Demon Box by Ken Kesey
1987; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1987.0129
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo240 Western American Literature Agatite—is the catalyst for events one would consider absurd, even Gothic, were it not true that things of the sort do happen in that part of America so recently removed from the frontier. The townspeople have seen Agatite erode and wondered what power, what evil caused their town to die. They fear that someday something “will visit them in a horrible way,” their premonitions aggravated by “their preachers’ favorite texts from Revelations.” But they never understand that they are the guilty ones upon whom retribution will fall nor do they recognize that the uselessness of their lives has left the way open to the beast of the Apocalypse. Roy Breedlove had left home in 1966 to find the good life denied him by Agatite. Chapter by chapter, he drifts through time, like Yeats’beast in “The Second Coming,” ever slouching homeward. Parallel to this story is Sheriff Abie’s attempt to solve the mystery of the dead girl in the outhouse, his actions always placed in August of the Present. The reader’s anxiety rises as Fate moves the players into position for the showdown. Altogether the novel has the impact of rock video with rapid-fire crash ing, clashing scenes of violence leaving blood, mutilation, and death in the wake. But Reynolds, evidently aware of the saturation point of his audience, tempers shock with black humor. Readers will doubtless wait expectantly for the coming of further tales from Clay Reynolds. ERNESTINE P. SEWELL Commerce, Texas Demon Box. By Ken Kesey. (New York: Viking, 1986. 384 pages, $18.95.) Demon Box details the metamorphosis of Zeitgeist into weltschmerz. In the epilogue, “Last Time the Angels Came Up,” Devlin Deboree, the collec tion’s voice, comments on the visiting Hell’s Angels, saying that they were “voices from a time-impacted playground, the kids never heard the bell end ing recess, now they have all become man-sized and whiskered and hung over.” That’s the image of the 1960s that I am left with. As an exercise in demystification of the period, Demon Box reflects a retreat from the mytholo gies which fueled the rebellious soul of that revolutionary time. I feel the same thing in the middle-aged Mailer of Armies of the Night oiling himself against Reviews 241 the water of young protesters in their March on Washington, feeling the psychic energy of their protest only in their attempt to exorcise the Pentagon, but an outsider after all. This writing marks a retreat with fleeting glimpses of the good times and periodic visits to the Oregon farm by the burnt-out faithful where the “tarnished Galahad” of the mobile roundtable has retired the soul of the Merry Pranksters. There are nostalgic memories of meeting the Beatles in London and the Nazi gestalt therapy of Dr. Woofner, the Charismatic Manipulator of the Big Sur Institute of Higher Light. But the tone is as entropic as Deboree’s preoccupation with the Second Law of Thermody namics, with James Clerk Maxwell’s demon of Crying of Lot 49 fame. One might locate the demythologizing center of the collection in Kesey’s tribute to Neal Cassady in “The Day after Superman Died,” an ambivalent elegy for a figure Kesey felt to be numinous with the revolutionary potential of the period. His tale sours, though, and buries the decade with Cassady, who died in the fashion of a junkie’s nightmare—overdosed with drugs, pneu monia, and exposure. But I prefer the image of the young bull in “Abdul & Ebenezer,” one closer to the Oregon farm and the present. Abdul with long eyelashes and “altar-boy innocence,” the suspected “Faggerdeen” Angus, presumed a “steer miss,” but in the end virile in a nocturnal way. Faced with incest when his daughters got “that age,” Abdul challenged a neighboring Hereford bull and won and a .30-.30 and lost, turning to fertilizer for a cowslip bed. That’s the image of the 1960s that Demon Box locates in Oregon at Devlin Deboree’s farm. Not Aquarius the truth seeker, but the infantile Venus-ruled Taurus gunned into fertilizer because he got too big for his fences. The text is a...
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