Favorite Banned Books – Catch 22

This is “Banned Book Week”, an annual campaign by the American Library Association and Amnesty International to increase awareness around banned and challenged books, celebrate the freedom to read and highlight persecuted individuals.  This year I am doing a little highlighting of my own, with a favorite banned book each day.  The list of books that have been banned in our own country both fascinates and appalls me.  I encourage you to read widely and outside of your usual comfort zone at least occasionally.  Each of the books this week is a well-worn favorite that I have read over and over.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) – The satirical story of Captain Yossarian and the aircrews of the fictional U.S. Army’s 256th Squadron during World War II.  It skewers the war, the military, and bureaucracies in general.  At the center of it all is the section of Army regulations that tells a soldier how they can be grounded, and not have to fly the extremely dangerous missions they are given.  It’s called Catch-22:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

Heller takes on authority, duty, war and even God in this classic.  I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t been banned more often than it has.  The main characters have casual sex, swear, and give aid and comfort to the enemy.  They are caught in the brilliant madness of modern warfare and respond they only way they can to survive.  For some that is going with it, for others being broken by it, for still others, it is retreating into a different reality.  For Yossarian, it’s finding a way to resist.

And the writing gives the reader their own dose of madness.  Heller tells the story in non-chronological order, which can leave you as confused as his characters at times.  At the end of my first reading, I just stared at the cover and said “Wow”.  The feeling has changed very little through subsequent readings.

For all the things that could set some folks off about this book, it was banned in 1972 because of bad language.  And there’s plenty of it there, though it would be much less shocking today.  That banning, by an Ohio school district, resulted in an important case in the jurisprudence of censorship in the United States.  It was the students who took their school district to court.  While the courts initially ruled that their Constitutional rights had not been violated, on appeal the book was returned to the shelves. 

It’s had a reserved spot on my shelves for years.  Just about time to read it again.