It’s been three years and a bit since I read and loved Catch-22. It was quite a rewarding experience, and I spent the next few months searching for Joseph Heller’s other books at the Landmark and Oxford bookstores in Mumbai (this was before the flipkart and eBook era). I found 2-3 other books, but the enthusiasm flagged – unsurprisingly, Heller found it impossible to top his first and seminal achievement. In fact, legend has it that when a reporter approached Heller in his twilight years and mentioned that he hadn’t been able to recreate the magic of Catch-22, Heller retorted, “Who has?” Nevertheless, both were right – the later books tried hard to capture the same banter and spirit that made the first book famous, without meeting anywhere near the same level of success. I never finished any of these books.
However, I decided to try again, and I picked up Closing Time, which is the sequel to Catch-22, never mind that it was written 33 years later. Presumably, never seeing the same success again, Heller decided to bring back his tried-and-tested characters. A wise decision – this book is a neat follow through to Catch-22. While the one explores the futility of war, the other exposes the futility of the glorious reality that victory in the war helped shape. It expertly deconstructs the so-called ‘American dream’, painting a stark landscape of human life. Yes, there’s a little bit of old-fashioned “Look at what the people have done with the world we fought for”, but Heller sensibly desists from ranting too much.
As the book seems to say, there are three ways to die (with some overlap): (1) War; (2) Old age; (3) Some human’s stupidity. It is as if the author tells Yossarian (the protagonist of the first book), “Congratulations! You didn’t die during the war! Never mind, you’ll die anyway. Do you want to guess how?” There is no element of the ‘If it’s not happy, it’s not the end’, or the ‘it’s always darkest before dawn’ that one hears at low points in fluff romantic movies. Rather, it’s the more dismal (and realistic) ‘Life will try to knock you down. If you are strong, you will stand up. But no matter how many times you do, the knocks will keep coming. And coming.’ While I was contemplating this message, and yes I do this a lot, I realized why I find it so attractive. Consider the following fable:
"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
A (very) short story by Kafka, this sums up why I find his work so funny and captivating. And the essence is the same – “it’s the trap or the cat for you, my friend. Choose well.” So much for this choice – in lazier moods, I would call this a catch-22 and applaud my own intelligence.
The cycle of life continues, with scarce respect to the trials and tribulations of the human existence. Every now and then, you win a lottery, forge a path-breaking deal or write a bestseller – you think you’ve arrived. No matter – the wheels of existence chug remorselessly on, and before you know it, you wake up tied to the tracks, with a few slow and painful seconds to contemplate your life before death arrives. Dog eat dog, cat eat mouse – life goes on, and will go on regardless of your participation in it.
The timeless Tom and Jerry shows try to tell us something similar. But alas, we don’t get it at all. Children (young and old alike) see how resourceful Jerry is, and imagine themselves being similarly heroic. A few bored adults comment sadly that such cartoons introduce violence very early in children’s lives. But not a soul sees that no matter what Jerry does, Tom keeps coming after him. He has been coming after Jerry since 1940, and when I last switched on my television, there he was, still after Jerry. And he will keep coming. No matter how many shrewd engineering contraptions of ever-rising complexity Jerry fashions to keep Tom at bay, Tom will reply with more and more diabolical schemes to trick or force Jerry into his wide-open mouth. And he will eventually succeed and Jerry will be no more, just like our favorite superheroes. And us.
