The Hipster, the Hero, and the Psychic Frontier in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The Hipster, the Hero, and the Psychic Frontier in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Thomas H. Fick Southeastern Louisiana University In "The White Negro" Norman Mailer describes the "hipster" as a philosophical psychopath living on the fringes of society: "One is Hip or one is Square, . . . one is a frontiersman in the Wild West ofAmerican night life, or a Square cell ..." (339). Mailer's essay is a characteristically American attempt to define possibility as the product ofstark opposites. Hip and Square quite explicitly translate into contemporary and psychological terms the opposing forces that have been the basis for much of our greatest literature: civilization and wilderness, Aunt Sally and the Territory. The internalization of geography is an attempt to compensate for the disappearance or degeneration of a literal frontier. The West may still offer freedom, but in addition it frequently represents an exhaustive emptiness, or else (telescoping freedom and repression) inspires madness—both a consequence and a rejection of restrictive society. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) is the classic portrayal of emptiness and despair erupting into violence on what was once the frontier, the California toward which Jack Burden drives, in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946), feeling that he is "drowning in West," in a motionless "ooze of History" (288). Five years later, J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951) dreams of fleeing to a rustic cabin to live a sequestered life with his girl. Yet when he goes West it is not to freedom but to recover his shattered nerves in the relative restriction ofa Hollywood sanitorium. But if, as these novels suggest, the West provides no ready-made opportunities for escape, there is another intangible and portable frontier which can be maintained by constantly calling attention to the defining extremes of freedom and restriction.1 The modern frontiersman invests his energy in disruption rather than flight: he must be a fighter, not for the sake ofviolence or ofwinning permanent victories but for the clearer distinctions and hence greater freedom that conflict engenders.2 "Vet this investment in a conflict from which there is no easyTIïght often demands an emphasis on personal 19 20Rocky Mountain Review inviolability—on the public to the exclusion ofthe private man—which can be a condition of defeat. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) concerns just such a man, one whose successes and failures can help us to understand the special demands of the psychic frontier. Cuckoo's Nest takes place in an Oregon insane asylum—a version of Holden's sanitorium. In The Closed Frontier Harold Simonson remarks that "one way of escaping nineteenth-century conventions was to go west, another way was to go 'beyond' " (14O).3 Rändle Patrick McMurphy, the protagonist of Cuckoo's Nest, does both. A footloose westerner, he ostentatiously transgresses the limits of society, much like Kesey himself, whose destination—Furthur [sic]—was emblazoned on the Pranksters' bus. McMurphy teaches the inmates of the insane asylum to create their own truths and identities, but to do so he must share himself and inevitably compromise his own. Committed to the asylum as a psychopath, McMurphy is a downhome hipster who vitalizes the sterile ward with the energy of his language. "Some thiefin the night boosted my clothes" (93), he explains to Nurse Ratched when he appears the first morning wrapped in a towel (with his white whale undershorts beneath). The Nurse's confusion inspires McMurphy to more elaborate jive, a burst of verbal energy that cuts through the inert institutional vocabulary: " 'Pinched. Jobbed. Swiped. Stole,' he says happily. 'You know, man, like somebody boosted my threads.' Saying this tickles him so he goes into a little barefooted dance before her" (94). And McMurphy makes his presence felt with fancy footwork as well as fancy talk, on his first day dancing away from the aides with all the grace and savvy of a street fighter and politician: "One ofthe black boys circles him with the thermometer, but he's too quick for them; he slips in among the Acutes and starts moving around shaking hands before the...