In Favor of Human Pluralism

Foucault’s Madness and Civilization in Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Morrison’s Home

Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization outlines motifs inherent to literary madness, or the thematic representation of madness in literature, which inform sociocultural perception of mental disability once the representing novel is published, and contemporary American novels adhere to this literary madness. Two novels set in the same time period, though separated in publication by fifty years’ time, demonstrate the effect and implications of literary madness. Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Toni Morrison’s Home employ not only madness but also the pertinence of race to discourses about disability to make social commentary. Through a literary madness informed by Foucauldian madness, or Foucault’s broader interpretation of madness as it relates to society, both novels reject hegemonic structures that oppress humans according to race and disability, advocating a pluralistic notion of humanity over normative embodiments. This critique of oppressive norms manifesting across time in novels set in 1950’s America suggests persistent cultural problems that literary madness can address in its representation. Both novels propose that returning home is a means of circumnavigating these cultural problems and positions home as a space where race and disability are accommodated and can find support for their existence in the array of human identities. Despite the Foucauldian dynamics working in these texts’ literary madness, home is a location that protects characters from both being sent away and being confined to institutions, which suggests it is a spatial arrangement which Foucault did not foresee in his conceptualization of madness.

            This study first delineates the prominent motifs of Foucauldian madness. Next, study of the novels will demonstrate that the identity markers of race and disability are joined in the novels and that the way for these identities to generate their own subjectivity in the face of conformist America is to empower their emplacement at home. In this way, the non–white mad characters control the discourse over meaning embedded in the space, which Foucault did not explain, for in Foucault’s time, the idea that the mad might control discourse in any space had not yet been a possibility.