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KEN KESEY: THE HERO IN MODERN DRESS John A. Barsness John Barsness (A.B., William Jewell; M.A., Montana State University; Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is chairman of the English department at Boise State College. He had taught previously at Montana State University where he served also as director of composition. Mr. Barsness has served as director of the Rocky Mountain Writers Conference (1960) and has held offices in the Western American Literature Association and in the Rocky Mountain American Studies Association. His publications include articles in Western American Literature, New Mexico Review, Film Quarterly and Montana. In American literature, it has been virtually impossible to distinguish between the serious and the popular hero. On the one hand, he may appear as Melville's Handsome Sailor, "with no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality . . . mighty boxer ... on every suitable occasion foremost";1 on die otiier, he may be as familiar as Owen Wister's Virginian, "a slim, young giant, more beautiful than pictures ... no dinginess ... or shabbiness . . . could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength."2 Eitiier figure is interchangeable with the other, a peculiarly native and primordial image arising primarily out of nineteentii-century notions of die democratic frontiersman , made virtuous and pure by the beneficial influences of nature, absolutely free physically and morally from the debilitating corruptions of European civilization. He flourishes best among the innocent ideals of the Jeffersonian landscape, that well-groomed pastoral panorama, populated with peaceful, hardworking, independent yeomen, roused to instant action by any threat to their independence. In such surroundings, the Amercian hero was adored for over a hundred years. He has had less success in the twentieth century, except in his bestknown native form as the cowboy, where he lingers on in popular literature in multiple versions of the Virginian, more and more stylized, farther and farther from the nineteenth century pastoral conviction. But it has become increasingly difficult to maintain that rugged frontiersman as hero, particularly since at midcentury the society approaches an overwhelming urbanization , and contemporary literature seems totally preoccupied with non-heroes whose landscapes are concrete and steel and whose primary characteristics are fixed upon failure. In such surroundings, faced with such assumptions, the hero is an anachronism, out of scale and out of kilter with contemporary standards of trutii. ?ßp?ß? Melville, "Billy Budd," The Portable Melville (New York, 1964), pp. 638-9. 2OwOi Wister, The Virginian ( New York, 1911 ), p. 4. 28RMMLA BulletinMarch 1969 That is why it is so surprising to meet a pair of Western heroes in contemporary American literature, the protagonists of two novels by Ken Kesey: Rändle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ( 1962) and Hank Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion ( 1964). Even more surprisingly, both of these heroes have received contemporary praise and survived contemporary criticism, possibly because they are so cleverly concealed in the jungle of contemporary standards which Kesey nourishes around them. McMurphy is a patient in an Oregon mental hospital; Hank Stamper is so surrounded by Freudian implications, complicated fraternal relationships, and sexual rivalries that it is nearly impossible to catch a glimpse of his shining armor. Yet heroes both are, and they dwell, as their ancestors did, in the Virgin Land, victims like all their kind of the pastoral dream in which civilization is a dirty word and Jeffersonian democracy is both the shape of the golden past and the definition of the Utopian ideal. It is an attractive dream, a familiar and simple myth in the Western novel, where the good guys always triumph over the bad guys; or it is a complicated fable in a novel like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the heroes of the river glide forever past the slack corruption of the town. In essence, any version of the story is a transcendental one. Central to it is the hero, more Jacksonian than Jeffersonian man, intuitive in action, non-intellectual in habit, anti-social, anti-urban, and full of the freedom and strength inherent in nature. The enemy he fights is society, artificial, complex , institutionalized—civilization, if you will, the enemy of Rändle McMurphy...

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