Fiction Friday: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

For me the title of this book has always conjured the image of a young Jack Nicholson in roughneck clothes grinning dangerously within the sterile ward walls of a mental hospital. It was a defining role for him and in many ways serves as a cultural landmark for America as well, signaling the transition of our society from the logical 50′s to the passionate 60′s.

In that sense, the film was a faithful rendering Ken Kesey’s watershed novel of the same name, which takes place not so much in a mental hosptial, but in that manic and medicated space between freedom and security, anarchy and order, organism and institution. These archetypal Modern nemeses are sketched in the characters of Nurse Ratched, the authoritarian dictator of the ward, and McMurphy, the new patient faking mental disorder in order to live a life of leisure among the harmless stooges.

The hospital ward is an extension of Nurse Ratched herself: cold, clean, hardened and impersonal. Everything is orderly, material, and tightly controlled. She wields power through punishment, provides safety by threats, gives comfort by means of control. Into this micro-culture McMurphy enters as the revolutionary, the anarchist, the agent of spirit and creativity which overturns convention. Like all freedom fighters he represents danger for both his rulers as well as himself and his compatriots.

As with the 60′s, the power struggle between McMurphy and Ratched is most powerfully symbolized by sex. Ratched is uncomfortable with her own sexuality – her large breasts strictured by uniformed sterility. McMurphy is sexually unfettered, introducing prostitutes to the residents and working to arrange a sexual encounter for Billy – the tamed and timid child of Modernity’s puritanical authoritarianism. This is the struggle of our era, one just beginning to simmer in the early 60′s when Kesey wrote this novel, and its tragic ending turned out to be remarkably prescient. We view this descent into violence through the narrative eyes of Chief Bromden, the bewildered native-American who stands, perhaps like most of us, off to the side pretending not the hear or speak, while the extremes of society battle for supremacy.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a mythological drama for the malcontented children of Modernity, a dramatic battle between the gods of our age: Eros, the creative Greek god of sexual love and beauty, and logos the neatly-ordered incarnation of Christendom’s version of Jesus. In this sense I don’t think the relevance of Kesey’s novel ended with the flower-children of the 60′s. Eros is still the god of loafers, poets, artists, and lovers and he still strives to liberate the repressed in a logos society dominated largely by cold calculation, dogmatic assertion, and quantifiable production. This struggle continues in various postmodern subcultures like Hip-Hop, Hackers, Freegans, Street Artists, Cybergoths, Polyamory, and hundreds of other North American neo-tribal groups who still can’t conceive of a brand of institutional authority rooted in anything but control, and toward whom the American church still largely projects the Jesus of logos.

Kesey provides no answers – no hopeful way forward. In the novel, this climactic battle wounds both sides irreparably, and as I set it down I couldn’t help but wonder just how prescient Kesey may yet turn out to be.

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Fiction Friday: John Updike

Today is the first in what will hopefully become a weekly series: Fiction Friday. I’ve alway been a voracious reader, spending more time in fiction as a teenager than in the books I was supposed to be reading for school (and it showed in my grades). Then in my early twenties I “got serious” about my faith and swore-off fiction forever, deeming it to be a childish escape and a waste of time.

Eventually I learned that non-fiction can be just as escapist, and somewhere in-or-around my 30th year a close friend re-introduced me to the wonders of fiction. “You’re just not reading the right stuff,” he said, tossing me Pynchon, Delillo, Saunders, and Borges. Those authors captured by imagination and now, it seems, the older I get the more I appreciate story and myth as far better handmaidens of truth than the slipp’ry cold stuff we usually call “facts.” Actually, the more I see biblical literature as “mere” story and myth, the more it seems to change my life.

Enough of the introduction. On to our first spotlight author.

John Updike passed away one year ago and was best known for his Rabbit series. He is generally considered one of the greatest American writers of all time, and, in my opinion, for good reason. His prose is lyrical, his psychological insights piercingly true, and his settings are earthy and accessible. Best of all, he always seems to know where he’s going. He’s the best of guides.

In his short story Pigeon Feathers John Updike uses a mature narrator’s voice to give us a peek into the crisis of faith being experienced by the young adolescent main character, David. Having returned to the childhood home of his mother (much to the consternation of his father), the pastoral expansiveness of their new agricultural community serves a fitting panorama to the exploding emotional vistas in David’s own heart and mind.

Everyone in David’s house seems to go about their own business – his mother tasks about house blissfully with Grandma hanging annoyingly on her hip, while his father, utterly disconcerted by the earthy, pagan landscape, runs endless errands to the city, finding a sophisticated respite from the “unintelligent” and backward farmers in their new hometown. David is busy too, lamenting the loss of innocent pleasures; familiarity, science-fiction, and comfortable furniture, all indiscriminately stowed away under heavy tarps in the barn.

Treading in this restlessness, David happens upon an historical work by H.G. Wells, in which he reads a passage wherein the author cavalierly dismisses the divinity of Christ as the superstitious power-making of an ambitious early Church. (Wells, apparently was the Dan Brown of his day!) Severely shaken, David seeks to re-appropriate the misplaced furniture in his mind, pressing doggedly toward a quest for truth but losing many of his illusions along the way about the world, the church, and even his own family. Just when we think David might in fact lose everything he cherishes most, including his faith, he is brought to peace in an act of violence, reborn in a moment of death played out in the very barn stuffed full of his own dusty artifacts.

Updike makes liberal, yet masterful use of simile and metaphor to communicate the subtle and complex cues of external human interactions and internal rationalizations, and paints strikingly vivid metaphors of the human psyche: discarded old furniture, dusty books, a darkened barn. Updike is especially skilled at invoking the atmosphere of death without clumsily announcing its presence – in a fathers habitual saying, a grandmothers hooked claw, the irreverent memory of a long-dead grandfather, and the lifeless soil itself, stripped of life by agro-chemicals and turned hard as slate. We sense with some horror that this thread is pulling David toward a kind of spiritual death – and David is horrified too – but the surprise is how death itself becomes the surprising catalyst for the emergence of new life in a simple observation about pigeon feathers. Indeed, if it weren’t for David’s transformation death would be salvation in this story, but through David we discover that real salvation is found in the dogged search for eternity.

Technorati Tags: Fiction Friday, John Updike, Pigeon Feathers