The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joseph Heller · a novel in forty-two chapters · Simon and Schuster, New York, 1961 · scored on Heller’s English in the 1961 text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Satire and black comedy in the form of the war novel: a novel of institutions built of logic loops, with a death at its centre approached, withheld and at last opened
Mythos
The self-sealing rule as the order of things; the secret at the centre of a labyrinth; the naked man in the tree, an Adam and a crucified figure at once; Mammon as a cheerful young man; the holy fool who rehearses escape; the oldest refusal
Phase
Pianosa, off the Italian coast, in 1944, with flights over Bologna, Ferrara and Avignon and leave in Rome; published in 1961, with a satire of the McCarthy years in its loyalty oaths and its interrogation
Presentation
Fiction; forty-two chapters in the third person, most titled with a character’s name, told out of chronological order and circling back to one death until it is told whole in the forty-first
Register
Vaudeville logic, comic reversal and the definition that eats itself for most of its length, turning in the late chapters to a realist register of terror
Scale
A squadron as a state in miniature, its army, commerce, medicine, church, sex and money, and death and the body, held in one structure across some four hundred and fifty pages
Governing Proposition
On the island of Pianosa, off the Italian coast, in 1944, a squadron of B-25 bombardiers lives under a rule that seals itself, and the number of missions a man must fly keeps rising. The rule is run again and again, through promotions, oaths, trials, manifests and profits, while one death over Avignon is approached in fragments and withheld until the forty-first chapter. The wager of the novel is that the war novel can be told as farce without losing its dead: that an institution’s circular logic and the body it destroys are one mechanism seen from outside and from inside, so that the comedy becomes the instrument of the horror rather than relief from it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on a joke that is also a declaration: “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.” The place is the island of Pianosa, off the Italian coast, in 1944, among a squadron of B-25 bombardiers; the flights go out over Bologna, Ferrara and Avignon, and the leave goes to Rome.
The early chapters are portraits. Most of the forty-two are titled with a name, “The Texan”, “Clevinger”, “Havermeyer”, “Doc Daneeka”, “Chief White Halfoat”, “Hungry Joe”, “McWatt”, and the book moves through the squadron one figure at a time rather than along a line of events. The narration is out of chronological order from the start, and it circles back over the same missions and the same death.
In the early chapters a question is asked at a briefing: “Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?” The book does not answer it for four hundred pages. Its first chapter had appeared in 1955, in New World Writing, under the title “Catch-18”; the number was changed before the book was published.
Movement II
The catch is explained by Doc Daneeka, and the exchange that ends the explanation is the book in small: “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” and the answer, “It’s the best there is.” The rule seals itself; it binds by being circular, and it needs no reason, only a form.
The figure is run again and again. Major Major, whose name is a vaudeville turn and whose promotion was made by an I.B.M. machine, may be seen in his office only when he is not in it. A dead man in Yossarian’s tent cannot be removed because he never officially arrived. Doc Daneeka is declared dead because he was on a manifest. There is a loyalty oath crusade, and there is Clevinger’s trial.
Over the loops Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions a man must fly, from the twenties at the start to eighty by the end. The repetition is the argument, the rule everywhere because it is the order of things, and it is also the book’s cost: Scheisskopf’s parades, much of the Major de Coverley and Chief White Halfoat material and stretches of the hospital restate rather than advance.
Movement III
Milo’s syndicate is the book’s second order. Milo, Mammon as a cheerful young man, contracts with both sides of the war, and the syndicate in which everybody has a share ends by owning the war it supplies.
Milo bombs his own squadron for the Germans, and the squadron forgives him when it learns the profit. The episode sets the commercial truth beside the bureaucratic one: the institution that makes its own rules has a market inside it, and the market is forgiven because it pays.
Rome holds sex and money. Nately’s old man, the hundred-and-seven-year-old in the brothel, argues that Italy will survive America as it survived everyone, the old world set against the new. The women of these chapters are appetite and victim; the book discloses them no further, and what it says of them is the men’s view, not its own.
Movement IV
Before Rome there are rises out of the farce. The chaplain lives in dread, and in the sense of having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral, a sight he cannot tell from memory: an Adam and a crucified figure at once. Kid Sampson dies under McWatt’s propeller, and McWatt turns into the mountain.
In Rome an old woman in a brothel, after the girls have been driven out, gives the law of the book its plainest statement: the catch, she says, gives them the right to do anything that cannot be stopped. Power needs no reason, only a form, and the comic mechanism the reader has held since the early chapters is about to be turned on the reader.
In chapter 39, “The Eternal City”, Yossarian walks alone through Rome at night: beaten dogs, a beaten boy, a soldier in convulsions. Aarfy’s murdered maid lies on the pavement below the window, and the police arrest Yossarian for being in Rome without a pass. It is the height of the book’s terror, and nothing in it is a joke.
Movement V
Chapter 41 is “Snowden”. The death over Avignon, approached in fragments across the book, is told whole: the wound is opened under the flak suit, and the secret is given. “Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret.” “The spirit gone, man is garbage.” “Ripeness was all.”
It lands because it has been withheld. Told in sequence, it would be one terrible incident early in a war novel; told here, it is the book’s reason, and the farce of the earlier chapters is seen to have been the same mechanism, the institution’s logic indifferent to the body it governs, watched from outside.
The last chapter is “Yossarian”. Orr, the simpleton who kept crashing into the sea, has escaped to Sweden, and his crashes are revealed as the plan behind it; Yossarian leaps to follow him, and Nately’s whore lunges at him with a knife as he runs. The ending is a comic deliverance that the book’s physics has spent four hundred pages denying, told in a different, nearly sentimental key: a moral choice made against the book’s evidence, and the book’s own choice.
Act III · The Twelve
The lowest of the twelve. The book’s engine is a single logical figure, the self-sealing rule, and it is run again and again: in the catch itself, in the loyalty oath crusade, in Major Major, who may be seen in his office only when he is not in it, in Clevinger’s trial, in the dead man in Yossarian’s tent who cannot be removed because he never officially arrived, in Doc Daneeka declared dead because he was on a manifest. The repetition is partly the argument, for the rule is everywhere because it is the order of things, and the mechanism must be in the reader’s hands before it is turned on the reader in Rome. What holds the axis there is the subtractive test. Scheisskopf’s parades, much of the Major de Coverley and Chief White Halfoat material and stretches of the hospital could go with little loss: they restate rather than advance.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: an institution that makes its own rules can make any rule binding by making it circular, and power needs no reason, only a form. The book gives the statement to an old woman in a Roman brothel after the girls have been driven out: the catch, she says, gives them the right to do anything that cannot be stopped. The second disclosure is commercial. Milo’s syndicate contracts with both sides, Milo bombs his own squadron for the Germans, and the squadron forgives him when it learns the profit. The third lies under both, and it is Snowden’s secret: “Man was matter”. The book holds the bureaucratic, the commercial and the bodily truth together. What keeps it below the summit is that its women are disclosed only as appetite and as victim, and the disclosure about them is the men’s, not the book’s.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, and it comes late. Chapter 39, “The Eternal City”, is the height of the book’s terror: Yossarian walks alone through a night Rome of beaten dogs, a beaten boy and a soldier in convulsions, and the police arrest him for being in Rome without a pass while Aarfy’s murdered maid lies on the pavement below the window. Chapter 41, Snowden’s wound opened under the flak suit, is the other summit, and it lands because the book has withheld it for four hundred pages. There are smaller rises earlier: the chaplain’s dread and his sense of having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral, the death of Kid Sampson under McWatt’s propeller and McWatt’s turn into the mountain. What holds the axis there is frequency: for most of its length the register is farce, and farce does not elevate.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The particular has become archetypal in the plainest way open to a book: its title has become the name of a pattern of human bondage, used by people who have not read it. That is myth made, not evoked. Inside the book the archetypal structure bears weight. Snowden is the secret at the centre of a labyrinth the narrative walks around until it has the courage to enter; the naked man in the tree at his funeral is an Adam and a crucified figure at once, seen by a chaplain who cannot tell vision from memory; Milo is Mammon as a cheerful young man; Orr, the simpleton who keeps crashing into the sea, is the holy fool who has been rehearsing escape; Yossarian’s flight is the oldest refusal. What holds the axis there is that much of the cast, Scheisskopf, Cathcart and Korn among them, stays at the level of type and turn and does not rise to figure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The American war novel Heller inherited was naturalist and serious: The Naked and the Dead (1948), From Here to Eternity (1951), the honourable tradition of the platoon and the price of courage. Heller turned it into vaudeville logic, a circular comic syntax and a broken chronology, and made the comedy the instrument of the horror rather than relief from it. The turn has ancestors, and they are named: Hašek’s Švejk, Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, Nathanael West, the logic-chopping of the Marx Brothers. Heller did not invent the absurd war. The stake was real: a first novel of this size and this tone about the good war, sixteen years after it, by an unknown copywriter. What holds the axis there is that the departure, large in its field and costly, is not a new form of the novel.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The narration runs out of order: chapters circle back over the same missions and the same death, and every return yields a little more. That is the form of a mind that will not look at what it has seen, and also the form of the catch itself, a closed loop the reader enters again and again before discovering what is inside. Told in sequence, Snowden’s death would be one terrible incident early in a war novel; told as the book tells it, it is the book’s reason. The sentences carry the same law on the small scale: the chiasmus and the reversal are the catch in syntax. The figure stops short of the summit because the loop also lets the middle idle, and because the final chapter’s escape is told in a different, nearly sentimental key.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Sixty-five years of reading have not exhausted the book, and the readings are distinct. It has been read as an anti-war novel; as a novel of the Cold War and the McCarthy hearings, in the loyalty oaths and the chaplain’s interrogation; as a novel about corporate America written by an advertising man; and, under all of these, as a trauma narrative before the term. The chronology rewards the second reading: what is comic on first meeting, the soldier in white, Yossarian’s flights to the hospital, carries the weight of the Snowden chapter on return. What holds the axis there is the margin. The yield of the jokes falls on rereading, as comic machinery does, and the comic types do not open further when pressed: a well that runs deep at the centre and shallow at the edges.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the American novel of war and of institutions. The force is high: the book showed that the war novel could be told as farce without losing its dead, and that the novel of institutions could be made of logic loops, and it is one of the books that made the black humour of the 1960s a recognised mode. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the war comedy of the Vietnam years works in its key, on the page in Richard Hooker’s MASH (1968) and on screen in Altman’s film of 1970; Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978) carries its deserter’s flight and its dream logic; the comic-horror war of Gravity’s Rainbow shares its moment and its method. And its title entered English as a common noun, reach of a rare kind, though presence more than influence. What holds the axis there is that the reorganisation was of a genre and a mode, not of the novel.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Sixty-five years are weighed as sixty-five years, and presence is about as wide as any American novel of its decade can claim: continuously in print, taught in schools and universities in English, widely translated, and its title in the common language, which counts as presence, for no more than a tenth, and not as proof. The surface is fixed to a moment in two places. The satire of the McCarthy years, loyalty oaths and an interrogation by men who will not say what the charge is, has outlived its occasion, because oaths and charges without content have not ended. The Second World War hardware is setting, not argument. What holds the axis a tenth below the top of its step is that some of the comic set pieces, the parade chapters and the sex comedy, already read as period.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The command of the comic sentence is complete and individual: the reversal, the definition that eats itself, the dialogue that turns a premise into its opposite in four lines and closes on “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” and Doc Daneeka’s “It’s the best there is.” The management of the broken chronology across four hundred pages, so that Snowden’s death is approached, withheld and finally opened in the right chapter, is a structural achievement of a high order. The making is charged as well. The prose is often prolix; the same comic construction is used until the reader can finish the sentence; the middle sags; and the shift to the realist register of the late chapters, though deliberate, is not always made with the same control, as the final chapter’s hurried exit shows.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the vaudeville of Major Major’s name and his promotion by an I.B.M. machine, and Snowden’s entrails on the floor of the plane. They obey one law: the institution’s logic is indifferent to the body it governs. The farce and the horror are the same mechanism seen from outside and from inside, and that is the book’s great feat of coherence; the width of the range is what makes the figure. The law bends in one place, the ending. Orr’s escape to Sweden, revealed as the plan behind his crashes, and Yossarian’s leap to follow are a comic deliverance the book’s physics has spent four hundred pages denying, and Nately’s whore lunging at him with a knife as he runs does not quite pull the ending back under the law. As a moral choice rather than a plausible escape, the ending is credited in part.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The book holds many orders in one structure, and they are joined rather than listed. The army is a state in miniature, with its paperwork, promotions, loyalty and courts. Commerce is Milo’s syndicate, which ends by owning the war it supplies. Medicine is Doc Daneeka, the hospital and the soldier in white; the church, the chaplain’s lost faith and his persecution; sex and money, Rome; the old world against the new, Nately’s old man, the hundred-and-seven-year-old in the brothel who argues that Italy will survive America as it survived everyone; death and the body, Snowden. What holds the axis there is what is missing: consciousness is entered only through Yossarian and the chaplain, and the family and labour, as against commerce, are scarcely present. Wide, held together by the catch, short of the totalities.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Living Form at 8.8. A disclosure that holds the bureaucratic, the commercial and the bodily truth together, the rule that binds by being circular, the profit that earns forgiveness and Snowden’s secret; sixty-five years in print, taught and translated, with its title in the language; and a form that is the catch itself, a loop circling one death until the forty-first chapter opens it.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: a figure run again and again, partly as argument, while Scheisskopf’s parades, much of the Major de Coverley and Chief White Halfoat material and stretches of the hospital restate rather than advance. Next above it, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.4: two great heights in a book whose ordinary register is farce, and a yield deep at the centre and shallow in the comic types. Then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.5: prolix prose and a sagging middle, and an ending of deliverance that the book’s law has spent four hundred pages denying.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the novel is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.6, and is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, first published by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1961. It is scored as the novel as published in 1961, in forty-two chapters, on Heller’s English. The sequel Closing Time (1994), the stage adaptation and the chapters dropped from the manuscript are not part of the work. The first chapter appeared in 1955 in New World Writing as “Catch-18”. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The structure, the principal characters and their chapters, the Avignon and Snowden thread, the Rome chapter, Milo’s syndicate and the ending are known closely; the wording of the long middle is not, and it is argued from episodes. English is quoted only where the words are certain: the opening sentences, the close of the catch’s explanation, the question of the Snowdens of yesteryear, and the three sentences of Snowden’s secret; everything else, the old woman’s statement of the catch included, is paraphrased. Citations are by chapter. Matters that could not be verified, among them the month of publication, the reason the title’s number was changed, the word count, the reception of the first edition and the later publication of the dropped chapters, are not given.