North American Fiction and Film

Chapter 6: Ken Kesey's
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest


This chapter will provide a reading of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as an "affirmative" hero-centric "black humour" text which helps keep the "white" phallo-centric order firmly in place.

Table of Contents

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Discussion

Review questions
Works Cited

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"Black humour" hero

Randle P. McMurphy is a "text-book" case of a black humour hero fighting vigorously against the "system." Unfortunately, though, his fight is one that is ultimately both highly sexist and racist. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is probably best known through the highly successfully film version. The problems presented by the novel are equally evident in the film (so it would be useful for you to watch the video if you get the opportunity). Both the novel and the film accede to what has become known in American culture as the conspiracy theory: that is, the theory that "they" (the forces of hostile society) are out to crush the individual.

Conspiracy: "Controlled" by women
In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, this conspiracy is seen as controlled by women-a point stressed very strongly by Harding when he says: "'We are victims of a matriarchy here, my friend, and the doctor is just as helpless against it as we are'" (54). Indeed it is not too fanciful to suggest that Nurse Ratched represents that "wrong" kind of female freedom. In the following passage, for instance, Nurse Ratched appears (through Harding's description) as a ghastly travesty of the "angelic" female:
"Why, see here, my friend Mr McMurphy, my psychopathic sidekick, our Miss Ratched is a veritable angel of mercy and why just everyone knows it. She's as unselfish as the wind, toiling thanklessly for the good of all, day after day, five long days a week. That takes heart, my friend, heart. In fact, I have been informed by sources-I am not at liberty to disclose my sources, but I might say that Martini is in contact with the same people a good part of the time-that she even further serves mankind on her weekends off by doing generous volunteer work about town. Preparing a rich array of charity-canned goods, cheese for the binding effect, soap-and presenting it to some poor young couple having a difficult time financially." His hands flash in the air, moulding the picture he is describing. "Ah, look: there she is, our nurse. Her gentle knock on the door. The ribboned basket. The young couple overjoyed to the point of speechlessness. The husband open-mouthed, the wife weeping openly. She appraises their dwelling. Promises to send them money for-scouring powder, yes. She places the basket in the centre of the floor. And when our angel leaves-throwing kisses, smiling ethereally-she is so intoxicated with the sweet milk of human kindness that her deed has generated within her large bosom, that she is beside herself with generosity." (52-53)
That this account is a ghastly parody is underlined by Harding whispering through his teeth almost immediately after it: "'Oh the bitch, the bitch the bitch'" (53).

The mechanical network
Not only is this conspiracy controlled by women, it is linked with a vast mechanical network (that is, a network which is dehumanising). Chief Bromden sees this ubiquitous machine as pumping a perpetual fog through the asylum (which itself becomes a microcosm of what "Kesey" sees as radically sick contemporary American society). Nurse Ratched is introduced into the action, for instance, carrying a "woven wicker bag" which contains "no compact or lipstick or woman stuff" but rather "a thousand parts she aims to use in her duties today-wheels and gears, cogs polished to a hard glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers pliers, rolls of copper wire . . ." (9-10).

This description is extended just a little later to a physical description of the "Big Nurse":
She looks around her with a swivel of her huge head. Nobody up to see, just old Broom Bromden the half-breed Indian back there hiding behind his mop and can't talk to call for help. So she really lets herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load. (10)
These references to the world as a woman-dominated machine are sustained throughout the novel. (You should now follow these up for yourselves. Here are the relevant pages: 11, 17, 18, 26-27, 32, 33, 35-36, 45, 71, 79, 127, 150, 186-187, 222 and 248.)

"Non-men" and "rabbits"
The effect of this mechanically feminine world is to reduce men to helpless "non-men" or "rabbits." Harding sums this reduction up the most strongly when he says:
"This world . . . belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognise the wolf as the strong. In defence, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?" (54-55)
Harding reinforces this view a little later when he says: "We comical little creatures can't even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world, that's how weak and inadequate we are. Hee. We are-the rabbits, one might say, of the rabbit world!" (57).

Now there would certainly be nothing wrong with opposing an order that unfairly privileged power-mad women over men. But that is not what is at stake in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (at least in so far as I read it). The novel does not appear to me to want "equality" for the sexes-rather it expresses, I believe, a radical fear of women and the desire to re-assert (in the crudest possible fashion) the patriarchal order. And in so doing, I might add, it also re-asserts white supremacy in, as I will show, presenting Black people as being in league with the castrating women who appear to constitute the majority of the female sex.
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Sexist rejection/suppression of women

The sexist rejection/suppression of women is evidenced largely through the depiction of Big Nurse, through the fact that the only "good" women in the novel are the good-hearted whores, through the attitudes of some of the patients to their wives, and, of course, through the unabashed celebration of McMurphy as red-blooded all-American frontier "man" who is as well (regrettably) a Christ figure (which points to a highly sexist/repressive aspect of Christianity itself).

The sexist presentation of Nurse Ratched begins with the first sustained physical description of her:
Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-coloured enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils-everything working together except the colour on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it. (11)
The (highly sexist) implication here is that the only real women are those whose big breasts make them objects of desire for men.

This particular sexist description of Big Nurse is later compounded when Chief Bromden (the book's narrator) reflects:
There's something strange about a place where the men won't let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. (43)
The most strongly sexist aspect of Kesey's drawing of Nurse Ratched, however, is revealed when she tells young Billy Bibbit: "'I saw your mother on the way in, and she told me to be sure to tell you she thought of you all the time and knew you wouldn't disappoint her'" (82). This highly unprofessional behaviour on the part of Big Nurse reinforces the novel's anti-matriarchal stance and, when Nurse Ratched later threatens to tell his mother that he has consorted with one of the prostitutes McMurphy smuggles into the asylum, her behaviour actually results in Billy's suicide (247 ff). In this, the novel is unfairly sexist in its positioning of Nurse Ratched as breaking the confidentiality that traditionally exists between counsellor and client.

The further highly sexist suggestion that the only "good" women are whores is made clear in this passage:
The whores were late. Everybody was beginning to think they weren't coming at all when McMurphy gave a yell from the window and we all went running to look. He said that was them, but we didn't see but one car, instead of the two we were counting on, and just one woman. McMurphy called to her through the screen when she stopped on the parking lot, and she came cutting straight across the grass towards our ward.

She was younger and prettier than any of us'd figured on. Everybody had found out that the girls were whores instead of aunts, and were expecting all sorts of things. Some of the religious guys weren't any too happy about it. But seeing her coming lightfooted across the grass with her eyes green all the way up to the ward, and her hair, roped in a long twist at the back of her head, jouncing up and down with every step like copper springs in the sun, all any of us could think of was that she was a girl, a female who wasn't dressed white from head to foot like she'd been dipped in frost, and how she made her money didn't make any difference. (179)
This male-centred desire for "useable" and "willing" women carries over into the attitudes of many of the patients to their wives. Ruckly, for instance, constantly yells: "'Fffffffuck da wife!'" (19), and Harding refers to his wife as his "'counterpart and Nemesis'," averring: "I would be trite and say, 'to my better half,' but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don't you?'" (141).

Chief representative of this "high" sexism is, of course, R. P. McMurphy himself. Before looking at his character, however, it is worth noting how the sexism of the book is compounded by its racism-in particular, its positioning of Black people.
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Racism

The Black men in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest are presented as Big Nurse's henchmen. There is the repeated suggestion that they aid in the "matriarchal degradation" of men by anally raping them. Consider, for instance, the following passage:
"We need that Vaseline," they'll [the "black boys"] tell the Big Nurse, "for the thermometer." She looks from one to the other: "I'm sure you do," and hands them a jar holds at least a gallon, "but mind you boys don't group up in there?" Then I see two, maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission, running that thermometer around in the grease till it's coated the size of your finger, crooning, "Tha's right, mothah, tha's right," and then shut the door and turn all the showers up to where you can't hear anything but the vicious kiss of water on the green tile. I'm out there most days, and I see it like that. (14)
(Further suggestions of the black ward attendants as sodomites are to be found on pages 31, 33 and 117).

McMurphy's "valiant fight"
R. P. McMurphy begins his "valiant fight" against all these de-masculinising dehumanising forces when he enters declaiming: "'And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I never been in a Institute of Psychology before'" (14). He is identified almost immediately as an agent for potent male sexuality when he tells Cheswick: "'I brought along my own deck, just in case, has something in it other than face cards-and check the pictures, huh? Every one different. Fifty-two positions'" (16). He then goes on to reinforce this heavily sexual orientation by stating: "'Now they tell me a psychopath's a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain't wholly right, do you think? I mean, whoever heard tell of a man gettin' too much poozle?'" (16).
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Male aggressive dominance

McMurphy is linked with the mythical frontier American when he engages in battle with Harding for the position of "Bull Goose Loony":
"Then you tell Bull Goose Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital ain't big enough for the two of us. I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton-so I figure if I'm bound to be a loony, then I'm bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one. Tell this Hardy that he either meets me man to man or he is a yaller skunk and better be outta town by sunset!"
Hardy leans further back, hooks his thumbs in his lapels. "Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I'll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we'll settle this affair once and for all, libidos a-blazin'." Harding tries to drawl like McMurphy; it sounds funny with his high, breathy voice. (21-22)
A further linkage of McMurphy with the heroic (male) American past is forged by the fact that he wears a pair of shorts decorated with "big white whales" which recall Melville's Moby Dick.
Indeed, so that the reader does not miss the allusion, Kesey has McMurphy relate that the person who gave him the shorts was "'a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a Literary major'" who made him the present "'because she said I was a symbol'" (69). Melville is a by no means unambiguous writer. Indeed, in Moby Dick, the white whale may be seen as a symbol of impenetrability which forms the book's focus over its "hero" Captain Ahab.

Kesey, however, appears to associate Moby Dick with male aggressiveness/dominance as is shown in this later confrontation between McMurphy and Big Nurse:
"What do you think would have happened if one of the young nurses had come in early and found a patient running round the halls without a uniform? What do you think!"
The big black boy isn't too sure, but he gets her drift and ambles off to the linen room to get McMurphy a set of greens-probably ten sizes too small-and ambles back and holds it out to him with a look of the clearest hate I ever saw. McMurphy just looks confused, like he don't know how to take the outfit the black boy's handing to him, what with one hand holding the toothbrush and the other hand holding up the towel. He finally winks at the nurse and shrugs and unwraps the towel, drapes it over her shoulder like she was a wooden rack.
I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.
I think for a fact that she'd rather he'd of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She's glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage. That's more'n she can take. It's a full minute before she can pull herself together to turn on the least black boy; her voice is shaking out of control, she's so mad. (81)
The conflict between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched here founded through the Moby Dick allusion is the motive force behind the novel's whole action. The battle begins with Big Nurse, whose "lips are in that triangle shape, like a doll's lips ready for a fake nipple," deliberately calling McMurphy, "Mr McMurry" (25); that is, she is presented as refusing to acknowledge McMurphy as an individual.

McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched in sexual terms
For his part McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched in sexual terms (the implication being that her radical anti-male stance stems from her frigidity). In one of the "therapy" sessions early in the book, for instance, there is an exchange between Big Nurse and McMurphy during which the latter relies heavily on sexual innuendo, almost succeeding in unsettling the nurse. She says of Harding: "'He has also stated that his wife's ample bosom at times gives him a feeling of inferiority. So does anyone care to touch upon this subject further?'" McMurphy snaps his fingers, and the nurse responds:
"Mr-ah-McMurry?"
"Touch upon what?"
"What? Touch- "
"You ask, I believe, 'Does anyone care to touch upon- '"
"Touch upon the-subject, Mr McMurry, the subject of Mr Harding's problem with his wife."
"Oh. I thought you meant touch upon her-something else."
"Now what could you- "
But she stops. She was almost flustered for a second there. (39)
McMurphy undermines Big Nurse's power over the other male patients by characterising her as a "bitch," a "buzzard" and a "ball-cutter" (51-52). He wins some major battles with her by asserting the right for the men to "watch" the ball game on TV (111-114) and by organising the deep sea fishing trip (186 ff).

McMurphy's frontal lobotomy
The whole situation reaches a head when, following Billy Bibbit's suicide, McMurphy smashes into the nurse's glassed-in station and physically assaults her:
Only at the last-after he'd smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light-only at the last, after the officials realised that the three black boys weren't going to do anything but stand and watch and they would have to beat him off without their help, doctors and supervisors and nurses prying those heavy red fingers out of the white flesh of her throat as if they were her neck bones, jerking him backward off of her with a loud heave of breath, only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, wilful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not. (250)
Big Nurse retaliates for this outrage by having a frontal lobotomy performed on McMurphy (252) which leads to Chief Bromden's smothering him with a pillow to put him out of his pitiful "vegetable" misery (253-354).

It is this action which gives some credibility to the presentation of McMurphy as a martyred Christ figure and operates to position Chief Bromden's final escape from the ward ("taking huge strides" as if he were "flying" 254-255) as an expression of liberation from a system which radically oppresses the individual. Chief Bromden's escape, incidentally, reinforces the Christian dimension of the book because, in pulling up the therapy tub panel and smashing it through the window, the glass splashes "like a bright cold water baptising the sleeping earth" (254).
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McMurphy as hero

This positive reading of the novel is given even more support by the book's celebratory humour, an affirmative humour-a laughter which supports the potency of McMurphy as hero. The first description that Chief Bromden provides of McMurphy is one that stresses his capacity for powerful laughter:
He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there's nothing funny going on. But it's not the way that Public Relation laughs, it's free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it's lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realise all of a sudden it's the first laugh I've heard in years. (15)
There are many similar references to McMurphy's liberating laughter throughout the novel.
The strongest statement on the positive power of the comic, however, occurs during the fishing expedition-a very significant location in that this expedition represents the height of McMurphy's activity as "sexual saviour" of America's repressed males:
While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water-laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. 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; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humour no more'n he'll let the humour blot out the pain.

I notice Harding is collapsed beside McMurphy and is laughing too. And Scanlon from the bottom of the boat. At their own selves as well as at the rest of us. And the girl, with her eyes still smarting as she looks from her white breast to her red one, she starts laughing. And Sefelt and the doctor and all.

It started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them-and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself, and I could look down and see myself and the rest of the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds, see McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people, and watch them, us, swinging a laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave. (194-195)
The transcendental (implicitly Christian) intent of this passage is obvious. McMurphy, surrounded by his twelve apostles, is a Christ of contagious laughter which redeems not only his fellow patients but the whole world.

Within the passage, however, is that blatant phallocentrism which effectively and violently undercuts what the novel might otherwise be thought to offer in terms of liberation from individual repression. The exposed red and white breasts of the prostitute prefigure that later scene in which McMurphy violently exposes Nurse Ratched's breasts as he attempts to choke her (see above). It should also be noted that Chief Bromden (described early in the action by McMurphy as "'your Vanishing American, a six-foot-eight sweeping machine, scared of its own shadow'" 59) shares in McMurphy's radical sexism.

He blames his mother for the selling out of his tribal land to the whites (166) and declares with regard to McMurphy: "I want to touch him because he's a man" (172).
It is true that the novel makes at least one token gesture against sexism. Fairly early in the narrative McMurphy states:
"No, that nurse ain't some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes-people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to." (51)
While this statement is directed against men as well as women, its central thrust is still the preservation of the male order represented by McMurphy's pre-occupation with the preservation of his "balls." It is this pre-occupation which I believe finally takes over the text and makes it so objectionable and unproductive in terms of any real statement concerning individual freedom/rights.

The Chief's delusions?
One last point for consideration. While the end of the book suggests Chief Bromden's symbolic liberation, the opening pages reveal that the Chief is still in the asylum and that the narrative is one extended flashback all contained within his mind. In short, this suggests that the "action" is delusion. But does this alter the reading I have offered within this chapter? After all, as the Chief himself thinks: "It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen" (13).
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Review questions

Work Cited

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Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
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