Catch-23

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].