Title: Review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Author(s): R. L. Sassoon

Publication Details: Northwest Review 6.2 (Spring 1963): p116-120.

Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 64. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay

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A vision of Hell ... An ironical view of American society ... intimations of an ideal of fun and self-realization in community ... all these develop out of Mr. Kesey's tasial, semi-fansemi-realistic treatment of a mental institution, the setting of [One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest]. It tells a story at once horrific and humorous: an appalling nightmare that has its sources in the most ordinary, recognizable reality and issues continually into the delightful farce of only daydream. If at the extremes beyond credibility the narrative and point of view are sometimes frankly infantile—so also, the author implies, is the world with which he deals, not only the mental institution but its explanatory context, America. With great originality the author has succeeded in achieving, almost throughout the novel, a subtle balance and correspondence between the social burden of mirroring purposefully place and time and the personal art of creating fiction with the immediacy, the completeness in itself, of myth or parable.

The story is told us by a half-Indian inmate of the hospital, whose long-standing pretense to being both deaf and dumb makes it possible for him to hear (literally and imaginatively—“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen”) all that goes on, day and night, in the wards. The hospital is a place, essentially, for the rejects of a matriarchal, increasingly technocratic and fanatically collective society. Through the narrator's naive but vividly mythopoetic (and/or mythomaniac) mind is conveyed a vision of humanity reduced to “controlled” machinery “installed” and adjusted in living bodies by the agents (the hospital staff) of a super-institution he calls the “Combine.” While we laugh both with and at the absurdity of it, we are also uncomfortably chilled by this infernal revelation that we may all of us be electronic puppets functioning, well or poorly (that is, on the “outside” or in the hospital), according to some panoramic design which absolutely negates the possibilities of freedom and individuation: such that we may have become categorically without privilege or responsibility. (p. 116)

At night Bromden sees the floor of the dorm sink away from the walls, dropping him and his ward-mates into a science-fictional hell of machinery and radio tubes and transformers; robot devil-mechanics approach a patient and tear him open and go to work on his insides ... “Right and left there are other things happening just as bad—crazy, horrible things too goofy and outlandish to cry about and too much true to laugh about—but the fog is getting thick enough I don't have to watch.” The “fog,” which swamps the ward from time to time, is protective; but it also serves, by isolating man from man, to keep the patients in a state of cooperative docility. If all this is nightmare, and in its way comic too, Bromden also knows and speaks about such grim realities as shock therapy and, worse, the frontal lobotomy. Moreover, the daily routine of the ward is sordid and humiliating in every detail; the patients are degraded, wretched and resigned.

Into this world where men are either reduced to animals or turned into automatons, there enters a rough-and-tumble, logging and gambling man, whose relative freedom and invulnerability, his male wildness and woodsy common sense and humor, all convince the narrator—it is pathetic as much as comic—that this one must be “controlled” by some anti-Combine. The new-comer, McMurphy, who has feigned psychopathy because a mental hospital seems more pleasant to him than the state farm to which he has been sentenced for a few months, comes immediately into open conflict with the hospital staff. At first for kicks, but ultimately out of concern for his too easily cowed ward-mates, he engages in a battle to the finish—hilarious in its maneuvers but sombre in its presages of a sacrificial martyrdom—for the souls of these men.

His rival and enemy is “Big Nurse,” a tyrannical, sadistic woman whose authority over the ward is almost total. Her gelid inhumanity is symbolized, with poignant irony, by nothing better than her preposterously huge breasts tightly packed behind ever clean and stiffly starched hospital-white: they are a bastion, not the sign of flesh of womanhood. McMurphy is a threat to her “control” over herself as well as over the ward. A genuine therapist, he commences at once to teach the patients to laugh—“Because he knows you have to laugh at things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side ... but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.” Worse, he influences them to try to accept themselves, even to assert themselves. And all the while Big Nurse and her flunkies are waiting for the chance to make him bow bloody or else to annihilate him—and that chance comes.

Before the appalling denoument, however, some of the ward have known the thrills of camaraderie of a wild, free-wheeling fishing trip, the delights of liquor, marijuana and sex—in short, have experienced (howsoever childishly, yet therapeutically) their own urges toward freedom and self-expression. Enough that some, who are voluntary patients, elect to leave the institution; and Bromden, who is committed, finds means and courage to escape.

The great power of the Combine is, after all, that it is believed in—whether explicitly, as by Bromden, or implicitly, as by (the author suggests) most of this society. It is a kind of corrosive religion, wrongly terrifying and wrongly consoling; its victims are not only those who have failed to be “adjusted to surroundings” but also those who have succeeded—for in doing so they have surrendered their capacities to respond, either to their own inner natures or to the world about them. The vicious circle of not being able to feel and not being able to make oneself felt—reflected in the impotence of the patients, but also in the cold sterility of the world from which they have run away—is guaranteed by what Bromden calls the Combine in its imposition of an ideal of non-humanity. The uniqueness and value of McMurphy is his aliveness, his uninhibited responsiveness to things and to people—which ultimately develops into a responsibility for Bromden and the other patients, such that he sacrifices himself so they, too, may choose to know the fullness of life, its joys and its pains.

When Bromden, after years of total isolation as a supposed deaf-mute, feels the greater necessity of using his voice to speak to McMurphy, he begins to recall his life before he entered the mental institution and those occasions that led him unconsciously to seek an escape from any human intercourse. He remembers a critical instance in his childhood, and his peculiar (and yet only too apt) understanding of it, when having spoken quite purposefully to three strangers who are looking for his father, he is ignored by them, because what he has to say does not communicate to them (that is, they prefer not to hear him)—

I get the funniest feeling that the sun is turned up brighter than before on the three of them. Everything else looks like it usually does—the chickens fussing around in the grass on top of the 'dobe houses, the grasshoppers batting from bush to bush, the flies being stirred into black clouds around the fish racks by the little kids with sage flails, just like every other summer day. Except the sun, on these strangers, is all of a sudden way the hell brighter than usual and I can see the ... seams where they're put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don't have any place ready-made where they'll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren't even spoken.

In the wonderfully unembarrassed and naive, yet rather dignified, language of his narrator, Kesey continually focuses on the equal absurdity and pathos of man's inability and unwillingness to listen (whether to the urgent speech of one's own body and heart and spirit, or to those occasional essays at communication from outside), an abdication which can only make him increasingly a stranger both in the natural world (which anyway he is rapidly marring beyond recognition) and amongst his fellows. Bromden's half-stoical, half-childish flight into a bizarre, purely interior life is exactly correlate to a panicked society's determination to “control” human nature, reducing expression and activity to certain common-denominational patterns of predictably mechanical performance. It is taken for granted that this mass dehumanization serves a communal, quasi-sacred purpose, just as Bromden quite matter-of-factly, submissively, accumulates his real and imaginary evidences of an all-powerful, all-controlling Combine. Not until his encounter with McMurphy does he recover any sense of human realities and, simultaneously, the will and courage to return to real life.

Mr. Kesey's personal vision, while relating to universal problems of existence, springs from and reflects parabolically the individual's struggle for wholeness and survival in the specific context of American life today. For the most part he has made his perceptions and criticisms of this context implicit in the depiction of his characters and the development of the story. Unnecessary, therefore, and a dilution seem to me those passages where the author tends, in my opinion, to step outside of his fiction, as it were, in order to present a sort of more “objective,” or explanatory, assessment of the social situation or to emphasize certain why's and wherefore's of his characters' actions and mental processes. For instance, it is out of Kesey's way in this novel, I think—and certainly out of his narrator's—to make so much of a point as he does of “exposing” the matriarchal aspects of our society or of “explaining” Bromden's and other characters' flights into neurosis with reference to bad, castrating mothers and/or wives, social pressures to tow the line, and so on. There is little originality of style or matter in the sections of the novel conceived for such ends and they are written unconvincingly; they may serve for some readers as a justification of the major portion of the novel and of the author's unique approach to reality by offering some sort of recognizable social and psychological matrix from which to interpret the characters' motivations and the author's purpose. As such, however, they may be misleading; this novel strikes me as much more of a myth or parable than a direct journalistic commentary on the times, and the intrusions of the latter, perhaps only because they are too close to being cliched, do not always mix. Moreover, while Kesey has imagined his characters vividly and presented them with depth of understanding, his consciousness of the actual social ills of our times is comparatively superficial, focused as it is on symptoms rather than essential factors. If I belabor the point, it is because I think it would be a mistake, and a diminishment of the work, to view this novel as primarily a social “protest” or “evaluation.” Rather, I see it as an intensely imaginative conception of the personal tragi-comedy of awakening to selfhood in a world largely held together through a utilitarian, artificial programming of human nature. While the setting and conditions are appropriately contemporary, properly judged and found wanting, the concern is for the timeless individual: his battle against and for himself, against and for those around him—that harsh struggle for personal values and self-fulfillment.

Mr. Kesey writes with both anger and compassion, with severe irony and broad, congenial humor. Following him with the involvement his style demands, one cannot but experience a vision that is truly authoritative and original. (pp. 117-20)

Source Citation

Sassoon, R. L. "Review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Northwest Review 6.2 (Spring 1963): 116-120. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 64. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 July 2010.

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