Modern Critical Interpretations of Catch 22 - Essay Example

"We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, butby his fantasies as well" (Richard Hofstadter) Discuss the manipulation of history in any TWO of your chosen texts. The texts that will be considered are Catch 22 and Jazz, both of which deal with the problems of history and the individual's relationship to the manipulation of what did and did not 'happen'. In Catch 22 there are various situations presented from different points of view and the reader learns that any sense of historical reality depends largely upon perspective. This mutable reality is also linked to the famous "catch" of the title, which will be discussed later and shows the absurdity of the modern world. In Jazz, the improvisational form of the art is used to suggest how the past is changeable through the perspectives of the couple who are slowly falling out of love with one another. An event in their past, like a theme in jazz music, may be different upon each 'playing' or 'remembering'. In Catch 22 time is represented as a manipulative continuum in which what occurs depends upon the person seeing it. The very structure of the book seems to reflect the paranoid and near-to-insane characters who inhabit it. Thus the novel starts with ten chapters dealing with the present, before flashing back to the past of the events in the Siege of Bologna for a few chapters. The present appears once again before flashing backwards into the past. The final section of the book is set once again in the present, but with a more formal and linear narrative than the fragmentation what characterizes the other parts. Slipping backwards in time, the reader learns how the characters avoid the true horror of what occurred on the undefended Italian mountain village with the rape and murder of a completely innocent girl. The soldiers do not want to admit what has occurred and so they at first deny it or obscure it through the various bureaucratic absurdities of the military situation they face. The insanity within both their present and past world is best described by the various 'catches' that the soldiers must face, the most famous of which is the catch 22 of the title: There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. (Heller, 1961) This kind of bizarre circular logic, which is obviously absurd and nonsensical, but is impossible to deny due to its own frame of reference. In the same way a person who tries to fully understand the past must be crazy, but if he is crazy he will then not have a genuine grasp of what happens. Again, a circular logic that wraps around itself and forbids any kind of rational in-roads into comprehension. The novel revolves around a kind of complex sense of dj vu that many of the characters express. Thus the chaplain has an "impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him" (Heller, 1961). The use of the word "foredooming" is integral to this section. The past cannot be understood, but it is most readily available to the characters through the overwhelming sense of dj vu that many of them feel. The Chaplain is central to this questioning of history, and this is done through the emergence of his questioning of his faith. The past is a place in which people were profoundly ignorant compared to the knowledge of the Twentieth Century, but it is also the place in which the scriptures of his faith were supposedly handed to mankind from God. The Chaplain muses on this paradox in the following manner: Did it seem possible, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven. (Heller, 1961) The implied answer to both questions would appear to be "no" - and as such the whole of history is called into question. The Chaplain suggests that nothing is certain within this section. The plot of Jazz is essentially given in the opening paragraph: there is no 'suspense' in the traditional sense of the word for the reader to enjoy. The whole of the book after this takes the history that has already been given to the reader and plays variations upon this. The narrative is in the form of disperse threads, all of which start with this basic plot-line, but which eventually move far away from it. The "paranoid" person within Jazz is Violet, who attempts to disfigure the face of her beautiful rival (even though she is already dead) while the woman is lying in her coffin. This is an attempt to destroy "history" through making her rival's face disfigured in death: as if it was never beautiful in the first place. Once again, the manipulation of history is attempted within the mad-woman's slashing knife as it fails to really change anything. After this Violet indulges in an affair with another man, but this fails to attract her estranged husband Joe back to her. So she then decides that she will fall in love with him all over again. Essentially she attempts to resurrect their own history through a purposeful effort to recreate it. But Violet, while she has the self-belief that perhaps can only be held by a mad person, realizes that she has failed when all she can follow through on is mundane tasks such as cooking him meals and ironing his handkerchiefs. She can never love him again in the same way because that time has been irretrievably lost. She is doomed in her Proustian attempt to recapture "lost time" because she lacks the imaginative tools to truly relive it. The meals and the chores are merely the empty vestiges of what had once been complete. Actions do accomplish something, but not what she had expected. They are merely reminders of what has been lost. In many ways the actions are like a sharp memory that tugs at a person even though they wish to avoid it. Violet's attempt to resurrect the past contrasts with the characters in Catch 22 who attempt to avoid it, but both are doomed in their attempts. The past does exist as a concrete, unchangeable whole, but it cannot be brought into the present because of this. Governments and armies may attempt to purge the past of inconvenient occurrences, but they fail in the face of the individual's recall of it. Podhoretz (2000) suggests that Catch 22 in fact reflects the fact that increasing numbers of people were suspicious of governments during the Cold War. The prospect of complete destruction by nuclear war made many people suspect both the competence and the sanity of their governments. In this sense the governments are seen as "paranoid" in the same way as the soldiers are. In many ways Heller's vision may be seen as similar to that of Kurt Vonnegut (1999) in Slaughterhouse Five. In this novel the lack of certainty of time, as the protagonist moves from one decade to another without explanation, reflects an alienation of the individual. Vonnegut sees the needless destruction of Dresden near the end of WWII as a symbol for this type of paranoid alienation, just as the catch-22 is an embodiment in Catch-22. In one sense Morrison's peculiar writing style and non-linear structure within Jazz is an attempt to relive the creation of the art form of jazz by African-Americans more than a century ago. Morrison has stated that she wants her work "to be - a private thing for public consumption", and this is most clear within the text of Jazz. It has a gossipy, informal feel at times, as if Morrison is chatting with the reader and revealing the secrets of her characters' past that they would not want revealed, but which they cannot avoid showing because Morrison takes on the role of the omniscient narrator within the book. Morrison has explicitly stated that "the plot is just the melody" (Middleton, 1999) in Jazz, much, one might argue as the physical "events" of history are just the bare bones upon which the more interesting body of historical interpretation is built. The actual plot of Jazz might appear to be rather traditional: a man fall for a much younger woman than his wife, younger woman dies, wife attempts to win husband back but fails because he is forever lost. But beyond these bare bones there is much more. Just as a beginning jazz musician can perhaps perfectly mimic the basic theme played by a master, he will eventually become lost as the true heart of jazz appears with improvisation, so the characters are lost once they attempt to improvise upon the themes that have been set for them. Violet learns that it is impossible to escape your past through bringing a more distant, happier time back to life. Both are irredeemably lost. In both novels the reader is meant to feel a number of different emotions for the characters. For example, as Bloom (2001) suggests, the reader of Catch 22 is meant to feel fear with the airmen as they know that each mission might be their last. The reader should also feel pity for them as they are so uncertain about their fates, hope as they think that they might crash successfully in Sweden and so escape the war. Also, exasperation and a kind of morbid irony at the absurdity of life with the catch-22 that all are caught within. In Jazz the reader may feel sorry for Violet and yet also empathize (if not outright sympathize) with her husband as he has escaped her near-madness with another woman. Violet's gradual disintegration and hopeless attempts to capture the joy of young love that has utterly vanished may also inspire sadness within the reader. In this sense the reader is made to feel the same paranoia as the characters and also to understand the terror that they feel before the immutability of history. The reader may attempt to remain distant because of the irony of the books, but will be drawn in nevertheless. To conclude, both these novels have a number of paranoid and/or near insane characters who live within an often nightmarish world in which the present is uncertain and the past a mystery. These characters attempt to define "history" in the peculiarly intense manner of those suffering form the various mental ailments that appear to afflict them, but history always seems to dominate them in the end. In Catch 22 the terrible "history" that many of the soldiers have been involved in, including the massacre and rape of innocent civilians cannot be hidden within the maze-like morass of the logic found within the "catch 22". In the same way, Violet cannot avoid that her husband has indeed fallen in love with a now-dead seventeen year-old, even though she attempts to disfigure the face that he loved and also seeks to recapture a long dead love that she and her husband once shared. Fantasy and reality are mixed within the minds of the paranoid, and they are cursed by both whereas the nominally "sane", such as the reader and this writer, are supposedly able to tell the difference between the two. This is perhaps a qualified "supposed" as both writers suggest that madness is not far from the surface of any psyche in the modern world, due to the pressures of society and the madness inherent therein. ________________________________ Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations of "Catch 22". Chelsea House, New York: 2001. Heller, Joseph. Catch-22, Scribner, New York: 1961. Middleton, D. Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Routledge, New York: 1999. Morrison, Toni Jazz, Vintage, New York: 2004. Podhoretz, Norman. "Looking Back at Cath-22". Commentary, Feb. 1., 2000. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Everyman, New York: 1993. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-5. Dial Press Trade Paperback, New York: 1999. Read More