Taking sides: Great Notion Vs Cuckoo's Nest

'With a small bottle of Vodka always nearby, Kesey ranted and raved about his likes and dislikes. "Cream rises to the top," he stated. "Shit floats to the bottom." "Hunter Thompson?" he posed, raising his hand high. "Cream." The crowd cheered. "Tom Wolfe," he said, obvious disdain in his voice. "Shit!" Raucous laughter and applause ensued.'

I'd never heard Kesey disparage Wolfe before, though I can see what he means. TW's written some good stuff, but his post-60s writing always seems a bit fake to me. Even with the 'classic' stuff, there's a lot of posing there - Zap! Pow! Look at me! Isn't this WILD? That aside, though, did Kesey think that Wolfe's picture of the Acid Tests was inaccurate?

omg

Impossible to imagine anything that could speak more eloquently of the complete down-to-the-dregs exhaustion of American popular culture as the very existence of "Ratched."

— 💜💜ɢɨʟɮɛʀȶ ɢռǟʀʟɛʏ💜💜 (@NickPinkerton) August 4, 2020

icymi (as i did)

Ryan fucking Murphy of course

https://www.vulture.com/2020/08/ratched-netflix-premiere-date-trailer.html

Can't wait to see the newest addition to the Ken Kesey Cinematic Cuckooverse. Studio apparently has long term plans for a crossover into the Stegnerverse as well... very exciting!

Can't wait to see a scene of her gabbing it up with Billy Bibbit's mom at the opera.

could be better than the original if it jettisons the whole “white masculinity being oppressed by ambitious women and violent blacks” theme, fuck ken kesey

can always trust left to come out with the most rote woke-scold take

are you one of those podcast types

do you know the history of the words woke and scold

not as well as the history of c***

(Chaucer et al)

just for you, sweetiebot

I would estimate that there is approximately a 0% chance that Nurse Ratched's madness isn't revealed to be a product of the postwar reassertion of strict gender roles in America.

— 💜💜ɢɨʟɮɛʀȶ ɢռǟʀʟɛʏ💜💜 (@NickPinkerton) August 5, 2020

I didn’t think this criticism was hugely controversial these days, are we supposed to read the above take as inherently ridiculous

It continues to amaze me that the dude who made Nip Tuck and Eat Pray Love thinks he has the moral authority to revise cultural history like this

Nurse Ratched, as written by Kesey, isn't a three-dimensional human being, and neither are any of the other characters

I think we can rest assured that a Ryan Murphy Ratched won't be a three-dimensional human being, either.

thinks he has the moral authority to revise cultural history like this

as much as I wish, as a loyal Oregonian, that Kesey were as important a writer as his reputation implies, Cuckoo's Nest is nowhere near good enough to be considered sacrosanct cultural history. it is popular culture with pretensions. imo Kesey is not as good an Oregon writer as his contemporary Don Berry and their reputations should be reversed.

I don’t have any preciousness about Kesey or Rock Hudson for that matter. It’s Murphy’s own history of peddling anti-trans and orientalist content that I’m bothered by. If someone else wanted to produce a revisionist feminist riff on Cuckoo, I couldn’t care less

Ratched is described as "an origins story, beginning in 1947, which will follow Ratched's journey and evolution from nurse to full-fledged monster. The series will track her murderous progression through the mental health care system."

this sounds so stupid and horrible

nurse ratched is not a sympathetic character in the original novel but kesey was writing about a bad system, not an otherwise normal system that had been distorted by a single "monster"

a bad system he explicitly gendered & racialised in ways that are supposed to be inherent to its badness

seriously it’s not subtle, how many fucking castration references are there in that book

missing the point as usual always

i agree with left tbr. it's such an adolescent novel.

finally a TV series with that takes an unflinching look inside the twisted mind of a monster

Television history is made

could be better than the original if it jettisons the whole “white masculinity being oppressed by ambitious women and violent blacks” theme, fuck ken kesey

― nihilist carelord (Left), Friday, August 7, 2020 1:24 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, i was assigned to teach this book this semester. doing so now and it has been good -- the text is engaging and an interesting bridge to discuss the 60s, the counterculture, the kind of foucaultian critique of institutions that were ascendent at that time -- but i completely forgot how misogynistic and racist it was.

rote wokescold take

like, the patients ability to objectify ratched and the other nurses is shown to be a key to their liberation. it's a very clearly stated, not subtextual.

harding is the character who theorizes about this, how modern society is a matriarchy. i'm struggling with how to approach this. i want to say that the misogyny of the book shows the limitations of kesey and his milieu, their romantic critique of postwar america. and i have said things like this in class.. but it kind of falls flat. they seem confused, like i am siding with nurse ratched, a person who punishes unruly patients by giving them lobotomies.

getting high school students to see works in a broader social/historical context is always tough, even students who are good at analyzing what is going on in the narrative itself, the characters, the symbolism, the themes

I've come up against quite a bit of indignation irl and a bit on here for apparently misinterpreting what the book very clearly spells out. I know other readers with similar reactions have also been told for years that they/we must have been misreading something because we got the wrong message from it. I consider it a bad book (it doesn't work in the way it's supposed to) despite approving of some of the (other) things it was trying to do

I can't begin to imagine how to teach something so complex - I assume there is a stock interpretation which downplays the race/sex stuff which some teachers might be (and have been) happy to stick with. I'm glad you're trying to tackle more than that but it sounds tough

the best way to understand the book is as an artifact of the beat/hippie movement. the limitations of those movements are also the problems with the book: its vision of freedom is too one-dimensional, and too attached to a romantic idea of "natural man" and his corruption (in this book, explicitly emasculation) by "society."

the book is good in its depiction of how the nurse uses therapeutic language to create an atmosphere of shame and mutual suspicion, a subtle mechanism of control. but it's wrong in its apparent prescription for this repressive atmosphere, which seems kind of nihilistic honestly, a total giving-over to libidinal and transgressive energies. what's missing is a real vision of ethics that transcends these power games.

i'm going to try to find some feminist critiques of the book to assign to my students, something that is penetrating but accessible enough, and then have the students debate this issue. the sexism in the novel is too central to ignore.