One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'
Ken Kesey
Half a century late, remiss of hundreds of screaming intertextual references and dozens of raving reviews by Senior Reading Raccoons, Ken Kesey ‘s ‘One that flew over the Cuckoo's Nest’ finally found me.
Had it not, I would have remained an illiterate reader ,a fledgling Raccoon ! That's how overawed have I been reading the book.
Kesey had a big say in shaping the sui generis literary mould of counterculture resonating in the psychedelic sixties in the USA. Its informal mode of expression freely embracing the popular, the vernacular, the conversational idiom made for facile, fluid, fervent and familiar reading.
The plot is simple. A ward in a mental asylum in Oregon under the hawk eye and iron clad discipline of the Big Nurse, Ratchet, in this sombre ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ of hers where patients cower as affrighted ‘rabbits’, flies in a ‘bull goose loony’ R P McMurphy. Flaunting ways of the ‘wild west’, not amenable to regimentation, he provokes and eggs on the patients to manoeuvre for a freer, less oppressive existence. The grim, sterile, humourless, drilled to precision routine is upset. Laughter, not just snicker, gets heard after years. The anarchist, the street smart disrupter looms as a serious threat to the power and absolute control wielded by the Big Nurse. Thenceforth a fascinating, gripping psychological ‘joust’ ensues- the disrupter hell-bent on making ‘men’ of ‘rabbits’ ,and the Big Nurse -cold ,calculating, patient- manipulating things to protect her turf, reassert her authority, and restore the staus quo. This cat and mouse game of one-upmanship is exquisitely curated and jocosely related. It keeps the reader irresistibly hooked.
Throughout, the narrative has strong sexual overtones. Playful ribaldry, bawdy jokes and titillating double entendre lighten the otherwise despairing melancholia of an insufferable, dehumanizing asylum.
At the literal level, the book debunks contemporary treatment protocols of the mentally flawed as devices to assert power and control , and forcing an inhumane segregation of the mad from mainstream society. Not curing them.
The narrative emphasizes fuzziness of the boundary between sanity and insanity. When Mr Taber wants to know what tablets are being given to him, the query is ignored. Instead, he is ‘straightened’ by lobotomy ( surgically short-circuiting of pathways to nerves in a brain lobe). Brain burnt, he ends up a vegetable. Who then was the madder? Was Hitler sane ?
In its allegorical import, the asylum encapsulates contemporary societal imperatives of control and conformism to an ideal conceived by power structures, Kesey calls it the ’Combine’. Concomitantly, repression of individuality and deviant thought followed in its train. The looming spectre of McCarthism, doom presaged by the Cold War and a post war societal churn mirrored in the beat movement fed into these impulses.
Kesey’s characterization of the loonies is convincingly plausible (I hope so for I haven’t been mad enough to experience it first hand) . And the portrayal of ice-berg Big Nurse wielding an illimitable 'power of insinuation' behind the façade of her glued plastic smile is a marvel. So too the description of disoriention, fragmentary recall of the past, mental and vision fogginess after an electric shock therapy session. The narrative climaxes in the last part of the book but leaves behind a lingering sense of business ‘unfinished’.
More humane and efficacious treatments for mental disorders have now evolved. Also, the dark mood of stifling control in the Cold War era has dissipated. Yet, in very many subtle and overt ways freedom to choose, assertion of individuality and free expression of thought and sexuality is suppressed. Increasingly, media houses and echo chambers of social media subconsciously influence choices, socio-politico narratives, even art and culture - all converging towards an uniformity dictated by the ‘Combine’. As Herbert Marcuse bemoaned, man is becoming inexorably ‘one-dimensional’.
The instruments of control and conformism have changed from those in the 60s, but not our date with control itself. Kesey is ,therefore, as readable in the twenty first century too.
He has whetted my appetite . I wanna beat around the sweet beat Lit a bit more. ‘On the Road’ with Jack Kerouac is my next reading beat.
