The expression ‘Catch 22’ has become part of the language, routinely employed without further explanation in newspapers, television programmes and everyday speech, and invoked without further reference in the learned papers of both British and American authors.¹ A related, but less common tendency, which serves to identify admirers of the novel, is the predisposition to see particular incidents and characters as exemplars of the world beyond its pages.² Ransacking the text for such Goffmanesque parallels can, at a minimum, contribute to a kind of world weary higher gossip and a repertoire of novel epithets for characterising faculty committees. This is clearly not what so perceptive a political theorist as John Schaar had in mind when he located Catch 22 between Horatio Alger and Goodman's Growing Up Absurd as one of those books which, for Americans at least, has ‘had important effects on our political life’.³ Indeed one critic has even suggested that Yossarian, the central character, was a role model for those Vietnam war draft resisters, evaders and AWOL veterans who chose exile in Sweden and elsewhere.⁴ Whatever the status of this and similar contentions (and prescience seems a more plausible claim than influence) my intention is not to establish the precise impact of Catch 22 on attitudes and action.

I am, however, concerned to explain the basis of its popularity. Hence my tactics are to reconstruct how the novel works on its reader and to suggest the ways in which this connects with, and selects for, a public which occupies a distinctive social and cultural situation. That public, it is argued, is all but coextensive with Gouldner's ‘New Class’,⁵ and the form style and structure of Catch 22 dramatises the sociolinguistic implications of the contradiction which characterises the New Class's social position. Moreover the book provides a symbolic solution to that contradiction. For Heller, method, ideas and sensibility are linked in a strategy which both uncovers the use of language as a bureaucratic resource and uses the resources of language to uncover bureaucracy.⁶

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Street-Level Bureaucrats in a Catch-All Bureaucracy

Catch,Class and Bureaucracy: The Meaning of Joseph Heller's Catch 22