#9 - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Back to the present day, we take a look at something that I already knew something about. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is an adaptation-prone work, so let me explain further. There is the original book, by Ken Kesey. There is the play, adapted by Dale Wasserman. There is the movie, starring Jack Nicholson and adapted by Milos Forman. The movie was interesting in that it was actually filmed at the same hospital that the book was set in, giving it a very truthful adaptation.

Having seen the play before, I was excited to read the book. The play was, for the most part, comedic. Billy Bibbit with his stutter, Ellis coming down off the wall, Martini being wacky, and most of all, McMurphy. Big Randle McMurphy running around causing havoc. The whole thing was hilarious. Chief Bromden, however, is given a tiny role in the play. He enters as a sort of narrator, hallucinating the audience before him and talking of the combine. At the time (this being a couple of years ago) I considered him a bother, a bit of trivial add-on that detracted from the real story. Well, I apologize. The book is narrated by the Chief, and his concentrated, exacting narrative gives the book a special kind of life. His hallucinations even serve to help the story, the fog and the size of people showing things as they are instead of how they look. It gives a reversal of the usual "things aren't always as they seem" concept.

The characters are still wonderful in the book. Being a fan of psychology, having the archetypes of the nervous Oedipal (Billy Bibbit), the paranoid delusional (Martini), and more there reacting to everything was simply entertaining. Then the villains. The black boys, supposedly rapists and at the very least sadistic jerks, are their as the henchman. But the true antagonist is Nurse Ratched. An old Army nurse, she rules the ward with an iron fist, quelling any sort of rebellion. So when McMurphy hits the scene, full of swagger and raw power, we're faced with an immovable object versus an irresistable force. In the end, Nurse Ratched loses the battle but defeats her opponent, giving one of the most bittersweet endings I've ever seen.

I'd like to take a moment to applaud the multiple tracks that the human mind can work on. I've been on this journey of reading for a while now, and I certainly believe that I have improved in terms of knowledge and understanding when it comes to literature. I've gotten better at dealing with complex books, and altogether feel liek my smartitude has improved. And yet, I'm writing this while watching Recess on Family Channel, and fully enjoying every bit of it. How is it possible for both the Iliad and Recess to reach someone in the same way? Gotta love the human mind.

Anyways, I liked One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

9/10

#8 - Heart of Darkness

One of the classic works of high school English, Heart of Darkness was muttered in the same breaths as Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Brave New World. We were told to be afraid of Conrad's work on the travels of Marlow, and that those 100-odd pages of writing were filled with the darkest, slowest reading we were to find in school. Well, I don't know if it was the Iliad that I was comparing it to, or the Moby Dick I had suffered prior, but I don't believe that it was nearly as bad as people said.

First, a word about Joseph Conrad. Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was a pretty rad dude. Born in the Russian Empire in what is now Ukraine, of Polish descent, dodged the Russian draft by going to France, had learned four languages before even beginning to learn English, and went sailing for about twenty years (including smuggling guns and drugs) before settling down to have a remarkably robust literary career. Basically, he's fairly kickass. And if you weren't already feeling bad, he had inherited Polish nobility, and turned DOWN a British knighthood. Now, many of Conrad's works are nautical works. As I read the first pages and the talk of the wind and the sails, I immediately began to have heart palpitations. This wasn't going to be another Moby Dick, was it? I was panicked, but I kept moving on. Luckily, as Marlow (Conrad's alter ego, used in many of his stories) began weaving his yarn, I was treated to a nice story about terrible anguish, insanity and the depravity of the human condition. Because as much as Conrad's works are nautical, they are also psychological thrillers that dig into the meaning of humanity.

Heart of Darkness is viewed as the pinnacle of Conrad's work. It takes Marlow, a sailor, on a trip up the Congo River to meet a fellow agent named Kurtz. Along the way we see the world through Marlow's eyes, and feel the atrocities that he does. The sarcastic, sneering view of the colonialists, the pilgrims, is a view more vicious than many would have believed possible for his time period. Chinua Achebe, who is on my list for his book Things Fall Apart, claims that Conrad is remarkably racist throughout, dehumanizing black people. However, when I read it, I saw Conrad as being sympathetic to them, and while he did not see them as friends, he saw them as humans and equals. There was no claim of superiority, simply a difference between them.

For the class of the English, the assignment connected to Heart of Darkness was to compare it to either a series of poems, or Apocalypse Now. The latter, a film by Francis Ford Coppola, is a remarkably well-done adaptation that was at the time the most over budget film of all time. It connected visuals to some of the most chilling moments in the book, and turned it from a story about British colonialism, a fairly outdated topic, to American interventionalism, which continues to this day. Together, the two of them were simply shocking, and managed to reach to the core of the issues both times.

I love the smell of ivory in the morning...smells like crossovers.

8/10