Blindfolded and Backwards: Promethean and Bemushroomed Heroism in One Flew Over the Cuckoo'S Nest and Catch-22

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 commanding 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 selfseeking, so that its primary concerns become self-perpetuation and omnipotence. In Catch-22 the diabolical General P.P. Peckem informs an incredulous 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