Blindfolded and Backwards: Promethean and Bemushroomed Heroism in "One Flew over

the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Catch-22"

Author(s): William Schopf
Source: The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association , Autumn,
1972, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 89-97
Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

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 BLINDFOLDED AND BACKWARDS: PROMETHEAN AND
BEMUSHROOMED HEROISM IN ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO'S NEST AND CATCH-22

WILLIAM SCHOPF

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest have been heralded as prominent political-literary statements of the
American New Left. Subversive and irreverent, these novels boldly confront
the shape and aims of the authority-structure. As New Left literature
they challenge the divine right of American Authority by ridiculiug all
jingoism underlain by the arrogant assumption that a hotline wires the
Structure to Divinity. Colonel Cathcart, for example, speaking for the com-
manding officers in Heller's novel, asks unbelievingly, "What are you talking
about? You mean they [the enlisted men] pray to the same God we do?"
(p. 199).1
The two novels have been revered by the young if only because they
attest to the Basic Conflict-enlisted men vs. officers, idealism and change
vs. rigidity. Politically powerless, America's young can envision themselves
as Yossarians combatting their personal Cathcarts. The themes of the novels
are, of course, representative of the Sixties: man in alienation from himself,
society, God and the past; man rootless and unstable in a world spinning
away madly and irretrievably. As Paul Goodman has written, "History is out
of control. It is no longer something that we make but something that
happens to us ... What is the psychology of feeling that one is powerless to
alter basic conditions? What is it as a way of being in the world?"2
The New Left conceives of Authority as intrinsically wicked and self-
seeking, so that its primary concerns become self-perpetuation and omni-
potence. In Catch-22 the diabolical General P.P. Peckem informs an in-
credulous subordinate that he can do anything not forbidden by law and
there is no law against lying. General Dreedle indignantly asks, "You mean I
can't shoot anyone I want to?" (p. 228). The essence of the best catch of all,
catch-22, is that "they [Authority] have a right to do anything we can't stop
them from doing" (p. 416). Likewise, in Kesey's novel the hospital wards
compete for prizes given to the group which cooperates most with Big Nurse
Ratched, the self-proclaimed divinity of a mental institution.
The body of criticism of Catch-22 and Cuckoos Nest, in suggesting
the inevitability of permanent warfare with the Structure, has largely ignored

1All page numbers of quotations from Catch-22 are taken from the Dell paperback
edition, 1962.
2Paul Goodman, 'The Psychology of Being Powerless," People and Personnel; Like
a Conquered Province (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 336, 338.

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90 RMMLA BULLETIN FALL 1972

the non-conflict possibilities inherent in the novels.3 Critics have viewed

both books as basic enactments of the totalitarian myth, in which totalitari-
anism as a structure seeks to perpetuate the Zeus-figures. In this perspective,
the modem literary hero opposes the current Zeus-figure who may be en-
shrined in the White House, the Headquarters of Heller's 256th Squadron, or
in the glass-panelled office on Kesey's psychiatric ward. In this classical
configuration, Captain John Yossarian and Randle McMurphy have been
cast as the Promethean heroes of our age, locked in war with Zeus. Here,
however, the modem myth diverges from its ancient model. Standing alone,
silhouetted against the Universe, this Promethean man, as C. Wright Mills
has suggested, "falters, turns softly inward, and feels in quest of salvation."4
To assume, however, that Catch-22 and Cuckoo's Nest pose only this
Promethean conflict resolved by a necessary softening of man in confrontation
with the world misses the point of both novels. Obviously, Yossarian and
McMurphy are pitted against their worlds. But equally obviously, in terms
of efficacy, Promethean man in the 1960's and 70's is an anachronism. In
the nineteenth century Shelley unbound his Prometheus with the principle
of love; in the twentieth century, unfortunately, no such apocalyptic force
operates and our Promethean figures remain chained to the rock of futility.
As radical statements of modem man's possibility, Catch-22 and Cuckoo's
Nest transcend the traditional survive-or-perish encounter between Individual
and Authority to pose an entirely different concept of the American hero.
The novels, as congenial as they are to New Left protest, actually circumvent
confrontation politics.
While Yossarian and McMurphy atrophy in an outmoded heroic posture,
Orr and Chief Broom Bromden emerge as what Timothy Leary has termed
bemushroomed heroes. "Poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incor-
poreal, seeing but not seen,"5 the bemushroomed man is not only disaffiliated
from his society and considered expendable by the Structure; he has no con-
cern with warring against the Structure. Refusing to accept even a penny-
worth of the social lie, he totally disengages himself from protest and dissent.

3For instance, James L. McDonald ["I See Everything Twice: Structure of Joseph
Heller's Catch-22," Kansas City University Review (34), pp. 175-180] sees Catch-22 as
marked by a series of bids for power and sees the basic structure of the novel as a conflict
between the powerful and the powerless. In this perspective the only way victims can
preserve their identity is to rebel against the power. Minna Doskow ["The Night Jouney
in Catch-22," Twentieth Century Literature (12), pp. 186-193] sees the hell Yossarian
has entered as the physical and spiritual hell man has created on his earth. Likewise,
Cuckoo's Nest has been seen as "a glittering parable of good and evil" [New York Times
Book Review, February 4, 1962], and further as "a parable of life in a world presided
over by a tyrannical junta of compulsion and conformity . . . a profound and searching
parable of government and the governed" [Chicago Sunday Tribune, February 4, 1962].
4C. Wright Mills, "Pragmatism, Politics and Religion," The Collected Essays (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 163.
51n his book High Priest, Leary borrows the term "bemushroomed" from Aldous
Huxley's novel, Island.

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 BLINDFOLDED AND BACKWARDS 91

This sense of disembodiment enables Orr and Chief Broom to surmount

the Power Center and yet remain poised in life, "seeing but not seen." This
trick of bemushroomment lies at the heart of Heller's and Kesey's novelistic
intent. Confront Zeus head-on like Yossarian and McMurphy and the results
are obvious; compromise oneself and be made a fool; or bemushroom, move
with the flow of existence and push aside the compulsion for control. This
distinctly non-Western idea appears to be for Heller and Kesey "the solution
to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped mortal
and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly! . . .
flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power
so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to."6 This principle of
nonattachment offers a choice, perhaps the only real choice, of existence in a
world such as ours.
Consider, for example, Orr, Yossarian's "bouncy and bizarre buck-toothed
tentmate" in whom Heller has created a unique pose of lunacy in a world of
insanity. Invisible in an obviously mad and topsy-turvy world, Orr com-
pulsively ignores this madness-a rejection which in Yossarian's terms con-
stitutes madness itself. The enlisted men and the Squadron psychiatrist, Major
Sanderson, think that Yossarian is crazy; they tell him so repeatedly. But
they know Orr is crazy because of his apparent noninvolvement with Yos-
sarian's campaign to survive and to stop flying endless missions. This craving
for survival constitutes what Sanderson calls Yossarian's insanity; frustrated,
unhappy, maladjusted, and gripless, Yossarian is deemed crazy because he is
"unable to adjust to the idea of war ... [has] a morbid aversion to dying ...
[has] deep seated survival anxieties . . . [and is] antagonistic to the idea of
being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated" (p. 312).
Orr's insanity, though, is of a different nature. Orr is crazy not just be-
cause he smashed open Appleby's forehead with a ping-pong paddle or be-
cause everytime he takes a plane up he takes it back down engines afire, belly-
landing in the sea, but also because he is obsessed with building a gas stove
for his and Yossarian's tent, constructing andirons for the fireplace, framing
pin-ups of nudes with stained wood, chopping wood, and expertly hauling
water in canteens. Seldom identified with the social world, the world of
bombing missions and diabolical commanders, Orr is linked with natural
creation. In short, Orr is crazy because he is not a social being involved in
protest against Headquarters. Constantly tinkering with the valve on his
stove, he drives Yossarian into a frenzy and then responds to his anger by
merely snickering. "Tee-hee-hee-hee," Orr laughs. "You ought to try flying
a few with me when you're not flying lead. Just for laughs. Tee-hee" (p.
320). But Yossarian refuses.
Orr is crazy because his responses to Cathcart and Peckem are not health-

6Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 114.

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92 RMMLA BUrLLET FALL 1972

ily insane, that is, they are not responses of outrage. Hungry Joe drea
Huple's cat sleeps on his face, suffocating him, and awakes from his nig
mares screaming-a perfectly healthy insane reaction. Captain Flume
convinced that Chief White Halfoat wants to slit his throat, and Flume thu
flees to the bushes where he eats berries and runs wild-eyed from hum
contact-a perfectly healthy insane reaction. Yossarian marches backwa
with a gun on his shoulder and perches naked on a treelimb, refusing to w
the uniform that symbolizes what killed Snowden-perfectly healthy in
reactions. If faith is defined as the confidence that life proceeds and the wo
will continue to support the next step of it, then only Orr possesses fa
While he sniggers and tinkers contentedly with his stove, secretly knowin
that somehow he will manage to oar out of this madness, Yossarian,
Daneeka, Hungry Joe, the Chaplain, Flume, and Nately walk with a p
carious gait and know not if their next step might well be their final one.
Passivity towards an insane world contributes to Orr's craziness. Follow
ing him down a Rome street, a girl hits him on the head with her shoe an
Orr only snickers. Unable to piece together the incongruities of the st
scene, Yossarian fails to understand until the chaplain bursts through the
at the novel's end shouting the news that Orr is safely in Sweden. "Bec
he was paying her to, that's why!" Yossarian yells. "But she couldn't hit hi
hard enough, so he had to row to Sweden" (p. 460). Playing the buffoo
talking with horse chestnuts and ping-pong balls in his mouth, he had con
founded the entire Squadron. Seeing but not seen, sane and not insane
successfully bemushroomed and poised himself outside the war's obsess
with life and death. He drew enemy flak and ditched his planes purpos
in order to disaffiliate himself.
Primarily, what Yossarian failed to see in Orr's approach to the wo
was the irrelevancy of the individual struggle against Authority. Rather t
accept Yossarian's position of Promethean protest, Orr simply bemushroom
The craziest of them all, Orr emerged the sanest, indeed the most percept
Yossarian, caught in the either-or trap of the Air Force Power Structure b
his physical compulsion for survival, emerges with nothing but a wild, dis
jointed hope to somehow join Orr in Sweden. As a result of his desper
campaign against the Structure, Yossarian's "spirit was sick. He longed to l
down with some girl he could love who would soothe and excite him and p
him to sleep" (p. 426). But between himself and this longing for pea
stand General Dreedles, Colonel Cathcarts and Nately's knife-wielding whor
By the deftness of his disembodiment, Orr denied the very existence
the game between Authority and Individual. He aborted Authority by stri
ing at its vulnerable link-by invalidating its claim to him. Taken for a
and madman and long considered by Yossarian as insensitive to the lar
issue of survival, Orr survived without Yossarian's anxieties and frustratio
in the spirit of the bemushroomed man.

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 BLINDFOLDED AND BACKWARDS 93

The problem of visibility and the nature of the hero is also crucial to
an understanding of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The Promethean
Yossarian, wrestling with the probability of personal extinction, and the be-
mushroomed Orr recur in Kesey's novel as McMurphy and Chief Broom
Bromden.
A self-admitted con-artist who is vibrantly in tune with life, McMurphy
finds himself immediately at odds with Nurse Ratched. She sees in him a
flagrant embodiment of a human richness which is subversive to her self-
created "little world Inside that is a made-to-scale prototype of the big world
Outside . . . your own democratic, free neighborhoods ... that you will one
day be taking your place in again" (pp. 48, 49).7 McMurphy lives life to the
hilt and is in the asylum because of his "fightin' tendencies and fuckin' ten-
dencies" (p. 62). In rejecting the Combine's values he, like Yossarian, be-
comes a threat. While Major Sanderson blames Yossarian for having "no
respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions . . . [who] ought to be
taken outside and shot" (p. 307), Big Nurse calls McMurphy a "manipulator,"
accuses him of "disruption of the ward for the sake of disruption," and sug-
gests he entered the asylum only for "comfort and an easy life ... the feeling
of power and respect... monetary gain" (p. 29). To a degree her accusa-
tions are true; but in a more important sense she is dead wrong. Because he
recognizes that power is not necessarily wisdom, McMurphy perceives the
economy of pain and fear in which the inmates live. He recognizes Big
Nurse's power for what it is-a suppression of pleasure and human energies
for its own self-perpetuation. He sees that real usury does not lie in his own
money-making deals but rather in the predation of Big Nurse herself as she
feeds on the men. Self-admittedly, her inmates are 'failures ... rabbits sans
whambam.... There's not a man here that isn't afraid he is losing or has
already lost his whambam .. . we are-the rabbits, one might say, of the
rabbit world!" (p. 63). Like Chief Broom, the "Vanishing American . . .
scared of its own shadow" (p. 65), they lie pathetically locked in sub-human-
ity.
In this context McMurphy, Kesey's Promethean defender of coerced
man, is absorbed into the life of the Nurse's psychiatric ward and quickly
perceives her strategies. Frightened and docile, regimented with pills and
schedules and encouraged to dwell on their problems and weaknesses, they
are further urged to seek out and report revelations of their fellows' secret
lives. If, like Tabor, they ever do rebel, they are dragged to the Shock Shop
for mental realignment. Suffering from what Goodman calls "excessive stimu-
lation and inadequate discharge,"8 a basic malady of our times, they are un-
able to achieve any orgasmic release-sexual, emotional, or mental. Society's

7All page numbers of quotations from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are taken
from Signet edition, 1962.
8Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 225.

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94 RMMLA BULLETIN FALL 1972

ultimate antidote for their ailments is continual stupefication and regression

into the state of whambamless rabbits. McMurphy's self-appointed role on
the ward, then, is to goad the men out of their ersatz existence into a life of
fuller orgasmic potential. In restoring their "fightin' tendencies and fuckin'
tendencies," McMurphy's vision becomes, like Goodman's, one of bringing
forth "a more worthwhile world . . . [where] worth, like happiness, comes
from bona-fide activity and achievement."9
Like the struggle between Yossarian and Group Headquarters, the con-
flict between McMurphy and Big Nurse attests to the basic polarization of
modem America into the power elite and the powerless. Big Nurse is indeed
a "ball-cutter" (p. 57); both physical and psychological castration figure in
her suppression of her world. On the literal level, the anonymous man, "Up-
stairs on Disturbed," cuts off both testicles and bleeds to death. After she
discovers Billy Bibbit's fornication with McMurphy's whore-friend, Big Nurse
threatens to inform Billy's mother; her psychological castration of the mother-
tied Bibbit is so effective that he is found shortly thereafter, a suicide, throat
slit open in the doctor's chair. To eliminate masturbation, strict policy pre-
vents the men from being alone in the toilets. Finally, the omnipresent Shock
Shop overwhelms the Chief both when he is shaved and when he awakens
from his horrible nightmares which must be true "even if they didn't
happen ... for if they don't exist, how can a man see them?" (pp. 13, 82).
Confronting this machinery of human extinction, McMurphy stands in
an agony of aloneness. Sensing his mounting pain, the Chief sees that beneath
the texture of boasting lies a "dreadfully tired and strained and frantic" (p.
218) spirit. The price of rebellion is high. For once in his life, McMurphy
becomes powerless; his spirit gradually eroded by Big Nurse, his sense of
personal history swirls out of his control. Although no one will say it, the
men on the ward sense this re-gathering of the Nurse's momentum. "The
thing he was fighting," Broom thinks, "you couldn't whip it for good. All you
could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out any more and
somebody else had to take your place" (p. 265). In both Catch-22 and
Cuckoo's Nest the Promethean struggle is shown to be an anachronistic one.
To consider otherwise is to sabotage truth.
On this point, Kesey has constructed the thematic groundwork of his
novel. Throughout, it carefully points to a transfusion of energies from Mc-
Murphy to the Chief. They shake hands the first day and Broom thinks it is
"like he was transmitting his [McMurphy's] own blood into it. It rang with
blood and power" (p. 27). In the morning after the men have vacated their
rooms, the odors of bodies remain "but never before now, before he came in,
the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat and work"

9Ibid., p. xvi.

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 BLINDFOLDED AND BACKWARDS 95

(p. 91). And when the Chief speaks after years of muteness, he says, "I want
to touch him because he's a man" (p. 188).
At one time disembodied of his ancestry as an Indian and further disem-
bodied from the race of humans as social beings, Chief Broom gradually slides
into the novels center of concern. Although McMurphy has proven it im-
possible to surmount the Power Center, Broom embodies the alternative of
slipping back into the world in an invisible and incorporeal aspect. In re-
orienting himself, the Chief clearly sees the untenable position of visibility
and active protest into which McMurphy had tried to force him. "Us wanting
to be safe," he thinks, and "he keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in
the open" (p. 114). Like Bibbit, Broom "could go outside to-today, if I had
the guts" (p. 168), but when he does finally master his fear he does not
merely "go outside." Rather, he leaves filled with the essence of McMurphy,
a man with whambam. He breaks into a real world to look around and feel
his natural suroundings. But unlike McMurphy, whose boyhood home has
been boarded up and deserted, and unlike Yossarian, who leaves for Sweden
with only the vaguest idea of rendezvousing with Orr, the Chief has a place
to retun.

I'd like to check around Portland and Hood River and the Dalles.... Id like
to see what they've been doing since the government tried to buy their rights to
be Indians. Mostly, I'd just like to look over the country around the gorge
again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again. I been away a long
time (p. 272).

Sensitive to the organic continuum of his life, he comes to possess faith that
the future will indeed provide a support for his next step. Broom has dis-
covered a new way of feeling what it is to be "I."
Like the young dog he had once watched on the asylum grounds-

sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one
but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour ... so took
with what was coming off ... listening . . . Canada honkers going
south for the winter . .. [and] when he couldn't hear them any more
commenced to lope off ... steady and solemn like he had an appoint-
ment (pp. 142, 143)

-the Chief too keeps his appointment with his roots, the earth and the tribe.
He has heard rumors that his people have sabotaged the new hydroelectric
dam by constructing ramshackle wood scaffolding around it to spear salmon
in the spillway, thus symbolically striking at the white social structure for
destroying the tribe and driving the chief, his father, into the cedars to die
a broken alcoholic.
No longer dislocated from himself, Chief Broom grows into full conscious-
ness. Free and cagey-"if my being half Indian ever helped me in any way
in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey"-he adopts the survival kit of be-

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96 RMMLA BULLETIN FALL 1972

mushroomment. In defining who he is, he correlatively defines who he is not.

He is not a successful Dismissal "sliding across the land with a welded grin,
fitting into some nice little neighborhood where they're just now digging
trenches along the street to lay pipes for city water" (p. 40). Nor is he a
Randle McMurphy, a Promethean hero warring against an American Zeus.
Broom, like Orr, is heroic simply because of his accomplishment, his invisibly
feeling his way back into the world without the Power Structure suspecting.
Hidden beneath the flaming oratory of Yossarian's and McMurphy's
politics is the secret of survival. To physically and verbally assail the System
accomplishes only the destruction of the assailant. Only a nonviolent subter-
fuge-the construction of a survival kit of disaffiliation-can insure a lasting
peace. Orr, in freeing both the Chaplain and Yossarian from spiritual par-
alysis, becomes an exemplar. "If Orr could row to Sweden," Yossarian says,
"then I can triumph over Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Kom, if I only per-
severe" (p. 461). Similarly, the Chief, by heaving the control panel through
the window, shatters Big Nurse's hold on his life. Quickly and silently, he
breaks the lock and returns home. Orr, a "simple-minded gnome" (p. 321),
and the Chief, son of a broken and drunken Indian, win. What could be a
greater subversion of the America of Colonel Cathcart and Big Nurse?
McMurphy tells the story of how he once conned a cowboy to ride a
brahma bull blindfolded in an Oregon rodeo. Able to see nothing, the
cowboy crawled onto the bull backwards. "Blindfolded and backwards,"
McMurphy exuberates, "and I'm a sonofagun if he didn't stay the limit and
won the purse. And I was second" (p. 139). Heller draws an analogy be-
tween Promethean man and the omnipotent nation-state. "Could you really
say with much certainty," the old man in the whorehouse asks Nately, "that
America with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is
second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world,
will last as long as . . . the frog?" (p. 249). Shaken, Nately replies that
America can't last forever but he does know "that we're going to survive and
triumph for a long, long time" (p. 251). Chuckling at Nately's growing
chagrin, the old man tells him that the real trick of survival lies in losing
wars and knowing which ones can be lost. He points to Italy's modem history
as an example.

Victory [in Ethiopia] gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that

we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now
that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better,
and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being
defeated (p. 251).

Confounded, Nately discards him as a madman. But in the contrasts between

Yossarian and Orr, America and Italy, and McMurphy and Broom, the point
becomes clear.

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 BLINDFOLDED AND BACKWARDS 97

Both the old man's and McMurphy's analogies contain the essence of
bemushroomment: in losing, things turn for the better; blindfolded and
backwards, we win the purse. Winning (or survival) involves a necessary
reversal of the thrust from inside out (the Promethean stance) to inward (the
bemushroomed stance). To orient ourselves like Yossarian and McMurphy
against the omnipotent world invites instant failure; to remain uncompre-
hending, like the "successful Dismissal . . . [who] brings joy to the Big
Nurse's heart and speaks good of her craft and the whole industry in general"
(p. 41), is to be made a fool.
In seeking to follow Orr and find sanctuary, Yossarian never can seem to
stop paying for his sins. As he flees his tent, Nately's avenging whore hides
outside his door, her knife missing him by inches. So Yossarian runs and runs
through his world, Nately's whore missing him by inches each time until it
seemes inevitable she will one day catch him. Like McMurphy, Yossarian
has made himself too big, too visible, too polarized to the Authority. "They
can't have somebody big running around unless he's one of them," Broom
says to McMurphy. "You can see that.... They see you're big now. Now
they got to bust you" (p. 187). An example of the deviant, McMurphy re-
turns to the ward on a stretcher, his face "just like one of those store dum-
mies" (p. 269).
'Promethean man falters, turns softly inward, and feels in quest of salva-
tion." He has failed. But by approaching the world in losing, blindfolded
and backwards-like Orr, Broom and Italy-we win the purse.

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