One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

212 Pages·2008·1.32 MB·English

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Editorial Consultant, Robert P. Waxler
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest—New Edition
Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9616-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 2. Psychiatric hospital patients in
literature. 3. Mentally ill in literature.—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.
II. Title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
PS3561.E667O5328 2008
813’.54—dc22 2007045157
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and the High Cost of Living 3
Terence Martin
Big Mama, Big Papa, and Little Sons in
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 15
Ruth Sullivan
The Cuckoo Clocks in Kesey’s Nest 29
James R. Huffman
Tangled in the Language of the Past:
Ken Kesey and Cultural Revolution 43
James F. Knapp
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Rhetoric and Vision 53
Michael M. Boardman
The Truth Even If It Didn’t Happen:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 67
Jack Hicks
vi Contents
Separation, Initiation, and Return: Schizophrenic
Episode in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 81
William C. Baurecht
Stories Sacred and Profane: Narrative in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 89
Janet Larson
Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief
as Narrator and Executioner 107
Fred Madden
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:
A Tale of Two Decades 123
Thomas J. Slater
The Hipster, the Hero, and the Psychic
Frontier in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 137
Thomas H. Fick
The Mixed Heritage of the Chief:
Revisiting the Problem of
Manhood in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 151
Robert P. Waxler
The Western American Context of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 161
Stephen L. Tanner
Chronology 187
Contributors 189
Bibliography 191
Acknowledgements 195
Index 197
Editor’s Note
M
y Introduction, with benign amiability, does not allow Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest one place in my personal pantheon of Period
Pieces. On rereading, it remains a comic strip. The baker's dozen of enthu-
siasts for it, reprinted in this volume, represent popular opinion. So be it.
Terence Martin has the temerity to invoke Moby-Dick, while Ruth
Sullivan relies upon Freud’s Oedipus Complex and James R. Huffman praises
the Chief's stoic ability to live in the present moment.
The Cultural Revolution, responsible for the demise of Antioch College
even as I write, is surpassed by Kesey’s McMurphy as Christ, according to
James F. Knapp, after which Michael M. Boardman discusses “tragic art” in
Cuckoo’s Nest.
Jack Hicks associates Kesey with Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg,
while William C. Baurecht describes Kesey on Schizophrenia, Janet Larson
studies narrative in Cuckoo’s Nest, and Fred Madden examines Big Chief’s
functions in the book.
The film of Cuckoo’s Nest, by Milos Forman, is seen by Thomas J. Slater
as worthy of Kesey’s novel. I myself would rather resee the movie than reread
the book, unlike my usual pattern of response.
A final triad of kudos is bestowed upon Cuckoo’s Nest by Thomas H.
Fick, Robert P. Waxler, and Stephen L. Tanner. All three of these enthusiasts
center upon notions of the frontier, psychic or geographical.
vii

HAROLd BLOOM
Introduction
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the CuCkOO's nest (1962)
I
T
he “Period Piece” is necessarily an involuntary genre, and I find it
always causes rage—in some—when I nominate a particular work of enor-
mous popularity to the Period Piece Pantheon. I do not judge One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be worthy of that pantheon, even though I see that
my paperback copy is part of printing 88. My personal treasury of period
pieces includes To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher In the Rye, A Separate Peace, All
Quiet on the Western Front, several Rabbits, Beloved, Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Lord of the Flies, Tobacco Road, The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, The Old
Man and the Sea. Kesey’s books palpably are not of that caliber: they sort
better with On the Road, The World According to Garp, all the Harry Potter
books—I forebear continuing, though Tolkien is the Emperor of inferior
period pieces, perhaps never to be dethroned.
Rereading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the comic strip genre begins
to contaminate me, and I start to tell myself the tale from the stance of
Big Nurse, the nightmare projection of the male fear of female authority.
Nurse Ratched should be compared, in her function, to Vergil’s Juno, not a
comparison that writers far stronger than Kesey could sustain. I entertain
myself with the wild notion of rewriting the Aeneid from Juno’s perspective,
but the prospect becomes phantasmagoric, and so I cease.
What is the utility of period pieces? In furniture, sometimes in
costume, sometimes in songs—they can achieve, when rubbed down by
time, something of an antique value. Alas, literature does not work that way,
and the rubbing process leaves only rubbish, vast mounds of worn words,