Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Thursday, 15 October 2009 Books: That's some catch, that catch-22
Joseph Heller's 1961 Catch-22 has remained in print for nearly fifty years. One of the rare (and one of the most popular) American novels to be directly influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, its appeal has deepened over the decades, perhaps because it's taken so long for its perspicacity to emerge. Like its European twin, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, it's had a
reputation as an anti- Though Heller's books, like Celine's and Hasek's, are extraordinarily funny, he has been rather condescendingly and unfairly pigeonholed as a comic novelist. Catch-22 reaches its peak with chapter 39, "The Eternal City," in which Yossarian wanders a Rome that has turned into a kaleidoscope of ruins, suffering and despair; the comic tone is entirely abandoned, and the writing is at its finest. A similar tragic consciousness informs Heller's next book, the 1974 Something Happened, a finally shocking condemnation of the administered world in the domestic sphere and to my mind a novel that equals the achievement of Catch-22: a comic portrait of cultural and spiritual deterioration and, with William Gaddis' 1975 JR, one of the few postwar American novels that could have been written yesterday; both of them remain in print, but sadly, little read. (Kurt Vonnegut memorably and enthusiastically reviewed Something Happened for the New York Times; "This is black humor indeed — with the humor removed," he said.) The reputation of Mike Nichols' 1970 film of Catch-22 has also
grown over the years, though at the time of its release it was buried by
hysterically positive critical response to the more raucous and
superficial service comedy M*A*S*H. The film isn't perfect, by
far: Nichols slightly fudges the ending, and a two- Two clips from the film are available on YouTube. In the first, Doc
Daneeka (Jack Gilford) reveals the definition of the ubiquitous catch to
Yossarian after Yossarian leads his tablemates (including Jon Voight,
Peter Bonerz, Charles Grodin, Martin Sheen, Bob Balaban and Art Garfunkel)
on a hilarious tour of his own well- In this second clip, which comes somewhat later in the film, the idealist Nately is engaged in debate with an old man, who tries to teach him the means of survival in a collapsing world (though it must be noted that even his cynicism does not save him in the end); the old man is played by a barely recognizable Marcel Dalio (Robert de la Cheyniest in Renoir's masterpiece Rules of the Game and Rosenthal in his Grand Illusion): The dialogue in both clips, if I remember correctly, is taken verbatim from the novel itself. Posted in /Books |