Further to my piece on the decline of the blogosphere: WordPress has listened, and modified its presentation of viewing statistics so that I can see exactly how much they’ve declined! Result! Why they believe that depressing their regular users is a good idea is another question…
So, I shall defiantly continue to use this blog for things that it’s definitely good for: above all, keeping a record of random thoughts in case I ever want to refer to them (Twitter is great for many things, but finding old tweets is not one of them; “micro-blogging” my arse, unless “micro” refers to duration as well as length). And since at some point in the future I may well want to write about Thucydidean influences on Catch-22, it seems worthwhile recording my immediate reactions to the new TV adaptation.??
Okay, so you put the story into chronological order [as the adaptation has done, and been praised for it], and it all makes sense – where the whole point of telling the story out of order is that this doesn’t make sense. It’s not a war story, it’s a portrait of a fragmented consciousness. It is, quite deliberately, the antithesis of Thucydides’ “thus ended the summer; in the following winter…”. Yes, in this version we get to see the unravelling, rather than starting right in the middle of the mess and having to follow different strands backwards and forwards… [and I can well imagine that this makes things much easier for people who don’t already know the book, and who are therefore having to get to grips with a lot of different characters, many of whom are barely distinguishable whereas in the book McWatt and Kid Sampson and Nately and Aarfy and the rest are brought to life with a few sentences] …and the same unifying theme, trying to make some kind of sense of the senseless absurdity of war. With Thucydides, randomness interrupts the apparent predictable logic of events (or at least people’s belief in predictability); with Heller, sense occasionally interrupts or emerges from the chaos. Both emphasise cruelty, violence, absurdity, and the collapse of even the facade of civilised values, and Catch-22 is the logic of the question the Spartans put to the Plataeans after their surrender. But Heller’s narrative structure says something important about *modern* war [that’s been completely lost from the adaptation].
Sphinx 
I missed this last night and was intending to catch up later, but…
They’ve told the story in chronological order? Starting with Snowden? (Starting before Snowden?)
I agree with your last point about the dissociative quality of modern war, and how brilliantly Heller’s structure brings it out – how there’s, always, too much to process, not least because the people failing to process it are still trying to process what they failed to process the previous day/month/year, and how life goes on, and bureaucracy goes on, and business goes on, in the midst of all this, but they all add to the general overload and become fragmentary and unreal and incomprehensible as a result. But there’s a more fundamental point about war stories generally, as distinct from histories: haven’t they always begun with a leap in medias res?
[A Pedant Writes (when doesn’t he?): just noticed that the phrase in medias res uses the accusative of motion towards – even though we generally use it in English as if it was the ablative of position – hence the slightly awkward phrasing. Never going to be able to use that phrase again now.]
Opening credit sequence has Yossarian covered in blood coming out of burning plane, and at the end we see he’s naked, but no explanation. Bulk of first episode is the training camp, then early days at Pianosa – including the actual arrival and accidental death of Mudd – but no Snowden yet.
In that case I salute the enormous amounts of work they must have put in, but it sounds quite remarkably misconceived. As the book goes on there is a drive towards ever greater horror and insanity (and death, let’s not forget death) – but a big part of the power of the book is that you come to realise that there was no ‘before’; nothing actually changes, it’s just the situation that Yossarian was in from the start working itself out (the situation being the War).
That’s a very useful contrast between Catch 22 and Thucydides – it illuminates both works. Now that you’ve pointed it out, it’s plain that the emphasis Thucydides puts on making his timelines clear (“While the war went on in this way at Mytilene, the Athenians, about the same time in this summer, also sent thirty ships to the Peloponnesus….” ) also serves to emphasize the rational, ’cause and effect’, structure of his narrative, and presumably, of his understanding of war. I hadn’t realized how Heller’s narrative structure is designed to underline his very different understanding of war.
It’s not strictly analogous, but I wondered if you would comment on an interesting contrast I came across while reading up on Agamemnon for a performance in DC while also going through some old seasons of Game of Thrones.
A King gathers his forces to make war on his enemies; trapped and immobilized by the weather, he is informed that only a great sacrifice, the killing of his daughter, will extricate him. After painful debate with himself, he kills the young girl.
In the Agamemnon, the enormous sacrifice is rewarded, the King’s navy sails on and he gets what he wanted, victory over Troy. In GoT, the sacrifice is fruitless and Stannis cannot extricate his army and is defeated and killed. Agamemnon is a tragedy precisely because the King pays a price and gets what he wanted, his subsequent death at the hands of his wife can’t change that. But in GoT, killing the daughter is a terrible blunder not a tragedy at all, tho perhaps a warning about who to believe when receiving messages about the intentions of the gods.
I hadn’t realized before that paying the price and getting what you want is a key constituent of classical tragedy. That certainly covers Macbeth and probably Lear, but excludes Hamlet, I think, but really, I’d be interested in your response.
Thanks for this. A few random thoughts, as I’m neither a specialist on Greek myth nor a fan of Game of Thrones… One of the things I like about the former is its ambiguity and openness, especially when myth gets used as raw material for tragedy – it’s the Vernant line about original myth answering questions without ever explicitly posing the problem, whereas tragedy opens up problems without ever giving an answer. You can see Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia as you describe, as the price to be paid for power (rather Wagnerian, you could say). Or you could see it as part of the endless cycle of violence in the house of Atreus, continuing with Clytemnestra killing him and Orestes killing her. Or you could read it in terms of the violence of the patriarchy. Or lots of other things. Whereas GoT seems to me only ever to have one message, that there is no meaning, only violence, especially against women, which is pursued with sadistic relish. As I said, I’m not a fan…
I appreciate your responding. And it is worth being reminded that ambiguity is part of the power of old stories: it is hard to avoid “irritable reaching” for a single key. Helen, forcibly abducted by Paris or eagerly deserting her husband, is the model.