s discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence intoabstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybodycould do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character' (p. 356). Hannah Arendt has essayed soberly on the most alarming point about this in herstudy of Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). I wonder how she would have responded to the Kleinian psychoanalyticnotions of the ubiquity of psychotic anxieties and the idea of the inhumanity of groups and bureaucracies as an institutional defence against them (Bion, 1961; Jaques,1955; Lyth, 1959; Young, 1992, in press).Yossarian bears it all, contains it all and lives a life ruled by psychotic anxieties, and in defence against the terror of disintegration, all the rules make group relationssense, i.e., they are mad. He and his tentmate Orr survive - he through psychical distress and insight and knowing when to stand and when to run (p. 440), Orrthrough rigorous training in physical hardship, won through repeated crashes, the cunning point of which Yossarian only grasps at the very end when Orr turns out tohave rowed all the way to Sweden and freedom. Unlike my other two favourite anti-authoritarian hard cases - Randle McMurtry of One Flew Over the Cuckoo'sNest and Cool Hand Luke - Yossarian stops short of provoking the system into destroying him. He knows when to take off on his own path to redemption - 'tosplit' in the depressive sense.It is ultimately a book about ideals, about the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and about how hard it is for people to behave well, especially in groups andinstitutions under duress. 'That's my trouble, you know,' Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. 'Between me and every ideal I always...
