In Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a 31-year-old Ken Kesey denigrated his two novels--the much-celebrated One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its less famous successor, Sometimes a Great Notion. Books could be no more than records of a changing world, he announced, while real greatness lay in being the agent of change. "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," Kesey said.
As the creator of Randle Patrick "R.P." McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, the young writer already had done much to romanticize the individual and defy an American identity seemingly based on little more than affluence and social conformity. But being a scribe wasn't enough for Kesey. He succumbed to the lure of playing prophet. And instead of pursuing fame as a student of character, he became a character himself--the jovial frontman for the Merry Pranksters--a novelty act instead of a novel writer.
But fate confounded both the hopes for literature and the demands of counterculture. Despite himself, Keseyleft behind a solid foundation of achievement. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--now available in an anniversary edition published by Viking ($24.95, 281 pages, illus.) with a text introduction by Robert Faggan--still has much to offer. It still matters.
Not that the book doesn't have its flaws. Its narrator, Chief Bromden, is a walking cliche. In a loose bundle of hippie suspicions--that power thrives on hatred, that order is the opposite of freedom, that democracy is a mere cover for authoritarian impulse--the chief departs from sixties orthodoxy only in imagining that he and his fellow patients are being controlled by the electrical signals of an elaborate machine. Thus, in a crazy world, only the insane can discern what's really going on.
What is one to make of the chief's occasional lapses into authorial omniscience? Describing one of the black boys who work the mental ward, he notes, "His mother was raped in Georgia while his papa stood by tied to the hot iron stove with plow traces, blood streaming into his shoes. The boy watched from a closet, five years old and squinting his eye to peep out the crack between the door and the jamb ...."
Kesey left many obvious questions unaddressed--how did Chief Bromden know this tormenting story, and would the boy himself remember details such as the blood streaming into his father's shoes? Such flare-ups of extrasensory perception are not even consistent with the chief's regular hallucinations.
Blame such problems on an excess of storytelling enthusiasm, which is, in fact, the main virtue of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Indeed, the novel's singular attraction does not lie in its Big Statement about society and social norms. Nor was it ever much in the way of a muckraking classic, though its gallows humor about the Shock Shop says a great deal about the inhumanity of such treatment (electroshock therapy still is used in moderation today). The novel's greatest merits lie in the character of R.P. McMurphy and his contest of wills with Nurse Ratched.
"He's a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel," says the marketing copy on the back jacket of my old paperback. That's not quite the sum of it, but more to the point than most discussions of the book's political message and Freudian implications. Though he clearly aimed to write a profound novel, Kesey succeeded only at the more prosaic task of finding compelling characters and setting them loose in a well-structured plot.
The central conflict of the story is beautifully simple. On one side is a bad guy, Nurse Ratched, who wants to control her ward as much as any comic-book villain ever wanted to rule the world. And she is formidable. Because of psychiatry's jurisdiction over the private self, her tyrannical impulse to remake others according to her own whims goes unchecked.
On the other side is one of the best talkers ever set loose in an American novel, a con man so crisply depicted and so charming one easily can imagine losing a fortune to him at the poker table and signing up for his every crazy scheme. Formal power versus personal charisma.
This contest plays out over a series of battles, each one upping the ante. So long as neither character is willing to back down, which of course they never do, the contest slowly becomes a struggle to the death. In McMurphy's case, this means permanent unconsciousness by lobotomy. The hero perishes, but not until he has liberated his friends and irrevocably damaged the authority of Nurse Ratched.
Kesey died in November 2001, a story that undoubtedly would have received more notice in a less eventful time. The books most often mentioned in his obituaries were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the two main sources of his fame. One made him a famous writer; the other made him a famous personality. But had he written more adventures such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he could have been even bigger.
DAVID SKINNER IS AN ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
