Let's Build a Canon: Sometimes a Great Notion
Ken Kesey's 'other' book gets its due
Let’s Build a Canon: All canon building is stupid. And I love to do stupid things! Let’s Build a Canon will be a place to celebrate good books for no reason other than that they deserve praise. You can go ahead and call me Howard Bloom, Harold’s less-serious cousin. Today’s inductee: Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.
Ken Kesey: he lives in the American imagination forever finishing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest before hopping on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test bus and riding off into the sunset high as a kite, never to be seen again. Like the rest of those damn hippies, we assume he ended up somewhere in the Northwest eternally nursing the end of the summer of love. Cuckoo’s Nest is the one that still gets taught at schools, and the one that was made into a (very excellent) movie starring Jack Nicholson, but today we’ll be focusing on Kesey’s lesser-known follow up, Sometimes a Great Notion, which is a particularly American masterpiece, and, hey, they even made a (pretty good) movie out of it starring1 Paul Newman.
In the current age of no assumed distance between representation and endorsement, Sometimes a Great Notion isn’t an easy sell; it’s the story of defiant scabs, a family of loggers bucking a union strike in rural Oregon. The Stamper family lives in a ramshackle compound on the banks of the Wakonda Auga river, a literal rampart of stubbornness built against the ceaseless torrent of the water, and they don’t want any part of solidarity with the other loggers in town.
“It, the house, protrudes out into the river on a peninsula of it own making, on an unsightly jetty of land, shored up on all sides with logs, ropes, cables, burlap bags filled with cement and rocks, welded irrigation pipe, old trestle girders, and bent train rails… the house presents an impressive sight: a two-story monument of wood and obstinancy that has neither retreated from the creep of erosion nor surrendered to the terrible pull of the river.”
(Look how Kesey starts that description - ‘It, the house, protrudes’ - the house’s clause literally sticking out in that sentence!)
Henry Stamper, the family’s patriarch, and the inventor of their family creed – “NEVER GIVE AN INCH!” – is the main driver of the family’s cussed stubbornness, and it’s up to his son, Hank, to finish the actual work: bringing down every log that would’ve gotten to the local mill without a strike. Also occurring in the background of this struggle – the classic collective vs. individual plot, with the third party ‘the inexorable and indifferent force of nature’ hanging over everyone – is some sort of mix between Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov2. Short a hand, and needing a non-union worker, the Stampers invite Leland, Henry’s prodigal son and stereotypical East-coast beatnik, back West to help finish the job. Leland doesn’t return out of a sense of familial duty, however: he wants revenge on Hank, his half-brother, who had sex with his mother and, it’s intimated, helped drive her to suicide. Leland’s planned revenge, Danish-Princely, is to try and seduce Hank’s wife, Viv, and bring down the whole operation from the inside. Leland and Hank’s animosity for one another is deep seated and perfectly drawn, a sort of elemental fraternal relationship, pitting Hank’s older brother taunt of “You oughta be a big enough guy now, bub” against Leland’s long-simmering little brother promise that “someday you’ll get it for what you – … just … you … wait.”3
Got all that? That description just scratches the surface, as Kesey’s drive in this book is maximal: the perspective shifts from every member of the Stamper family (dogs included) to the native woman who lives on the outskirts of town to the poor union president to the Stamper’s cousin Joe Ben – oh, saintly Jobie! – and back around to Kesey’s mystic narrator not only from section to section, from paragraph to paragraph, from sentence to sentence, but sometimes even within a sentence. It is not a stream of consciousness as much as a “river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface” of consciousness, the spirit and psyche of an entire community swirling around the narrative. (And look how that description of the river whirls and eddies around itself with the rare English language chiasmus!) Its in this encompassing ambition that the book takes on a Melvillian or Faulknerian Americanness – a youthful4, naive, and absolutely Herculean attempt at mapping the entire world onto the written page. As the book directs early on:
"STOP! DON’T SWEAT IT! SIMPLY MOVE A FEW INCHES LEFT OR RIGHT TO GET A NEW VIEWPOINT. Look… Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. So don’t sweat it. For focus simply move a few inches back or forward. And once more … look:
It’s practically provocation, but it’s also an invitation to be swept away by the scope of the novel. Just don’t sweat it, dip your toe into the sea-green deep of Scenes Gone By and Scenes to Come and the spreading circle of Now!
Beyond the lofty excess of the novel’s form, what really makes this book tower over the 20th century of American literature is its embrace of antithesis; it is a most surprising novel of ideas, and all the better for the weight it gives both sides of the ‘argument,’ as it were, between the individual and the collective. Antithesis is the backbone of of much great literature, and while it’s easy on a surface level to see this book as anti-union, especially when put in line with Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey uses the trick of the old masters to make his ultimate point more forcefully. William Blake once wrote of Paradise Lost that John Milton was “of the Devil’s party and didn’t know it,” despite the text being a pro-establishment work about the power of God. Dostoevsky’s “Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor” chapters in The Brothers Karamazov are probably the best literary representations of nihilism, atheism, and the problem of theodicy ever written, even if the book, and Dostoevsky himself, are on the side of a hyper-reactionary Russian religiousness. These writers, and Kesey, know the allure of the side they’re writing against, and know that goodness, or any sort of triumph, can only exist with a strong opponent. Not to use the canon as another chance to inveigh against contemporary fiction – though, after all, what is a canon good for otherwise – but the current vanguard of books obsessed with what it means ‘to be a good person’ or ‘how to exist ethically under late capitalism’ never give this kind of time to the other side. I don’t mean that in a sort of cheap political way – some Republican twerp like Ben Shapiro challenging you to DEBATE HIM IN THE PUBLIC FORUM – but instead that the depictions of moral failure, or evil, are one-dimensional and/or brief, lest a writer get in trouble for an out-of-context quote, or because the author can’t imagine a real argument against their own beliefs, can’t brook any contradiction. The most common opponent in work of autofiction is the author’s own shortcomings, the action of the meager plot a continual hitting of the snooze button on a wan promise to be 'good' going forward5; whatever might be said to exist for a ‘social novel’ these days mostly sets up cheap carnival pins to easily knock down.6 In contrast, Kesey expansively animates the clash between the utopian liberal imagination of the American 60s against the country’s fundamental renegade spirit, no matter how fundamentally stupid that rebellion may be. Like any good dialectician, Kesey recognizes that both sides contain a little bit of each other – the hippie left and revanchist right both staunch in their anti-authoritarianism, but differing on whether to ‘solve’ this problem with collectivism or libertarianism. One for all, or one has all, and Kesey uses a classic tragic plot to illustrate the ultimate costs of going it alone. (You can head to the spoiler zone7 for more on that.)
Placed against Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion evinces Kesey’s growth as a thinker and writer; the proto-Men’s Rights Advocate stuff is thankfully mostly gone, and the battle lines are more ambiguously drawn than in Cuckoo’s standoff between MacReady and Nurse Ratched. The women in Cuckoo are either castrating shrews or whores, while the women in Sometimes a Great Notion are fully drawn human beings, especially Viv, who may just be the best of the bunch. The Stamper men are rugged, cussed, and cool in that old-school Paul Newman kind of way, and yet they have equal adversaries working alongside them in Leland, Viv, and Joe Ben, despite those characters’ outward meekness. Just as Christ answers the Devil in Paradise Lost, and Alyosha and Zosima answer Ivan in Karamazov, every Stamper action has its balancing counteraction by one of those three, who find ways to shine through. The conflict between these two sides, and their relationship to one another (one brash and bold, the other persisting from underneath that boldness) is neatly encapsulated by the closest thing to a Stamper family coat of arms, a piece of outsider art that hangs in Hank’s childhood bedroom:
“NEVER GIVE AN INCH! In Pa’s broad, awkward hand. The dirtiest, crummiest, cruddiest yellow under the sun and that awkward school-kid lettering in red… NEVER GIVE AN INCH! Just like the corny, gung-ho, guts-ball posters that I seen a good thousand of, just exactly like, except for that raised picture of Jesus and his lamb under the gobby machine paint and them curlicue words you could read with your fingers at night when the lights went out, ‘Blessed are the meek’ and so forth and so on.”
What also neatly encapsulates the conflict of the book is the indelible image of a severed loggers’ arm hanging over the river giving a bunch of union boys the finger, a “rigid and universal sentiment lifted with unmistakable scorn to all that came past.” (Don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler, something that nuts happens in the first ten pages of this book). The image of the stiff rigor mortis finger to authority is also representative of the clash between the hi-falutin’ ideas of the book and the ‘low’ culture it depicts. The book is rollicking, full of hard days of logging, drunken late night arguments about jazz records, barroom brawls, cross country motorcycle trips, cracked out bus trips (not of the Acid Test variety, but close), hunting expeditions, and a whole lot of the word ‘Bub.’ There’s one scene where Kesey throws down the authorial gauntlet and narrates most of a hunt from the perspective of the family’s eldest dog, playing out the themes of the book in miniature as the pack pursues a bear. It’s one of many bravura moments in the book, a book that in its ambition will go down swinging, appropriately enough for a book full of characters who will absolutely go down swinging, but are more likely to knock you over first.
In celebrating an older book, there’s an instinct to try and link it to the present day, to give some concrete reason why you should read the book now and how it actually relates to the way we live now more than ever. Cheaply, I could ask: what could be more prescient to our present American moment than the story of a collective force undone by the selfishness of the individual? I think we all watched the last couple Democratic primaries play out, and we had the king of selfishness presiding over the country for a couple years. But great literature lives outside time, transcends the time and place of its creation, and rings out forwards and backwards, into eternity; this is a book about a conflict as old as humans, as old as fiction itself, a malignant individualism that stretches back as a far as Achilles sitting on the beach rather than fighting the Trojans and on through Ahab steering the Pequod into certain doom. Sometimes a Great Notion, in the sheer bonkers size of its ambition and accomplishment, reminds me of what someone once tweeted about Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master:
The book is a bear, a wild book about a wild country, a capital letter Great American Novel, with particular stress on that troublesome middle word. It will not be tamed in its excesses. Accept it or go, and most of all, don’t sweat it: just look.
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And directed by!
Never doubt my ability to compare something to Brothers Karamazov. In this case Henry is Fyodor Pavlovich, Hank is Dimitri, Leland is Ivan with a little Smerdyakov thrown in, and Joe Ben is Alyosha.
I love you, Mason, and I think we’ve already had our Stamperian fights for dominance in Mario Kart.
Author-wise and country-wise
See Lerner, Ben, 10:04, and Offill, Jenny, Weather, and many more in that ilk
Like those weird looking clown pins with the big mouths, ya know?
Spoiler zone! Don’t read this if you don’t want the book spoiled!
Joe Ben’s death is one of the most crushing in literature, a slow motion martyrdom of one of the few characters worth a lick in the end, a price too much to bear for the delivery of some damn logs. (It also produces some of Paul Newman’s most emotive acting ever in the film version). Hank’s final act – his doomed doubling down on driving down the logs, even with no support – is also one of the great departures in fiction, the ending of the book not so much a final stop as a last look at a receding, indelible figure, tragically set in his ways.
Had to skim this one to avoid the spoilers! But you actually witnessed me purchase this book, so you can be sure it’s on the TBR . . . I’m currently building my own Canon as well, we will have to compare notes!
What a glorious read, Evan. Thank you. Have you read Damon Galgut’s “The Promise”? It won Booker in ‘21. Good and evil in everyday South Africa, with devastating results to one family. Narrator often changes, mid sentence.