The merits of the book cannot be explained by any properties of the author’s creative individuality – none of the later works, in which Keesey unsuccessfully imitated himself, even approximately corresponded to the artistic level of the first novel of the non-professional writer. It was as if the era itself, a disturbing, conflictual, contradictory one, had chosen this unremarkable young man as the spokesman of its spirit. (Kizi, always prone to epatage, claimed that the novel was entirely “dictated” to him when he was in a drug trance).

K. Kesey’s book became the “bible” of the 60s, its characters and the author – the heroes of the youth movement and the counterculture. In a brightly colored bus Kesey and a group of friends who called themselves “The Merry Pranksters” toured the United States, promoting freedom from any restrictions, was in prison for drug possession, and in the 70s he settled down and lived – until the end of his life – on his ranch. In spite of the fact that Kesey wrote about a dozen books (And Sometimes I Can’t Bear to Want It, 1964; A Sailor’s Song, 1992; The Last Circle, 1994 and others), in the history of American literature he went down as the author of one work. The novel “Above the Cuckoo’s Nest” was for the 60s what Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” was for the 50s: it opened people’s eyes to what was happening to them.

The book is written with a tragifarse tone. Incredibly funny in places and creepy in essence, it nevertheless does not leave a sense of hopelessness. McMurphy still manages to defend his comrades as living people, to prove to them that protest is possible. One by one the “voluntary” patients leave the clinic. The structure of the novel is open-ended. It ends with the daring escape of the most faithful of McMurphy’s followers, the “forced old-timer” of the ward, the half-breed Indian Bromden, on whose behalf the narrative is told. The main plot is somewhat complicated by lyrical digressions – passages-reminiscences of Bromden about his Indian childhood and his past pre-colonial life, as well as passages-dreams and hallucinations; they, however, are very organic and do not prevent the novel to read “in the same breath”.

However, the novel’s relative simplicity is deceptive. It is a postmodern text, and it is literally saturated with evangelical, transcendentalist, Freudian motifs and literary associations that, with few exceptions, are nowhere to surface, but give the book a multidimensionality. For example, McMurphy, who knew his fate and accepted the death throes for others, is clearly associated with the Son of God, Jesus Christ (the Gospel subtext is felt in a number of scenes in the novel). The hero’s actions are based on Emerson’s principle of “self-trust,” essential in transcendental ethics, and on Thoreau’s doctrine of “civil disobedience.

Particularly clear, however, is the Freudian overtones of the novel. For example, McMurphy intuitively understands the origins of the psychological sadism of the fifty-year-old old maid Miss Gnusen-it is a compensation for a repressed sexual instinct. It is true that the hero has not read Freud or Jung, or, as he says, “is not familiar with Jung Fred,” but the author is very familiar with them. And, for example, the matchless, exceptionally lively and funny scene of fishing during a boat trip, organized by McMurphy for the sick, has an underlying symbolic meaning. While the hero and his girlfriend Candy, his girlfriend “from the outside,” are secluded in the cabin, the other patients are enthusiastically catching fish. The fish, on the other hand, is a common Freudian symbol of love. (Sexual emancipation was one of the points in the author’s program for the recovery of society.) The fishing scene is weighty in the gospel plan of the narrative. The fish is also an important Christian symbol. As we know, the image of the fish, not the cross, marked the temples of the first Christians.

K. Kesey’s book blended seamlessly into the broadly unfolding in the 1960s, along with many other movements of this tumultuous decade, the movement for “getting to the roots”. It was the critics’ way of describing the then surge of general American interest in all things “Indian,” driven by a desire to support Native Americans in their struggle for their civil rights. In literature, this movement manifested itself in an increased attention to the “Indian theme”: to the ancient mythopoetic work of Native Americans and to the modern folklore of their reservations, to their inner world.

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Time did not inspire hope, left no way out. Exit was an exciting way of literary game, daring experiment, parody. These two moments: firstly, the feeling of absurdity of social life and history and, secondly, the taste for the literary game, – in various combinations, defined the essence of American postmodernism, which was the mainstream of American literature in the 60-70s, remained an important factor in its development until the mid-80s and largely influenced its future fate.

As you know, literary postmodernism is not specific to American literature. And that is why it is paradoxical to hear some critics say: “Unlike modernism, which appeared in Europe, postmodernism is a purely American phenomenon.” Meanwhile, in this paradox, there is a great deal of truth. Indeed, unlike in Europe, postmodernism in the U.S. is not genetically linked to the “high” modernism of the beginning of the century.

The connection in general turns out to be rather shaky: expatriate writers, American modernists who lived in Europe in the twenties (H. Stein, H. Miller, T.S. Eliot, S. Anderson, to some extent, E. Hemingway and some others) and V. Nabokov, whose English-language work is a strong, but rather narrow bridge between European modernism and American postmodernism. Besides, domestic modernism was a phenomenon so specific and individual that it could not be used as a platform for a large-scale experiment.

The result was twofold. On the one hand, if Europeans have “been through it all already,” then American literature has practically for the first time discarded the crutches of both literary and moral conventions and felt the freedom of self-expression. Hence the intensity, scope, and staggering audacity of the experiment. On the other hand, virtually devoid of a literary basis, postmodernism in the United States arose solely on a sociocultural basis. Modern America, with its purely technological superiority, cultural heterogeneity, and the rapid washout of moral and political beliefs from recent American life, was a country of distinctly postmodern culture. This is what determined the specific reversal of postmodernism in the United States and its particular expressiveness.

Postmodernism here has never been a departure from reality, even if such a departure is an indirect response to contemporary anxieties (as in the European version). American postmodernism very often finds itself directly involved in the world of big politics and history and seeks to reflect it directly. It reflected social reality in a fundamentally different way, however, than the ideological realism of the “reds of the 30s” or the psychological “war” prose of the late 40s.

Postmodernism put before the country a kind of mirror, but not an ordinary one, but one that concentrated and sometimes grotesquely distorted proportions – like in a laughing room. In doing so, such “immutable” notions as “freedom,” “democracy,” the “American way of life” were also reconsidered, authorities – social, political, religious, even the supreme authority of God – were debunked.

This is the case, for example, in Ken Kesey’s novel Above the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), which depicts a model madhouse that serves as a transparent metaphor for contemporary America. The only living and whole person here, the subversive, tomboy, rowdy, and womanizing McMurphy, is given the traits of Christ the Savior. Such is the case with Joseph Heller’s Amendment-22 (1961), a novel about World War II in which the military operations and laws of the American army are presented as utterly absurd.

At the center of “Massacre No. 5” К. Vonnegut’s centerpiece is the apocalyptic absurdity of the bombing of Dresden at the end of World War II. Not only the war, but the entire life of human society, seen from a distant Tralfamador, appears to be a complete absurdity. At the same time, the technologically advanced Tralfamador itself appears as a kind of anti-utopian parody of American civilization, its reflection in a concentrating mirror.

Along the way, the authors rethink and sometimes defiantly violate literary conventions: verisimilitude, chronological and logical sequence of events, genre and style unity. For example, Heller’s “Amendment-22” mixes the comic book and the war novel, favored by mainstream fiction. Vonnegut melds the classic genre of popular literature of science fiction with military prose in “Boyne No. 5.

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In the 1960s – the years of the highest flowering of postmodernism – the general spirit of experiment has captured a number of writers-realists, which affected in two ways: some authors created one or two clearly experimental novels and, as if paying tribute to their temporary passion, returned to the old path. The most striking example is the work of John Updike, who suddenly wrote a technically complex text that used modernist techniques – the novel Centaur (1963).

Later Updike, as the creator of the famous epic about the “average American” Rabbit Engstrom and numerous other moral and descriptive novels until the 80s, confirmed his reputation as a brilliant writer-realist. It was only in his “New England” books (“Let’s get married,” 1976; “The Witches of Eastwick,” 1984; a collection of short stories, “Trust Me”, 1986, and later works) clearly demonstrated a new quality of realism.

A second manifestation of the writers’ propensity for experimentation was the formation within realism of a new line, the so-called literature of fact, an organic fusion of document and fiction prose. Literature of fact became an additional channel into which the work of such realist writers as N. Mailer (“The Army of the Night”; “Miami, or the Siege of Chicago”, 1968), T. Capote (“In Cold Blood”, 1965) rushed. The “new journalism” (Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, and others) was the ultimate expression of the American literary impulse for reportage and fact. It reached a particular heyday in the 1970s, developing in parallel with the literature of fact.

A great contribution to the development of fact literature was made by African-American writers: James Baldwin (“Nobody Knows My Name”, “Next Time – Fire”), Alex Haley (“Autobiography of Malcolm X”) and many others. J. Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the few African American authors to call for nonviolence even during the “Negro Revolution. Both in his journalism and in his fiction prose (The Other Country, 1962; Tell Me When the Train Gone, 1968; If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974) he denounced separatism: “We, blacks and whites, need each other deeply if we are to become a real country. Baldwin was one of the few African Americans who, as early as the 1960s, was able to find a gap in the walls of a kind of “ghetto” black prose and step out into the eternal collisions of human existence.

One of the most extreme and aggressive black activists in the arts was the poet and playwright Leroy Jones, who in the 1960s adopted Islam and the new Muslim name Imamu Amiri Baraka and turned his later work into an instrument of political separatist activity. More promising, however, was a quieter and more moderate movement in African-American literature of the 1960s – the “new wave” (in the terms of our critics), or “new black literature” (in the definition of U.S. critics). They were Ernest Gaines, John Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and others. They raised questions of historical black self-determination in America, touched on their African roots, and explored life in the Negro ghettos. Aesthetically, the “new black literature” drew heavily on the experience of the Harlem Renaissance. It spoke for those who could not speak for themselves, but not just for them, but for all who would listen.

By the 1970s, the ghetto walls of African American literature had opened up, and it turned out that the work of black authors could be very different. It could include postmodern experiments (Yellow-Black Radio Broken (1969), Mambo Jumbo (1972), Escape to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed) and the entirely traditional “big American novel” in form (Roots: The American Family Saga (1976) by Alex Haley). It was in the ’70s that a whole cohort of gifted black women writers entered literature: Gail Jones, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelov, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. The latter two became central figures not only of African literature, but of late-century American literature as a whole.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, U.S. literature entered a changed, diverse and multicolored world, filled with a sense of its own scale and its unconditional significance in the global artistic process.

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