In Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties, Raymond Olderman argues that Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is based on the myth of the fisher king and is similar in theme and imagery to T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land."¹ Fertility elements are basic to Cuckoo’s Nest, but it is unlikely that Kesey, the leader of the pranksters, would use as the basis of a novel a myth which ends with the restoration of order to society. Eliot is a classicist. His wasteland (in "The Waste Land") is caused by moral chaos and is potentially cured (in "The Four Quartets") by the unifying force of Christianity. Kesey is a romantic. His wasteland is epitomized by Nurse Ratched, who "dreams . . . [of] 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."² His alternative to an orderly, mechanistic world is found among the psychopaths (for example, McMurphy), schizophrenics (Bromden), neurotics (Harding), and idiots (Pete) who inhabit an insane asylum because they cannot, or will not, become well-adjusted robots. In less analytical times, these lunatics and idiots were called fools.

The fertility myth which informs Kesey’s novel is not the fisher king myth, but the romantic myth of the king, the hero, and the fool. To understand the myth, to see McMurphy and Bromden as fool and hero, and to appreciate Kesey’s redefinition of this ancient myth in terms of contemporary American experience are indispensable to an understanding of the novel.

The myth of the king, the hero, and the fool is inherently romantic. The king creates a wasteland by imposing order on the kingdom. The fool represents alternatives to this sterile order. Kings traditionally have jesters, "wise fools," who correct and teach them. William Willeford, in The Fool and His Scepter, explains the archetypal significance of the king and the fool. Willeford says that the king is representative of organized society (Big Nurse) and is associated with classical values and with civilization. The fool (McMurphy) is an outsider and is associated with romantic values and with nature. The fool traditionally stands beside the king because he "provides an institutionalized link with all

the forces and values [irrationality, individuality, magic, mystic religion, humor, rebellion, and natural sexuality] which have been sacrificed to an orderly kingdom," a kingdom (for example, the Combine) which values rationality, moral seriousness, conformity, efficiency, and loyalty to the group.

The mythic hero (and future king) at the conclusion of a mandatory quest represents a wholeness—the fool and the king, chaos and order, reason and emotion unified in one person. When he becomes king, however, "his folly . . . gain[s] a voice separate from his own," and when his folly becomes totally embodied in the court fool, "The king begins to lose his heroic power. . . . Once crowned, the hero comes more and more to fulfill the pattern of ‘old king,’ destined to be superceded by the ‘new king.’" If the old king (Big Nurse) becomes too exclusive in his desire to maintain order, totally banishing his folly, he "may even degenerate into something like an obstructive and ill-adapted instance of the superego’ formulated by Freud. This degeneration may be seen in fairy tales in which the king appears as a stuffy, self-righteous tyrant, his presence strangling and suffocating everyone around him." Since this degeneration results in the sterility of the entire kingdom, a new hero is needed to restore the banished values.³

The villain-king of Kesey’s novel is Nurse Ratched. She personifies the technological society which has banished the fool’s values in the interests of order. To conform to this order, men must become robots. As Olderman explains, Nurse Ratched’s ward "is mechanically controlled from a central panel . . . so that everything in it is run by tiny electrical wires or installed machinery. People are often robots or are made of electric tubing and wiring and springs, as the ‘adjusted’ ones seem to be."⁴ Although Bromden is the obvious choice for the hero because he knows about the Combine and its effects, he is so alienated and pessimistic that he plays deaf and dumb rather than talk to anyone, and he feels powerless although he is physically huge. McMurphy is the fool; he embodies the romantic values banished by the Combine. He can, therefore, act as a mentor to Bromden, freeing him from alienation and helping him to grow from a protagonist to a hero and a worthy antagonist to the Combine.

Bromden’s relationship with McMurphy suggests Lord Raglan’s explanation of the relationship between the fool and the hero:

Like Falstaff, McMurphy is a buffoon. At first, when he plays practical jokes on Big Nurse, he is a disrupter of the ward For the sake of disruption (p. 25); like the traditional fool, he playfully threatens the too orderly kingdom with chaos. Later he uses clowning to undermine Big Nurse and the Combine. Finally, he uses laughter to save the inmates from despair. As Bromden recalls, McMurphy is "being the clown working at getting some of the guys to laugh. It bothers him that the best they can do is grin weakly and snigger sometimes" (p. 98).

On the fishing trip, when McMurphy makes the inmates laugh, he has brought them very close to mental health. And McMurphy laughs, too, because "he knows you have to laugh at the 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 . . . but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain" (pp. 237-38). Like the traditional fool, McMurphy transcends contradictory categories of experience with laughter. He unites the good and the bad, the humorous and the painful,⁶ and thus provides Bromden with the "wholeness" necessary to the future king.

Since McMurphy saves the inmates through laughter, his association with Christ is related to his role as fool. First, both the fool and Christ are fertility figures. As Lord Raglan explains, the fool is a descendant of the seer: "the official position, the recognized costume, the coxcomb and bladder, emblems of fertility and the impunity from reprisal or punishment, all mark out the fool as a holy man" of a fertility religion? Second, Kesey’s Christ is a comedian. McMurphy clowns through his symbolic crucifixion.

Kesey portrays McMurphy as a Christ-figure because the Christ story is America’s most endemic fertility myth, but McMurphy is also associated with Indian fertility myths. McMurphy’s story parallels a Hopi legend, called "The Red-Headed Stranger," which explains the origin of squash and corn. Although it is possible that Kesey is not familiar with the legend, certain similarities between the story and the novel are suggestive, especially since Kesey’s narrator is an Indian.

The story recounts the coming of a Red-Headed Stranger to an Indian village, offering to fight anyone: "He was beautiful as a pine tree or a lake trout, with his brass-red hair, his golden body, and his green clothes." McMurphy is big, tanned, red-headed and wears the hospital’s

"green convalescents." Even Harding’s metaphor describing the inmates as rabbits and the Big Nurse as a wolf suggests this legend (p. 62). As the Red-Headed Stranger fights Rabbit Ears and is destroyed by him, the rabbits in the ward make McMurphy fight Big Nurse, and hence cause his destruction. In the legend, the Stranger is defeated because he is weak with laughter. The comic god, then, dies laughing and his death promotes fertility: corn and squash grow from his head and body.⁸

Other incidents and allusions also establish McMurphy as the central figure in a fertility rite. His virility and his association with nature make him an appropriate fertility figure. As Olderman explains, "the fishing trip—considering the fish as the traditional mystical symbol of fertility—is the central incident in MeMurphy’s challenge to the waste land":

Returning from the fishing trip, McMurphy proclaims himself a "dedicated lover." His black shorts "with big white whales with red eyes" suggest Moby Dick, a symbol of the fertile natural world. And the orgiastic party which results in McMurphy’s destruction suggests a fertility ceremony, and it culminates in Harding’s parody of the mass and prophesy of the sacrifice to come. Renewed by the ceremony, Bromden concludes that "Maybe the Combine . . . [is not] all powerful" (p. 292).

As the mythic kingdom banishes the natural values embodied in the fool as fertility figure, the Combine obscures nature. When the government builds a dam on the Columbia River, the Indians forget that the river still flows and still has fish, and consequently become robots who serve the machine. Similarly, Bromden is so successfully brainwashed that the machine is omnipotent and omnipresent; he never even looks out the ward window until his mentor demonstrates that nature continues to provide a viable alternative to the machine. After McMurphy gives him enough hope to vote in the group therapy meeting,

he looks out the window, realizes for the first time that the "hospital was out in the country," and sees a dog that he describes as a sacred fish. The dog "twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray comes off him In the moon like silver scales" (p. 156).

Bromden’s escape from the control of the hospital follows the path of the dog and is pictured as a baptism of the earth: "The glass splashed out in the moon, like a bright cold water baptizing the sleeping earth" (p. 308). Bromden’s mentor is dead, but Bromden has become a hero who may provide fertility in the hand. Consequently, he goes to investigate stories that the Indians are fishing off the dam. If they are, natural religion may be alive even in the Combine’s territory.

While McMurphy as Christ and fertility god reasserts natural values in the world of the machine, he shows Bromden how to live as Christ the comedian. When McMurphy undergoes his first shock treatment, he self-consciously likens himself to Christ:

As he is being martyred, McMurphy plays the clown; thus in this scene he combines the roles of Christ and fool. Even when he attempts to lift the control panel, he is both Christ and fool. He begins as a comedian:

But he ends as Christ:

The message of McMurphy’s attempt to lift the control panel is the fool-ish philosophy of the existentialists. Like Camus, McMurphy understands that heroism is persevering in a hopeless task. As Bromden says, "I looked at McMurphy . . . . He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round—in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn’t whip it for

good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn’t come out any more and somebody else had to take your place" (pp. 302-303).

Bromden begins following McMurphy’s example when in order to protect George he helps him fight the aides. After this fight a patient in Disturbed asks him for help, just as the inmates had previously asked McMurphy. His face, "just a yellow, starved need," haunts Bromden, and he begins to feel the pressure on the hero to continue fighting the unbeatable Combine (p. 234). That he will continue the fight and that he will lose it is symbolized by Bromden’s escape. He follows the path of the dog he last saw running into the path of a car.

At the end of the novel Bromden is the hero and potential king in the myth of the king, the fool, and the hero; but Kesey has carefully redefined the myth to be relevant to the experience of twentieth-century Americans. Bromden could not be a hero before meeting McMurphy because Bromden, like all Americans, has become a robot who serves the machines that were meant to serve him, and consequently he has lost touch with traditional American optimism. McMurphy is able to discharge his function as comic mentor to Bromden only because he is not enfeebled by twentieth-century American limitations. As he first appears, lie is not a modern hero at all, but a walking anachronism. Like the traditional fool, he demonstrates "traits belonging to our developmental past . . . [which] seem an opening into a past to which we have closed ourselves by becoming what we are."¹¹

McMurphy is anachronistic because he is a nineteenth-century cowboy. Terry C. Sherwood, explaining Kesey’s use of comic strip techniques and character, notes McMurphy’s resemblance to the Lone Ranger and other cowboys:

McMurphy is less the strong, silent Lone Ranger than the garrulous backwoods braggart that Constance Rourke describes as one of nineteenth-century America’s most representative folk heroes. McMurphy

shares the dominant attributes of this nineteenth-century trickster (or fool). He calls himself a "bull goose loony" and engages in verbal battles. When he matches wits with Hardy, for example, he wins by claiming, "I’m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November" (p. 20). He has accomplished legendary physical feats such as escaping from a Chinese prison camp. And he is too optimistic as he first appears to fear defeat. As the backwoodsman’s "heel-crackings and competitive matches were like savage efforts to create strength for the tribe by exhibiting strength,"¹³ McMurphy challenges the Combine by opposing Big Nurse and thus gives hope to the modern tribe.

Kesey’s most positive character is an anachronism in this novel because of a crisis of heroism and of myth in contemporary America. As Americans currently collect antiques or idealize the fifties, Kesey responds to modern despair by nostalgically creating a mentor for Bromden who epitomizes nineteenth-century simplicity, naturalness, and optimism. However, McMurphy’s anachronistic optimism at the beginning of the novel is a product of his naivete. When he learns that he is committed and that most of the other inmates are so corrupted by the Combine that they stay in the ward voluntarily, he begins to understand the threat of the Combine. As he awakens to twentieth-century America, he is both backwoods braggart and Christ. He combines nineteenth-century heroic actions with twentieth-century understanding.

A twentieth-century hero, however, must interpret the events of the novel and transform them into a myth adequate to contemporary American experience. Although Bromden’s escape is the culmination of the story recounted in the novel, we know that he takes one further step as a hero: he writes the novel. But again he cannot act until he learns from a fool. As McMurphy could not provide a new pattern of heroic action had he lived by the mechanistic values of the Combine, Bromden cannot create a viable twentieth-century myth if he uses the analytic language of the Combine. As William Willeford explains,

The mystic, the fool, and the poet share an anti-rationalistic perspective, since the poet and the fool are joint descendants of the seer.¹⁸

While McMurphy teaches Bromden to act with the hope, love, and humor of the fool, another fool teaches him how to write like a poet. As Bromden discovers, Colonel Matterson’s crazy gibberish is more nearly true ‘than the Combine’s rational discourse: "He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I’m getting it, and I want to yell out to him. Yes, I see: Mexico is like a walnut; it’s brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it feels like a walnut! You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think" (p. 129). Accordingly, Bromden writes a myth in symbolic language that is "the truth even if it didn’t happen" (p. 8). In this case one descendant of the seer has succeeded the other; the poet follows the fool as the modern culture hero. As McMurphy does justice to the whole of life through laughter, Bromden does justice to it through art, providing us with the myth of the fool, the hero, and the Combine; and thus Bromden chooses to be a fool, a hero, and a mentor to the reader.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO

NOTES

    ¹Raymond M. Olderman, Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, t972), pp. 35-51.
    ²Ken Kesey, One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), p. 27. All references to Kesey’s novel will be to the Viking Press edition and are in parentheses in the text.
    ³William Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptor (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 166-168 and 171.
   ⁴Olderman, p. 37.
    5Lord Ragtan, The Hero (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937), p. 213.
   ⁶Willeford, p. 118.
   ⁷Raglan, pp. 219 and 215.
    ⁸G. Borland, Rocky Mountain Tipi Tales (Garden City: Doubleday, 1924), pp. 127 and 132-33.
   ⁹Olderman, pp. 45 and 35.
    ¹⁰John A.Barsness, "Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress," Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain MLA, 23 (March 1969), 27-29.
   ¹¹Willeford, p. 71.
    ¹²Terry G. Sherwood, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nes.t and the Comic Strip," Critique, XIII, 1(1971), p. 99.
   ¹³Constance Rourke,American Humor (Garden City: Doubleday, 1951) p. 40.
    ¹⁴The Fool: His Social and Literary History (Garden City:  Doubleday, 1961), p. 82.