B-25 bomber used during filming of the 1970 movie Catch-22
1 July 2020
A catch-22 is a type of paradox where the condition necessary for success conflicts with that success. The term comes from the title of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 about bomber crews during World War II. In the novel, Catch-22 referred to the rule for grounding aircrew because of psychological instability:
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.
Within two years of the novel’s publication, catch-22 was being used to denote other paradoxes. From a review of a comparative literature textbook in the journal Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien from 1963:
Probably no subject currently being taught in the universities of the world contains more traps, difficulties, treacheries, mirages, pitfalls, illusions, and Catch 22’s than does Comparative Literature. The thing in itself, the process or discipline has been in existence for as long as humane scholarship has existed, yet for almost a century, scholars and critics have been unable even to agree on a satisfactory definition.
Heller had published a chapter of the novel in 1955 under the title Catch-18 but changed it with the 1961 publication of the full novel to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s Mila-18 which was published the same year. Maybe it’s just my familiarity with the phrase, but the cadence and consonance of Catch-22 makes it seem much more appealing than Catch-18.
Sources:
McCormick, John O. “Besprechungen: Newton P. Stallknect and Horst Frenz, eds., Comparative Literarture: Method and Perspective.” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 8, 1963, 359–60.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2019, s.v. catch-22, n.
Photo Credit: Bill Larkins, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.