Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Katalin Grezsu: Layers of Implication in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest

40 problem the intellectuals of this age must face is that actuality is continually outdoing one's talents, and that culture tosses up figures that are the envy of any novelist. So fact is becoming more and more fictional. The only way to get out of this situation is to return to the values that can be still preserved for posterity. This worldview does not believe in man as it was so often disillusioned in him. Post-modern literature regards man as a helpless puppet, a clown who is confused in his own sense of identity. The persona of this fiction has one important goal: to survive it all, to wait it out. Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, was at the time one of the most representative novels of post-modern literature. One basic dilemma of the novel is the borderline between sanity and insanity. The distinction between the state of madness (or irrationality) and the state of sanity (rationality) was important not only to Kesey but to a great many intellectuals during the Sixties and Seventies.^ On the other hand Kesey has always been interested in human consciousness widened by drugs, in the way the mind works. He has first-hand experience as he worked in a mental institution where he persuaded one doctor to give electroshock therapy to him so that he could describe what McMurphy felt. The story itself takes place in a mental asylum which is a perfect model for the wider social reality. The Combine, which exists only in the mind of the Indian, is the embodiment of an alien power, the aim of which is to fix up mistakes in the patients's mind and to produce 'sane' persons for the outer world. Kesey, who knows psychopathology very well, is interested in disturbed personalities. The reason why he studied these figures was that he could view society through these characters, and could show the way the combine destroyed personalities. On the other hand the madness (or otherness) of the patients is symptomatic of several problems. In this manner Kesey could attack certain things in American society rather than the entire society itself. Kesey's novel is illustrative of two well-known psychiatric trends. The first is traditional psychiatry, which claims that mental diseases are caused by a malfunction of the brain. These problems are treated with drugs. The second is a new school of humanistic psychiatry, which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. The representatives of this school claim that a lot of these diseases are of social genesis, so drugs only paralyse patients. Kesey emphasizes the harm that social problems caused to the members of the asylum, who are best characterized by ontological insecurity, loss of identity, absence of assurance. They have the feeling of being valueless, they are afraid of being related to anybody or anything. The atmosphere of the institution can be characterized by