640 The American Century: Literature since 1945action and the rebel in vision, the bond between two men, the woman as a threatening
instrument of the system, the liberation in the wilderness, the sacrifice of the mentor,
the survival of the disciple, and the final lighting out for the territory. But they are
all set in their own transgressive space, an area of vulgar power and possibility that
mocks claims to authoritativeness and authority of any kind – including those of
high culture. Kesey was to go on to chart that transgressive space in other fiction and
essays (Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), Kesey’s Garage Sale (1973), Demon Box
(1986), The Further Enquiry (1990)). He was also to attempt to create it for himself
and others: traveling in his “Magic Bus” around America with his companions,
whom he called “the Merry Pranksters,” organizing psychedelic events and light
shows – all of which Tom Wolfe wryly recorded in his book The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test (1968). But One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains his most powerful
mapping of transgression, his most memorable expression of the belief that lost
freedom can and must be recovered. “I been away a long time,” are the last words of
Bromden as he lights out for a past that is also his future. It stands, not only as a
supremely, seriously comic book, but as a major document in the American literature
of resistance and rebellion.The Art and Politics of Race
Defining a new black aesthetic
Nobody has had to resist more in American society, and rebel more as far the
institutional structures of the nation are concerned, than African-Americans.
One the level of what Norman Mailer would call the “visible” river of public events,
there has been the trauma of the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King, the “Second American Revolution” of the Civil Rights movement and its
aftermath, the emergence within the framework of party politics of leaders like Jesse
Jackson and, outside of it, of the followers of Elijah Muhammad and the Black
Muslim movement, the controversies and crises surrounding the cases of Rodney
King and O. J. Simpson, the election of Barack Obama. And much more. On the
level of the “subterranean” river, there has been the slow, painful, but triumphant
growth of black pride. Black pride and the black aesthetic were promoted in the first
instance after World War II by the Black Arts movement. Following that movement,
there has been an exponential increase in significant writing by African-American
women. African-American women suffered, many of them felt, from the double
jeopardy of racism in the women’s liberation movement and sexism in black
liberation movements. That sexism led Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), for instance,
to equate black pride with sexual manhood and, in his best-known book, Soul on Ice
(1968), to describe the rape of white women as “an insurrectionary act.” The remedy,
as Toni Cade (1939–1995) argued in her preface to The Black Woman (1970), a
seminal anthology of short stories and essays, was for black women to start “turning
toward each other.” This is what African-American women writers proceeded to do.GGray_c05.indd 640ray_c 05 .indd 640 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM