Notes on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

Robleh Wais 7/26/14

Joseph Heller’s bestseller Catch-22 is one of the most enjoyable comedic fictions I’ve ever read. The humor in the novel is based on a logical paradox. One paradoxical construction that Heller utilizes is a concept from the world of logic, known as recursion. Recursion is popularly known as self-reference, though technically it does not have to be self-referring. Confounding paradoxes can be created when sentences are allowed to refer to themselves. Here is an example of a self-referential paradox: This sentence is false. If we evaluate this sentence and try to discover if it’s true or false, we are led to conclude it can’t be determined. In other words, the sentence’s truth-value is undecidable. The problem with this sentence is self-reference. When a statement refers to itself and makes a statement about its content, it is a recursive construction in truth-functional logic. Heller uses this idea repeatedly, to hilarious effect, in Catch-22.

Starting on page 77 of the book, he puts this idea of recursive reference to work in a laugh-out-loud encounter. Clevinger is a soldier who has been accused of making the statement you couldn’t punish me... A hearing with a Colonel, Major, Lieutenant, and a Corporal stenographer has been scheduled. A fierce and angry Colonel, bent on punishing him, questions him. After screaming, haranguing, and threatening Cadet Clevinger for several minutes, the Colonel is irritated. In an attempt to assess what has been learned in the hearing, he asks the Corporal to read back his last line, to which the Corporal responds:

Read me back my last line.

The Colonel is enraged by this true statement and demands that the Corporal read back someone else’s last line, to which the Corporal responds:

Read me back my last line.

This angers the Colonel even more, not understanding how he could have gotten the same response until the Corporal explains that that line was HIS last line. At this point, I had to put down the book and giggle for a minute or two. Here we have a self-referential statement being used to spur comedy. It is obvious this is a causal impossibility; after all, nobody can record in writing themselves at the same time as they record the statements of others. The entire point of stenography (prior to the personal computer era, of course) was for a person to record the statements of others. But, when Heller takes it to the absurd extreme, this little sequence is the result. He uses self-reference in a variety ways during the course of the entire book. In fact, in the same sequence above, he has the Colonel questioning Clevinger about statements he didn’t make as opposed to statements he did make, which then becomes another recursive construction like the one shown above. He then has to deny that he didn’t make such statements, which is undecidable. The sequence ends with nothing having been discovered about what Clevinger actually said.

The movie of the same name, by the way, did not capture the rich comedy of the novel.