After posting “Looking back, looking ahead” yesterday, I found that Slate was having a Joseph Heller day of its own. Yesterday they posted Walter Kirn’s long think piece on Heller, “War is Heller: Why there are no more Joseph Hellers,” which provided an overview of Heller’s career and the seeming impossibility of such a writer gaining traction in today’s publishing world.  Kirn compares the author’s work to that of other novelists, including several working today:

Philip Roth, you say? Too inward, too high-strung, too trapped in the gravity field of his obsession. Jonathan Franzen? His exhaustive, itemized emotional inventories of comfy but unfulfilled Midwestern types and his virtue-fueled indictments of baddies such as corporate polluters are controlled releases of steam, not savage, concerted do-or-die assaults. And David Foster Wallace’s lampoons, though verbally lavish, tended to end up as tight, self-conscious spirals. They’re engrossing but seldom explosive. By contrast, a Heller novel (even the later ones dismissed by critics as the spasms of an atrophying Goliath) hit the shelves with an echoing blunt impact.

The full essay can be found here. I find Catch-22 to be more ingeniously constructed and less repetitive than Kirn does and hope to write about that soon.

There is also Ron Rosenbaum’s “Seeing Catch-22 twice: The awful truth people miss about Heller’s great novel.” Rosenbaum provides an intriguing interpretation of the novel as, on one level, a refutation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and Rosenbaum is right that to characterize the book as an anti-war novel doesn’t “go far enough.” He also interprets it as a “war on God,” especially how that God is defined by theodicies. He cites chapter 18, “The soldier who saw everything twice,” as “perhaps the thematic high point of the book,” pointing especially to Yossarian’s outburst that concludes the chapter:

“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? … Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! [to warn us of danger] Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He? … What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. …”

Maybe, but I frequently run into the problem that you can’t blame God for a world if you set out from the assumption that God never existed, a concept that is something of a Catch-22 itself. From a formal standpoint, Yossarian as a character created by an omniscient author can’t possibly have the breadth of vision of the author himself, and this outburst strikes me — as powerful and consistent as the argument may be — as something of an indication of Yossarian’s adolescent petulance. Heller’s target may be ideological belief itself, but Yossarian remains one step short of this realization: his anger clouds his vision, and Yossarian’s own recognition of the ultimate metaphysical significance of the Catch-22 principle itself must wait for chapter 39, “The eternal city,” which ends with Snowden’s death.

Rosenbaum’s otherwise interesting essay can be found here. And so long as I’m linking, there’s also the recent New York Times review by Janet Maslin of the new Heller biography and a new memoir of the author by his daughter Erica.