Did Heller base his sarcastic swipe at academia on any actual example?
In chapter 1 of *Catch 22*, Yossarian describes how he makes a boring task (censoring letters) interesting by erecting "dynamic intralinear tensions":> All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more **dynamic intralinear tensions**, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name.Was Heller having a go at a particular pompous academic or clique? Or, did he invent this strained term?
It's quite feasible that the author did have a specifically pompous academic in mind. He studied English as an undergraduate at University of Southern California and New York University after which earned a MA in English from Columbia University in 1949 (approximately 12 years prior to publishing Catch-22). He then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University and taught composition for 2 years at Pennsylvania State University. (He later taught again part-time inside the 1970s at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania, but that become after the booklet of Catch-22).
