Oedipus of Oregon
Reading a new theory into an old book, Ken Kesey’s "Sometimes a Great Notion"
Before getting to the subtextual reading, I’ll issue my review. I would give this book 10/10 if it weren't for the unnecessary racism and slurs that made the text hard to read without cringing. The text dripped with psychedelic descriptions and gorgeous purple prose until suddenly I was assaulted with hard-R slurs that broke my enjoyment completely. While I understand that language is a part of worldbuilding, I didn’t feel that the N-words on nearly every page (often slung between white characters to other white characters for seemingly no reason, even as terms of endearment) didn’t add anything to the text and detracted from my experience of the work. If not for this glaring issue, I would argue this is one of the greatest works of fiction I have ever read. 9/10 for some of the best writing, character development, world building, and epic depictions of Oregon and human nature I’ve ever read. Now onto theory-crafting a deeper meaning from a sixty year old book.
Who is telling the tale?
“It takes you along, you can follow it, and pretty soon there are no capitals and no periods, no commas, no quotation marks; it's just continually a little bit, just like a Charlie Parker jazz piece. Writing Notion, I would lull the reader into following, following, following, and then go faster and faster until the reader was having to follow into places that he couldn’t figure out how he was understanding but he was doing it because I had captured him where he had to continue no matter how hot the tempo got you.”
Ken Kesey on writing SaGN as a Jazz “Quo Vadis”
Ken Kesey - In touch with the Invisible: On The Rhythms of Writing
The book’s narrator is not to be believed. I have read a few reviews and explanations of this book, and all of them (that I found) seem to overlook this point. The unreliability of this narrator is never mentioned because many seem to take the text at face value and claim, incorrectly, that there are multiple POVs in the book. Some describe the “switching” of viewpoints as part of the text’s approach to a story of community. This is a mistake.
From the first chapter to the last, we are reminded that the narrator is Viv. At the start of the tale, Mr. Draeger goes to “the Snag” (the local watering hole in fictional Wakonda, Oregon) to talk to Viv at Evenwrite’s urging.
Evenwrite waits a moment, grinning. “Hank’s wife’s still in there, though. Now you, with all your methods, you might get something out of her. . . .”
Draeger does go to the Snag, and finds Viv sitting in the very back, in the depot section.
“Mr. Draeger . . .” The girl indicates a chair. “You look like a man after information.”
“I want to know what happened,” he says, sitting. “And why.”
The two talk back and forth for a minute about the risks Hank is taking, both with losing her and his life, not to mention the townsfolk’s approval. Draeger is a calculating man and he really didn’t think Hank would flip-flop on the issue in question, so he’s trying to get information, but he’s got a flu-induced fever, and besides that, is lacking some critical information. He probes the woman for the missing intel, but she is being vague and cryptic, holding an old family album and some papers.
The girl studies Draeger a moment, then takes a sip of her beer. “You could never understand it all. You just want a reason, two or three reasons. When there are reasons going back two or three hundred years . . .”
“Rubbish. All I want to know is what changed his mind.”
“You would have to know what made it up in the first place, wouldn’t you?”
“Made what?”
“His mind, Mr. Draeger.”
“All right. I mean all right. I have plenty of time.”
This is the beginning of Vivian Stamper’s telling of the family tale to Mr. Draeger. The entire text from cover to cover is Kesey’s Jazz cover of a family history. From the first chapter we can see him taking liberties with the linear nature of time, telling us the end of the story first and peppering family history throughout. He introduces us to the climax in the first pages as the first notes of a leitmotif we won’t hear again until the book’s closing.
The girl opens her eyes and pulls up a sleeve to look at her watch. Then folds her hands on the maroon album again. “I guess, Mr. Draeger, things used to be different around this area.” Rubbish; the world is always the same. “No. Don’t scowl, Mr. Draeger. Really. I didn’t quite believe it myself . . .” She knows what I’m thinking! “. . . but I gradually came around. Here. Let me show you something.” She opens the book; the smell reminds her of the attic. (Oh, the attic. He kissed me good-by and my sore lip . . .) “This is the family history, sort of. I’ve finally got around to reading up on it.” (I’ve got around to admitting . . . my lips blister, every winter.)
She pushes the book across the table toward Draeger; it is a large photograph album, awkward with old prints. Draeger opens it slowly, hesitant since his experience with those binoculars. “There isn’t anything written here. Just dates and pictures . . .”
“Use your imagination, Mr. Draeger; that’s what I’ve been doing. Come on, it’s fun. Look.”
That quote was a long passage, so I’d like to draw special attention to a few points. From a formatting perspective, Kesey is showing us how each of the instruments is going to play. We have the dialogue and the narrative, written within and without quotations respectively. We also see the italicized and parenthetical thoughts. It seems (though this may be a subjective interpretation) that the italics represent internal dialogue, like thoughts within the mind. The parenthesis represent memories or histories, the past or rumors that are being remembered.
Also important is that she says “This is the family history, sort of. I’ve finally got around to reading up on it.” Indicating to us that this is the first time she’s actually sat and looked through this information. This is crucial because we learn later that she’s the one that moved the stuff to the attic of the Stamper home, and it tells us she may not have known all that her husband had been through with Myra or done for Lee until this point. Up until she’s in the Snag reading the stuff Leland left behind, she is in the dark about this particular evidence.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly to my point, she tells Draeger (not for the last time, either) to “use your imagination”. This tells us that while she is probing the family history to put the story together, she is filling in the blanks with fiction. She doesn’t know the whole story, because as Draeger says, “There isn’t anything written here. Just dates and pictures . . .” But she insists that’s enough to understand if one just adds imagination. This is how a woman who was not present for (nor inside the minds of) so many POV characters and events is able to tell their story. She has the broad outlines in the letters and album, from conversations and town gossip, and from her lived experiences, and she imagines the rest.
She repeats her plea again in the same sequence, as though Kesey wants to make sure we get his drift.
“This is senseless.” He pushes the book away again. It is nonsense.
“Not at all, Mr. Draeger. Look.” (Every danged winter . . .) “Let me leaf through a bit of the Stamper family past . . .” Giddy bitch, the past has nothing to do—“For instance, here, 1909, let me read you”—with the ways of men today. “ ‘During the summer the red tide came in and turned the clams bad; killed a dozen injuns and three of us Christians.’ Fancy that, Mr. Draeger.” The days are the same, though, damn it (days that you feel like pages of soft wet sandpaper in your fingers, the silent pliant teeth of time eating away); the summers are the same. “Or . . . let’s see . . . here: the winter of 1914 when the river froze solid.” The winters are the same too. (Every winter there is mildew, see it licking its sleepy gray tongue along the baseboards?) Or not essentially any different (every winter mildew, and skin rash, and fever blisters on your lip). “And you must go through one of these winters to have some notion. Are you listening, Mr. Draeger?”
Draeger starts. “Certainly.” The girl smiles. “Certainly, go on. It’s just . . . that jukebox.” Burbling: “Ah cast a lonesome shadow/An’ Ah play a lonesome game . . .” Not really loud but—“But, yes; I am listening.”
“And using your imagination?”
This passage was confusing to me the first pass because I thought the jukebox that distracted Mr. Draeger had some essential point, but it seems to quite literally function as a distraction, a misdirect. Here again, she asks him if he’s using his imagination, repeated more for our sake than Draeger’s, yet easily overlooked. Because, at over 700 pages long, by the end of the book you might have forgotten the other line nestled there in the original leitmotif: And you must go through one of these winters to have some notion.
Kesey indicates the bookending of Vivian’s story to us by clipping in the same dialogue in the first and last pages of the book, bringing this back around in the last pages of the text to say:
And Draeger, walking past the gently throbbing glow of the jukebox, the shuffleboard, through the partitioned gloom of empty booths—I want to know what happened, and why—finally finds the slim blond girl. By herself. With a beer glass. Her pale hands resting on a large maroon album. Waiting to tell him:
“You must go through a winter to get some notion . . .”
Reminding us that this whole story was the imagined subtext between the pages of Viv’s album, Myra’s letters, Henry Sr. 's annotated dates, and the rest of the papers in the folio. Both times the line is within quotation marks as though it is what was said verbatim, but you can see slight changes between the two lines in each telling, reminding us that no account in this story is precise as it is all imagined. At the end of the book, immediately after the last quote above,
Viv closes the large book. For some time now she has been turning the pages in silence as Draeger watches, entranced by the flow of faces. “So,” she says, smiling. Draeger starts, his head coming up. “I still don’t understand what happened,” he says after a moment.
“Maybe that’s because it’s still happening,” Viv says. She gathers the strewn papers and photos into a neat pile on the table, laying that picture of the dark-haired woman and boy on top. “Anyway . . . I think I hear my bus now. So. It’s been nice running through the family history with you, Mr. Draeger, but now—as soon as I . . .”
What are they telling us?
Viv is the narrator of a family history she has only just pieced together from scraps in an album and her imagination. We can assume a few things are true, because there are dates and names in the book, but not for all things, not for private things, or for shameful things. We can believe that:
When the boy Hank was ten, his mother, always grim and gray and distant—an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew—took to her bed in one of the dark rooms of the old house and devoted two months to some fervent ailing, then got up one morning, did a washing, and died.
We are also given the ages of Henry Sr. and his second wife, Myra.
Henry was fifty-one at the time, and to those who saw him pacing the New York streets, with a boyish grin beneath a black derby and wrinkles at the side of his face looking like fresh cracks in old wood, he looked possibly twice his age, as easily half.
..secretly they were impressed that this skinny fool had had the perception to pick the most comely, the most witty and charming of all the eligibles, a young co-ed home for the summer from her studies…
..the laughter got even weaker when, after weeks of persistent courting, he headed back West, taking the girl along as his fiancée.
She was twenty-one and had one year to go for a degree at Stanford.
But things get muddier when we begin to hear the unfolding tale of Myra’s seduction of her underage stepson, Hank. Of course, Hank never told anyone about this (though it’s implied that the whole town save his father was the wiser,) and likely, Viv doesn’t piece it together until she reads Myra’s letters in the Snag. Remember, she is imagining Hank’s testimony here.
The twelve-year-old Hank, busy rifling through the magazines in the waiting room, seemed determined to dismiss the birth completely.
“You want to run in to take a quick look at your little brother?”
“He ain’t my little brother.”
“Well, don’t you imagine you ought to leastways say something to the new mother?”
“She ain’t never said nothing to me.” (Which was about the truth. Because she hadn’t said more than hello and good-by until that day when she comes in on my birthday. It’s late spring; I’m racked up in bed with a broken tooth I got from trying to field a bad hop with my mush, and my head’s about to blow to pieces from the pain of it. She looks quick at me, then away, walks across the room and flutters there against the window like a bird. She’s wearing yellow and her hair’s long and blue-black. She’s got in her hand a story book she’s been reading to the kid. He’s three or four at the time. I hear him fussing next door. She stands there at the window, fluttering around like, waiting for me to say something about her being lonely, I guess. But I don’t say anything. Then her eyes light on that plaque nailed up there beside the bed. . . .)
Of course, Hank’s age at the time of Lee’s birth can be deduced from the family records. What can’t be deduced is how old he was when Myra first took advantage of him. There are several indications that Viv has imagined a scene in her mind, as she has included little details to bring to life a testimony that’s described in the text as “about the truth.”
(Even after Boney’d told me about the plaque I never really paid it any more mind than a fly on the wall—till that year I was sixteen; when Myra comes into my bedroom for the first time. In fact, I’d just turned sixteen. It was my birthday. I’d got presents—baseball gear—from everybody at the house but her. I hadn’t expected a gift; she’d never given me much more than the time of day. I didn’t think she’d even noticed how old I was. But it was like she’d been waiting till I was old enough to appreciate my present. She just came in and stood there. . . .)
To clarify that the date isn’t certain, we’re told:
(And next door I remember thinking, She’s right about that plaque, too. It is nice to be out of sight of the godawful outfit. But I found that just being next door didn’t make any difference about getting away from it. In fact, over in the next room, after she told me what she felt it was doing to me, was when I really began to see that plaque. With a pine wall in the way, I saw it—the yellow paint, the red lettering, and all the stuff underneath the red and yellow—clearer than ever before in my life. But by the time I noticed it, I guess it was too late not to. Just like by the time I noticed what that little trip next door had started—and if I was forced to mark a place where this whole business commenced, that’s where I’d have to put it—it was way too late to stop it.)
The parentheses here are Kesey’s, which I’ve deduced seem to indicate imagined memories or whispered histories. While I haven’t seen anyone make this claim before, I think Viv imagined wrong. I think at least one other person saw what I see in this unreliable narrator, and that’s John Gay, the screenwriter for the film starring Paul Newman.
In the movie, the step-mother-fucking discussion between Lee and Hank is much more direct than anything in the book. I assume this is designed to avoid a lot of voiceovers to cover the dense internal monologues of each character, but it makes the presumptions between the two men much more overt.
For example, in the movie, Lee outright tells Hank he not only knew about Myra banging him, he saw it with his own eyes. Lee is also more forthcoming with his intentions in the movie, telling his half-brother at 1hr:40min:
Lee: “I’d like to see you make the same splat my mother did when she hit the pavement.”
To this Hank replies:
Hank: “You’re still laying her off on me, huh? But let me tell you something kid: I was fourteen, she was thirty. Maybe you’re old enough now to help me figure out who the hell was banging who.”
So, it seems that Gay also disbelieves Viv’s imaginary timeline, thinking Hank to be only fourteen, not sixteen.
The timeline is not fixed, in either work, because the memories are old, the details are not written in stone, and the hushed whispers of town gossip lingered long after. Additionally, we are made to see how Lee doesn’t just jump into bed with Viv, there’s a buildup between them. Likewise, I don’t think Myra sprung on Hank one day without any preliminary glances, flirting, or seduction.
I think this is a good time to mention the sign Henry hung in the room that says “NEVER GIVE A INCH!” and is nearly as famous as the book itself. The movie was actually called “Never Give A Inch” in some television broadcast marketing. The phrase was painted over a Christian plaque sent by Henry’s father, J.A. Stamper, on the birth of his son, Hank. Henry hung it in Hank’s room for his “son to grow up under,” and so he did.
But underneath Henry’s screed lied a bible verse, “Blessed Are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth. Matt. 6” which is incorrect. This passage is from Matthew 5:5, not “Matt. 6” as it says in the book. I don’t think Kesey made a mistake here.
Matthew 6 tells Christians to be righteous for God, not for the praise of others. It reminds them not to sound trumpets for their charity, and to give in secret. It details how to pray privately, and reminds Christians to forgive the trespasses of others in order to be forgiven. Throughout the book, we see Hank shrug off the jeers of the townsfolk, putting others first without complaint, and even turning a blind eye to his wife’s infidelity. I can’t be certain, but I assume that Kesey didn’t have the bible memorized, he probably looked the passage up himself, and it would be weird if such a “mistake” got past his editors as well.
The sign in Hank’s room, like the hole in Lee’s, are fixtures of a house where the walls do talk. The sign looms with doublespeak, telling us that the Stampers won’t budge their stubbornness, but also that they are rebels against Christian fundamentalism. The hole in Lee’s room talks metaphorically, allowing truth to be spied from both directions.
Viv’s “room of one’s own” is in the same space that used to belong to Myra. It seems like Vivian has conjured a story involving Hank being newly sixteen and surprised by Myra’s advances on his birthday, but that just doesn’t add up with the timeline as presented. I don’t believe that Viv is trying to cover for Myra, who she never met, but I think she’d have a natural affinity for a woman who had once held her position, shared her room, loved the Stamper men. I think it’s easier for Viv to imagine a Stamper wife falling for her husband’s younger family member than to imagine Hank doing something he doesn’t want to do and giving a’ inch.
She (Myra) spent her first year in Wakonda wondering whatever on God’s green earth had possessed her. (“I’ve always been lonely. It’s always been in me, like a hollow . . .”) By the end of her second year she had given up wondering and had definitely made up her mind to leave. She was already making secret plans for departure when she discovered that somehow, in some dark dream, something had slipped up and got to her and she would have to postpone her trip a few months . . . just a few more months . . . then she would be gone, gone, gone, and would at least have some little something to show for her sojourn in the north woods. (“I thought Henry would be able to fill that hollow. Then I thought the child would . . .”)
Reading this, we can deduce a clearer timeline.
Henry was fifty-one at the time…
She(Myra) was twenty-one...
(Henry Sr.) was gone for three months. (to find a new wife after Hank’s mother died when Hank was ten)
Not sure of Hank’s birthday, but we can assume he’s still around 10 years old when his dad (51) and stepmom (21) return to Oregon. She spent her first year in Wakonda, according to the passage, wondering why she’d come. Then “by the end of her second year” means that Hank would be twelve-ish, and Myra is making plans to leave. But “in some dark dream, something had slipped up and got to her and she would have to postpone her trip a few months”.
Myra’s slip-up, her dark dream, gives her something to remember of the North Woods. This is clearly indicating that Lee is a “memento” of Oregon when she leaves, but the language is clearly indicating that she did not get pregnant by her husband. A “slipup” and “dark dream” are indications that the boy was sired by infidelity, and directly after this passage we get pretty clear confirmation.
The twelve-year-old Hank, busy riffling through the magazines in the waiting room, seemed determined to dismiss the birth completely.
“You want to run in to take a quick look at your little brother?”
“He ain’t my little brother.”
In both the book and the movie, Hank is conflicted about being used by his stepmother. He was sexually abused by her as a child, whether he was twelve (the age Lee was sired) or fourteen (age he was assaulted in the movie) or just turned sixteen (age Viv imagines he was.) He was just a kid and Myra was a grown woman, and Hank’s stepmother. So when Lee is born, Hank dismisses it and tries to tune it out. Kesey tells us no one, including his dad, expects Hank to treat Lee like a brother.
The two boys were twelve years apart and Henry saw no reason to try to bring them together. What was the sense? When the boy Lee was five and had his drippy nose in a book of nursery rhymes, Hank was seventeen and he and Ben’s boy, Joe, were busy running that second-hand Henderson motorcycle into every ditch between the Snag in Wakonda and the Melody Ranch Dance Hall over in Eugene.
“Brothers? I mean, what’s the sense? Why push it? Hank’s got Joe Ben ifn he needs a brother; they always been like ham an’ eggs and Joe’s at the house most of the time anyhow, what with his daddy always hellin’ around the country…
…And no other explanation for his young wife’s fidelity ever penetrated the old man’s cock-certainty. In spite of all the hints and innuendos he remained doggedly certain of her devotion to pure memory and wild hope for the fourteen years she lived in his wooden world. And even after. His veneer of vanity was not even scratched when she announced that she was leaving Oregon for a while to take Leland to one of the Eastern schools.
This part of the story seeks to explain to us that there was plenty of opportunity for Henry to deduce what had happened, but he was too cocky to admit the truth. For fourteen years, until Hank was 22, Myra strayed (but stayed) in Oregon with Henry in denial. This would have broadcasted to Hank that Henry would not protect him from this abuse and in fact, would refuse to acknowledge it.
“You don’t reckon,” Boney called haltingly as Henry walked toward the saloon door, “Henry, ah, you don’t reckon, do you . . .” reluctantly, with an apologetic tone as though hating it that he’d been driven to asking—for his old friend’s good, of course—to asking this painful question “. . . that her leavin’ . . . could have anything to do with Hank joinin’ the U.S. Armed Services when he did? I mean, her decidin’ to leave when he decided to join?”
Henry paused, scratching at his nose. “Might be, Boney. Never can tell . . .” He pulled on his jacket, then jerked the zipper to his chin and flipped the collar. “Except she announced she was leavin’ days before Hank had any notion a-tall about joinin’.”
Henry waves away the idea that his wife could be leaving in time with his eldest son because of the order they announced their departures publicly. This is, of course, foolish. We (and everyone but Henry) know that no matter what age it started, by this time, Myra had secret rendezvous with Hank that Henry intentionally ignored. We also learn that she’d been planning her escape for at least ten years. Whether Hank and Myra conspired to leave at the same time or not, we can presume she told Hank before she told Henry.
Who is the father?
Now I think is as good a time as any to define my theory outright: Sometimes a Great Notion was Kesey’s Oedipus retelling.
From the first words of his story, Lee is destined to destroy his father and make love to his mother, but he doesn’t know it. He thinks that Henry is his father, and his mother killed herself. He thinks that Hank is his half-brother, but worse, he seeks revenge for his brother’s sexual assault by Lee’s own, dead mother.
The first time we meet Lee, he’s mentally unstable after botching his own suicide. He is assaulted by voices in his head for the duration of the book, mostly telling him to watch out, mostly when he plots against Hank. I posit that the “watch out from behind” voice is calling him to reassess his past, and just like the voices’ urgings, Lee refuses to reflect every time. He never assesses Hank’s agency with Myra, because he’d have to acknowledge his own existence is the product of rape. Lee doesn’t want to consider that Hank was just a kid, because he idolized his much older “brother.” He doesn’t want to know his mom Myra, now dead, was someone’s abuser, someone he looked up to. He also doesn’t think of Henry as a father at any point in the book, even struggling to remember if he called him ‘father’ or ‘dad’ when he meets him.
And when I found that my wandering had brought me to Neawashea Street, near the hospital where my father was reported to be crumbling apart, I turned off, not really so much because I wanted to see the old man—though I had been damning myself for two days for putting off the visit—as because the hospital was the nearest dry place at the moment.
Lee doesn’t care about Henry, his “father,” no matter what state he’s in. Lee never interrogates why he expects more from Hank than Henry. Lee’s resentment for Hank is so total, while for Henry he is indifferent. Even when the doctor tells him that his father is going to die, Lee only cares that there’s a life insurance policy to cash in (and is angry when he learns it was Hank paying for it the whole time.) Lee can’t stand to admit that Hank stepped into the role that Henry never actually filled.
In the Halloween memory sequence, scatted like jazz between a story of the present like stray trombone wails, we get the parenthetical story of the past. Here are some excerpts:
(“Here’s as good a place to start as any.” Hank stopped the pick-up and pointed to a yard already choked with twilight. “Just knock an’ say ‘Trick or treat’ is all there is to it, bub . . . head out.”)
(Finally the boy managed to get through the gate and across the yard, only to stop once more at the door. Fear paralyzed his fingers again, but this time he knew that the thing he feared lay not in back of that door, but behind him! back across that yard! waiting in the pick-up! Without thinking another second, he jumped from the porch and ran. “Bub, hold it. Where—?” Around the corner of the house. “Bub! Bub! Wait; it’s okay!” Into the tall weeds, where he hid until Hank was past. “Lee! Lee-land, where you at?” Then jumped up and ran again, and ran and ran and ran)
(The boy walked through the overhanging dark, able for the first time to question his sudden flight; he knew that it hadn’t been the house that he ran from, nor did he really fear his brother—Hank would never hurt him, never let anything get him—so what had he run from? He walked on, knotting his little features to understand his actions . . .)
(Why’d I run? I ain’t scared of them Swedes. I ain’t scared of Hank neither. The only thing I was really scared about was that he might be watching when I jumped or yelled or something . . .)
In Lee’s parenthetical flashbacks, Henry is never fathering him, it’s always Hank. Hank takes him trick or treating, and Hank is the one Lee is afraid will witness his fearful, scared state of mind. Lee doesn’t doubt that Hank would protect him. And sure enough, when Lee gets caught up in the sand, Hank saves him.
(Halfway to the sea, completely alone on a bare, sweeping field of sand, the little boy vanished . . .)
(vanished—into close and musty dark, vanished down into the black and moonless earth itself!)
With no tool but his pocket knife it takes Hank most of an hour to cut the limbs from a little scrub pine that he dragged onto the dunes. He works as near to the mouth of the hole as he feels safe, so the boy will be able to hear his labors.
Hank shines the light around the tube; it might stand another hundred years or it might cave in in another ten minutes. Likely ten minutes. He can’t chance going for help; he’ll have to go down and carry him out.
“I reckon you know what you got into,” he says after a few minutes of silence.
“But what I want to know is what in the goddam hell were you doin’ out here anyway, headin’ across the dunes to the ocean in the dead of night? Huh? Tell me that.”
The boy doesn’t speak; his face is cold and wet against Hank’s neck, and the dilapidated mask flaps about them on its elastic string. Hank doesn’t ask again.
“Anyhow, you ain’t never to come out here again.”
This anecdotal story is a perfect example of Lee and Hank’s relationship. Lee doesn’t know why he cares so much what Hank thinks, Hank is caught off guard by Lee’s seemingly nonsensical reaction to an unclear internal distress. Lee acts out and gets them both in trouble, Hank stoically faces that danger for both of them and saves them both at great personal risk, which Lee is never grateful for. Lee doesn’t have gratitude because he always expected Hank to do what he did, protecting and parenting him.
So Lee returns to Oregon to take revenge on his brother, and decides the best revenge is to fuck his brother’s wife. Only, I believe Hank is Lee’s father, and that would make Viv his stepmom. But just like Oedipus, Lee doesn’t know his true relationship to the people he’s using in his revenge plot.
There were only three people who could know Lee’s paternity, and one of them jumped to her death. The remaining two, Hank and Henry, are openly in denial from the start of the book. The only indications that Myra might have left behind are in her letters, which aren’t revealed to Lee (and then, to our narrator Viv) until the end of the book. The following three paragraphs are a little long, so I’ve tried to embolden the most important parts because I think they reveal a lot.
The album, though it had been in the boat during the fracas, had still been splattered with mud and blood, but the photo was still in as good condition as ever, which wasn’t saying a whole lot; the only thing the scuffling had done was succeed where I had failed in separating the photograph from the papers. I started to drop these papers in the shoebox with all the other stuff I was planning to leave with Teddy, when the handwriting on one of the envelopes caught my eye. For an instant he is lost from time, the past and present crisscrossing through his mind like bright swords dueling in the dawn fog. They were letters from my mother, dating from our first years in New York up to the time of her death. The letters tremble, rustling; the picture in his other hand slides away unnoticed to the floor. In the dim barroom light it was almost impossible for me to make out much more than the barest of details. He sinks over the first letter, forming the words “Dearest Hank:” with his lips as he brings the faint rustle of scented print close to his eyes . . . Damn him, he has no right, no he has no right. I was able to make out however various requests for money, anecdotes, sentimentalities . . . but even more infuriating than these things was the discovery of that that perfume? little booklet of my high school poems White Lilac? that I remember she claimed she had no right lost in an Automat on Forty-second Street years before. The poems I had written and hand-printed meticulously the scent falls, white lilac for her birthday, now, here from the trembling page, her perfume it turns up, a few thousand miles like crumbling petals from dear old Forty-second shaken from a faded lilac . . . and in the mail of my brother! He has no right she has no right with my poems!
As I scanned the letters I went quietly mad. Because he has no right it became increasingly apparent that she had never been mine my dearest Hank I have no way of telling you in all those years together she had still been his how much I missed your hands your lips and they had no right it can’t be can we ever see each other again but each word, each scent without my bringing back so cruel Sweetheart the snow here turns black and actual movement of her hand the people here are even colder and blacker but as it lifted her hair to touch the bottle of perfume I do so wish that we might have beneath her pearled earlobe of course Lee does much better in school scented dark pendulum of her hair still, we may not have to wait as long as he has no right to my twelve years darling until he had his twelve years he has no right to mine we can find that place alone in the sky please to write more until, by the time the door opened, with all my love, Myra and Viv was there, crying, nondescript in her big poncho PS Lee needs tuition and the doctor writes that the payments on the policies have lapsed again; could you? By the time the poor girl arrived the insurance too? I was almost beside myself with rage. They had no right to do this!
And by the time Viv had stopped crying long enough to tell me he was taking the run down the river, “Just he and Andy. And he’ll drown out there . . . and I hope he does!” I was already feeling that the years had used me badly. When she finished choking out her news I felt as though I were being raped by time itself. Again! Just like he did before when he let her go! I tried to explain, but I fear it was largely gibberish. Again he will let her go and steal her forever from me! I could only try to tell her, “When we fought, Viv, he asked if I’d had enough. But hadn’t I taken his best punch? Hadn’t I! Hadn’t I!” I demanded shouting at her, lashing out in a fury of denial and affirmation, but she didn’t understand. “Viv, don’t you see, if I let him do this I’ll just lose all over again. I didn’t have enough. I can never have had enough as long as he makes me say that! I can never have you as long as I let him make the heroic runs down the river. Don’t you—? Oh, Viv . . .” I gripped her hand; I could see she had no idea what I was talking about; I could see I would never be able to explain it. “But listen . . . for a while there, do you see? out on the bank? I was fighting for my life. I know it. Not running for my life as I’ve always done before. But fighting for it. Not merely to keep it, or to have it, but for it . . . fighting to get it, to win it?” I slapped the table. She was saying something but I didn’t hear. “No! by god I don’t care what he thinks I haven’t had enough. And the pompous prick, he doesn’t have any goddamned right—Where is he, anyway, still at the house? Well, where’s Andy with the boat? I’m not going to let him, not again. Not this time! Here, take all this stuff. I’ve got to catch a boat.”
And Viv does ‘take all that stuff’. She reads through it for the first time, realizing what has happened. She is Jocasta to Lee’s Oedipus, unwillingly participating in the destruction of Laius and the royal family. The Stampers are clearly the biggest name in Wakonda logging, and because of the cursed state of their family, Lee’s mother tries to take him away from there to avoid a fateful end. Lee doesn’t care that Henry dies and loses Myra to suicide, just like Oedipus’ parents, but that’s not quite how Kesey tells it.
Instead, Kesey has his Oedipus try to destroy a man who he doesn’t know is his father and seduce the woman who took his mother’s place in Hank’s life, in the family unit, and her literal place in the Stamper house. Kesey’s King and Queen don’t just lay down and die, though. The crossroads where Lee meets Hank is a metaphorical one, but it’s clear. The book tells us that the Stampers built their compound jutting out on the “‘Highway of Water,’ as the river is referred to frequently in yellowed newspapers in the Wakonda Library.” He’s also at a crossroads in his life, not sure what to do after losing Myra and botching his own suicide attempt.
Watch out for what?
Since we meet Lee directly following his failed suicide, it is the first we hear of the voice that comes from behind him warning him to Watch Out. I believe this is the Oracle (Lee calls it “Old Reliable”) that warns Oedipus of the prophecy. Like Oedipus, Lee misinterprets the prophecy because he is missing critical information, and goes to do the exact thing he’s been warned not to do. The voice tells Lee to WATCH OUT! About fifty times.
I knew that I had in no way achieved the stature I had subconsciously dreamed that my revenge would bring about. I had very successfully completed my ritual of vengeance; I had accurately mouthed all the right mystical words . . . but instead of turning myself into a Captain Marvel, as the ritual and words were supposed to do according to all the little-guy-beats-big-guy tradition . . . I had merely created another Billy Batson.
Then, finally knew what I had been warned to WATCH OUT for.
But Lee is wrong, he doesn’t know, and it’s not over. He hears the voice warn him to WATCH OUT another five times, all in the sequence where he fights Hank at the triple crossroads. After that fight, he never hears it again.
When Lee sees Viv at the end, he’s got a ticket and is ready to leave town, but he abandons it and she takes it instead, not sure where she’s going to go. I think this closes the metaphorical “one way ticket” Lee tried to take at the beginning of the book, and she’s (metaphorically) taking herself out now. Where Lee was going to leave, Viv actually does.
“Who knows?” Viv answers. “I’m just going.”
What does it mean?
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and when it ended, I was dismayed to find the discourse online seemingly overlooked all the analysis I had been brewing as I read. I thought Viv’s role as narrator was obvious from the start, made impossible to miss by the ending. I thought Hank=Lee’s father was clearly defined through every chapter, and couldn’t believe I didn’t see anyone else speculating. Maybe if the book had come out later, in the age of reddit or google, we would see more analysis of this kind. Or, worse perhaps, maybe I’m treading new water that was previously undisturbed.
If this book gets its flowers, which seems unlikely (fair, due to its racist themes and slurs) I wonder if it’ll get taught in High Schools or Colleges and perhaps have some deeper critical media analysis. Despite its flaws, this book did a few things very well.
It showed Oregon winter in an honest, lived-in way.
It showed a broken family and the ways it keeps breaking if the broken pieces are swept under the rug, left to trip more people.
I’d argue it’s Oregon’s Oedipus retelling and is a must-read early modern classic.