Man. That was heavy.
I've gotta' say that my reading of this novel was undoubtedly colored by the fact that I had just finished Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men just before starting it. I had never seen the movie, so going into it, I was a clean slate. I had no real preconceptions, and thank God for that, because this was one of the most incredibly fresh and interesting novels that I've ever read.
It opens with our narrator, Bromden, "Chief", giving us a schizophrenic, nightmare rundown of the Asylum, a stronghold of The Combine ruled by the icy Nurse Ratched, "Big Nurse." Her almost hypnotic hold over the patients of the ward is challenged by the arrival of Randle Patrick McMurphy - a wild, gambling, Southern, red-headed con-man trying to escape four months on a workfarm by having himself committed. The stage is then set for the clash of two titanic personalities and the forces they come to represent. Faceless, unaccountable, institutional power, The Combine, represented in the figure of Big Nurse. Fundamental humanity, agency, and the dignity of natural man championed by McMurphy. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but truly by the end of the book, it has become both a deeply involving personal tale of hope and redemption, and that of a much larger and more fundamental struggle.
Because that is what McMurphy becomes to the men on the ward, who are disenfranchised and alienated even within the hospital, which Nurse Ratched strives to make a microcosm of society at large. And man, did I feel the joy of their brief and glorious triumph. Kesey writes with such honesty that, as Bromden says, "...it's the truth even if it didn't happen." Bromden's narration is a key part of what makes this novel so stirring. His paranoid schizophrenic fantasies turn the ward into a hellish dystopia, all the more terrifying because he is arguably more attuned to the reality of what is happening than anyone else. His hallucinations are in touch with the unseen, coercive power of the institution, the insidious nature of which is much more dangerous, subversive, and divisive than outright acts of force.
I've seen a lot of criticism of the book online for perceived sexism, which I'm not sure I agree with, as I believe that's not really giving Kesey enough credit. Demasculinization, castration - these are symbols used, but I believe that if you look deeper, Kesey is really talking about the enforced alienation of humanity from our sexuality by society as a means of control and dehumanization. As surely as the sterilized figure of the Big Nurse uses desexualization as a weapon, Candy uses sexuality as a means to heal Billy Bibbit. Indeed, even McMurphy says at the outset that the ball-cutters can be male just as easily as female. The Ward doesn't simply desmaculize the men, Ratched defeminizes herself. The institution isn't being painted here as a tool oppressive only to men, it is robbing everyone of their humanity. I think it is very telling that Harding, the only man who complains of the "modern matriarchy," is a gay man.
I was really legitimately surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. I was expecting something more sterile, more academic, I think. Really, this novel is a wonderfully emotional book, while diagnosing the modern schizophrenic disconnect of the individual from the mechanical institutions of society by a demonization of the natural impulse (even laughter is foreign to the men of the ward). It mirrors in some ways a lot of the reading I've been doing lately (Catch-22, Rousseau, Marx) in highlighting the dangers of modernity: in this case, that, in the face of an insane institution, the sane man is necessarily a lunatic.
No comments:
Post a Comment