I have just been reading the introduction to One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. I discovered something that did not occur to me when I read it in High-School. The title and its working out in Keseys narrative and Robert Faggens introduction is the perfect metaphor for those who suffer under and endure settler colonialism. Look at the viciousness of the cuckoo bird and how it develops its nest.... To call Chief Bromden schizophrenic, as many critics have done, eviscerates and reduces his own visionary brilliance and humor with the very kind of condensation and control that the novel calls into question. Bromden is the book’s first fool and trickster. When he tells us from the start “But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen,” he reiterates the essential trick of art, a lie that tells the truth. Tricksters are widely prevalent figures in North America Indian literature as well as European literature, noted for their uncanniness and unaccountability, for subverting all our sense of hierarchy and expectation, and for the irony of fooling those around them while fooling themselves. They appear to shake the placid order of too much civilization by embodying the power of primordial and forgotten past. Bromden has been fooling everyone around him into thinking he’s deaf and dumb. But he has also trapped himself and perhaps the only way to reclaim himself may be through a form of the very violence that helped make him a “Vanishing American” and a “six-foot-eight sweeping machine, scared of its own shadow.” The threat of extinction and the reduction of a strong human being to a machine seems to be part of the work of the elusive “Combine,” an entity that unifies individuals to further its own corporate interests and a machine that threshes, cuts, and cleans whatever is in its path. Bromden appears as a reluctant and somewhat broken component of this machinery and its goals. Bromden’s vision of the Combine and its machinery has been formed by the dislocating wounds of his past: the loss of his family’s tribal fishing grounds by government construction of a hydroelectric dam. In a moment of oneiric panic, he describes the hum of the Combine as being “a lot like the sound you hear when you’re standing late at night on top of a big hydroelectric dam. Low, relentless, brute power.” He hears workers “pass each other so smooth and close I hear the slap of wet sides like the slap of a salmon’s tail on water.” Later, in another chill panic he recalls “the US Department of Interior bearing down on our little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine.” The dam is part of the machinery, and it is a machinery that affects both men and fish as they press against its intractable force destroying their ways of life. Kesey’s experience with Indians and the outrage of destructive power began much earlier than Menlo Park Veterans Hospital: My father used to take me to the Pendleton Roundup in northern Oregon. He would leave me there for a couple of days. I spent time hanging around the Indians living in the area. I used to take the bus back down through the Columbia River Gorge where they were putting in the Dalles Dam to provide electricity to that part of Oregon so the fields could be irrigated. But it was also going to flood the Celilo Falls, an ancient fishing ground along the Columbia. The government was using scaffolding to build the dam. When I first came to Oregon, I’d see Indians out on the scaffolds with long tridents stabbing salmon trying to get up the falls. The government had bought out their village, moved them across the road where they built new shacks for them. (Interview with Ken Kesey, The Paris Review, Spring 1994) Once, when Kesey was leaving the Pendleton Roundup with his father, an Indian, a knife between his teeth, deliberately ran into an oncoming diesel truck bringing piping to the dam project. The suicide left its own mark on Kesey, who had witnessed a man willing to make the greatest sacrifice in honor of a way of life, a way of life that no developer could buy from him. In a perverse way, the Indian embodied Thoreau’s view that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” The dam represents machinery that destroys one way of life in service of another. The asylum, in Kesey’s world, performs a similar task. Is nature, though, any different? The title of Kesey’ novel, which comes from a nursery rhyme, playfully invites the comparison between the workings of civilization and those of nature. A cuckoo’s nest may be just a playful name for a madhouse (as well as slang for female genitalia), but the common association of cuckoos and insanity comes from the baffling and brutal behavior of cuckoos themselves. In nature, cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, depositing one egg per nest. Because the newly hatched cuckoo chick is not related to its step-siblings, it throws the other eggs and even live chicks from the nest. It is a process by which an outcast becomes a tyrant and in which disorder, displacement, and competition hold sway over any sensible design. Darwin himself saw the behavior of cuckoos as an instinct, like the slave-making instinct of ants, that argues for nature’s brutal machinery of natural selection instead of divinely beneficent design. Nothing can escape being at some point destroyed by nature’s technologies: Indians used the ancient trick of fishing to lure and catch unsuspecting salmon. And salmon are lured to swim upstream to spawn and die. How, then, are the traps of civilization different from those of nature?
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 05:48:01 +0000
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