Before he became a counter-culture icon of the 60s as head of the “Merry Pranksters,” mixing LSD consumption and multi-media performances and launching the Grateful Dead into stardom, as documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey was a lowly orderly working the night shift at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California in the late 1950s, accumulating the experiences that would produce his breakout novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962.
Written while Kesey was a creative writing student in Wallace Stegner’s program at Stanford, it became a huge best-seller and catapulted Kesey to fame and fortune. The book remains one of the most admired novels of the 60s, being named on Time magazine’s famous list of the 100 greatest English language novels since 1923, and on Penguin classics’ list of 100 favorite novels as chosen by their readers. On the Website “Greatest Books of All Time,” an amalgamation of 291 different “greatest books” lists, Cuckoo’s Nest ranks as number 62 among English language novels. And it comes in as number 52 (alphabetically) on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
The novel focuses on themes of conformity, coercion, and the categories of sanity and insanity. It provides a damning critique of psychiatry and the treatment of patients in mental institutions as practiced in those years, treatment Kesey would have witnessed in his time working at the Menlo Park asylum. The book quickly became a favorite in high school curricula nationwide, and has since become one of the most commonly banned or challenged books in America. It has been challenged or removed from the curriculum or libraries in towns from Colorado to Ohio to New York to Maine to New Hampshire to Washington to California to Idaho (where the Fremont High School teacher who assigned the book was fired). As in most such cases, complainants pick and choose small incidents in the book and take them out of context. The complaints called the novel “pornographic,” claimed it glorified criminal activity, promoted “secular humanism,” and contained profanity, violence, sexual situations, and oh yes, it taught children “how easy it is to smother somebody” so that “they’re going to think that when they get mad at their parents, they can just ax them out.”
The actual novel is none of these things, but is a scathing commentary on the state of mental health treatment in the late 1950s. It is narrated by one of the patients in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, “Chief” Bromden, a half-Native American giant of a man who is apparently a deaf-mute who seems largely unaware of what happens around him. He has been subjected to electroshock treatments and is severely overmedicated. Known as Chief “Broom,” Bromden persistently and vacantly sweeps the floor around his ward—an activity that convinces others that he is harmless and docile, calmed by the repetitive motion of the broom, but that allows him to observe everything that goes on in the ward while remaining virtually invisible himself. As readers, however, we are aware of the Chief’s keen observations, albeit the observations of a troubled mind. Bromden, once a star high school football player, after witnessing the humiliation of his proud father at the hands of his white wife and the U.S. Government, has suffered from clinical depression and hallucinations. Thus, at least at first, we may not be able to trust everything Bromden says, as he is reportedly schizophrenic. His dreams and hallucinations chiefly involve what he calls the “Combine”—a large interlocking system that pervades all areas of society and quashes all personal freedom. It was this Combine that demeaned his father, that dammed the Columbia River wiping out his ancestral hunting grounds, that enforces the conformity of post-war consumer society. In his own institution, the Combine is personified by Nurse Ratched, the tyrannical head nurse who rules the ward with unquestioned authority.
The ”Big Nurse” does not generally rely on harsh discipline or punishment, but mainly on subtler mind games, utilizing a combination of rewards for those who follow her rules and shaming for those who do not. When these methods do not work, she may restrict the patient’s access to medications, or over-medicate them. Or she may deny their access to basic amenities until they conform to her will. One of the patients, a shy and stammering youth named Billy Bibbit, she finds most easy to manipulate. Threatening to complain about Billy to his equally dominating mother, she bullies him into betraying to her anything his fellow patients may be doing or planning that could disturb her absolute control.
Into this rigidly controlled Eden slips a serpent in the form of Randle McMurphy, a raucous rebel convicted of gambling and battery, and accused of statutory rape but saved from conviction on that charge when the fifteen-year old victim refuses to testify. McMurphy has faked insanity in the belief that spending his sentence in a hospital ward will be much easier than serving it at a work farm. And from the beginning, McMurphy deliberately provokes Nurse Ratched and disturbs her smooth-running ward. Among the patients labeled as “acutes”—that is, those thought to be curable as opposed to the “chronics,” mostly the superannuated or those in a vegetative state (as the Chief is thought to be)—McMurphy introduces a poker table, organizes a ward basketball team, and rallies the others to conduct a vote that will allow them to watch the World Series on television. This last effort particularly grates on Nurse Ratched, since it is an instance of her losing face in the power struggle between them.
When McMurphy learns that the acutes are for the most part committed to this ward voluntarily he can hardly believe that these men have given up their freedom, their manhood, to willingly live under the Big Nurse’s bullying. At this point, the Chief opens up to McMurphy, revealing that he is able to hear and speak, and has essentially fooled everyone up to this point. Now McMurphy’s acts of rebellion become more daring and more defiant. He organizes a fishing trip for the acutes supervised by prostitutes, after which Nurse Ratched sends both McMurphy and Chief Bromden to receive electroshock therapy. Even after this, however, McMurphy is undaunted.
One night McMurphy bribes a nightshift orderly and is able to sneak two prostitutes onto the ward. One is for himself. The other, Candy, is one McMurphy had noticed Billy Bibbit had shown a particular liking for during the fishing trip, and McMurphy hopes that the bashful Billy will lose his virginity, and simultaneously gain some confidence. But after a wild night of partying with codeine and meds, the orderlies arrive and discover the place is a mess, and Nurse Ratched finds Billy with Candy and threatens to tell his mother what he’s done.
Here the novel has reached its crisis point, and spins wildly toward its powerful conclusion which of course I’m not going to reveal because, of course, that would be a spoiler of immense proportions. Read the book if you haven’t.
A hint, though, might be found in the novel’s title: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is actually a line from an old nursery rhyme, one that Chief Bromden’s grandmother had sung to him as a child:
Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
The poem presents the geese as free, untrapped by the “wire, briar, [or] limber lock.” The three geese fly away to freedom, one of them flying over the cuckoo’s nest—a play on the slang term “cuckoo” for insanity, thus suggesting the cuckoo’s “nest” is the mental ward of the novel. One of the geese flies away.
Kesey’s novel has come under some serious criticism, especially by feminist scholars. In the book, more than anything else a plea for personal freedom in a society intent on suppressing that freedom, it can hardly escape notice that the Combine, the metaphor for all those things in society that restrict our freedoms—is consistently personified by women: Chief Bromden’s mother, Billy Bibbit’s mother, Nurse Ratched, the “mother” of the mental ward. Masculine “freedom” in the novel involves free sexuality, which is where the prostitutes come in. Of course, the real power of the “Combine”—whether it is the government or the capitalist economy or the dam builders on the Columbia River—are not women. But their personifications are. This may suggest simply that Kesey was a misogynist. But given the themes of the book he could hardly consider the Patriarchy a preferable aspect of the “Combine.” Perhaps it’s Freudian: psychiatrists of the 50s were still asking their patients all about why they hated their mothers.
As I probably don’t have to mention, but will anyway because I want to, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest inspired one of the great adaptations of all time in Milos Forman’s 1975 film starring Jack Nicholson as McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. As was the case previously with The Maltese Falcon, this film is perhaps more famous and more acclaimed than the book. It was the first film in forty years to sweep all four of the most significant Oscars—Best Picture, Best Director for Forman (who would win again ten years later for Amadeus), Best Actor for Nicholson (who would win twice more), and Best Actress for Fletcher. It also won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman. You should definitely see the movie if you haven’t done so. But remember that many of the book’s subtleties cannot really be portrayed in film. One of these things, for example, is the chief’s narration, which is a significant loss. So read the book first.
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