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The Novels of Ken Kesey
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
In their manual based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary discuss the signs of the ‘Third Bardo’ existence in a psychedelic experience in the vocabulary of Ken Kesey's fiction:
Where Tibetans saw demons and beasts of prey, a Westerner may see impersonal machinery grinding, or depersonalizing and controlling devices of different futuristic varieties. Visions of world destruction and hallucinations of being engulfed by destructive powers, and sounds of the mind-controlling apparatus of the ‘combine's fog machinery’, of the gears which move.
In his two novels, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, Kesey has described that sense of the disintegration and death and ultimate rebirth of the ego which lies at the heart of the LSD ‘trip’. Both books are literary metaphors for psychedelic experiences.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971
References
1 Alpert, Richard, Metzner, Ralph and Leary, Timothy, The Psychedelic Experience (New York, 1964), p. 80.Google Scholar
2 Kesey, Ken, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (New York, 1962).Google Scholar Quotations will be from the Compass Books paperback edition.
3 Kesey, Ken, Sometimes A Great Notion (New York, 1964).Google Scholar Quotations will be from the Bantam paperback edition.
4 Jung, Carl, ‘Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead’, Psyche & Symbol (New York, 1958), p. 294.Google Scholar
5 Alpert, Richard, LSD (New York, 1966), p. 70.Google Scholar
6 McMurphy at first tries to taunt the Negro aide, ironically named Washington, into striking the first blow by calling him a ‘goddamned motherfucking nigger’. But Washington only ‘shook his head and giggled’. He is, of course, immune to the insults of the white world and forces McMurphy into taking the initiative.
7 The novel actually begins at this point. Jonathan Draeger, head of the union, tries to find out from Viv just why Hank insists upon going it alone. ‘Isn't he aware that he is risking complete—total—alienation?’ Draeger asks. The book cuts back and forth in time.