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Mechanistic and Totemistic Symbolization in Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

1975; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1975.0004

2158-415X

Don Kunz,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

MECHANISTIC AND TOTEMISTIC SYMBOLIZATION IN KESEY'S ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Don R. Kunz* In Form and Fable in American Fiction, Daniel G. Hoffman describes how Hawthorne and Melville transformed Puritan allegory, which was designed for the elucidation of certainties, into a symbolic method by using it in the service of search, scepticism, and sometimes a comedie affirmation of human values.1 Of course the symbolic method characteristic of the American novel does not now depend upon Puritanism's gradual disintegration and periodic resurgence. Perhaps this technique remains current because so many of our novelists insist upon inquiring into the meaning of becoming an American in terms of a dream. In dreams, interior, subjective experience is expressed as if it were exterior and sensory. And according to Erich Fromm, "this interchange between the two modes of experience is thevery essence of symbols, and particularly of the dream world."2 Treating the shifting national Platonic conception of the self encourages symbolization. Ken Kesey is no different from other American novelists in finding his symbols within our cultural detritus. But in One Flew Overthe Cuckoo's Nest his fusion of specific conceptual sources comprises an ingeniously comprehensive symbolic matrix and gives that traditional technique new validity. One source descends from Newton's conception of the physical world as an orderly mechanism, a view later applied by the Naturalists to animal and human behavior. Kesey's most immediate model of it is the idea of man as a reactive organism, the theory which dominated all schools of American psychology including classical and neobehaviorism , learning and motivation theories, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics, during the first half of this century.3 The idea that man responds predictably to stimuli, is shaped by environmental conditioning , and strives in the most economic fashion to achieve homeostasis, is for Kesey a nightmarish absurdity. A priori, these "Don R. Kunz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. He has published widely on fiction and satire in American and British literature, including a book, The Drama of Thomas Shadwett. 66Don R. Kunz behavioral hypotheses are a sophisticated extension of classical physics. Experientially, and as an exclusive theory, the novelist sees them as a grotesque, dehumanizing myth which receives suicidal endorsement by an America that glorifies machinery. Kesey's first novel dramatically and symbolically reduces the American psychologists' robotic theory to delusion and hallucination and, so, casts doubt upon the sanity of a nation which subscribes to it. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest also revitalizes from an existentialist posture one of the oldest American alternative visions: totemism. The setting is a mental hospital in Oregon after the Korean War. The narrator is a gigantic half-Indian inmate, Chief Bromden. We see him first as the victimized exemplar of his therapists' reductive mechanical theory and later as an heroic model of the vitalistic view of man. Early in the novel Bromden exhibits the usual behavioral symptoms of the schizophrenic: hallucination and delusion, confusion, stupor, and fluctuation of mood from manic to depressed.4 Although he is ambulatory, the narrator is considered a "Chronic" case beyond therapeutic help; he feigns deafness and dumbness, avoids contact with other inmates, and sometimes feels frozen in place by a solidifying plastic, pinned down by a one-thousand-pound weight, or, more often, lost in and stupefied by a thick fog. He seems unable to control the confusing free association of memory, fantasy, and present sensory experience. He thinks of himself, his fellow inmates, andhis therapists in the hospital as machines; his ward is variously imagined to be a hydroelectric dam, slaughter house, smelter, and, most often, a factory. Bromden fears the HeadNurse andher staff are part of avast conspiracy he calls "The Combine," an organization engaged in secret control of a nation of robots: She wields a sure power that extends in all directions of hairlike wires too small for anybody's eye but mine; I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the result she wants...