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"Joseph Heller consistent? The author of Catch-22? Nah, it was his inconsistency
that made him famous. You never knew what Yossarian (his fictional double) was
going to do. One day he was blacking out all the adjectives in enlisted men's
letters, the next day all the articles. One day he was all for defeating Hitler
and the next day he was deserting the Army and going to Sweden. That, random
impulsiveness, is what made him so attractive — and got Catch-22 voted the seventh best novel of the 20th Century."
I know, but the consistency I am referring to is
different from all that. It's a consistency of character. In Catch-22 Yossarian is a beast to women.
They're either prim nurses you "grab by the snatch" or
"wonderful tomatoes" you "should have been screwing."
That's the way it is with his whole animal-house gang. Amusement when the nurse
tries to get away and irritation when a fellow officer quits on a tomato
without giving her to a buddy is all they feel. In a recent biography (Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of
Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty) we see that Heller was a beast to women
all his life.
"You're taking the man to be the same as the
fictional character."
Yes, just as his daughter Erica does in her recent
book, Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph
Heller was Dad and Life was a Cath-22. To her he's Yossarian and he's got
all Yossarian's callousness. She thinks she sees herself belittled in one of
his books and asks, "How could you write about me that way?"
"What makes you think you're interesting enough to write about?" he
replies.
"But that's just his daughter's report, of one
incident. It could be biased and the incident could be exceptional."
Could be, but then there's what he said to his wife
when she asked him why, after 39 years of marriage, he was leaving her.
"Because you are old and fat and ugly," he said. That's reported from
outside, on good authority. What we see in the life is what we see in the
novel: consistent, juvenile, '50s-male beastliness.
"OK, this novelist was a bastard. But that
shouldn't disturb me. I'm an English professor, I know that a lot of novelists
were bastards, and I know that that shouldn't make any difference in the value
we put on their novels."
But this bastardly set of values is right in the
novel, front and center, up for admiration.
"True, but they're expressed by a character who
feels pity for all the prostitutes suffering at the hands of American soldiers
in Rome, and for all the abused wives and children back home, and all the
miserable people everywhere. Doesn't that make him a lesser bastard?"
No. It only makes him a contradictory bastard. If his
humane feelings were genuine they'd be consistent. His expressions of pity, all
in abstractions, all at a distance, are clearly phony. They make a claim for
humanitarian credit that only sentimental people will honor — you know, people
who don't care whether or not feelings are consistent, the ones who so love the
feeling of the moment that they quit thinking.
"So all those professors who put Catch-22 on their reading lists, and
made it the subject of symposia, and backed those who made it number seven,
have quit thinking?"
They've quit thinking the way academics are supposed
to think. Those who take Socrates as their model must always respect logical
connections — part with whole, premise with conclusion, principle with
practice, cause with effect, ends with means.
"Always?"
Always. Even as they teach literature. Poets claim
to be "large," they "contain multitudes," and therefore,
according to Walt Whitman, they can very well contradict themselves. Professors
wanting to escape from logic can claim the poet's license, but they won't get
it from Socrates. They know that. That's why they so often go to other
philosophers.
"Who issues such licenses?"
Not scientific philosophers. Not British philosophers.
Not continental philosophers, even — except maybe down at the tail end.
Absurdists issue licenses. They're the ones English professors took Catch-22 to right away. If reason is
"useless" and logic has been "dethroned" then you can go
back to class with your license. If anybody objects let them go to Sartre and
Camus, who will show them the larger (existential) permit.
"You mean English professors were still driving
on those licenses in 2000, when they backed Catch
22 for seventh place?"
Who knows? You can see the beliefs implied by an
intellectual's word-choice but that's a long way from guessing what's behind
them. Thomas Powers writes (in the 8 March London
Review) that Norman Podhoretz changed his mind about Catch-22 because it "had done 'moral, intellectual, and
spiritual harm' by undermining support for American military endeavors
Podhoretz happened to back." Happened
to back. There's the belief: values are random, some backed by this person,
others backed by that. No sign that values can be rationally ordered, no
recognition that one of the values is the value of defeating Nazi Germany, nor
that it might be a shared value, nor that there might be rational justification
for it. It's just one of the values
that Podhoretz, at the moment, happens to hold.
That's a pretty close fit with Yossarian's beliefs.
And I think it's a close fit with the postmodern philosophies appealed to to
defend those beliefs. I can see and know that. Whether Powers has those
philosophies in mind, though, whether he would acknowledge and defend them in a
classroom, that's something I don't know about him (or, indeed, about any of
the public intellectuals writing in the LRB), and can only guess at.
