The Eternal City
The Eternal City
Chapter 39 of Catch-22, “The Eternal City”, is the heart of the novel, though it stands out like an amputated thumb. It is stylistically quite unlike the rest of this five-hundred-page work. There is no humor in it. It is bleak to the point of pugilism: it pulverizes the reader. Yossarian is in Rome looking for Nately’s whore’s twelve-year-old kid sister. She has been forcibly ejected from the brothel in which her older sister worked and no one knows what has become of her. Milo, the cheerful entrepreneur, at first thinks Yossarian wants to have sex with a young virgin and offers to help. Early in the chapter, reference is made to little boys in Africa “stolen away by adult slave traders and sold for money to men who disemboweled them and ate them”. Yossarian first encounters a lone old woman left behind in the smashed apartment where the brothel used to be, the smashing and ejecting done by “tall soldiers with hard white hats and clubs”. She is obviously traumatized to the point of insanity. She keeps saying “Catch-22”. We then read: “He could picture the fiery and malicious exhilaration with which they had made their wreckage, and their sanctimonious, ruthless sense of right and dedication.” There is no one left to take care of the weeping old woman. Next Yossarian goes with Milo to meet the chief of police “who was fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins”. This man, Luigi, also thinks Yossarian is in search of a twelve-year-old sex partner and also offers to help. But this meeting comes to an inconclusive end, because Milo gets wind of a traffic in illegal tobacco, which distracts his businessman’s mind, “his twitching mouth slavering” with “epileptic lust”. The corrupt policeman then threatens to arrest Yossarian.
Now things get really unpleasant. Out on the street, in the cold and dark, Yossarian sees a solitary boy dressed in rags with bare feet, pale, poor, cold. He is moved by “intense pity for his poverty”, but does nothing. Immediately, a nursing mother passes “holding an infant in black rags”. He reflects on all the sadness and suffering in the world, about “how many good people were bad people”. Suddenly he is confronted by a young soldier having convulsions and being held down by six other soldiers. A jeep with two military policemen in it races by: one of them remarks, “That’s good. He’s under arrest”, “doubling over with raucous laughter at his jest” and then speeding off. Yossarian moves away and hears a female voice from above pleading, “Please don’t. Please don’t”. He then sees a drunken woman being sexually assaulted by three drunken soldiers, also saying “Pleeshe don’t”. One of them throws a bottle at Yossarian. Soon he comes across a man beating a dog: “The dog whimpered and squealed in brute, dumbfounded hysteria…and groveled and crawled on its belly”, but the man “beat it and beat it anyway”. He threatens to beat a woman who asks him to stop. At the next corner, “a man was beating a small boy brutally in the midst of an immobile crowd of adult spectators who made no effort to intervene”. The man kept knocking the boy down with “hard, resounding open-palm blows to the head, then jerking him up to his feet in order to knock him down again”. “Bright red blood was streaming from his ears”. No one interferes. Next a man with a smashed mouth waits for an ambulance that never comes, while another man is whisked away by police after having his books spilled (he cries ambiguously, “Help! Police!). Yossarian then sees an eighty-year-old woman trying to keep up with a forty-year-old woman but being left behind alone in the night to fend for herself. “The nasty, small, gloating smile with which she glanced back at the laboring old woman was both wicked and apprehensive”. Yossarian does nothing to help. He then notices a gaunt man “with a star-shaped scar in his cheek and a glossy mutilated depression the size of an egg in one temple”, to be followed by a young woman with “her whole face disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and stretched in a raw, corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes!”. We next learn that Aarfy, a comrade of Yossarian, has raped and murdered a simple-minded servant-girl, Michaela, that very night, throwing her out of the window. Aarfy protests, “I only raped her once”, and feels convinced he will not be held accountable. Yossarian assures him he will be arrested for the rape and murder, and sure enough sirens sound. Two “large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy, unsmiling jaws” enter the room—and arrest Yossarian! He has committed the unpardonable crime of going to Rome in search of a lost girl without a pass (Aarfy is left to his own devices). So ends Yossarian’s visit to the eternal city.
I told you it was a bleak chapter. But what are we to make of it, artistically (the mutilated thumb twitching before us)? The chapter is clearly a litany of human (and animal) pain, suffering, poverty, neglect, violence, fear, malice, and indifference. It is crammed with injustice, corruption, callousness, maliciousness, brutality, and evil—all conscience-free. If there is any humor at all, it is of the blackest pitch. The rest of the book is overflowing with humor, albeit also black. This is Catch-22 at its most hard and unforgiving. I think it is intended in two ways. First, it reminds us of the horrors that lie behind the story told in the body of the book (a kind of gritty literary-realist Sergeant Bilko). One might say it points to the underlying politics of war—what we are fighting for, and against. But second, it functions as a kind of rebuke to the rest of the book—a kind of apology for it. All those laughs, the literary acclaim, the fame—but this is the reality: the human horror behind it all. We make art of it, but it isn’t art. Just to describe it, as Heller does and I repeat, is difficult, morally difficult. Really, it just makes you want to cry—to curl up in a ball and cry. And yet we admire the novel. Nately’s whore’s little sister is never found.
I read Catch-22 three times when I was in late teens and 20s. It spoke to me then, as an anti-Vietnam war protester. (I’m about Colin’s age.) I read it a fourth time in 2012 (my early 60s), and it no longer appealed to me. I was especially bothered by the scene early in the book (which hadn’t bothered me before) in which Yossarian’s job is to censor letters that the other pilots write home. He does so in arbitrary ways, such as by (these may not be exact examples) blacking out all the articles (“the,” “a,” “an”) or blacking out everything BUT the articles. I understand what Heller was satirizing, but I couldn’t get over how awful this was — how it would worry the pilots’ loved ones back home. Why did Heller have Yossarian, who is otherwise the hero (or anti-hero) of the book, rather than some other pilot, do this?
Despite having read it four times, I have no recollection of “The Eternal City” chapter. Its bleakness must not have come across to me.
That’s very interesting to me: it does seem tonally at odds with the rest of the book. I suggest having a look at it and reporting back. I would never consider re-reading the book myself and did find it quite hard to get through.
I will do that; I’ll have to get a copy of the book, because, after my 2012 reading, I got rid of it. An anecdote: An interviewer said to Heller that, since Catch-22, he hadn’t written anything nearly as good. Heller replied, “No, but neither has anyone else”
I reread “The Eternal City” and am stunned by it. It is beyond powerful and is brilliantly written (“a leaky insipid mist lay swollen in the air”). Your synopsis is brilliant too; I’ll just add a few things that struck me that you didn’t mention.
The first paragraph ends with a humorous sentence, though its content is not funny. Yossarian is warned that “he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”
Yossarian sees a boy whose “sickly face was pale and sad…. Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly, children in Italy that same night….” I wonder whether some people blame the victim for causing them to feel pity. I don’t.
“How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph.” Heller works in humor by equating cockroaches and landlords.
After Aarfy rapes and murders the servant girl, he says, “I hardly think they’re going to make too much of a fuss over one poor Italian servant girl when so many thousands of lives are being lost every day [in the war].” That comment makes two points: (1) that war makes mass killing acceptable even though ordinary murder remains illegal (except that the police don’t bother to arrest Aarfy), and (2) war can harden soldiers so that killing doesn’t bother them.
Rereading this chapter makes me want to reread the novel again.
That chapter alone is worth the price of admission. There are other great passages in it that neither of us has mentioned. Do you think my diagnosis of its meaning in the novel is plausible?
Yes, I certainly think your diagnosis of its meaning in the novel is plausible, and creative and insightful (which means that it never would have occurred to me). But I don’t understand what you mean by “the underlying politics of war—what we are fighting for, and against.” I take the novel to be anti-war — anti-all war; even though it takes place during World War II, I don’t recall that it mentions anything about that war. In World War II, we were fighting against the supreme evil, but I don’t see that as relevant to the novel. That’s why I don’t understand what politics you mean.
I’m also puzzled by your reference to “the literary acclaim, the fame,” because they came after the book was published, of course.
I mean that wars are fought because we make moral judgments about the reasons for war, which involve questions of justice and human suffering. Politics is really about that. I don’t think the novel is pacifist. It is clear in the novel that the enemy is the Germans.
When a person writes a literary novel there is the hope (and possibly expectation) that it will bring literary fame.
I said that war can harden soldiers, but Catch-22, of course, is not about soldiers but about bomber pilots who don’t see their victims, many of whom are not combatants but civilians (in World War II more than in previous wars). I have no point to make here and don’t know that this is relevant to the novel, but I mention it in case it prompts any thoughts on your part.
I didn’t express myself well. By “anti-all war,” I didn’t mean pacifist, but rather the irrationality of the way war is conducted, as exemplified by Catch-22 itself. (I don’t mean the novel.)
Does that mean all wars or just some? It doesn’t seem to be a necessary truth that all wars are absurd–unless all human endeavor is absurd.
OK, I guess that not all wars are absurd, but all military institutions (I presume) act irrationally. That may stem from their being authoritarian. Democratic institutions perhaps act more rationally. If the U.S. were more democratic, then perhaps we wouldn’t have Trump. Yes, his second presidency, unlike his first, was not the doing of the Electoral College. But the Electoral vote was determined on a winner-take-all basis in all but two of the states; Citizens United allowed unlimited spending; the undemocratic Senate allowed just one of its members (Mitch McConnell) to stack the Supreme Court, which in turn endorsed gerrymandering so that Republicans control the House and the state legislatures despite receiving a minority of the popular vote.
All true, and damning.
This article also sees the heart of the book in a bleak aspect of it, but not in “The Eternal City” but rather in Snowden’s dying. https://newrepublic.com/article/91327/catch-22-joseph-heller-birthday-war
Good article–that is a very grim scene.