One Flew over the Sexist Nest

I groove on the transcendentalists as much as any other red-blooded American.  Give me a story about the individual pitted against the society that is trying to grind all individuals to an undifferentiated paste, and I’ll cheer on the individual as much as anyone else.  Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is just such a story.  Chief Bromden, the half-breed Native American who narrates the story, reveals to us a world of individuals who have rejected and been rejected by the unstoppable “Combine” that hums smoothly along.  The machinery of the Combine has human cogs and pistons that twirl and pump with precision to make the device run smoothly and perpetuate itself. 

In any story about the machinations of society, the author must create representatives of the machine, caretakers that keep it running smoothly, people who aren’t afraid to take a metal file to the gears that don’t fit right and clog up the whole works.  It is in selecting who represents the machine that an author makes his or her specific claims about society and the nature of its woes.  Politicians, millionaires, Big Brother—there are so many targets and causes to choose from!  For Ken Kesey, the caretakers and brutal filers are women and the culture of femininity that they use to crush the spirits of the would-be men.

Yes, Chief suggests that the Combine is much bigger than women, but Kesey focuses his attention obsessively on the women of his world.  Nurse Ratched is the obvious villain, but the concern about masculinity and women who emasculate their men goes way beyond her.  Ruckly’s one phrase, “fuck da wife!”, seems to be an appropriate motto for all the men in the novel.  Harding’s wife, when we meet her, attacks Harding for his laugh, saying, “when are you going to learn to laugh instead of making that mousy little squeak?”  Billy’s mother is a dominating woman who manipulates her son.  Chief recounts the story of his childhood to McMurphy and notes that his mother  played a key role in reducing his father from being a big man: "He was real big when I was a kid.  My mother got twice his size. . . .   She got bigger all the time” and “made him little.”  Moreover, when Chief is talking about how some men escape the Combine, he makes a list of things that men need to avoid.  At the top of the list is “no wife wanting new linoleum.”  The female demands on the man for consumer goods forces men to play by the rules of the combine. 

Amongst all these back stories is the main focus of action and concern: the ward.  The story of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of how McMurphy enters the ward and, like a testosterone-filled Mary Poppins, helps the “rabbits” become “men” again.  After seeing how Nurse Ratched controls the men, McMurphy has a long talk with Harding and declares Ratched “ain’t peckin’ at your eyes”!  He and Harding agree that Ratched is a ball-cutter.  And all efforts to overthrow Ratched center around her sex.  McMurphy warns her to behave properly on his first day in the ward by telling a story of his uncle Hallahan: 

It’s okay, Doc.  It was the lady there that started it, made the mistake.  I’ve know some people inclined to do that.  I had this uncle whose name was Hallahan, and he went with a woman once who kept acting like she couldn’t remember his name right and calling him Hooligan just to get his goat.  It went on for months before he stopped her.  Stopped her good, too.

The threat is clearly sexual in nature.

Ratched’s attempts to nullify her own sexuality seem to frustrate all the men, and the suggestion keeps recurring that if she would just be a real woman, she’d stop ball cutting.  In describing her, they call her “impregnable,” that she has “too-red lipstick and . . . too-big boobs,” even though she tries to disguise them in her uniform.  McMurphy says to Harding,

So you see my friend, it is somewhat as you stated:  man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it is certainly not laughter.  One weapon, and with every passing year in this hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are discovering how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been the conquerors— 

Yep, the only true answer to female power is a good raping, and the problem with modern society is that they are figuring out how to unman the most virile of men and make them victims instead of victors.  Later in the novel, McMurphy postulates that “the solution to all your problems would be to just throw her down and solve her worries,” but no one wants to be the one to have sex with such an unappealing creature.  Every attempt to undermine Ratched involves reminding her that she is a woman.  McMurphy “destroy[s] her whole effect” by asking her about the size of her bra cup.  He pinches her ass to belittle her, and the guys on the ward mock her for those pinches in order to take away her power.  And in the end, when McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched, he first tears off her clothes, and it is unclear if he merely strangles her or rapes her simultaneously.  When she returns to the ward, her power is gone because her sexuality has been revealed:  her uniform “could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.”

The solution is not just to sexually dominate Nurse Ratched, but to make the men men again.  After McMurphy arrives, Chief reflects on what McMurphy has brought into the ward:  for all the smells he smells while cleaning the ward, “never before now, before he came in, [was there] the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.”  Thank god for the “man smell”!  Baseball on TV, basketball on the ward, blood and fighting, and a great fishing trip with beer and relaxation, the replacing of McCall with Playboy—all good manly things—these are the building blocks by which McMurphy restores the masculinity of the men on the ward.  When he promises to build Chief back up to his original sizes, Chief’s first sign of growth is an erection: “You growed a half a foot already.” 

The open laughter of men is pitted against the manipulating smiles of women, and it’s the machinations of women that make the combine grind out the laughter.  Ratched works by insinuation instead of anything direct that the men could answer to.  When the government folks came to take the land from Chief’s tribe, the two men want to talk directly to Chief’s father, but it is the woman with them who proposes they work by rumor and a letter addressed to the Chief’s wife to reach their ends.  The men on the ward can’t manfully confront Ratched without punishment, so they learn the wily womanly way of being “cagey” and “sly.”

I know that is an annoyingly long list, but even at that it is only a sampling of the instances in the novel in which the fault of society is worked onto the shoulders of women.  

The bemoaning of the feminization of culture is as old as culture itself.  It is a fantasy embraced by some men to explain all their problems on a convenient other, and it seems to crop up every few years along with calls for getting in touch with our primal masculinity.  It’s a worn out attack, and I have zero point zero interest in it.

Kesey’s obsession is all the more upsetting because he is such a great writer.  He deftly handles character and has a keen ear for conversation.  I love the way McMurphy comes off the page, and I think he is a wonderful character all around.  He comes from a long tradition of American tricksters, harkening back I believe to the slave stories of John, who outsmarts Master and the Devil at every turn.  He is a rebellious force whose wit is his most powerful weapon, in the mold of Tom Sawyer, playful and smart and fun.  He has a brain for business and a heart that even though it appears cold is actually warm and caring.  But every time I was enjoying the novel, Kesey would throw a wrench in the works with his ringing accusation that America is being pussified. 

So, if you like excellent writing, fantastic characters, a vibrant world, and a well placed plot, and believe that America is being destroyed by the feminization and unmanning of our virile men, then this is the book for you.

All Else Pales against Nabokov's Fire

As always,  spoilers ahead: read at your own risk!

Prior to reading Pale Fire, Lolita was the only book of Nabokov’s that I had read.  After reading Pale Fire, I have plans to read a lot more of his novels.  I was smitten by Pale Fire by the end of the third paragraph, when Charles Kinbote, the fictitious author of Nabokov’s book, announces without warning or context, “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”  There is nothing like an off-kilter and potentially unstable first-person narrator to make me weak in the literary knees!   Then once the structure of the novel became clear to me I nearly swooned into a dead faint!  A novel in the form of a commentary on a 999-line poem, complete with an index and a never-ending set of refer-to’s and see-also’s?  I wasn’t sure my ex-academic heart could take the excitement!  Add to all of that Nabokov’s fierce intelligence, erudition, and sense of play and you have what is possibly a perfect novel.

This novel seems to me to be first and foremost a novel about the relationship between art, artist, and critic.  As a novelist and an academic, Nabokov would have been familiar with all the roles he explores in this work.  And as one who analyzes the books I read, I find my role as reviewer a fun dilemma, since Pale Fire effectively criticizes the critic.  I suspected from the forward that Kinbote’s commentary would be about way more than the poem upon which it claims to be commenting, but I was unprepared for how very little it cared about the actual poem.  Instead of subtly unraveling a narrative from verse, the novel tells its story in spite of the verse! 

Kinbote, once Charles the Beloved of Zembla, has fled to America after escaping from the extremists who have taken over his “distant northern land.”  Having made his way to New Wye, he has befriended poet John Shade and attempted to influence him to write an epic poem about Zembla and its erstwhile king.  In spite of the fact that the poem written has nothing to do with Kinbote’s intended theme, he has decided to create a commentary to the poem that “attempt[s] to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me,” as he tells us at the very end of his book.  This open tension between the text and Kinbote’s revealed subtext makes for great humor and amusement.  My favorite example is his dismissal of most of the second canto, which focuses on the death of the poet’s daughter.  Kinbote finds the whole section rather tiring, as he states: 

[The poet] affected not to speak of his dead daughter, and since I did not foresee this work of inquiry and comment, I did not urge him to talk on the subject and unburden himself to me.  True, in this canto he has unburdened himself pretty thoroughly, and his picture of Hazel is quite clear and complete; maybe a little too complete architectonically, since the reader cannot help feeling that it has been expanded and elaborated to the detriment of certain other richer and rarer matters ousted by it.

Through Kinbote’s commentary, Nabokov shows on an exaggerated scale how the critic can never read a work for what it actually is.  He brings to it all his own expectations, his own experiences, his own memories, and his own desires.  What the artist wants to say and what we want to hear are seldom if ever the same thing.  We will skip over whole sections that do not address the area that we are interested in in order to focus on the thing that resonates with us.  And of course Nabokov has fun with this very idea by lacing Pale Fire with all kinds of references and interests that no one reader will gather altogether to one big end.  Even as I focus on the relationship between the critic and the art work, there are dozens of subthemes that I need to leave alone for other readings.  How is Timons of Athens central to the themes of the book (other than providing the line of poetry that gives Shade’s poem, and Nabokov’s novel, its title)?  What is the importance of Kinbote’s religious observations?  Why is Kinbote obsessed with surnames and their national origins and meanings?  Why are Kinbote’s sexual proclivities given so much attention in the novel?  Any area of focus will not be able to give full due to the text because we as readers pick and choose our own way through the novel. 

And there is the suggestion that the act of reading and interpreting is its own creative act, separate and distinct from the creation of the original art.  In commenting on Shade’s poem, Kinbote creates his own narrative, and as we bring ourselves to any work, we necessarily re-create our own stories and experiences within that reading.  The uniting factor, according to Pale Fire, is that all these acts—the act of creating art and the act interpreting art—are incredibly narcissistic!  Shade refuses Kinbote’s suggestions of a poetic theme in favor of his own life story revolving around him, his wife, and his daughter.  Kinbote can’t  help but wish the poem were about him, and creates his own story, redirecting us from Shade’s experiences to Kinbote’s own!  And we, of course, at the next level, take it all and make it about ourselves.   I suspect Nabokov had a blast playing with this idea, and in an interview I read, he stated that he purposefully planted all kinds of hidden treasures and allusions for readers to find and grab onto.

Also in my reading I came across the notion that a series of articles have been written arguing over the relationship between Kinbote and Shade.  Namely, they argue that Kinbote is not really Kinbote, but a crazy Botkin, a scholar passed over briefly in the novel and mentioned in the Index.  Others say that Shade never really existed but as a figment of Kinbote’s imagination, or that Kinbote is the fictitious creation in the mind of Shade.  I have no doubt that there is great evidence for any and all of these readings—and the end statements by Kinbote certainly suggest that there is a whole lot of crazy going on—but this is the type of analysis that I find generally unsatisfying.  The pleasure of the reading comes in that first-person narration in which we know that the narrator can’t be trusted to tell us the truth.  Whether that narrator is a deranged scholar, a manipulative poet, or a true king of Zembla doesn’t really matter.  Nabokov created a thrilling, funny, twisted tale that keeps the brain running around itself trying to figure out what is actually going on, and you can practically hear him chuckling to himself as he writes as Kinbote:  “I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel.”

Nabokov has made it to the top of my list of writers of whom I am in awe. 

Dancing into World War II: The Kindly Ones

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, since I began this reading project, I get asked regularly what book I am reading and what I think of it.  Earlier this week, I met a friend for lunch, and as we were leaving, she nodded to the book in my hand and asked what I was reading.  “The Kindly Ones, by Anthony Powell,” I said, holding up the book.  “Hmm,” she replied, which I took to mean that she had never heard of it (before this list, neither had I).  “Is it good?”  And for a moment I was stuck on what to answer, because as I was about to say “Excellent!” I realized that she might take the recommendation seriously and seek out the book, which made me consider whether I would recommend the book to her.  I don’t know enough about her reading tastes to be able to predict if she would enjoy the type of story that Powell is telling in this novel and the series of which it is a part.  My hesitance had to do with how unusual A Dance to the Music of Time is as a series.

The twelve books, published between 1951 and 1975, are an attempt at an unusual way to escape the tyranny of “plot” in writing a novel.  Here’s a passage from an interview with Powell that I quoted before in which he explains the impetus for the series: 

Well, this is rather a long story. You see I haven't any great talent for inventing plots, and indeed it seems to me that even the best writers are inclined to churn out the same stuff in eighty thousand words, although it's dressed up in a different way. And so I thought that there would be all sorts of advantages for a writer like myself to write a really long novel in which plots and characters could be developed, which would cover this question of not doing short-term plots—doing rather larger ones, in fact.

So when I explained to my friend that the novel was the sixth novel in a series of twelve that followed the narrator and the various people that come in and out of his life over a 40 year period from college days, through World War II, to post war Britain, she looked about as excited about the novel as she was about the pickle left sitting on her sandwich plate after lunch.  And who can blame her?  It does sound rather dry and uninteresting, and after I read the first book, A Question of Upbringing, I was not exactly excited to pick up future volumes.

But what is achieved over time is nothing short of mesmerizing for me.  You never know which characters will crop up in that particular novel, or which new characters will be coming back later.  Characters you had long forgotten about return in unexpected ways, and because Powell is playing the long game, the characters can grow and evolve and have contradictions.  In fact, Nick Jenkins, our narrator, is keen to simultaneously attempt to sketch a character and to let you know that he may not know what he’s talking about, because life and people are complicated.  At one point, Moreland, Nick’s musician friend, meets Templer, an old school friend of Nick’s, and Nick can read Moreland’s attitude toward Templer: “Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people – in this particular case, Templer – lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever.  That is perhaps an exaggeration of Moreland’s attitude.  All the same, he always found difficulty in accustoming himself to complete aesthetic indifference.”  In a 300 page novel, an author can be in a hurry to define a character as quickly as possible, falling on stereotypes and characterization to do a lot of the work of character-building.  In the leisurely storytelling that Powell adopts in this series, he has the time to admit that his attempt at characterization “is perhaps an exaggeration.”  In another case, he’ll follow up a brief analysis with “at least those were the reasons attributed by his brothers and sisters,” admitting that he doesn’t actually have any ability to look into the soul of another human being.  And human beings are exactly what Powell seems to be able to create in his method.  This series is as close as you can get to watching life itself unfold under the illuminating light of art.  It is as grand an epic as Lord of the Rings, but it is the epic of life itself, common, everyday life.

Each individual volume tries to capture a slightly different stage in life, and Powell unifies the smaller stories through thematic concerns at that stage of life.  In The Kindly Ones, Nick is in his early thirties, married, with a baby on the way and World War II looming like a dark cloud threatening to let loose a torrent without a moment’s notice.  Nick, who works as a writer, has a hard time concentrating on art or his job with all the global concerns, and the novel focuses on the dissolution of fragile peaces and uneasy allies.  The analogies for Europe’s strife are found in the marriages and love triangles that dot the stories unfolded in the four chapters of the novel:  Albert, Billson, & Bracey; Templer, Stepney, & Betty; Donners, Matilda, & Moreland; Nick, Jean, & Duport; Donners, Widmerpool, & Duport.  With these shifting relationships running parallel with Hitler’s signing a pact with Russia, there is also the theme of “the man of action,” who can be either one looking for adventure or one not unwilling to take an adventure presented to him.  The question of whether or not there will be war makes the United Kingdom a character in itself; will it be a man of action who takes matters into its hands and accepts the “adventure” of war that is thrust upon it?

Some volumes in The Dance to the Music of Time are more gripping and more rewarding than others, and The Kindly Ones is one of the most engaging so far.  Powell has a gentle hand and finds humor and pain in the subtlest places.  The story feels focused and unified, and the shadow of war is artfully portrayed so that the simple doings of these disparate folks feel like the inhalation and exhalation of life itself.  I don’t know if I’d recommend the series to any of my friends, but that's only because I imagine such a large undertaking would not appeal to many people.  Nevertheless, wading through these novels is an experience that I am very glad to have undergone.