One of the most striking postmodern texts of American literature of the 1960s, illustrating in particular the permeability of the boundaries between the two major postmodern movements (mega- and metaprose), and at the same time one of the landmarks of American literature of the second half of the XX century as a whole, was the novel Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey (1935-2001).
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.
