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IDENTITARY RESISTANCE TO CONFINEMENT AND CONFORMITY:
KEN KESEY’S ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
Bianca Ionescu-Tanasescu, Eduard Vlad, Abstract: The author’s of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s experience as well as his personal inclinations prepared him to play his role of the “psychic outlaw” figure and to serve as the liaison agent between the earlier Beat Generation and the counterculture movement of the 1960s, for which he turned into a cult character and a guru, rivaling Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Timothy Leary. The current article describes Ken Kesey’s “psychic outlaw” role in that age of consensus through the mediation of his best-known novel’s protagonists, McMurphy and Chief Bromden. One of them will be able to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. Keywords : cult fiction, the Combine, the counterculture, psychedelic culture, the Beats. It all started with what would become Ken Kesey’s most critically acclaimed and best-selling novel, published in 1962, but very much a book reflecting the spirit of the discontents of the previous decade. His One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would soon become a cult novel of the hippie generation. Whissen considers this cult novel to be a “modern morality play,” an allegorical cultural text, displaying religious overtones. The necessary archetypal characters of this morality play include a messiah or savior (R.P. McMurphy) and his apostle and disciple (Bromden) in a narrative in which good is victorious over the power of darkness, even if temporarily (Whissen 1992: 164). Ken Elton Kesey may be seen not only as a link between the Beats and the psychedelic culture of the hippies of the 1960s, but also as a son of the Great Depression years. He was born in 1935 in La Junta, Colorado, which his family left, to settle in Springfield, Oregon, during the Second World War. It is there that Kesey first attended school, before he went on to study at the University of Oregon, from which he graduated in 1957.The following year he began his studies as Stanford, California. As a student, he would also show to be a good wrestler, rising as high as the Olympic pre-selections of 1960. Creative writing was also something young Kesey was good at. Stanford University (where he had enrolled in creative writing) is the place where he came across the psychology student who led him to the environment that would inspire him for his best known work: Vik Lovell, to whom his best book will be dedicated. Lovell told him about the research on experimental drugs, such as LSD, being conducted at the Menlo Park veterans’ hospital. As a matter of fact, it was part of a secret CIA program called MKULTRA, which would be declassified several decades later. The idea was to test the reactions of people, potential spies, for example, to whom drugs had been administered. As scientists needed paid volunteers willing to serve as psychedelic guinea pigs, Kesey became one of them. He both
accepted the sum of money he was offered and the opportunity to investigate alternative modes of perception and consciousness which drug consumption produced. This appears to be an unexpected episode in the confrontation between the military- industrial complex and ordinary, but rebellious people, mainly artists, resisting its power. This time, young Kesey is paid, obviously working for the system and the power elite. He feels very patriotic, since he serves his country, he gets some money and feels high. Kesey becomes accustomed to LSD, he is also given peyote, Ditran, mescaline, which would eventually cause his long term drug addiction. Since LSD was still legal at the time, what is more, produced and marketed by a respectable Swiss pharmaceutical firm called Sandoz, Kesey is not likely to have worried much. Anyway, not enough research had been done by then to discover the terrible side effects and long term consequences of drug use. His job as a night attendant in the same hospital gave him both the time and the experience of that place and its inmates that would allow him to create the book that would make him famous. Like the Beats, Kesey is interested in the artistic potential of representations of madness. The fact that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became “cult fiction” in the United States is largely due to another central theme that it highlights. The central theme has to do with forms of resistance to what is here called the “Combine.” This theme, which was gaining particular prominence among the minority nonconformists of the 1950s and 1960s, will become even more prominent when the general conformism of the two above-mentioned decades is followed, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, by the rebelliousness of the counterculture. The novel shows the behavior of a determined rebel, McMurphy, initially defying the constraints of society as a troublemaking individual, then turning into a sort of mythical hero rising to defend the cause of the many and the weak and suffering the eventual ordeal. The first form of resistance that McMurphy will appear to put up, and with which he tries to inspire the other inmates, is the refusal to accept the prevailing discourse of mainstream normality imposed on everyone inside the cuckoo’s nest, as Knapp notes: Randle McMurphy succeeds in destroying the order of the ward, and in liberating some of its patients, not through any kind of direct attack on the system, but simply by refusing to speak the language which sustains it. His most telling weapons are jokes, games, obscenity, make-believe, verbal disrespect (Knapp 2007: 45). At the time, forms of resistance to mainstream culture were beginning to take the shape of experimentation with psychedelic drugs, which gave some of society’s discontents the impression of free access to a more exciting universe. The consequences of this kind of playing with fire were not fully known and understood either by the medical world or by ordinary people. The most successful fictional feature of the text is the use of an unreliable narrator to tell the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy. The half Indian Chief Bromden, the character-narrator, recounts the main events and incidents of his being confined to a psychiatric ward. He does not focus on his behavior, but on the “advent and crucifixion” of the hero, the charismatic protagonist. The sharp contrast between the protagonist and the world in which he chooses to descend, initially believing that this will be an easy place of rest for him, is noted by Terence Martin:
powerful and dreaded figure. She is pictured as a composite entity including the authoritative Big Mother, a monstrous, implacable machine, ready to deal with any sign of resistance. Before the situation becomes dramatic, though, the narrator describes one the frequent occasions on which a public relations man of the mental hospital guides visitors willing to see what the mental hospital looks like and how it is organized, stressing how modern the place is, what a cheerful and happy atmosphere reigns there. If mentally ill people were mistreated in the past, civilization has brought great progress in dealing with insanity. However, the narrator is not fully convinced of that, on the contrary. In fact, he is afraid of real and imaginary electronic and mechanical devices, such as microphones in his broom handle or even in the pills he is taking. The Indian thinks that the hospital is just a “factory” of the Combine, and its inmates are mechanical defective parts, and therefore needing repair. Bromden believes that the hospital, just like other institutions, such as schools and churches, are meant to keep people disciplined. Unlike the other institutions, though, the hospital fixes the “twisted” individuals up, sometimes making them better than new, the Indian claims: The ward is a factory for the Combine. It’s for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart (38). There are clearly-defined circumstances that can explain how the Indian’s alienation came about. Bromden is a six-foot-seven-inches tall former World War II combatant who was shocked by the terrible uses of modern technology. He transfers the artificial fog used to hide military objectives during the war to the surroundings of his ward, where “metaphorical fog” is seen both as an instrument of oppression (probably the effect of medication on the minds of the patients), and as a means of escape against authority. The fog, deafness, and dumbness appear to have helped the Indian survive in the hospital for a long time. In addition to being a World War II veteran, he is also a hospital veteran, as he says: “I’m the one been here on the ward the longest, since the Second World War. I been here on the ward longer’n anybody. Longer’n any of the other patients” (16). Bromden’s feigned deafness and dumbness is meant to isolate and protect him from the others. Initially, Bromden felt that it was society that made him silent and invisible, turning him into a non-entity. As Lupack correctly observes, “…even as a young boy he felt his invisibility in a white man's world and learned that Indians are misfits, bereft of any real sense of self (Lupack 68). His deaf and mute status also allows the Indian to overhear and report, as a narrator, exchanges that the hospital staff would otherwise keep from him. Assuming deafness and dumbness, Bromden accepts a less-than-human subaltern position in the hospital. The Indian deliberately diminishes, belittles his presence. He is seen by patients and staff as deaf, dumb, Chief Broom, hardly more than a piece of furniture, a tool. He sees himself as “very little,” much smaller than McMurphy, although he is a very tall Indian, the tallest man on the ward. The Big Nurse probably reminds him of his mother, a white woman who controlled her giant of a husband, the Indian chief. The father, whose Indian name means The-Pine-That- Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, gives up his proud name for his wife’s surname, Bromden. It will be easier for him to get his Social Security number in this way. His wife will also persuade him to accept the deal whereby the Indians’ lands and way of life (they are fishermen) are
destroyed by modern technology: a hydroelectric dam will be built, the Indian settlements will be flooded. Significantly, the traumatized son sees his very tall Indian father getting smaller and smaller and his white mother bigger and bigger, finally twice her husband’s size. Gradually, with McMurphy’s assistance, Chief Bromden will see himself grow up again, and regain his prodigious strength. Kesey appears to use the stereotype of the Native American as innocent child to be educated and initiated into adulthood by his white father. The white father here is not a representative of the Establishment, but the “psychic outlaw” himself, Randle Patrick McMurphy. McMurphy initially comes over as a picturesque character, an adventurer, troublemaker, gambler, who finds a way of escaping the rigors of the prison work camp. Seen this way at the beginning of the novel, he appears to resemble the protagonist of Heller’s Catch- 22 , also examined in this chapter of the dissertation. Yossarian, the protagonist of Joseph Heller’s novel, was pretending to be ill in order to avoid flying more missions. McMurphy is pretending to be mentally ill, the “cuckoo’s nest” appearing to him to be a better place to be than the jail in which he is serving a sentence for assault and battery. Simulating madness brings him to the asylum, in which he intends to relax and have an easy time, gambling, playing poker, thus earning some money as well. He is very friendly, he jokes and shakes hands with the madder and less mad inmates, with the so-called Acutes and with the Chronics alike. He declares to be delighted to be admitted to an “Institute of Psychology.” Knowing how to interact with the inmates, he first tells them that they look normal to him. On the other hand, he claims to be very mad, the maddest person around. He declares that he is ready to challenge the person who claims to be the most prominent madman, as he wants this honor to be his. There is a dramatic confrontation which follows, between the champion, Harding, and the challenger, McMurphy. Very ironically, to prove that he is mad, McMurphy confesses to having voted for Dwight Eisenhower, while Harding claims to have done so twice so far. McMurphy, in order to beat his opponent, expresses his determination to vote for Eisenhower for a third presidential term, “this November” (Kesey 20), a temporal clue that sets the novel in 1960). The result of the competition entitles McMurphy, the recently arrived inmate, to claim the leading status among the patients, getting “bull goose loony” position. McMurphy wants to give the impression to the inmates that this is an important title, rather than the sign of a bigger mental handicap. The narrative which follows will clarify the newcomer’s relation to the other characters and to the narrator character. In the children’s folk rhyme that features as the book’s epigraph, a children’s folk rhyme, goes, “one (goose) flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” One will have to wait and see which of the “geese” will manage to do that, who will be the bull goose loony breaking free. An interpretation of the novel will depend on answering this question. Is it McMurphy who, through death, is released from what he had thought would be an easy game and then proved to be an ordeal or is it Bromden, no longer Chief Broom, who becomes aware of who he is and what he can decide to do? Randle McMurphy gradually realizes that the treatment the patients undergo, including shock therapy, even lobotomy, does not appear to help them recover, on the contrary. What is even worse, Nurse Ratched encourages the patients to spy on one another. If something embarrassing is revealed about one of the inmates, he is publicly humiliated, thus diminishing even more his self-esteem. McMurphy realizes that something is very rotten in the cuckoo’s nest and that he cannot stay uninvolved, while the others are manipulated and humiliated. He will use his newly acquired “bull goose loony” position to defy the orders and the regulations imposed by
for a man – her son – to achieve maturity. In Leslie Horst’s words, “Big Nurse appears to be a perversion of femininity” (Horst 465). Billy Bibbit’s story is a good illustration of the catastrophic influence, here illustrated as that of a domineering woman, can have on a vulnerable young man having to cope with his identity crisis. A timid, stuttering virgin, Billy is urged by “his father,” McMurphy. This will happen during the farewell party that will lead to the catastrophic denouement of the plot. When the Big Nurse, the intimidating mother substitute, catches Billy and his woman having sex, she humiliates the young man, also threatening to inform his mother about a very serious offence. Terrified, the young man commits suicide. This will lead to the episode in which McMurphy violently confronts the Big Nurse. As punishment, McMurphy is to undergo lobotomy. He is then shown to have turned into a pathetic vegetable. Lobotomy symbolically equals castration here, and the Big Nurse finally prevails over her rebellious antagonist. It is at this stage that the reader might think again about the overall interpretation of the narrative and about its central protagonist or pair of protagonists. Various interpretations may focus on McMurphy as a Christ- like or Messiah figure and on his final fate as a sort of ordeal that he has to undergo in order to allow his disciples, especially Chief Bromden, to break free from the constraints of the world of confinement. This applies to the space inside, but also outside the asylum, in which they are made to live a far from dignified life. Thomas J. Slater, for example, stresses McMurphy’s centrality and his Christ-like stature, as seen through the eyes of his main disciple, the Indian: … the Chief’s depiction of McMurphy as a Christ figure is blatantly obvious. McMurphy comes into the ward, gathers his followers about him, instructs them in how to live, and then sacrifices himself for them even though he has done nothing wrong. He dies merely because he is a threat to the status quo (Slater 124). This is probably the main interpretation, with McMurphy as the protagonist, but this is not the only one. Although he discusses the duo at the core of the plot as fundamental to the interpretation of the book’s message, Fred Madden is one of those who find the disciple’s role central to the narrative, as he is the one who grows, and finally flies over the cuckoo’s nest: “At first McMurphy seems to be “big” from the Chief’s point of view, but by the end of the novel, his cap is “too small” for the Chief to wear”(Madden 109). Chief Bromden has by now recovered his sense of dignity. He does not want to see his mentor turned into a vegetable. Out of respect, he strangles McMurphy while he is sleeping, thus preserving his role model’s dignity. Being reminded by one of the other inmates of McMurphy’s unsuccessful attempt at lifting a very heavy control panel, he summons his huge physical strength, tries hard and lifts the huge piece of equipment. He then uses it as a heavy tool to break out of the asylum, and manages to do what McMurphy had wanted to do: to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. Bromden recovers his pride and self-esteem, combining what is best in his mixed family and racial background. His final gesture is, like Huck in Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , to run away from civilization. Unlike Huckleberry though, Bromden does not light out for the Indian territory to stay there, only to see what his brothers have been doing. He would then head for Canada, away from the country that has destroyed the ancestral lands he had grown up in. Chief Bromden is not seen as seeking integration in mainstream America, the way Kesey will eventually do, settling at his ranch and looking after his family as any respectable American citizen. He will fly over the whole of the cuckoo’s nest, which appears, in this satiric novel, to
refer to the whole of the United States. Through this gesture, at least within the universe created by his fictional work, the author comes up with a memorable expression of a discontent rejecting the conformism of the Combine as a whole.
Works Cited
Horst, Leslie. “Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature.” Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Text and Criticism. Ed. J.C. Pratt. New York: Penguin, 1996: 464-471. Huffman, James R. “The Cuckoo Clocks in Kesey’s Nest.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nes t—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 29-42. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ed. J.C. Pratt. London and New York: Penguin,
Knapp, James. “Tangled in the Language of the Past: Ken Kesey and Cultural Revolution.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nes t—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 43- 52. Leeds, B.H. Ken Kesey. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Lupack, B.T. Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction: Inmates Running the Asylum. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. Madden, Fred. “Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner.” Martin, Terence. “ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the High Cost of Living.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nes t—New Edition. Ed. with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007: 3-14. Oliver, Paul. Foucault: The Key Ideas. McGraw Hill, 2010. Parsons, Anne E. From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pratt, J.C., ed. Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin, 1996.
