202
PARTISAN REVIEW
taking: an impertinence to do it, the height of
chutzpah
to bring it
off. The scene must be read as a whole to see how well it works-it's
the penultimate moment of the book-but even the delicate texture
of these pages of prose would be nothing had not the "secret" of
Snowden been such an important leitmotif throughout the book.
(Snowden's death had taken place before the book opened, but it's
fully remembered and decoded as he lies on an operating table in the
next-to-Iast chapter, as if its meaning, which underlies the whole
book, had taken that long to be reduced to its terrifying simplicity
and finality.) The sombre tome of this passage-despite the necessary
farcical touch ofYossarian's dislike of stewed tomatoes-is something
that's not available to verbal black humor, which aims for wild incon–
gruities at every turn, which is more at home with disgust and humili–
ation and absurdity than with the simple terror of the world as it is;
such a poignant effect requires a more fully human respondent,
which Yossarian has by now become. Heller's" structural" use of the
secret of Snowden makes it a time bomb of ineluctable tragic fact
ticking away beneath the book's surface of farce and rollicking in–
sanity; except that the secret unfolds its revelations gradually, along–
side the story, until it finally
becomes
the story.
When I first read
Catch-22
I felt strongly that except for the
Snowden chapter the book's final shift in tone in the last seventy-five
pages didn't work, that after doing an amazing
comic
adaptation of
Kafka and Dostoevsky most of the way, Heller unaccountably switched
to imitating them directly in the finale , a contest he couldn't win .
Rereading the book I can see why I felt that way-we miss the sheer
gratuitous pleasure of the comedy-but I also see how much the
sombre and even ugly side was present from the beginning, and how
gradually the book modulates into it: for such laughter we have the
devil to pay. The
Mr. Roberts
element won't do all the way through.
I'm now sure the last section works, and makes the whole book work;
up against a wall, I'd have to call
Catch-22
the best novel of the
sixties.
But what can we learn about the sixties from
Catch-22?
I think
the popular success of the book can be attributed to the widespread
spiritual revulsion in the sixties against many of our most sacrosanct
institutions, including the army; to which our leaders replied by
heightening just those things which had caused the disgust in the
