Book #21: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Book #21: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

May 29, 2013


I have one more day left in my sub assignment, and I was at least able to make use of one book off of the regular teacher's shelf. I've had a hell of a time locating this book (as previously noted, our city's main library is still under construction...unless anything goes awry, it should be running within the next month!), so I'm glad that I had time to read this one (it's not very long, only 272 in the version I read).

So I have seen the movie, and I would consider Jack Nicholson's depiction of R.P. McMurphy, the main character in the text (though not the narrator) to be one of his best roles. I didn't see him exactly as the character in the book as I read it...I kind of more imagined Nicholson with red hair, since McMurphy is constantly being described by his red hair. Anyway, the movie is pretty different from the book, but then again, how can a film capture the mind of a crazy man?

The story is told from the perspective of Chief Bromden, a mute (at least for about 3/4 of the novel) Native American of the Columbia tribe. He's not real prominent in the movie, if I'm recalling correctly, but he's the one telling the story. He's not always a reliable narrator, as he's drugged out much of the time and often describes his hallucinations, at least during the first half of the text. How he ended up in the psychiatric hospital isn't clear, though Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after WWII would be my guess. His story itself is pretty interesting. He's had other traumas in his life, not the least of which being how his people's land was sold after the government put heavy pressure on their tribe (especially on the Chief's father, whose white wife put the screws in him as well, which led to not only the sale of the land around the falls, but also his heavy drinking problem).

Speaking of the narrator's white mother, women are not depicted in a very flattering manner in this book. There are perhaps a handful of female characters. The main female character, of course, is Miss Ratched, the controlling, emasculating head nurse. She rules her roost through manipulation and fear, and she is cool and calm...until McMurphy comes along and ruffles her feathers. Now, here's a personal reflection on this character. Having only the movie version to go off on (Louise Fletcher depicts her perfectly, though I imagined her looking a bit older than she was in the film), I used to be afraid of being a "Miss Ratched"-type teacher, a bitch, and stifling my students' creativity in my attempts to keep order in the classroom. I'll admit that at times, the structure (and a lot of the policies) of schools don't always fit with my personal philosophies. That, and the fact that I'm still without a job for next fall (I'm still in grad school, no big deal at this point) are making me question where it is that I want my career to go. Anyway...

The book gave me more insight into this character, but at the same time, presented some more questions. WHY does she have this need to control the men on her ward? It's only briefly explored amongst the characters, and some hints are dropped (I mean, she's not married...), but that's not really enough for me. What, since she's like sex-deprived, she's going to ruin people's lives? Not so sure about that one...I think there's a lot more to Miss Ratched than we know, but for the most part, this wasn't really her story. Because she's only a symbol, you see. She represents THE MAN, the oppressor, society at large that also wants to control people, mold and shape them, make them act a certain way and do certain things. And crazy people are not fitting with the mold.

The Chief bitterly refers to society as the combine. As a mixed-race individual especially, and someone who has gone through some of his experiences, he certainly doesn't have a place where he belongs. He claims that he stopped talking because nobody was listening to him. His silence made people think that he was deaf, too, and he became privy to hospital secrets...but at the same time, trapped inside his own drug-addled mind, accepting that the combine is very real, and that there's nothing he can do to fight it.

Until McMurphy, a man whose sanity or lack thereof is questionable, comes along and throws the whole neat little system out of whack. McMurphy is a schemer, a con man, and a criminal...a rapscallion, to be sure, but not a "bad" guy. The others guys on the ward take to him immediately, are drawn to his outgoing personality and his hearty laugh, when they are so incapable of laughing themselves. The other main characters, such as Harding and Billy, have interesting stories themselves. some of them involving mothers or wives (like Harding's wife, who is described as being young, big-chested, and sexy, while her husband's sexuality is more or less questionable; or Billy's mother, a "very dear friend" of Miss Ratched's, who is domineering and smothering). McMurphy, a very masculine, macho guy, is shocked that these men have allowed themselves to be run-down by a woman...especially when most of the "Acute" patients are there on a voluntary basis.

McMurphy, who reveals that he purposefully got himself committed so that he would be off of the prison work farm, challenges the reign of Miss Ratched and the "black boys" (the ward aides; the novel gets pretty racist when it comes to these guys, though you have to keep in mind that this was the '60's). In the process, he introduces high-stakes gambling and rebellious fun to the patients on the ward, and draws many of them out of themselves...including the Chief, who first talks to McMurphy in the middle of the night, then begins talking to everybody like he's done it all along.

The power struggle between Miss Ratched and McMurphy were the main focus of the film, and it's the main plot in the novel as well. The Chief takes hope in this struggle; perhaps he sees it as someone fighting against an oppressive system, and gives him the idea that he can take on the world. Though McMurphy is eventually punished for his violation of the rules (with several EST treatments, pretty gruesome, and I will say that I think it's crazy that this kind of practice is still going on), but he still keeps fighting. In his last hurrah, as depicted in the film (though it wasn't originally part of his escape plan in the book), he invites a couple of hookers to the hospital, who bring booze with them, and the "Acute" patients and the night watchman have a wild night. As in the film, when Billy is caught by Miss Ratched with one of the whores, he is so distraught at the idea of his mother finding out that he commits suicide.

The Chief's mercy killing of McMurphy and his escape are pretty much the same in the book as they are in the movie. It's unclear what will happen to the Chief next. Will he be able to live outside of the hospital (I would say yes)? But what about his mental illness? He'd stopped seeing images and hearing things so much after siding with McMurphy, and by not taking his medication any more. Was he even really that damn "crazy" in the first place? McMurphy observes at one point that the men on the ward (the functioning "Acutes" at least) don't seem very "crazy" at all. What does it mean to be "crazy" anyway?

I can't help but agree with the Chief's observations about society, and I think that's it's worse now than ever. I mean, "average" people are drugging themselves into zombies just to make it through their hum-drum lives. This book definitely presents some interesting, existential-type questions, and being at such a critical sort of crossroads in my life, I'm afraid that some of these are questions that I will have to explore further.

Louise Fletcher as Miss Ratched in the 1975 film. She's a stone-cold bitch...and the craziest one of the entire bunch.

Ken Kesey's famous bus "Furthur." You know who was a frequent driver of that bus? Neal Cassady!

Book #20: Anna Karenina

Book #20: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

May 20, 2013


Obviously, it took me a while to get through this monster of a text. I don't think that a month and a half is too bad, considering that Anna Karenina was published as a series of chapters in newspapers, over the course of about four years (the actual timeframe of the book is about half that). The edition that I read has 817 pages, and it is a large book...with considerably small text. I got into it, whenever I did have the chance to sit down and read it, but lately I have been working more than usual (fingers crossed: a sub assignment could lead to a permanent one...will know for sure on that one in just a few days!), and finishing up my semester (only a month-long break from school now until my summer classes!). I have been busy, so I'm glad that I've made at least some time to get some reading done (which is really the whole point of this whole exercise). And for the most part, I really enjoyed reading what Tolstoy referred to as his "first real novel."

A note on the translation: apparently, this husband-and-wife duo (he from the US, she Russian) have won awards for this edition, and I think I can understand why. I found the language to be accessible, but the characters were certainly portrayed with the complexity that I think Tolstoy had in mind. This story is full of interesting characters, and the title character's story is only one of many stories interwoven here...and one of two main stories.

I admit, besides viewing it through a feminist frame, I didn't find Anna's story to be quite as interesting as others. If anything, I was more interested in her scorned husband, Karenin. I'll note here that in Russian society at that time, people referred to one another typically by their first names and their middle names, which are some derivation of their father's first names (feminized for women). I was watching a marathon of Freaks and Geeks on IFC this past weekend, and a 9th grade student, Sam, had been assigned to read War and Peace for his English class (psychotic). When his dad asked him how it was, he said something like, "All their names are really long and weird." That's about the extent of it, and I had to refer to the character guide that the translators kindly provided frequently for about the first third of the book, especially since Tolstoy switches up how he references them. For simplicity's sake, I'll refer to men by their last names, and women by their first names (or titles).

Of note on titles: princes and princesses were much more common in Russian at this time than in more Western monarchies. Remember that the czar was the ruler, before the revolution (is that the revolution that is hinted at in the text? I don't know...), and communism and all that. Princes and princesses were as common as, say, lords and ladies in England. The title did mean certain social privileges, but not necessarily wealth (Oblonsky and his wife Dolly, who have many children and are in terrible debt due to his irresponsible spending and their vast expenses, are a good example of this). When reading about the sharp divide in the classes (muzhiks seem to be the common workers, probably the former serfs of Russia, who live and work and just exist while the upper class, be they wealthy or in terrible debt, live comfortable lives of leisure), it's understandable that a revolution would happen there. At one point, Levin, a character who interested me probably more than any of the others, questions his own place in the upper class, though, as someone with whom he is debating points out, he is not eager to give up his wealth and join them. I like Levin for the most part, but his frequent contradictions grew frustrating (though I guess that was Tolstoy's build-up to what was ultimately his spiritual clarity at the end of the novel).

Okay, so here's an overview of Anna's plot. At the start of the book, she is the wife of a successful government official, Karenin. She has a son whom she loves very much (or at least claims to). She is very popular in society, and is very charming; Kitty, who is infatuated with Vronsky at this time, quickly becomes enamored with the slightly older woman. But then, Anna falls in love with Vronsky, and they begin an affair; when Vronsky follows Anna back to St. Petersburg (or Moscow, I had a hard time keeping track of which city the characters were in some of the time), and they have the affair in a way that is obvious to the people around them. Karenin is humiliated, but I felt that he was genuinely hurt by his wife's betrayal. His inner dialogue conveyed an effort to mask his hurt with indignation. The affair soon comes out in the open, and Anna, pregnant with Vronsky's child, runs off with him. Her husband does become a laughing-stock in society, but her situation seems to be worse; she is isolated. Vronsky is not; though he is the other half of the liaison, he was not married, and he had not abandoned a family. When he continues to live the social life of a bachelor, while leaving her at home, she becomes more and more jealous. Anna's jealousy of Vronsky tears her apart; she begins using opium to calm her nerves (she's an addict; she lies about how often she uses it), and picks fights with her lover constantly. He wants her to get a divorce from her husband so that they can be married, but her cuckolded husband, by the influence of a hypocritical Christian noblewoman and a false seer, refuses. Anna, believing that Vronsky plans to leave her all alone, and feeling guilt-ridden over abandoning her son (and knowing that she does not love her baby daughter, Vronsky's child), she kills herself by throwing herself under a train.

About half of Anna's story is the downfall of the relationship. Of course it was meant to be doomed. Not that the characters necessarily deserved it, in my opinion. Had they all been allowed to move on, they would have come out all right. I especially felt for Karenin, who was so easily swayed by the repulsive Countess Lydia, who preaches gospel to others and is constantly passing judgement, and is the chief instigator of the separation of Anna from her son. She cruelly tells the boy that her mother is dead, but he sees her again once after that...talk about traumatizing. Anna had been disgusted by her husband's weakness, and he certainly does seem to be weak. He is determined in his work, and proud of his accomplishments and titles, but when it comes to his personal life, he's pretty pathetic. And Anna becomes pathetic as well.

In the end, Anna and Vronsky's child goes to live with Karenin, since, by Russian law, his wife's child is legally his as well. Vronsky, in grief, did not fight it, and was gearing up to go to war against the Turks, in retaliation for a genocide against the Slavic peoples. His fate is left to be pondered by the reader. Does he die? Does he return home a decorated hero, and marry a woman whom his mother has chosen for him? He really loved Anna, and though his weariness of her accusations was expressed  in his thoughts, he never seriously considered breaking things off with her. She wanted him to admire and worship her like he had been they'd first became lovers, but that's not how relationships work. In the end, Anna was basically a spoiled brat who didn't know how to deal.

Her brother might be described the same way, though he does not wallow in despair. On the contrary, Oblonsky is a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. People like him...women like him quite a bit. He is a frequent adulterer, and not at all repentant. He gets to go on living his life, socializing and loving and being with his wife and children, he can have it all because he's a man. His sister suffers for the same crime (though with one man, out of something like love, rather than with many out of lust). Oblonsky is a despicable character in many ways, with his irresponsible behavior and his neglect of his wife and many children, and his philandering ways. Dolly, his long-suffering wife, was threatening to leave him at the beginning of the book, and Anna, who would not long after begin her own affair, had come to talk her out of it. Dolly again considers leaving her husband closer to the end of the book, but she doesn't do it...at least, she hasn't by the time the story ends. She probably won't, since she could see how much suffering leaving her husband had caused her sister-in-law.

Kitty and Levin's story, which I found the more interesting of the two main stories, was interwoven loosely with Anna's story throughout the novel. At the beginning of the book, Levin, a somewhat wealthy farm owner and member of high society, is eager for Kitty's hand in marriage. Kitty is Dolly's sister. Kitty is in love with Vronsky, and Levin is humiliated when Kitty refuses his proposal. But then, Vronsky runs after Anna and leaves Kitty scorned and humiliated. Apparently Kitty can't deal with it, and her health suffers, forcing her to go abroad (her encounters with other characters are noted; she comes across Levin's own terminally ill brother, a curmudgeon without his brother's sense of direction). Though Levin lives purposefully (running his farm more or less successfully, along with his household, and maintaining his social connections and acting as a sort of local leader for the muzhik workers in the area), he does feel aimless, particularly after the death of this brother (who died not long after Levin and Kitty's reunion and subsequent marriage). Levin is often insecure, very proud, intelligent, but he definitely has his own interests (for example, though he has many opinions about farming that are learned and practiced, he does not take enough interest in politics to understand the nuances of it). I found myself connecting more with him than with any other character in the book, though as I previously noted, I could not agree with some of his often contradictory opinions.

Tolstoy shows the thoughts of his characters, and sometimes (particularly for Anna or Levin), in a stream-of-consciousness sort of style. That can be hard to follow sometimes, although Anna's thoughts tended to become repetitive: he doesn't love me anymore, blah blah blah. Levin suffers from an existential crisis after the death of his brother, even as he gets married to the woman he's loved for so long, and has a lovely little child (whom he first pities more than loves). At the end of the book, he has a kind of spiritual reawakening or something. I can't get too much into religious stuff; Levin begins stacking up the teachings of the Church (in his case, Eastern Orthodox) with his new understanding of God and the necessity of good in humanity, and he finds that they match up. I don't believe that about organized religion nowadays. I don't think that I suffer from any sort of spiritual crisis. I know what I believe, I know what I have faith in, and it certainly has nothing to do with any man-made conventions. But for Levin, his realizations, along with the fact that he has a pretty damn good life to begin with, brings him inner peace, and that's good. Anna didn't have inner peace, obviously. Perhaps Tolstoy was trying to get a religious message across; as I write this, I haven't really looked up much on the author himself, so I don't know how uber-religious he was. That's kind of how it comes across. I do applaud his portrayal of Countess Lydia as a hypocritical Christian...what kind of Christian believes a "clairvoyant," anyway? Hello, isn't that, like, witchcraft or something? She was just an idiot...and startlingly, a very powerful person in society.

Levin realizes, with his new spiritual realizations, that he hasn't fully developed as a person. He still has his faults, but he has a lot of good things going on as well. But what I think is most important is, he is moving on from the sadness of his past, the loss of his brother, and his mother before. He is focusing on what's important: his family, whom  he loves very much and is faithful to (he refuses to go cavorting among young farm girls with Oblonsky and another guest when they are on a hunting trip, and he soon after kicks the guy out of his house); his work, which is important to him; helping Dolly and his wife's family, whom he has come to embrace, even though they crowded in on his quiet country life. Levin was always the example of an upstanding man, even before he embraced the teachings of the Church.

Anna, in contrast, could not move on from the past, nor could her husband, and that is what made them tragic figures. Oblonsky, though he makes many mistakes, always looks ahead (or at least, lives in the present), and so he avoids tragedy...at least, for the time being. That's one powerful message that I'm taking away from many of the books I've read so far, that allowing the past to dictate what you do or how you feel is a deadly mistake, and that the only way to be happy is to forgive yourself, forgive others, and move on. Levin got over his pride at avoiding Kitty after she rejected him, and they eventually got back together. Just goes to show...

A picture meant to represent the title character. Kiera Knightly recently played Anna in a film version, but I didn't hear great things about that one...

9th graders don't like reading Tolstoy.