Diary: Presidents Day and Beyond

　

1.

The week after Valentine’s Day, I drove about 1200 miles in six days and took eight depositions.

2.

I am working on two big cases – one involves two women incinerated in a fire that took place at a hog barn near the border with South Dakota; the other lawsuit arises from brain injuries suffered by a young man when his car collided with a garbage truck. I have other substantial litigation as well. As a lawyer, I have never been more busy.

3.

Travel was complicated by a harsh winter. At intervals of two or three days, storms pulsed from west to east, smearing sleet on the highways and, then, deep snow. Unrelenting cold gripped the upper Midwest – the rivers were frozen solid and 94% of Lake Superior was locked under thick ice. In the respite between storms, the skies cleared but were full of raging torrential winds. The wind dropped the temperature far below zero and blew the snow over the fields and rows in dense, impenetrable clouds. The drifts along the freeway migrated from the ditches into the lanes of travel and were ground down to the slickness of a ballroom floor. Trucks scuttling along the interstate cast up fogs of snow and created white-out conditions and there were hundreds of crashes: small cars pitched into the deep snow in the median and almost swallowed, snow-bound to the windows, trucks jack-knifed or spun off the road into wind-ravaged shelter-belts, multi-car pile-ups with vehicles locked together over several linear acres of freeway, hoods smoking and people huddled together on the roadside.

4.

On Monday, February 18, President’s Day, the office was closed but I worked all morning preparing exhibits for the deposition in Omaha on Tuesday. I put my exhibits in numbered manila folders in a plastic crate. Then, I dragged the crate and my brief case to the car and set off for Omaha.

5.

The trip to Omaha consists of two legs. The first, and longest, part of the journey passes along I-90 to 35 and, then, south to Des Moines – this is a distance of about 150 miles, across completely flat terrain. There is a one bridge over a big lake nine miles north of the Minnesota border, a body of water poised near the state line like a kind of greeting: Welcome to Minnesota – Land of 10,000 Lakes. It’s gusty on the bridge riding low above the icy desert of the lake and, then, after a low hill, the terrain is completely flat and the highway straight as an arrow running 130 miles to the northern suburbs of Des Moines. The level, unbending highway is hypnotic, soporific – it urges the driver into dizzy reverie. Along the horizon, sometimes a grain elevator makes an obscene gesture at the white and hazy sky and, at the edge of the white snowy fields, the rotors of wind turbines are whirling. Somewhere in the middle of the drive, a county highway crosses the freeway on an elegant concrete overpass, great pillars on concrete installed at intervals under the curve of the elevated road – that’s the only landmark on the route.

6.

The second leg of the trip to Omaha is due west along I-80, a freeway crowded with heavy and fast-moving trucks. This part of the journey traverses the ancient loess hills, dirt blown across the plains from the Rocky Mountains and deposited in a series of ridges running north and south across western Iowa. The loess hills rise trough to crest about 150 feet, an undulating landscape of identical valleys and ridges. The valleys are about six miles wide and this makes for interesting driving challenges. The huge trucks using the freeway struggle on the upgrade and, invariably, you pass by them as they labor to the crest of the ridge. But from the ridge-top down into the valley, the trucks toboggan downhill at high speed, zooming past you only to labor and almost stall on the upgrade once more. And, so, it goes for another 140 miles until higher bluffs and steeper, deeper valleys complicate the terrain and the freeway drops down onto the wide Missouri river plain on which Omaha is located.

7.

Blizzard snow had fallen over Omaha on the weekend before President’s Day. Forlorn-looking cars crashed in drifts alongside the road marked the way west over the loess hills. The sky was slippery white and every hilltop was plinth to three-hundred foot tall wind turbines, an army of colossi overlooking the barren, snow-clogged valleys. Many of the trucks were immense, carrying 150 foot rotors shaped like the aluminum and steel wings of an immense jet airplane. The trucks carrying the rotors used linked flatbeds and seemed to be the length of a football field.

8.

Omaha was still digging out from under the freshly fallen snow. The sidewalks were treacherous with alluvial fans of glass-slick ice and some of the walkways were blind, ending in heaped turrets of snow and road ice. There was no way out of a sidewalk blocked in that way and, if you found yourself, trapped by an igloo-shaped wall of grey snow and yard-long blocks of ice, there was nothing to do, but reverse your way and walk in the opposite direction.

9.

Savage cold burned like a torch between the buildings in downtown Omaha. I got lost looking for an Old Town steak-house. This part of the city seemed to have been bombed-out – whole blocks of buildings had been eliminated in favor of snow-mounded empty spaces and big parking lots, all of them mostly empty. There were 12 patrons at the steak house, eight of them cheerful and noisy Japanese tourists. I sat at the bar to eat. The hostess was dark with lustrous black hair and she looked Middle Eastern – on the wall, there was a large, colorful map of Iran.

10.

The deposition the next morning took place in a small custom slaughterhouse that had been converted into a labyrinthine office building – the walls were heavy with brick and mortar and the room in which we took the deposition was long and narrow with an exercise bicycle mounted like a piece of sculpture at one end of the space. The toilets were factory-cold and utilitarian. I led the questioning and the deposition continued for six hours.

11.

Omaha was under a blizzard warning. Another storm was whirling across the high plains, aimed at the city. Snow was expected to start around the evening commute, that is, between five and six pm. When I stopped for gas, one of enormous trucks hauling an equally enormous wind turbine rotor, had also chosen that exit for respite from interstate traffic. The trucks traveled in a small caravan of amber-flashing pilot picks, a couple vehicles ahead and behind the over-sized load. When the rotors were hauled off the freeway, turns were problematic – the big rotor swept like a clock-hand across the landscape at the corner, sheering away signs and clipping of the tops of passenger cars. Ambulances and squad cars were poised on side-roads and it took the truck fifteen minutes to execute the right-hand turn. Overhead, the sky boiled with angry grey storm clouds.

12.

The deposition was finally done at 3:00 pm. I drove back to Austin ahead of the storm. In western Iowa, the freeway passed under illuminated billboards that read Blizzard Alert: snow commencing at 6 pm and continuing overnight. On the straight, hallucination-inducing freeway running north to Albert Lea, the billboards warned: Blizzard Tonight: snow commencing around midnight.

13.

I had depositions scheduled for Rochester on Wednesday. I reached Austin, my home, around 8:00 pm. Stopped long enough to pack a bag and, then, continued to drive, this time east over the windswept Dexter ridge, another army of wind turbines on that height of land, and, then, to Rochester. The plan was to stay ahead of oncoming storm.

14.

I reached the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Rochester about 9:30. At check-in, the desk clerk gave me a warm cookie.

15.

The next morning, I walked through the skyways around 8:00 am, looking for something for breakfast. The skyway bridge over the street showed heavy snow falling in white clots and clumps, cars and busses crawling along over white, rutted streets. The facades of the buildings were a brown or grey backdrop against which balls of sticky snow plummeted straight down onto the sidewalks and roads.

16.

The Doubletree Hotel is three-blocks from the Mayo Clinic, second floor skyways connecting the downtown buildings together. Mayo Clinic consultants with lanyards swinging from their necks were hurrying through the skyways, walking at a high speed consistent, I suppose, with requirements for a cardiovascular work-out. Mayo Clinic consultants tend to be athletic-looking with studious glasses and they wear expensively nondescript grey or black suits. Of course, many of them are Asian, although all speak excellent, agitated English – they tend to move about in groups of two or three. In general, the consultants and the accountants working for the Mayo Clinic, also easily recognized by their lanyards, ignored the flurry of falling snow and the chaos on the streets where cars and buses were battling the blizzard.

17.

In the old days, Mayo Clinic docs (now called "consultants") worked all the time. Before dawn, they did surgery, in the afternoon, their schedules were crowded with patient consultations, and, after dinner, they did rounds in the hospital primarily to assess how their surgical patients were progressing. The docs were earnest, humorless, people who read no books because they had no time to read – saving lives was their vocation. All of them had written hundreds of papers, generally each with a half-dozen collaborators. When these surgeons and specialists had time to compose these publications was unclear to me –presumably, they dictated their contributions in traffic or between the hole and tee-box ath the country club. The Mayo Clinic is nominally non-profit but now "the enterprise" as it is called by its officers and business representatives seems primarily designed to funnel vast amounts of money to its upper echelons of management. In bygone years, the docs were always "on-call" and carried pagers in holsters strapped like pistols to their hips. The docs are not really "on-call" any more – the profession of "hospitalist" now exists to manage the post-surgical care of patients requiring intensive, or other in-patient, care. The financial guys now carry the pagers – they are "on-call" at all times in the event that something might go wrong with enterprise’s investments or bill collections or invoicing or its allocations of government and private grants.

18.

The dying or medically damaged people who come to the Mayo Clinic are, often, potentates of Middle Eastern nations or Russian oligarches or other specimens of the super-wealthy. (The chief of "the enterprise," Dr. John Noseworthy announced publicly that the Mayo Clinic didn’t want to treat "Medicare patients" because the fee schedules for payment for services for those patients were not adequately remunerative. When the royalty of Saudi Arabia travels to Rochester, the entourage rents an entire floor of the Kahler Hotel for the various emirs, viziers, harem girls and wives, and assorted regents, princelings, and crown princes. The entourage always makes a trip to the Mall of America 80 miles to the north in Bloomington before returning to Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or wherever they come from. These kinds of patients, of course, have brought to Rochester various elite shops – there are custom leather goods available in the skyways, jewelry stores, antique dealers, vendors of Louis Vuitton bags and other accessories, all sorts of boutiques selling astronomically priced gear to people who don’t care about the price. Some of these stores cluster around a vertical atrium called the Galleria – most elite shopping areas are named "Galleria" (have you noticed?) A scatter of tables fronts the escalators in the atrium and, at one of those tables, a homeless man is sleeping vertically, a battered suitcase on rollers between his legs. He is wrapped in a torn snowmobile suit and his red face is tilted back. The consultants and suits ignore him – hustling past the man as if he were a potted plant.

19.

Somali women in hijab are mopping floors in a food court. A burrito place is open and a husky Mexican man sells me breakfast. None of the other shops are doing business – I suppose the early bird gets the worm and, perhaps, the Somali char-women will get hungry and buy something for their breakfast, although this seems doubtful to me: the women are too earnest and skinny and energetic to be hungry. The burrito is excellent and I sit for awhile enjoying my food.

20.

On the way back to the Doubletree, I venture into a shadowy corridor strapped like a belt to the back of the hotel. The skyway passage leads to a parking lot and it’s quiet and poorly lit. Some shapeless bundles rest against the side of the walkway. Glancing at them, I see boots, a gloved hand: more homeless people sprawled in featureless heaps of blanket and coat, heads hidden under hoods and piles of garments. At first, I can’t recognize the bundles as sleeping people – it’s simply too alien to me, too unexpected here in a skyway on the backside of this luxury hotel. A faint feeling of dread suffuses me. Around the corner, there are more bundles, packages of ragged cloth zippered into cocoons, inert and inchoate. The bundles are motionless, headless, without shape. The skyway ends in the grit of a stairway dropping down to the sidewalk. I retrace my steps, cleaving to the center of the walkway, to avoid approaching the contagion of poverty strewn against the walls – pads of newspapers as blankets, styrofoam cups next to the formless caterpillar-shaped piles, no sound at all coming from the sleepers, perhaps, they are dead or comatose or holding their breath for fear of offending me. Like a toadstool or an umbrella the mighty Mayo Clinic rises in terraces above the center of the city but there is no place for these people within its galleries and plazas. Dread has settled into these skyways, deep and appalling dread.

21.

The hubris of lawyers knows no end. So we reached Rochester and have a room reserved for the depositions but this is all supremely impractical because, of course, you can’t have a deposition without witnesses and the witnesses have to appear to testify and it’s forty-five miles for them across rural winding roads that go up and down in the clouds of blowing snow. The witnesses can’t make the deposition – there’s no way for them to even get their cars through driveways submerged in snow. But we make due. Someone sets up a cellphone on the middle of the table in the conference room and we take the depositions by face-time, the court reporter leaning forward to hear and lip-read the little talking head on the screen of the telephone.

22.

The drive back to Austin is slow. At the Dexter ridge, the blizzard has seized the freeway and pumped a gruel of icy, wet snow down its gullet. The car skids underneath me. Crashes line the ditch.

23.

The next afternoon, I drive 175 miles to Rock County on the South Dakota border. The sky is clear and I pass through an elaborately sculpted landscape, alabaster drifts sanded by the wind into graceful waves extending out to the spectral white gusts blowing along the horizon. The sun is setting in a red haze of ice particles and each drift casts a perfectly blue shadow mottling the vast plains with white-caps curling scarlet above the slate-blue sea. Winter would be beautiful if it weren’t so very terrible.

24.

Another blizzard is on the way. We take the depositions at the old courthouse. The place smells of coffee, antiseptic, sweat. Sometimes, rain splashes against the windows of the law library where we are working.

25.

With the darkness, more snow is expected. The rain will freeze. I am running in front of the storm, eastward into the shadows of night.

On Pre-Columbian Art

　

　

Pre-Columbian art appalls and fascinates due to its strangeness. Walking among the frog-eyed gods and coiled snakes carved from spongy-looking volcanic rock, the tourist finds nothing commensurate with European norms of beauty – it’s all majestically unfamiliar: oblong mother goddesses carved from stone obelisks spurt curved and vegetal flourishes of blood from their severed necks, bony cadavers strain to give birth, huge stucco masks extrude tongues shaped like obsidian daggers. The figures are without grace, eyeless with skeletal jaws, raw blocks of pumice-like magma cut into inexpressive heads and arms raised to show flat, bestial palms, hands more like the paws of a jungle cat than the human fingers that gripped the artisan’s chisel. This is a culture without Socrates or Jesus, and its art is as alien to our imaginations as an artifact from outer space – and, indeed, many of these objects are excoriated, carved from pitted lava so that, it seems, they have been sculpted from iron and rocky debris from the farthest zones of the solar system, strange meteorites fallen from interplanetary space. Even the relatively lithe and terpsichorean idols made by the Maya are utterly bizarre – at first, the figures seem classical, well-shaped with serpentine limbs, but, before we can acclimate ourselves to these forms, we are struck by what they are doing – a noble-woman tugs a thorn encrusted coil of paper through her tongue, bleeding onto a heap of gore-soaked tissue. Fire blazes in the bloody paper and the smoke from that burning coalesces into jaws that open to disgorge a monster with fangs and pedipalps like a centipede that cradle a small, impassive human head. Masked dancers prance beneath insect-haunted heavens carrying human heads like lanterns. The face of a flayed man stares at us implacably, lidless eyes like boiled eggs.

What is most noteworthy is an absence: there are no female nudes, indeed, there is no conception whatsoever of lissome female beauty. The ancient Pre-Columbians did not regard the unadorned human body as beautiful. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, these people equated nudity with defeat and a horrible death – the only figures who are nude in Pre-Columbian art are bound, naked warriors awaiting death by torture. The Greeks stripped to compete; the ancient Americans went to war adorned so massively that their great chiefs and sachems could scarcely move – nudity was abject and disgraceful and a well-dressed Aztec warrior wore gloves made from the flayed hands of those he had killed, carried heads and scalps festooned around his neck, bore over his painted face a massive multi-tiered headdress imitating the different realities in the universe (the celestial world, earth, the underworld) – over his buttocks, he wore a ballooning bustle and feathered roach. With leggings cut from jaguar fur and gold gorgets and silver ear-spools and pinnacles of quetzal feathers, his features anonymous beneath a mask of flayed human skin or the wooden or stucco visage of his gods, the Pre-Columbians brought the art of personal adornment to its highest and most baroque state. In some Mayan and Mixtec art, the costume is so immense and architectural that it is almost impossible to see the tiny human figure within that carapace of mummified heads, feathers, and crowns atop crowns.

Western art is based most fundamentally on the notion that the nude human being is the measure of all beauty and the quintessence of the divine. Pre-Columbians viewed human nudity as disgraceful. For the slender beauty of Aphrodite, they substitute a single, awe-inspiring leit motif, an imago that underlies and motivates all of their greatest artistic works: the body stripped of its flesh, the skeleton, the grinning skull. Search the corridors and darkened galleries of the great Mexican museums of Pre-Columbian art: look for sculptures of nude women. You will find none. In their place, leer a thousand thousand eyeless and toothy skulls.

On Sometimes a Great Notion (Ten propositions and two questions)

　
1. Discomfort: a common narrative device is to introduce characters and setting by importing an outsider into the milieu presented by the novel. Kesey uses this device in Sometimes – we are introduced to the world of the Stampers through Lee. This forces the reader to identify with Lee. But Lee is an unpleasant character – he’s like Hamlet, vengeful, very smart, brooding, narcissistic, and (mostly) cowardly. Therefore, the reader experiences a certain discomfort as the book proceeds – we are put in the stance of emotionally identifying with someone who is not heroic and whose perspective is unreliable. Kesey dilutes this problem to some extent by using the perspectives of other characters for half of the narration (Hank, Joby, Old Henry, Teddy, Mr. Eggleston, Draeger, and Evenwrite). But the book poses a challenge by situating us smack-dab in the middle of Lee’s perverse point-of-view;

2. Agon: Kesey, as a world-class athlete, (he was an Olympic wrestler) views existence as a series of tests or trials to be undertaken. For him, the self is forged by testing itself against forces that are inimical (and destructive) to it. He tends to see the world as divided between heroic individuals who are willing to confront hostile forces and test themselves against them and those who lack the courage or fortitude to submit to such tests. This will become very apparent in Wolfe’s book named, after all, by a "test". Kesey’s development seems to me to proceed in this fashion:

– the individual is tested by the demands of a society that disciplines by conformity (this seems to be the burden of One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest with emphasis on the heroic "one");

– the individual is tested by fear of outside forces (nature, ghosts, women, sex, death, violence) – this seems to me to be the burden of Sometimes a Great Notion;– the individual is tested by fear of what lurks within the self: this is the theme of Wolfe’s book that I presume reflects Kesey’s idea that the "acid tests" are intended to liberate men from this fear.


A man’s role is to forge his identity by fighting. Men are fighters and conquerors. This is a repellant notion of masculinity but it is very central for men of Kesey’s generation – Mailer was similarly afflicted with this notion as was Bob Stone, Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow (to some degree), and, of course, Ernest Hemingway who is the paterfamilias for this concept. (Pynchon and Joseph Roth, at least in part, avoid this trap.) A man’s job was to fight – writing a big novel was an existential struggle: it was a kind of agon in itself. Kesey perceives the form of the novel itself as a competitive struggle: here against his great precursor and master, William Faulkner. Faulkner’s ideology is similar – his characters are always described as "unvanquished" and "undefeated": you can destroy a man, but can’t defeat him. Kesey ends up with the same formulation late in the book when he discusses the inviolate aspect of the human spirit that can be coerced, but never defeated. (See discussion of "the last inviolable sanctuary" at 708 - 709 – very much derivative of Faulkner’s southerners devastated but never acknowledging defeat after the Civil War). Note: Tom Wolfe shares the same ethos – see his book about the astronauts, The Right Stuff (hyper-masculine adventurers). Probably, these ideas trace back to the "frontier spirit" and Emerson’s famous essay "Self-Reliance", something that my father forced me to read whenever I showed signs of becoming a weak-minded artistically inclined sissy. (In my case, the indoctrination didn’t work. I became a sissy and remain one.) The problem with this world-view is that it postures everything external to the self as an adversary to be defeated – this applies to women who are the intimate enemy par excellence. See Kesey’s weird remark that dancing with a woman close enough to have her whisper in your ear is a lot more dangerous that a fistfight on a crumbling dock in which there is an actual risk of being killed or disemboweled. (See 699). There is a problem, of course, with identifying women as the enemy – Burroughs killed his wife and Mailer slashed one of his wife’s face with a knife. This kind of wild, berserk violence is the dark side of positing everything outside of you as the enemy. (Later, Kesey will go farther and posit the "mind-forged manacles" to cite Blake as the enemy and try to dissolve these shackles with LSD – like all fundamentally religious thinkers, a category that I apply to Kesey, he ends up determining that the only enemy really worth defeating is the darkness within the self. This seems to be his posture as reported by Wolfe in his journalism.)

3. Fear: Kesey’s Sometimes is the most thorough-going, blunt, and aggressive presentation of fear and its consequences known to me in literature. Ambrose Bierce wrote some short stories about fear and Poe (with Stephen King) has explored the topic extensively in their writing. And Henry James’ ghost story, The Jolly Corner is nonpareil on this subject. But, outside of horror and the uncanny, I don’t know of any more detailed and encyclopedic example of the analysis of fear and what it does to men and societies:

– Everyone in the book is afraid of nuclear annihilation. This deforms society;

 – The Stampers fear being humiliated by depending upon the community;

– Teddy sees that the people in The Snag are motivated by "the Supreme terror" (651-652);

– Lee is afraid that he can’t perform sexually with Viv;

– After having sex with Viv, Lee thinks he has been freed from "childhood" and other fears (663). When a woman scurries away from him, he thinks that this is due to his total "absence of fear" (667). But he is deluding himself. He remains afraid of his brother’s retribution. In fact, when he surveys himself in a mirror, he sees that he shows the face of "abject and total fear" – at 673.

-- Lee’s existential development that Kesey defines as a man overcoming fear is incomplete until his final battle with Hank. The fight frees Lee from his lifelong fear engendered by his brother’s power and masculinity – symbolized by "WATCH OUT!"

– One of the symbols of fear in the book is the Wobbly "Black Cat" decal signifying terrorism;

– Lee taunts Hank into the fight by playing upon the Stamper family fear of being dependent upon the community – that is, having Bony Stokes deliver Thanksgiving dinner to the besieged Stampers;

– Fear animates all of creation. Consider the animals in the hunt scene who swim out to sea and certain doom because of their fear of being trapped.

– These themes are visible on just about every page – people are afraid of ghosts (Joby), the dark, wild animals, the dangers in the forest, strange sounds, even light. Men like Biggie Newton seek to exorcize their fears by combat in bar fights. The community is afraid of not being able to pay bills and the poverty due to the strike;

– Lee is afraid of standing in his brother’s shadow. Hence, his final development as a man freeing himself from fear. He will work elbow-to-elbow with Hank to drive the boom to Wakonda Pacific. This is the final crippling fear that has to be faced and overcome and represents what Kesey would define as a happy if somewhat tentative ending to the novel.


So the book fits within the category of existentialist novels written in the fifties and sixties. The book is about a man (Lee) who becomes his better self by overcoming his fears. Fear is revealed to be a kind of nothingness – fear is a phantom or a specter that suppresses our better selves and sublimates itself in violence, substance abuse, and pointless aggression. Men are aggressive and violent because they are afraid. The only person who is not afraid is the "green-eyed" lumber jack released into the novel by Old Henry’s memories as he is dying. Old Henry is the only free man in Kesey’s brotherhood of men – this is because we have no evidence that he is afraid of anything. Joby is close to being free – but his courage in the face of fear is due to reliance on a conventional (organized) religious system, something that Kesey will conclude (I think) is untenable. Each man must forge his own religion – as Blake says: All men shall be prophet4. Lee must learn that you can’t run for your life. You must fight for your life. (700)


5. The House of Usher – A house divided against itself can not stand. Hence, the collapse of parts of the Stamper domain into the savage waters of the river. Poe has a brother seal his sister living into the tomb. She comes out to seek revenge – her advance into the domain of the living is a powerful study in fear. Here the two brothers fight, both of them driven by their fears, and the house, so carefully shackled together (it’s a symbol of the self and the tenuously affiliated family) starts to slide into the flood;


6. The fight between brothers is a symbol for the combat within the self that Kesey will later define as crucial to his fundamentally religious "acid tests" – tests forcing his apostles to confront the darkness (or whatever it is) within themselves. This isn’t recreational drug use – it’s pure Agon.


7. All religions understand that you can’t be free unless you are without fear. Religions have a curious relationship with the phenomenology of fear – fear God except that God (as the ultimate Good) is the one force you don’t really have to fear;


8. There is only one escape from the "toxic masculinity" depicted by the book – get on that old greyhound bus, as bluesman Robert Johnson tells us, and ride. Viv, as a woman, is not subject to the "hang-ups" that the men endure. She’s the only one who can get the hell out of there;


9. The battle against fear is never-ending. It only has periodic intermissions. When Lee and Hank cease fisticuffs, Lee realizes that "this is just an intermission in life-time fight." (708)


10. A man of my generation can see the conduct of the male characters as explicable in terms of gender roles and expectations arising in the wake of World War II. Kesey both critiques and endorses those gender roles – that is, he shows the trap and the bars to the cage, but can’t think himself out of the cage. (He turns LSD into some kind of "test" although as Wolfe shows us there is a "graduation" from that view.) Kesey probably views his flawed characters as heroic – that is, they confront their fears and overcome them. I can understand this perspective – although it is archaic to me, representing the code of masculinity that men like my father were trapped by. I would guess most young people reading this book today would be baffled by it. The sort of existential struggle dramatized by the book is an anachronism – today, people are acclimated to see the struggles in society as Marxist. It was a false consciousness, one might argue, to impute such importance to the Jungian development of the Self into its most differentiated and individuated form. (These are bourgeois concerns). Today, the struggles are between groups – women against men, rape victims against rapists, Black against White, poor against the wealthy. Kesey’s sensibility has faded into the past – the agon now depicted in art is generally groups of oppressed people developing consciousness of their oppression and working collectively to throw off their oppression. (The Invisible Man is an interesting case-study of a hybrid – part existential novel documenting the development of a unique self, but, also, inflected by Marxist collectivist ideology). But one can be nostalgic for the heroic individualism that animated many of the most important American and European novels of the post-War period.
　
Two issues:

What did you make of the ending?

What did you make of the voice that intrudes into the book at the beginning of one of the last sections – the voice talking about the new house and the child’s fear in that new house?