There’s nowt as queer as folk – never a truer phrase.
We’ve all been there. You’re sitting with a coffee or a beer and your friend is late. You haven’t got a paper to read, but you’re by a window. So you look outside to the busy high street outside and, having got used to the buildings long ago, you turn your attention to the people walking by.
People-watching sounds like a sinister activity but we’ve all done it. Wondering where everyone is going, where they’ve been, and why they’re acting the way they’re acting.
Walk around any city and you’ll see some real strange characters. Perhaps even mad, though these days calling someone mad doesn’t quite have the same connotations as labelling them insane. It’s used for as a synonym for eccentric.
Credible insight
But how do you define insanity? An unresolvable, but always compelling debate.
One of the best explorations of this issue was the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey.
The book is an examination of the nebulous boundary between sanity and insanity and how it shifts according to societal context. And it asks uncomfortable questions about the morality of imprisoning the mentally unwell and the system of ‘care’ in place in the middle of the 20th century.
Kesey, who had hitherto worked in a mental health facility in California, gives a credible insight into the sanatoriums of 1950s America.
Aside from the Native-American Indian who narrates the story, the story’s main protagonist is Randle Patrick McMurphy. McMurphy, who is serving time for battery and gambling, decides that the sanatorium represents an easier life than prison. He arrives from a prison work farm having jumped through all the hoops necessary to convince the authorities of his mental unsoundness.
McMurphy (played in the cinematic adaptation by Jack Nicholson) is mischievous, belligerent and boisterous. Nevertheless, the reader warms to him because of his irreverent wit, charisma and lack of respect for authority, which echoes Kesey’s own.
What he certainly isn’t is clinically insane. Even though McMurphy deliberately gets himself sectioned, he nevertheless represents the idea that sanatoriums can be used as a tool of social repression.
Staid routines
The sanatorium stultifies the patients rather than improve mental adroitness and wellbeing. Nevertheless, just as an animal will become anxious if released from its boring, but reassuring enclosure into the wild, institutionalisation has left the patients less capable of coping with outside world than when they went in.
In one memorable scene McMurphy helps the inmates escape and takes them on a sailing trip. But although they are initially enlivened by the activity, they soon begin to fret about being away from the orderliness of the sanatorium.
This is despite the fearsome nurse who runs the ward, enforcing strict routines and chastising inmates for deviating even slightly from the dehumanising system. Nurse Ratched symbolises everything McMurphy rails against: authority and rules. The fact that authority in this case wears a permanent ‘I’m not amused’ face riles him even more.
The battle of wits between them is enthralling and the reader always knows which side he’s on. Ratched is contemptuous of McMurphy’s attempts to freshen up their staid routines. A ward housing people with personality disorders seems to be the wrong place for someone such distaste for anything that doesn’t fit under the ‘normal’ category.
The other inmates engage him with varying degrees of lucidity. The narrator, a mute, doesn’t engage him at all.
One inmate, young Billy Bibbit, seems more attuned to reality than most, and the reasons for his self-enforced internment become clearer as the book goes on.
Most of the inmates are there voluntarily, which is paradoxical if you believe the oft-repeated axiom that no one who is actually insane can possibly know that they are insane.
Thanks to the film version, the ending to the book has become iconic and is a bittersweet denouement. McMurphy’s defiance turns to anger thanks to the behaviour of nurse Ratched and his downfall is swift and brutal. However, his misfortune at least shakes Chief Bromden, as the narrator is called, out of his impassiveness, and he is inspired to take drastic measures to leave the sanatorium.
