The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey’s Fiction by M. Gilbert Porter (review)

244 Western American Literature The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey’s Fiction. By M. Gilbert Porter. (Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 102 pages, $8.00.) The Art of Grit creates an unsettling critical tension in working a formalist-new critical analysis on a 1960s literary figure who seems an inappro­ priate subject for such a purely form- and style- oriented approach. Professor Porter’s traditional analysis of “The Art of Grit” in Ken Kesey employs chap­ ter epigraphs from the Beatles, Grateful Dead, even S. T. Coleridge (“Kubla Khan”). All very appropriate, but like Peter Max ties with Brooks Brothers suits, not quite integrated with the overall style. That Kesey was a key cult figure in the 1960s popular culture never clearly emerges. And the result reveals the limitations of the new criticism, especially the hermetic seal it can place on the text itself. There is an isolation from social and cultural context which gives rise to a sense of textual claustrophobia that tends to flatten out the reader’s sense of time and place. Kesey’s often poetic prose encourages this type of analysis, often because the language is superior to the content which it embodies. A World War II sense of grit emerges in Porter’s reading of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. Both books yield John Wayne-like expressions of American rugged individualism — the kind which in the 1940s and 1950s we associated with a barrel-chested Hemingway Agonistes and certainly not with soft and melancholy rich boys like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet Kesey’s grit — an argument which develops implicitly in this study — is more reminiscent of the B-movie hero than the authentic rebel with individualism as his cause. Often it would seem that the best background music for these novels would be Jim Morrison’s “The End.” And, surely, their grit, especially that of Cuckoo’s Nest, recalls other popular favorites of the period — “Straw Dogs,” The Graduate, Soul on Ice, even one of the requiems for the 1960s — Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. For Kesey’s individualism derives from an “Oedipal Grit,” that undercurrent of compulsion, blind rage, and guilt which characterized much of the politics of the counterculture in the 1960s. Oedipus lies at the heart of the interpersonal conflicts (McMurphy and Big Nurse; Lee and Hank) in both novels. And no analysis can overlook Kesey’schoice of figures and conflict structure (matriarchy) which embody his portrait of individualism, autonomy, and independence in danger. Certainly not such characterizations as Big Nurse and J. P. Donleavy avatars like RPM (Randle Patrick McMurphy). One suspects that if Kesey’sgritty heroes were not whoring, card playing, drinking, or logging, they would be at tableside in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The overview in The Art of Grit contains helpful analyses of both novels and reveals a portrait of an artist with a single message that, despite Kesey’s often impressive stylistics, comes off sounding like 1960s cheerleading: “Make Love Not War” (which McMurphy would restyle “Chase Poozle Not Gooks”), “Up the Establishment,” “Do Your Own Thing.” This is a stand that Porter sees taking a more mellow and mature form in Sometimes a Great Notion. Reviews 245 Like Hawthorne’s in his last phase, Kesey’s development reflects artistic fragmentation, incompleteness, and repetition. Both “The Day after Super­ man Died” (Kesey’s personal tribute to Neal Cassady) and Over the Border, a screenplay illustrated with drawings which Porter labels “philosophical cartoons for part-time adults,” reflect Kesey’s entrapment in the fossil record of the 1960s. In fact, there is a good deal of the cartoon in the melodramatic, alpha male-Oedipal visions of Ken Kesey. Too much, perhaps of the Merry Prank­ sters; too little of the mature visions that may have grown out of the lessons of the Age of Aquarius. Professor Porter’sbook would have been more useful had he moved beyond his considerable praise of style to consider a more integrated and critical assessment of the quality of Kesey’s vision as well as of its indebtedness to the social philosophies of the period...