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

39 GREZSU KATALIN LAYERS OF IMPLICATION IN KEN KJESEY'S ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST After the Second World War American society, the nation's social and cultural climate and literature, just like many other things, changed. In the 1950s, labelled as the 'silent decade', society grew passive, as well as indifferent, as the cohesion and the culture's community-building potential showed a spectacular decline. The confusion of values increased, the sense of community diminished. The 1960s heralded a sudden rearrangement of priorities and the beginning of an age from which the nation moved to cultural multiplicity, from rationalism to anarchy. For the moderns the world was still knowable and accessible. The post-moderns, the representatives of this new age, which was named post-modern as it followed in the wake of modernism, were confronted with a chronic confusion of values. For them the assured and reassuring definitions, fixed categories were gone. For the moderns it was clear what they were alienated from, but by this time the former central questions became meaningless. The real question for the post-modern writer is this: What do we know about the world and how do we know what we know? The polarities of the moderns or of any other previous group no longer make sense for the post-modern writer. As a result, he moves beyond the thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern. He thinks that a synthesis is no longer possible, the world is no longer analogous with the thesis and antithesis pattern of conceptualization, but with chaos. What you get is differences, there is no sum total. A vocal group in the 1960s of American novelists felt that it was no longer possible to grasp reality, control broke down, the world became an ethical quick-sand. As the traditional approach to reality did not work and reality shocked with new things, a new conception of reality came to be created. This reality becomes totally unrealistic. One of the first writers to put this complex feeling brilliantly was Philip Roth. 'In "Writing American Fiction", an article which appeared in the March 1961 issue of Commentary, Philip Roth stated that 'the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality.' Roth thinks that this reality is 'even a kind of embarrassment to one's on meager imagination.'

1 Philip Roth adds that the other