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What are we former students of the New Critics to think of Catch-22 and all the praise heaped on it, for more than a decade now, by English professors? If sentimentality means what we thought it did (invitation to unexamined response, indulgence of inappropriate emotion) and as bad as we thought it was (an insult to serious readers, an abomination to people in universities) then, if we are still able to read as we were taught to read, Catch-22 thoroughly sentimental and not worth teaching. But apparently most college teachers, like most American intellectuals, do not see the book this way. I have in my office three collections of Catch-22 criticism that have been offered to me, in the last two years, for classroom use. They hardly acknowledge that a reaction like mine, like ours, possible. The editor of one of them, Robert M. Scotto (Joseph Heller's Catch-22: A Critical Edition, New York: Dell, 1973), tells me in his first sentence that Catch-22 is our contemporary classic, and appends eight critical essays that show no sign of disagreement. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, editors of A 'Catch-22' Casebook (New York: Crowell, 1973), declare in their second sentence that they feel, without reservation, that Catch-22 a masterpiece. Of the forty-six entries in their collection only three or four, by my reckoning, could be called seriously unfavorable. This in a genre commonly devoted to dialectic. The third editor, James Nagel (Critical Essays on Catch-22, Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1974), advertises controversy in his collection, and says that nearly all the key issues remain unresolved and continue to be vigorously debated, but the controversy we see mainly over what the novel really about, or whether the disjointed time scheme functional or not, or whether Yossarian an epic or an existentialist hero, and so on. Though there some debate over how bad the writing and how stereotyped the characters are, and some discussion of how functional these crudities and stereotypes may be, Nagel's introduction heavy with respect for Heller's art, and only two of the nineteen essays he collects are unfavorable. One of these a one-page review. Through all these collections the student will hear little debate on the kind of question that seems, that once seemed, vital to me, to us-whether the novel will stand up to and reward a hard, critical reading, or whether it will break down, whether it sentimental. Instead he will hear many tributes and claims that link the novel to the questions he finds vital in our time: that Catch-22 a brilliantly comic attack, long before the Vietnam war, on all the stupidity and

THE THEORY OF CHAUCER'S iambic pentameter, and by extension of the English pentameter tradition, proposed in Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser's article in College English for December 19661 is not one to be taken lightly. The article is intricately argued, in correct and toughly objective linguistic terms; it asks the right kind of questions about the nature of a meter, and in my opinion gives some very good answers to some of these questions. It is an interesting, a substantial, and even an important article; it demands a very close reading (such as I hope I have given it), and I must confess it commands my admiration. Nevertheless, I have some objections to urge-not so much on the score of inaccuracies in the argument, so far as the argument reaches, but on that of a certain inadequacy to the full idea of the English iambic pentameter. My aim is furthermore to conduct my conversation or debate with Halle and Keyser in such a way as to promote one perhaps paradoxical emphasis of my own concerning what for the moment I allude to, without explanation, as a notoften recognized co-presence or co-operation, in English iambic verse, of two controlling conceptions, both a rule and a norm (the latter of which is the center of the rule but not itself a rule). It will make at least for clarity in the direction of my discourse if I begin by somewhat abruptly challenging an assertion made in the introductory paragraphs of Halle and Keyser's article.

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