University of Virginia Library

Charles Ribakoff

Ken Kesey's
Multangular
Cuckoo

"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's
Nest," the first novel by folk hero
Ken Kesey, is a multangular experience,
an impressive achievement
that juxtaposes terror and humor in
a well-concocted emotional montage.

I first heard about Kesey in Tom
Wolfe's fantastic book, the Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test. In it, Wolfe
traces the development of the
entire West Coast drug, music, and
communal living scenes directly to
Kesey and his friends, who called
themselves the Merry Pranksters.
Kesey, a student literati at Stanford
accidentally found out about LSD in
1963 while a volunteer in some
hospital experiments. While he
continued doing supervisory and
informal research on various drugs,
he completed One Flew Over The
Cuckoo's Nest; later, he used the
money he received from royalties
to finance the antics of the Merry
Pranksters and turn on, as it were,
the entire West Coast. Thus, the
book is indirectly, responsible for a
large part of current culture, an
interesting if irrelevant historical
footnote which adds to the book.

Making It

The book, however, easily
makes it by itself. It is the robust
story of McMurphy, a proverbial
Irishman and earth figure who, to
get out of a prison term for assault
on a work farm, feigns insanity and
gets himself committed to a mental
hospital. He feels that the hospital
will be an easy way out; after
several sentences he is rather tired
of the monotonous work on the
labor farm. What he does not
expect is Big Nurse, the matriarch
who runs the ward at the mental
hospital. She is an emotional
amputator beside whom Portnoy's
mother seems genteel, and she has
cowed and terrorised her ward of
chronics and acutes into a lethargic
state of quasiexsistance a meaningless
twilight.

But the book is more than just
another amusing confrontation between
two bipolar characters. Although
the book is extremely
funny, there are the constant
underlying questions of what is
really normal, and an implied fight
for survival. And it makes one
appreciate the outside world, and
wonder about it.

Big Nurse

Big Nurse is the boss; she holds
all the weapons. She can send the
patients off to the "shock shop"
for electro therapy, take away privileges,
be incredibly cruel to those
who are totally dependent on her,
or, ultimately, sentence a troublesome
patient to lobotomy. Big
Nurse holds all the cards, but
McMurphy is the irrepressible gambler,
boldly attempting to thwart
her power and work his own
therapy on the patients' life.

McMurphy goes to great lengths
to get responses out of the patients.
It bothers him to be in a place
where no one ever laughs. He turns
the ward into a casino, officiates a
basketball team, and otherwise tries
to make the ward a better place for
McMurphy to live in. The patients,
a brilliantly characterized group,
cannot at first understand what this
newcomer is trying to do to their
lives, but soon they understand. Big
Nurse's matriarchy is in moderate
danger, and she fights back every
way she can.

And suddenly McMurphy is no
longer working for himself - he is
involved in trying to save the
people on the ward, working only
for them.

The story is told by Big Chief,
an immense Indian who has been
silent for 18 years. Everyone
generally assumes that he can
neither hear nor talk, and as a result
he is allowed to go into closed staff
meetings and anywhere else on the
ward he cares to go. He therefore
makes an ideal narrator as he has
both practical access to everything
on the ward and still can report on
it as one of the patients. One is able
to literally get inside Chief's mind
and understand the change that
take place as he, and the rest of the
ward, get exposed to a bit of real
life. Chief gradually makes his way
back to a sort of reality, and one
gets immensely involved in his
personal struggles.

Well Written

The use of Chief as narrator
breaks down only occasionally
when the narrative gets so powerful
that it is obviously too much for
him to have written, but the scenes
are so well written that one realizes
only in retrospect that Chief
couldn't have written it. Further,
he describes beautifully some
scenes from his childhood, and the
crimes of the white man that had
driven him to silence.

There are also a series of
powerful scenes that happen while
Chief is being given electronic
therapy as he spills out his mind in
a series of high voltage images.
These scenes which Kesey presumably
wrote while experimenting
with drugs, are especially good
taking the reader into obscure
netherworlds.

Stylistically, the book is an
advanced piece of writing which
anticipated by years, many currently
popular techniques. Kesey
doesn't merely tell the story, he
makes you live it. His characters,
only occasionally contrived, become
a part of a supramedia
portrait of a world whose insanity
becomes irrelevant, and makes one
wonder where one is.

If life in Charlottesville is boring
you, try life in the Cuckoo's nest. It
is like no other experience.