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?
John very good.
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