Spoiler Alert!: If you really want to find out how some of the events of this novel unfold on your own I’d advise you to stop reading right….. now! But, you can rest easy. Research being conducted at University of California has found that spoilers actually don’t spoil books and can actually enhance your reading experience…
It all comes down to a handful of people who can really speak with any truthful certitude on how day-to-day life was inside post-World War II psychiatric asylums, places that have long since been reduced (thankfully) to an over-saturated movie trope and a blemished reminder of just how bad things can get. Myriads were admitted into those madhouses with or without expressed written consent. Few ever made it out and those that did were never quite the same. And an even smaller number of those who did make it out were able to make any sense of it all. Let alone art.
Once inside these asylums, unwilling patients were often exposed to various forms of gruesome treatments that have long since been considered violations of basic human rights. They were strapped down, stuck with electrodes, and electrocuted in an effort to invoke seizures. Instruments, often ice picks, were forced into their eye sockets to disable their brain’s frontal lobes (which is responsible for regulating motor skills, memory, and conscience). There were even a few known cases of patients being mummified with frozen towels, or being tied to the wall crucifixion style and blasted with high pressure fire hoses. They were dolled medicine that made them sleep too much, or too little, or not at all. Now, we call this subhuman, brutish barbarism, but the state often called hydrotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and lobotomy “ effective treatments”.
One person that offered a voice for people with mental illness, long before Girl Interrupted, Shutter Island, and Insanitarium, there was an American journalist named Nellie Bly who, in 1887, faked madness in order to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at The Women’s Lunatic Asylum stationed on an island in New York’s East River. The other person is world renowned Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, the author who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and who, according to psychiatric researcher Claire Hilton, did so while drawing on his experiences from 1959-63 as a night guard in a veterans ward not totally unlike the one depicted in his novel.
First Edition Cover, Viking Press 1964
To say the least, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, first published in 1964, takes its reader on wild romp into the hearts and minds of ten Oregon psychiatric patients of–depending on who is judging–questionable sanity. The cohort and their lives are disrupted by the fire-haired, fast-talking Randle McMurphy whose anti-authoritarian actions afford him a death wish with the evil Nurse Ratched. I won’t tire my reader by explicating a summary or review of the novel because they can be found here, and here.
But what I can tell you is that the novel did more for the discipline and standard of psychiatry than just offer a novel look into the minds of the mentally disadvantaged. Some critics say that it changed the way psychiatry was practiced ever after because of Kesey’s unrelenting slandering against the use of electro-convulsive therapy and lobotomy procedures, or “shock shops” as they are referred to in the novel (Swaine). Of course this is disputed many times over since many critics also argue that by the time Kesey wrote the novel, electro-convulsive therapy, or ECT, had fallen out of vogue (Kellner 41). But , the fact remains that ECT to this day is still a widely used, debated and challenged method of therapy, and according to Matt Kellner, the Director of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is rivaled only by abortion in its past and present levels of public controversy.
Regardless if Kesey was “on time” with his scathing deprecation of clinical procedures like ECT, lobotomy, and excessive abuse of barbiturates and tranquilizers, it truly doesn’t matter because his slandering of them was not just a slandering of the treatments themselves but a direct attack on the establishments that decided it was okay to impose them on unconsenting patients. The late 1950’s and early 1960’s were a time of experimentation for an entire culture. Bands experimented with music, artists and poets with abstract forms, and people–Kesey himself not excluded– with perception expanding drugs. Although the decade was a mind-altering Renaissance of sorts for women’s and civil liberties, unfortunately it was also an experimental period for therapeutic and psychiatric procedures implemented by governments of the state who thrived on the general paranoia of the time. All’s Kesey did was expose them for what they were. The narrator of this novel, Chief Bromden even states explicitly in the first chapter that “my god; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be truth! But, please…It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen” (Kesey 8).
Aldous Huxley, a prominent mentor to Kesey’s anti-establishment philosophy is also noted for railing against the flagrant mental health institutions of the 1950’s…
“In the 1950’s I noticed the consumerist frenzy post-war America was engaged in, but more to the point, I was troubled by the vast array of barbiturates–one of which was ironically named ‘soma’–that were being offered to American society, not in the name of public well being, but, I felt, in the name of public order and conformity (Elcock 299).”
So the question becomes, if the Kesey –and a host of other writers not mentioned here, like Kenneth Patchen, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg — have done so much in terms of exposing the then dark underbelly of psychiatric procedures while both directly and indirectly creating safer and more acceptable standards in the field, why does the novel continue to come under so much scrutiny time and time again all over the country in spite of its socially relevant, almost socially transcendental qualities? To give you an idea of the controversy this novel has sparked, here is the official American Library Association list of challenges it faced over the last 30 years…
- Challenged in Greenley, CO Public School district in 1971
- Challenged in Strongesville, OH, labeled it as “pornographic”, a “glorification of criminal activity” with “descriptions of bestiality, bizarre violence, torture, dismemberment, death, and human elimination.”
- Removed from public school libraries in New York and Oklahoma in 1975.
- Removed from the required reading list in Westport, MA in 1977.
- Banned from St. Anthony, Idaho Freemont School classrooms in 1978, (the instructor was ultimately fired.)
- Challenged at the Merrimack N.H High School in 1982.
- Challenged in an honors English class in Aberdeen, Washington in 1986 because “the book promotes secular humanism.”
- Challenged at the Placentia-Yorba Linda, California Unified School District in 2000 after complaints by parents stated that teachers “can choose the best books, but they keep choosing garbage over and over again.”
Well, I’m certainly not here to argue against the fact that the novel does, in some sense, promote secular humanism, and in fact, does possess descriptions of “bestiality, bizarre violence, and torture.” Any one who reads this book can not argue against what is in plain sight. The hookers, the violence, the sexuality, and the rebellion spirit are all present and vital. The novel, after all, does open up with the line “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them (Kesey 3).
There is also a particularly disturbing sequence where the narrator, Chief Bromden, witnesses a bizarre scene of patients being strung upside down from chains and eviscerated. It’s never exactly clarified whether the visions of violence that chief sees are reality or complete hallucination, and that’s one of the more pleasing enigmas of this book. The sad fact of the matter is most people who are in favor of banning OFOtCN most likely don’t make it past this first line, or make an effort to understand these particularly disturbing images in their own textual contexts to reach what is truly enlightening about this book.
Above all, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a book that seeks to upset the balance of the establishment in every conceivable form, in every conceivable way. THAT is why this book is volatile, NOT because of its imagery. It begs us to question the status quo, the way things have been done. “He’s not gonna let her twist and manufacture him”, Bromden says of McMurphy, he is “free enough to foul things up left and right, really make a hell of a mess and constitute a threat to the whole smoothness of the outfit (Kesey 39)”. As Meghan Mettler of Upper Iowa University posits, the ‘madmen’ trope was a way for Kesey to manifest his counterculture ideologies, and also ask his audience to reject “not just the war, but the entire concept of rational and civilized conformity. ” Kesey saw civilization as a machine to be broken at all costs. Take the following passage in which he describes nurse Ratched in depth for example:
What she dreams of there in the center of those wires is a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients who aren’t Outside, obedient under her beam, are wheelchair chronics with catheter tubes run direct from every pantleg to the sewer under the floor (Kesey 27).
And the bright side of all this is that the students for which these concerned parents are speaking for really seem to understand this point ten-fold. When Los Angeles Times writer Mia Tran interviewed a seventeen year old California School District student she says, “The words and scenes don’t bother me. It’s like TV today. It’s not anything different. There are other worse books and curse words, you hear daily.”
Go ahead, I dare you, turn on your television and flip around for a few minutes. I implore you to make it a half hour without seeing depictions of the most sinister and banal variety; police and detective shows with realistic and violent recreations of murder and rape, action movies with senseless violence, myriads upon myriads of programs that employ insipid sexuality as a means to increase popularity with young audiences. At least Keseys’ novel has a sense of catharsis, an artistic mechanism which seeks to better the world by upsetting everything you thought you knew, a philosophy that doesn’t care for ratings, sales, viewership, or senseless sensuality.
If those very same people who were so eager to judge a book by it’s cover, as is I’ve learned actually is the case with most banned books, had just read the book through with an open mind they would have understood, as any child over the age of 16 is capable of even in the era of failing public schools, that these condemned images come from the mind of someone who is mentally disadvantaged and who doesn’t necessarily see the world in quite the same way that it’s reader does. And excuse me for being pretentious, but isn’t the whole idea and magic behind reading the fact that we can see a worldview so remote and alien from our own that it helps us understand the world more clearly, even if just a little tiny bit?
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Works Cited
Boyle, Robert P.“Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.” American Library Association. N.d. Web. March 2016. http://www.ala.org/template.cfm?Section=bbwlinks&template=/contentmanagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&contentID=136590
Elock, Chris. “From Acid Revolution to Entheogenic Evolution: Psychedelic Philosophy in the Sixties and Beyond.” The Journal of American Culture, 36.4 (2013): 296-308. Web.
Hilton, Claire. An Exploration of the Patient’s Experience of Electroconvulsive Therapy in Mid-Twentieth Century Creative Literature.” Journal of Affective Disorders, v. 97 (2007): 5-12. Web.
Kellner, Charles. “Electroconvulsive Therapy: The Second Most Controversial Medical Procedure.” Psychiatric Times. January 2011. N.p. Web. March 2016.
Mettler, Meghan, W. “If I Could Drive You Out of Your Mind: Anti Rationalism and the Celebration of Madness in 1960’s Counterculture.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 9.2 (2015): 172-186. Web.
Rother, Lorraine Flint. “Electroconvulsive Therapy Sheds Its Shocking Imagine.” Nursing, 33.3 (2003): 48-9. Web.
Sutherland, Janet R. A Defense of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” National Councils of Teachers of English, 61.1 (1972): 28-31. Web.
Swaine, John. “How One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Changed Psychiatry. ”Telegraph. February 2011 Web. March 2016.
Tran, Mai. “Parents Ask School district to Ban ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’” Los Angeles Times. December 2000. Web. March 2016.
Hyperlinks
http://pages.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Publications_files/Spoilers.pdf
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172493/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1103984/
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html
http://www.cathryncasamo.com/themagicbus1.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/332613.One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo_s_Nest
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/book-reviews/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest
Interesting links For Further Reading
http://ronrecord.com/Stories/leary.html —kesey, leary interview
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf– Official Project Mkultra Transcripts (only known government document about it)