where culture has disappeared as the binding force by which an impersonal environment is humanized. The effect of this disappearance becomes clear to Yossarian in the stark and unequivocal terms of Snowden's secret: 'Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out the window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.'

Heller's use of the war novel as a genre appropriate for a serious critique of American culture is not original. Earlier novelists including Stephen Crane, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway used the genre to expose their culture's failure to provide ideals appropriate to the actual experience of war. After World War II several novelists, for whom the war years constituted an initiation into adult life, took this accusation much further. For them the War was—and continues to be—the event that destroyed their belief in America as a society with a culture shaped by humanistic traditions. The first war novel to express this disillusionment was Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948). Both The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22 use World War II for their settings, and yet the central conflict in each involves not the armies that the War made enemies, but men made enemies within the American Army and, more broadly, within American culture. The vision of the United States created by these two novels is that of a country with conflicting sets of cultural norms. One set has as its aims the acquisition of inanimate objects, and of the power to treat other men as if they were the abstract progency of a computer. The other is dedicated above all else to humanizing life. If the rhetoric of the nation supports the second, the actions of its leaders together with its institutions—political, economic, and social—are directed toward the first. And thus exposure to the phenomenon of war does not seem to have been in itself as important to novelists in World War II as to their counterparts in World War I, but exposure to life in a highly organized society, in a military establishment which clearly has a goal of destruction and openly values force, was more important. Experiencing the shock of army life during war, the novelists learned that in the opinion of the men whom their culture's values designated heroes, 'life is not the remarkable, the precious, or necessary thing we think it is,' as a character says in John Hawkes's superb war novel, The Cannibal (1949).

Behind the literary treatments of the War, then, lies the assumption not that World War II altered the nature of Western civilization, but that, to those who would look closely, it revealed what was already there. In the extreme situation of war, things concealed in humanistic rhetoric during peacetime existed without the rhetoric because the period of war, ironically, permitted honesty about the culture's aims. The War justified the use of force in any form to achieve goals, whatever the price paid by individuals. It worked according to the principle of 'Catch-22', and almost everyone accepted the 'Catch' without doubting its validity, much less its existence. The novel's most terrifying implication is that the 'Catch' still operates in 'peacetime' America today.

¹ Alfred Kazin, 'Literature,' in 'The Year's Developments in the Arts and Sciences,' The Great Ideas Today: 1962 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1962), p. 148.

² 'Culture' is being used throughout this article in its sociological, rather than strictly artistic, meaning.

³ Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1961).

⁴ Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 183. In his history of the development of the grotesque Kayser isolates distinguishing characteristics, and it is upon his discussion that my remarks about the function of the grotesque in Catch-22 are based.

⁵ See especially his introduction to The Disappearance of God (N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1965).