Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! We have only two pieces for you this week but I think they are good ones. One is a review of a twentieth century classic, it’s place in modern literature, and how literary canons get made. The other is the return of Ed’s Place, where roomie Ed expounds upon the market forces exerting pressure on some pillars of nerd culture. He calls his opinions tedious; I call them scintillating. It’s just possible I may take next week off, as it’s the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reading a fat book I may not finish by next week, and my reading pace is still not back up to where it was over the summer. We shall see. Either way, enjoy!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: I Have Tedious Opinions About Roleplaying Games & The Pickle That Is Rick
REVIEWS
Joseph Heller, “Catch-22” (1961) - Thirty-five is an unusual age to read this particular classic. In fact, I was given my copy of “Catch-22” roughly half my life ago by a dear friend. I was the right age then, but circumstance intervened: the prose reminded me of the speech of my high school girlfriend, and I put it down. Having now read it, I don’t quite see what teenage me was thinking in that, the memories don’t quite add up- adolescence is another planet. I assumed for years I’d never pick the book up again, and carried it with me through multiple moves mostly because my friend wrote a sweet note to me in it.
Why did I read it at age thirty-five? Well, out of general interest in American literature, is part of the answer. But I pulled the trigger now because I just re-read “A Confederacy of Dunces,” and reacquainted myself with the tortured story of that book’s publication. John Kennedy Toole, author of “Confederacy,” had a long correspondence with Robert Gottlieb, editor at Alfred Knopf and one of the most influential literary editors of his day. In it, Gottlieb repeatedly praised Toole and “Confederacy” but insisted on sweeping changes in the work, and in the end, passed on it. Gottlieb rose to prominence initially on the strength of discovering Joseph Heller and ushering “Catch-22” into print. So I was curious: what was in “Catch-22” that appealed to Gottlieb, that “A Confederacy of Dunces” (supposedly) lacked?
I wouldn’t call “Catch-22” story-driven or character-driven in the usual sense, maybe a little more the latter- I guess I’d call it “scenario-driven.” The scenario is this: in the waning days of World War Two, US Army Air Force bombardier John Yossarian doesn’t want to fly any more missions, because people shoot at him and try to kill him. No one else on his base, set on a tiny Italian island in the Mediterranean, seems to understand this simple concept, except for possibly Yossarian’s friend, the chaplain. Plenty of Yossarian’s fellows look to avoid combat, but primarily because they’ve got other irons on the fire: playing the black market, getting laid, being a nefarious colonel looking to use their men to advance their careers. Realizing that getting in an airplane and flying out to drop bombs on people while other people shoot at you is crazy, as Yossarian does, leads to the original of several versions of the titular “Catch-22:” if you realize what you’re doing is objectively crazy, than you are sane enough to undertake it.
The narrative of the book proceeds non-linearly. We get chapters, mostly named after one or another character, that relate one or another anecdote of life on the base, of missions, or of leave spent in Rome or elsewhere in Italy. They illustrate a whole world of military screwballs, dickering with each other comedically in action that sometimes recalls the Three Stooges and dialogue that is sometimes a little “who’s on first?” Not that either is damning- that kind of humor can be funny, and while I didn’t laugh aloud much I can see why it appeals, especially when it was written. I don’t call the work character-driven because the characters, including Yossarian, are reasonably well-characterized but seemingly thin by design. This makes sense, given the here today, gone tomorrow nature of extended combat tours and the surreal world of the war (what Pynchon called “the zone”) around them. A narrative eventually reveals itself through the non-linear confusion, as we see the missions Yossarian went on, alluded to in previous chapters, that soured him on war, and as the nefarious colonels ratchet up their demands on their men, bringing Yossarian and many of the others to a breaking point. But I’d say the plot isn’t really the point, either.
What, then, is the point? An especially important question to me, as one of the main points Robert Gottlieb made against “A Confederacy of Dunces” was what he saw as the book’s pointlessness. Well, not to be reductive, but it seems to me the main point of “Catch-22” would be “war = bad.” A valid point, and one often eluded in mythology of World War Two, “the good war.” There’s also a fair amount of “bureaucracy = bad,” producing humor about the irrationality of machine society, which reached unheard of potency during the war and looked set to dominate the peace. Also reasonably valid, if overdone in subsequent decades. These points helped make it a favorite of the Baby Boom generation, and the man-vs-sick-society thing still resonates, especially but not exclusively with younger readers. It’s a classic for a reason.
What opened up the book some for me and helped with the “Confederacy” comparison was this simple question: What does Yossarian want? We all know he wants to not fly missions any more. He wants to live. Sometimes, he expresses concern for whether others live, primarily his buddies but also sometimes civilians he’s sent to bomb, but Heller is admirably circumspect in making Yossarian feckless, no paper Christ. What I didn’t know going in was how much Yossarian wants to get laid. Yossarian is both horny (he gets laid a lot with sex workers and nurses, and basically sexually assaults one of the latter with a buddy in a scene played for laughs) and romantic (forever falling in love with one or another of his scores). Other than officers, sex workers are the most prominent occupation of character in the world of the book, and one (mostly referred to as “Nately’s whore”) goes some way towards advancing the action of the plot.
This might be a bit of a reach, but Yossarian’s rejection of the military -- an exclusively male institution, inhabited by men who seem to love being around other men, even as many of them also seek out women compulsively -- strikes me as another instantiation of a theme in postwar fiction pointed out by academic and critic Michael Trask: a man “coming out as straight,” in opposition to institutional settings that would make him unnatural and queer. Yossarian just wants to be left alone to indulge the appetites every man has- sex with women, and indolence. In this way, Yossarian sets the pattern for the comedic Everyman for generations to come, from the characters in MASH to Homer Simpson. We know Heller influenced these later generations of comic writers- Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” wrote an amusing comic about meeting Heller, one of his favorite writers. “Catch-22” reminded me of nothing so much as the fourth season of “Arrested Development,” one of my favorite tv shows, and I’d be very surprised if the writers weren’t familiar with “Catch-22.”
From a distance, this doesn’t look all that different from “A Confederacy of Dunces,” which has had its own impact on comedy writing. Ignatius Reilly, the main character, also wants to be left alone, to rot in his room, eating, bothering his mother, writing down his untimely thoughts, and masturbating. Both “Confederacy” and “Catch-22” end with the promise of escape for the main character, flight to a promised land with sexual overtones. But there are important differences. Ignatius may be a slob, but he is no everyman. His sexuality -- repressed, violent, fantastic, fundamentally solipsistic -- is the furthest thing from the straightforward and frequently-gratified sexuality of a Yossarian. What Ignatius wants -- either in his lazier modes or in the manias he goes into for much of the action of “Confederacy” -- is not the sort of thing that would be considered normal or noble (those near-homophones!) by most American readers at midcentury.
Robert Gottlieb was (is, he’s still alive) a classic literary gatekeeper. You don’t get to be editor of the New Yorker unless you’re a safe pair of hands. Put it all together and you get a dispiriting picture of why “Catch-22” would appeal to him in ways “A Confederacy of Dunces” would not. You can slap a big moral -- “war and bureaucracy = bad” -- on “Catch-22” in a way you can’t with “Confederacy.” The non-linear aspect of “Catch-22” makes it more confusing and obscure and hence “literary” than “Confederacy,” which is basically linear in plot. Despite wallowing in death and futility, “Catch-22,” in its apotheosizing feckless everyman Yossarian, celebrates the agreed upon postwar values, at least of the literary set: peace, plenty, and heterosexual intercourse. That, and the moral he could put on it, was the “point” “Catch-22” had for someone like Gottlieb, I think.
“A Confederacy of Dunces” did not have that point and did not reaffirm those values. And those values, relatively recently, were pretty strongly challenged by a serious artistic avant-garde, many of whom chose the wrong side in the war that serves as a setting for “Catch-22.” Along with “Confederacy,” while reading “Catch-22” I kept thinking of the works of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the French fascist who for my money wrote the best literary depictions of the Second World War. His outlook was at least as bleak as Heller’s and, while not exacting denying himself worldly pleasures, Celine no more thought they justified the world and human existence than he believed in democracy or equality. We know Celine influenced Joseph Heller’s friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut- I wonder if Heller read him? It’s worth noting that both Celine and Vonnegut present a ground-level take on the war (Celine as a refugee, Vonnegut as an infantryman), as opposed to Heller’s air war. The war was dangerous enough for American bomber crews, but you get a whole other look at the world and its quandaries from the perspective of people really in the meat grinder, like a Soviet infantryman, to allude to another ideological side of the war that postwar American literary culture strenuously sought to exclude.
John Kennedy Toole wasn’t a communist or a fascist, but “A Confederacy of Dunces” breathes just a little bit of that mephitic air of the tomb world of non-humanist ideology (reactionary Catholicism as practiced by Ignatius, the real old school stuff not this online “tradcath” horseshit, fits right in there). It emitted enough, I think, to scare someone like Gottlieb. Cynical and dark though “Catch-22” is, it would not ring the same alarm bells. None of this is to say that “Catch-22” is a less genuine book, or that it doesn’t deserve praise. It’s pretty good, though I think “A Confederacy of Dunces” is funnier and better. I guess I’m just interested in how the sausage of canon gets made, and I think the comparison of “Catch-22” with “A Confederacy of Dunces” illuminates the process. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: I Have Tedious Opinions About Roleplaying Games & The Pickle That Is Rick
Now it might appear from that title that only four entries into what is essentially my own vanity column I’m about to indulge in what is essentially forums posting levels of complaining that some roleplaying game is bad now because they changed it, and to a certain extent that’s true. A lot of this article is derived from my reflections on the differences between the current and previous editions of the popular roleplaying game system Dungeons and Dragons, I’d have name checked them in the title except the baked-in ampersand would’ve played havoc with my titling conventions. Now, of course if you wanted to read an argument as to why one version of Dungeons and Dragons is better than another you needn’t do anything other than look at one of any number of internet forums where this point has been argued endlessly since the dawn of the internet. But rest assured I’m offering some nuance and insight into issues far beyond the realm of the roleplaying community itself, and hope by way of my explanation I can explain how the problems present in this most recent edition can be extrapolated out to other segments of society. And by that I mean I hope to use Dungeons and Dragons to explain why Magic: the Gathering is bad now too.
Wait! Wait, I see you about to scroll away, and I can’t blame you for that being your first instinct. You’ve probably had your fill of nerds complaining about things generally, and specifically both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering, online for ages, but this time it’s not so much a complaint about them being bad, in fact I somewhat resist this analysis for both properties, but rather there’s some value in analyzing exactly where they are having problems. I wouldn’t really bother you, dear reader, with my tedious nerd opinions except in my obsessing over them I’ve found a very interesting relationship between the two properties and the problems I see in both of them. They’re both running into problems in similar, although not exactly identical ways, but the real interesting part of all of this is that their problems are interrelated. Dungeons & Dragons has the problems it has in part because of Magic: the Gathering, while Magic: the Gathering has problems in large part due to Dungeons & Dragons, and not just in some abstract sense, but rather directly and demonstrably related problems.
By way of explanation it might be important to explain both products at least in as much detail required to understand what’s going on with the analysis we’re about to work through. Dungeons & Dragons as I’m sure most people are familiar with, is a set of rules where you can pretend to be in a Tolkienesque fantasy setting, and with a group of friends posing as your fellow adventurers go on classic fantasy adventures limited only by the extent of your groups imagination, most often, but not always, involving both dungeons and dragons. Dungeons & Dragons traces its roots to the old hobbyist medieval wargaming circuit, when in the early 70’s Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson got tired of litigating the Battle of Hastings over and over again and wondered what might happen if you threw a dragon into the mix or something.
Magic: the Gathering is a fantasy collectible card game where you have a deck of cards that represents spells you can cast, as well as the land you can draw magical power from, if you’ve read Larry Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” it’s essentially that, with each card representing a spell you can cast, and each game representing a “duel” between two wizards. Magic grew up out of the culture surrounding Dungeons & Dragons, it was invented specifically as something you could do while waiting on line at large gaming conventions, and it’s connection to Dungeons & Dragons lives on in that the amount of “health” each player starts out with is set at twenty, as its inventor, Richard Garfield, assumed players of his game would have a twenty sided die, which is the game piece most heavily associated with Dungeons & Dragons, handy when they would be playing Magic.
Aside from just that, the only thing you need to know about both games is that the company that published all of the original Dungeons & Dragons products Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, ran into a series of financial troubles in the 90’s right as Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic Cards, was enjoying a great deal of commercial success. Because the two products already existed in much the same market demographic, it made sense for Wizards of the Coast to buy up the rights to Dungeons & Dragons and keep publishing books in the system. Eventually the giant toy company Hasbro came along and bought Wizards of the Coast, but the only thing that’s really important to understanding the point of this article is that both properties are owned by the same company.
So things continue along under Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, first one new edition is published, then another, and so on. Including the various editions published under TSR there are now a total of five editions, well five numbered editions there are various offshoots and in-between editions. Many long-time players have a favorite edition, normally it’s the one they were first introduced to the game growing up. I was introduced to the game in the third edition by my cousins, and played a lot of it in my teens, but my favorite edition is actually the much maligned Fourth Edition that followed that which came out in the late 2000’s well after I’d first played third edition. The core insight of Fourth Edition, and I think it’s largest step forward as a roleplaying product, was that the roleplaying parts of the game could be best adjudicated without too many rules as it was after all mostly just make believe. Where structure was most needed was in the combat portions of the game, so Fourth Edition really harkened back to Dungeon & Dragons wargaming roots, and did a good job of explaining concepts like balancing classes against one another, and a greater emphasis on the action economy.
The action economy is an expression of how many “actions” each side gets during their turn in combat, since most other editions of the game assume that the party of adventurers are teaming up against one monster, and each player gets one set of actions apiece versus the monsters one set of actions, the players generally had a huge advantage in terms of just the sheer amount of actions they could put out before the enemy had a chance to react. Fourth Edition changed the core assumption, designing a system where parties would be set up against a balanced set of monsters that were often faced them in equal numbers, or just as often outnumbered the party, but in a way where they were not overwhelmed by being on the wrong side of the action economy. Even in instances where players would face off against singular threats like boss monsters, the action economy was taken into account and these monsters were just given access to more actions at different stages throughout a combat round so they wouldn’t be overrun by actions being heaped on them between their turns in combat. Monster design and encounter design was probably the best feature of the entire edition, rules for building your own monsters from scratch were available to game masters right off the bat, and the process was quick and intuitive, with the math for creating balanced monsters and encounters being straightforward enough to be printed on the back of a business card.
There were of course problems with the edition, having more monsters means encounters are more complex to run, which initially the designers weren’t concerned about because they assumed the new edition would be launched with a set of robust digital play tools to handle a lot of the math and record keeping. Unfortunately the edition came out right as mobile devices like smartphones and tablets were gaining prominence, and Wizards of the Coast had chosen to build their play tools in Silverlight, which absolutely not compatible with mobile development at all. The digital component of Fourth Edition never really emerged, and without it the base version of the game was too full up complexities on both the player and monster side of things to run efficiently in a typical play setting. Eventually the line course corrected and reduced complexity for both players and game masters with later products, but all of the upfront complexity turned a good number of people off, and there was a pretty vocal reaction to it within the community about the need to return the game to its roots in earlier editions, and that reaction informs a lot of the design of the current Fifth Edition.
Some of the changes are for the best. Much of the modifier wrangling of Fourth Edition has been compressed down into a handy little mechanic called “advantage” where you roll twice and take the better result in places where you’d get generic plus ones of twos in previous editions. A lot of quality of life stuff did follow over from Fourth Edition on the player side, like wizards and other spellcasters having spells that they could cast even if they’d run out of other spells. Wherever they made advancements however, they lost many of the successes of the previous editions, balances in the action economy between players and their adversaries, and the individual player classes fell by the wayside, and monster design lost all transparency. In Fourth Edition I could write my own monster manuals, in fifth the best you could hope for was tweaking monsters published in Dungeons & Dragons supplements and hoping it stayed balanced. My complaint about current edition monsters isn’t just my personal gripe, designers who work on game supplements readily admit they just sort of guess and then spend dozens of hours playtesting each monster to get the balance right for monsters in the current edition, something someone running a game from home couldn’t really hope to do.
I’m not saying Fifth Edition is a bad version, in fact plenty of people seem to enjoy the game despite these personal problems I have with the system. Dungeons & Dragons is undergoing a bit of a renaissance at the moment, with several “live play” podcasts such as The Adventure Zone and Critical Role bringing Dungeons & Dragons to a mass audience. Despite my gripes many people, and an impressive number of new players, seem to be enjoying the game very much at the moment. It’s entirely fine for you to enjoy this current edition and in fact I’m heartened to see new players join the hobby. I’ve only related my history with and opinion on the game so far to explain my position as someone familiar with the game, but a bit outside of the current scene with a unique perspective to offer on the current trends I see in the game, and the trouble I see ahead. None of what I’ve outlined as of yet is what I’d classify as a “problem” with Dungeons & Dragons as a property. The real problem I see coming for Dungeons & Dragons is Rick.
No, not the cartoon character who famously turned himself into a pickle. Actually to a lesser extent him too as we’ll see in a moment, but mostly I mean Rick Grimes, the lead character from the popular comics-based zombie apocalypse television show “The Walking Dead.” Now, Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have any ties with The Walking Dead as of yet, but Magic: the Gathering does. Magic: the Gathering last month had a “Secret Base” limited edition card promotion where they sold a batch of cards based off of characters from the show The Walking Dead. The marketing for the event is a bit skeezy, the cards are a limited run with an extremely limited availability window at a high price point, essentially a high pressure sales deal. Secret Base releases have happened before and the Magic community have mostly let them go by without comment because they could reasonably assume it was just a thing for hardcore collectors to worry about. But The Walking Dead Secret Base promotion is different, the cards in this promotion, unlike the tie in sets that had been released previously are both exclusive to the promotion and tournament legal. Previous cards of this type were either made available for release later, or banned from tournament play, but that’s out the window now. Initially many in the Magic community still wanted to give the set a pass as the cards previewed kind of all sucked, but on the last day of previews for the set hoping to sneak under the radar was the Rick Grimes card.
By itself the Rick Grimes card doesn’t break the game of Magic, but Rick’s card is the missing piece in a long awaited deck in a particular format of Magic called Commander, which to greatly oversimplify things, is based around building a deck around a particular theme. For ages a “Humans” Commander deck had almost all of the pieces it needed to be competitive in the format, but was missing a card that could make the decks other “Human” cards work well together, and Rick was essentially everything on their wish list, but only available for a limited time at a high price point. These high pressure sales tactics were no longer negligible events that only really concerned fans of tie in properties and collectors, they now were going to affect players whether they bought the card or not, because they’d have to play against it in tournaments regardless. This was the latest in a string of broken promises between Wizards of the Coast and Magic: the Gathering players, and the community is understandably in an uproar, especially after the announcement of the new Legendary Commander block meant to put more of an emphasis on the format they’d just took a big step toward making “pay to win” with the Rick Grimes card a few weeks ago.
Now, the same financial incentives don’t quite play out in the less commodified game of Dungeons & Dragons, but the two product lines are moving along similar trajectories in their branding strategies. So much so in fact that they are slated to intersect. One of the first “core sets” slated for next year is a block of Magic: the Gathering cards specifically themed around Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property. I have to imagine a reciprocal sourcebook covering how to incorporate concepts from Magic: the Gathering, or perhaps even the cards themselves, into Dungeons & Dragons play is not too far away. In fact we’ve already seen two such supplements printed already, the first being “A Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica,” which Wizards of the Coast promised up and down was just a one off experiment in blending the two product lines. This promise was quickly broken when “Mythic Odysseys of Theros,” another Magic themed supplement came out that same year. Already we’re starting to see promises broken to the Dungeons & Dragons community like they were to the Magic: the Gathering players, how long until the high pressure sales kick in?
The basic problem is that Dungeons & Dragons is hitting all of the same beats as Magic: the Gathering was before everyone started threatening to quit the game. The pattern is a string of broken promises to the community followed by a callous cash grab that hides behind crossovers with other properties. There have been several brand tie-in supplements already, one involving the Penny Arcade line of webcomics, one for the Netflix show Stranger Things, and, yes, one for Rick and Morty. Even the new campaign setting that came with Fifth Edition published in The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is a tie-in to the Critical Role series of podcasts that have helped popularize the game again in recent days. The problem as I see it is that Dungeons & Dragons is slipping away from being a creative property, and is now mostly just an intellectual property to be licensed and used in cross brand synergies.
Dungeons & Dragons has always been a game of exciting creative potential. Yes, it was originally just a rip off of a bunch of standard fantasy tropes, sometimes explicitly in the case of the works of Jack Vance, but throughout Dungeon & Dragons history the basic elements of fantasy and wargaming have been recombined into new and exciting areas. There are whole play settings where the mechanics take the systems and tropes of Dungeons & Dragons and bring them into space, or into a bleak high scarcity magical post apocalypse, or even a bizarre cosmic dream trip based on the principles of hermetic magic, whatever it was, it was new and exciting. The reaction against the advances of Fourth Edition, however, have sent the game on a series of safe bets harkening back to the classic era. Most of the adventures published for this edition are actually nostalgic updates of “classic” modules from editions past, and many of them are actually written by outside “guest” writers, which neglects building up in house talent. This is a complaint oddly similar to those who grouse about Magic: the Gathering farming out its game fiction to ghost writers and pulp freelancers where before they had a stable of consistent in house talent that had a cohesive vision for the fiction of the game. Even the inhouse talent that they were still in contact with from the earlier days is getting burned by this corporate synergy kick. Laura and Tracy Hickman, married co-authors of the best selling fiction series and campaign setting Dragonlance, had essentially all but written the first book in a new trilogy of books in that universe when Wizards of the Coast backed out of the deal so abruptly over some concern of branding that it prompted a lawsuit from the authors. Now there’s not even anything new coming out of their old properties anymore.
I’m not about to get all doom and gloom about how Dungeons & Dragons is dying, it has been around long enough for this to have all happened before. Back in the final days of TSR, the company had acquired the rights to the sci-fi pulp property Buck Rogers, and really pushed a crossover between those two properties in a similarly cash grabby way and the game lived on. It’s not a bad thing that the new players the game has managed to attract get to experience older content in an updated and more accessible format, but I’m afraid those who own the property are going to take the wrong lessons from their recent success and try to cash out while the money is good. What I am saying is that we are seeing in real time a product shift from a creative property, one where new ideas and content can be created, to an mere intellectual property used for marketing purposes, and a nostalgia property that mainly just remixes and repeats content that had existed previously without adding much new to the creative landscape. This transition is still too large and too fresh to understand its full implications, but it is a cultural phenomena worth observing critically, as this shift from creative property to intellectual property is happening throughout popular culture in ways I hope to examine more in depth in future articles. For now I merely want to point out that it’s happening and it’s not really a game anyone is going to win.