[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]
On one
success and one failure in Joseph Heller’s famous wartime satire.
First, a
little blog inside baseball that is most definitely relevant for approaching
(and responding to) this post: I’ve read Catch-22
(1961)—not just the novel as a whole, but even any excerpts or
sections—precisely once, as a junior in high school (for pleasure, ‘cause I was
just that AmericanStudies nerdy). I enjoyed it, and even laughed out loud a few
times (which is very rare for me as a reader). But I don’t remember many specific
things about it from that reading experience (that is, I certainly know plenty
of particular lines and moments, including the famous definition of the
titular phrase, from general popular consciousness, but have very few
memories derived from my own engagement with the novel). I say that to make
clear that, as is always the case but doubly so for a post like this, I greatly
welcome disagreements or challenges to my ideas here (which you can share in
comments below; if you’ve read Heller’s Something
Happened [1974] you’ll understand why I’m being so parentheses-happy
in this post).
Heller was
far from the first satirist to engage with war as his subject—in American
literary history Ambrose
Bierce stands out as an ancestor to be sure—but I would say his focus on
World War II in particular makes his book quite surprising and groundbreaking nonetheless.
As I argued in
both this post on the film The Best
Years of Our Lives (1946) and this
one on the Dresden firebombing, there’s long (if not always) been a
sacredness to the way we approach and remember World War II, a sense that this
truly was a “good war” that can’t be challenged or critiqued in the same ways
that most such conflicts can and should. But the vital truth is that, whatever
the more noble sides to the war (and I’m not for a second disputing their
presence), it also featured all of the horrors and, perhaps even more
tellingly, all of the absurdities that are inevitably part of such historical
events and periods. I can’t help but think that it was precisely this
multi-layered and somewhat contradictory reality which caused Heller to take so
long to complete his World War II satire—he apparently began writing
it in 1953 and didn’t publish until eight years later—but we’re all
eternally lucky that he was eventually able to do so.
No cultural
work is perfect, of course, and thus none is above criticism (concepts with
which I’m quite sure Heller would agree). In this case, I would say that the portrayal of women
in Catch-22 is ultimately
unsuccessful, and perhaps even troubling. Of course the soldiers who form the
book’s main characters are all male, as was the historical reality of the US
armed forces in that era. But does Heller does bring in a female character in a
crucial role—the Italian maid Michaela, whom main character “Aarfy” Aardvark
rapes and murders while on leave in Rome. This isn’t Aarfy’s first such sexual
violence, either, as he has earlier in the novel told a story of raping two
young girls at his college fraternity house. Rape and sexual violence are certainly
part of war, and including them does represent another way in which Heller
complicates the “good war” iconography. But to my mind (and again, I welcome
challenges!), Heller uses Michaela entirely as a device for plot and symbolism,
to both reveal things about Aarfy and establish additional absurdities (such as
Aarfy’s famous line, “But I only raped her once!” when Yossarian notes that he
will be arrested for his crimes). Too often wartime storytelling has featured
women in only flat and problematic ways, and I don’t think Heller’s brilliant book
escapes that pitfall.
Next
wartime comedy tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?
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