Friday Column: Reading Images

I've been rereading Catch-22, Joseph Heller's epic satire that uses a community of soldiers in World War II Italy to critique the absurdity of war, politics, and bureaucracy. Yossarian is our protagonist, a sort of smart-alec lout whose cowardice the book tries to decode and comprehend. As I read, I'm picturing Yossarian as a firm, muscular man with a crew cut and wearing a wife-beater, a sort of provocateur who grins while he talks, but who is nonetheless a nice enough fellow at heart. I'm also picturing him in black and white.

I'm actually picturing good chunks of the book in black and white because the characters and morals of Catch-22 remind me of a number World War II/cold war movies from the '40s and '50s. It's not that I'm picturing Yossarian as any particular actor from that period; rather, I'm using the aesthetics of those movies--the haircuts, the clothes, the speech, the way a character moves around a set, the look of the se itself, the camera angles--as the foundation upon which my imagination acts. As I visualize this book in my mind's eye, these movies and their aesthetics are my principal guide. And part of those aesthetics, of course, is black and white.

I'm also drawing on another movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to think about certain parts of this book. There are some very general similarities between that movie and Catch-22. Both of them utilize main characters that are mostly very flat, cartoonish. Like Yossarian, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid spend a lot of time running around subverting the authorities with clever little schemes that would never work out in real life and generally being first class assholes about it.

But also like Yossarian, there comes a point at which they face a very hard reality. Toward the end of the movie they've fled the U.S. for Bolivia, and there they are robbed by a group of bandits. Later on they come upon these bandits, draw their guns, and enter into a standoff. With nothing left to do, Cassidy and Sundance unload the contents of their revolvers into these unsavory, but very human people. Up to this point in the movie, the violence has been very cheery in nature, and no one has actually been killed. But here, the murdering of the bandits is played in slow motion and is girded by the real-time screams of the dying men.

Something like this happens in Catch-22 when Yossarian fakes his way out of a dangerous bombing run over Bologna. All the way up to this point, Yossarian's schemes have been treated with the air of practical jokes, but Heller plays this one straight. We're made to feel Yossarian's remorse with a gravity that, thus far, the book has not exhibited. It's a critical change in key that, much like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, places the entire work in a new light.

When I read that part of Catch-22, I instantly thought of the comparable scene in Butch Cassidy and realized the broader similarities between the two. This, and my picturing of Yossarian and his cohorts in black and white, has made me wonder about the images I use to animate books as I read them: What kind of media do I get them from? How do I use them? How would my reading of Catch-22 have been different if I didn't have these particular images to draw on?

I think part of the job of any good art is to find new ways of showing us the world that we live in, ways we are normally unable to see it. For instance, think of Eadward Muybridge's iconic studies of horses in motion. With his camera, he showed the world something it had never seen before--that all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground when it runs. In a similar sort of way great artists like Picasso or Pollock or Van Gogh showed us new ways to see the world around us. They expanded our visual vocabulary for comprehending the world.

They also expanded our vocabulary for comprehending books. I think a lot of the pleasure in enjoying good art is in finding the ways it syncs up with other art, finding the connections you can use to form relationships between different pieces. This is more true for literature than for other kinds of art--since literature consists of words and not of images, it's uniquely open to this process of association. We're all free to visualize books however we want, so long as our visions are credible. For me, this drawing of connections is one of the unique pleasures of reading.

It's been said that you cannot read the same book twice because each time you approach it you are a different reader. Without you to comprehend it, the book is just a lump of paper--in a certain sense the book only really exists when someone is reading it, actively interpreting it in their mind. If I had reread Catch-22 a couple months ago--before I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--I would have visualized the book differently. For me it would have been a different book.

This, I think, is one of the best arguments there is for rereading. When you come back to a book years later, it will exist for you in a different way. (I'd even venture to say that as your exposure to art and life broadens, it will exist for you in a richer way. It's a networked image of art--the more nodes on the network, the more powerful it is.) If you're fortunate enough to remember your first reading of a book, then you'll be able to compare your two readings. This is something that tends to teach me something about myself, since I usually can see how I've changed by seeing how my reading of a book has. Of course, oftentimes years pass between readings, and it's hard to remember how I read it the first time. Which is one of my arguments in favor of taking notes.

Comments

[susan]

Very interesting posting. I'm currently concerned with the images and characterization after having just finished Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome." I feel that Wharton has drawn too definitive a picture of the wife versus the girlfriend that borders on author intrusion. Another instance of recent reading was Nabokov's "Lolita." Even with the years since seeing the movie, I could not see Humbert Humbert as anyone but James Mason.

I believe that all we've experienced to date forms our images in reading, and that's what makes it so individual. A similar pattern is in effect when we assign a certain type of character a face based on a name--Helen, for example, will always be Helen D. from kindergarten for me until I run across a stronger character of that name.

[hermit greg]

My first efforts at teaching fiction, I asked my students to describe their reading. One in particular was adamant to claim that to read was "to watch a movie in my head." For that particular student, the claim was limiting: it was the realism of film, not the artifice of it, that made the metaphor work. He was an inexperienced reader, and film was his only connection to storytelling. That student had a very difficult time reading prefilmic novels like Frankenstein.

But in the case of Catch 22, surely Heller had in mind the same body of war narratives as you've imagined. Surely the structure of scenes, the way characters talk, the very types of characters that populate the novel are borrowed from the same stories as you imagine. I wonder, then, for those who do not register the same repertoire, what makes Catch 22 worth it?

[Gwen]

Another great Friday column. Thank you. I realize now that I had the same black/white images running through my mind when I read Catch 22 a few years ago, complete with images of those old airplanes.

[Dan Green]

"I wonder, then, for those who do not register the same repertoire, what makes Catch 22 worth it?"

Bottom line: It's hilarious, perhaps the funniest novel ever written. Given the kind of novel it is, of course it's going to draw on previous war narratives, in order to travesty them.

[Scott]

hermit,

Well, what also struck me about this reading is how well the humor works with today's climate. There was a quote somewhere in there about bragging about your biggest mistakes, and I instinctively thought of Karl Rove.

My point is that even if you're not aware of the book's cultural antecedents, I think the fact that Heller's satire gets at stuff that will probably always be a part of the human race as long as it exists makes it "worth it."

[hermit greg]

I hope I didn't suggest I had some great criticism of your reading, Scott--I really liked it as a description of reading. You piqued my curiosity, especially because I recently started reading C-22, but I didn't get very far reading it. Why any one person likes or dislikes any single book is always a strange question (especially "the funniest novel ever written"); suffice it to say, I wasn't feeling it, and I saw your reading in stark contrast to my own.

I'll probably try again with C-22, someday...

[Dean]

Christ, how can you read that garbage?