Although Ken Kesey is possessed of a modern sensibility and is strongly influenced by the philosophy of existentialism, he fashions Hank Stamper, the protagonist of Sometimes a Great Notion, in the image of archetypes out of the dim mythic past of the Beowulf poet. Hank is the dominating, triumphant hero of the Germanic past, Americanized and brought into the modern age. Like Beowulf, he exemplifies a type of courage that can rise above entropy and even death. Though Kesey does not deny that the powers of chaos and darkness will eventually carry the day, he presents Hank's defiance of these powers as an alternative to either despair or absurd laughter.

Most critics who have investigated Sometimes a Great Notion have interpreted Hank as an “absurd hero” who struggles, like Sisyphus, against the uncaring universe. In the existentialist world-view the struggle itself, not the goal struggled for, is what gives meaning and purpose to existence, and the ultimate impossibility of the quest to subdue unconquerable nature makes the struggle both absurd and poignant. Elaine B. Safer's view is typical of those critical assessments that see the novel as a work informed by existentialism. She describes Sometimes a Great Notion as “comic absurdism” and “black humor,” interpreting the action of the novel as “an encyclopedic spectrum of expectation and hopes that fail” (138). While the hopes of many characters do indeed fail, the final image of the novel, Hank and Lee leaping from log to log while a tugboat pulls the booms downstream to meet the “impossible” contract, belies Safer's contention that in the end the story is best explained by an existentialist interpretation. “Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories,” writes Camus, defining the existentialist perspective (64). But Hank's cause is not lost: even more than Beowulf, he achieves victory. His chronicle needs to be read not as an example of the existentialist “absurd quest” but as a depiction of the heroic archetype Kesey has called “Man the Winner” (Strelow 72).

M. Gilbert Porter first noted the presence of Beowulfian elements in Sometimes a Great Notion, pointing out that when Hank's brother, Lee, imagines his homecoming he sees: “an atavistic time and place, a haunted mere where Heorot is ‘mighty Stamper hall,’ its ‘Great Ruler’ old Henry Stamper, whose ‘grisly visage’ rules over a ‘horde’ of kinsman in ‘plaid shirts, spike boots’” (62).¹ The parallels between the novel and the epic extend far beyond this scene, however. The displays of Henry's and Grendel's severed arms are only the most obvious congruence between the two works. Hank and Beowulf possess many of the same characteristics, including leadership, physical prowess and an unwavering spirit. Both heroes fight unrelenting battles against overpowering forces of destruction. And both Hank and Beowulf are examples of the unbending warrior defiant in the face of overwhelming odds. It is important to note, however, that Kesey's novel is not a simple recasting of the poem; Kesey uses the traditional material for his purposes and freely changes elements. But even though Beowulf cannot be used as a skeleton key to unlock the novel, an understanding of the relationship between the book and the poem can provide a deeper understanding of Sometimes a Great Notion.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HANK AND BEOWULF

Characters in separate works often possess similar characteristics, so the appearance of shared traits is not prima facie evidence of a genetic literary relationship. Nevertheless, the specific congruencies between the traits of Hank and Beowulf indicate an intertextual relationship between the two heroes. Beowulf and Hank derive their comparable identities from their kinship and their extraordinary physical accomplishments. The former serves to place them as part of a larger whole, the latter to distinguish them from their less celebrated kin. Beowulf is consistently referred to by noun-epithet formulas which denote his kinship. He is “the son of Ecgtheow” or “of the kin of Ecgtheow.” An Anglo-Saxon's identity was primarily that of his kin-group (Whitelock 31), and Beowulf performs his great deeds for the glory of his house. Tragically he, like Hank, has no sons to carry on his line. Hank, though more of an individualist than Beowulf, also views himself in terms of his kin. Kesey, in his preliminary work on Sometimes a Great Notion, has Hank say:

It's all relative. If America gets into a war with Russia, I'm on America's side. If we get invaded from Mars I'll fight with Russia to put 'em down. If Oregon gets in a fight with California, I'm on Oregon's side. Figure it on down. If it's the Stampers against the town, I'm with the Stampers, and if it's me against the Stampers, I'm with me! You want to know which side I fight for? The side I'm on.

(Strelow 75)

Hank, like Henry before him, views himself as a Stamper first and foremost. Though he has done his duty to the other groups to which he has a responsibility—playing football for his high school, fighting for America as a Marine—his primary allegiance is to his family, more specifically the loyal familial core that resides in Stamper Hall. Hank is not bonded to all those who share the Stamper name—witness his mere tolerance of Aaron and John and his active dislike of Orland. But his fidelity to his immediate blood kin is absolute, as is shown in the two times he rescues Lee on Halloween.

To bring honor to their kin Hank and Beowulf engage in feats of almost superhuman strength and endurance, particularly in the areas of fighting and swimming. When Beowulf introduces himself to the court at Heorot he tells Hrothgar:

[This] truth I tell:
that I possess greater sea strength
for hard struggles in the
waves than any other man.

(Klaeber, lines 532-34)²

Beowulf demonstrates his great “sea strength” by swimming in the ocean for five days, fending off monsters with the sword he carries in one hand. Later we learn that Beowulf took to the sea after his lord Higelac was slain. The warrior broke through the shield wall of the Frisians and swam to freedom encumbered by thirty suits of armor that he brought back to his people as booty. And when Beowulf fights Grendel's dam he must swim down through the haunted mere, battling against the sea-monsters that infest its waters. The watery realm, then, is a place of danger and testing, in which a warrior proves himself able to hold his place against the overpowering forces of nature.

The corollary to Beowulf's “sea strength” is Hank's prowess against the river's force. When Lee envisions Hank,

the picture that came on the clearest was of his long, sinewy body diving into the river, naked and white and hard as a peeled tree … this was the predominant image. … [Hank] used to spend hours swimming steadily into the river's current as he trained for a swimming meet. Hours and hours, swimming steadily, doggedly, and remaining in exactly the same place a few feet from the dock.

(69)

Hank is the only character in Sometimes a Great Notion to swim across the river, and he accomplishes this feat many times. Even when Hank is at his weakest—sick, struck by the runaway tree, and beaten by Evenwrite's toughs—he is still able to swim the river to return to Stamper Hall. Not merely a demonstration of physical prowess, Hank's personal defiance of the river represents his struggle against the chaotic powers of nature. The river is Hank's most powerful and persistent adversary. It attacks him by assaulting the things he loves: it kills Joe Ben and the bobcat cubs, gnaws at the foundations of the house, and destroys the barn. The river, like time, will eventually triumph and sweep everything to the sea. Being “run out to sea” (340) is Hank's view of ultimate failure. To Kesey, “The sea is surrender. Not the sea itself. No, it is a conqueror; it is the giving in to it that is surrender” (Strelow 53). Hank and Beowulf defy the sea and the river and the powers of non-human nature that these entities symbolize. The heroes' strength in the water is not merely an expression of their extra-human power; it is a metaphor for their struggles against the entropic flow of time, which, even for the greatest heroes, eventually leads to death and dissolution.

Hank and Beowulf also exert power in the world of men. They are both leaders and fighters of great renown. When Beowulf disembarks from the Geatish ship the Danish coast guard recognizes him as an extraordinary warrior:

There is one of your
men in war gear that is not a “hall” man
if his countenance does not belie, this one, who is
adorned with weapons,
is a glorious sight.

(248-51)

There are many references in the poem to Beowulf's surpassing size and strength. He is described as being “the strongest of men” (789). He has the strength of thirty men in the grip of his hands (379-80). Hank is also noted for the power of his physical presence. Lee sees him as “hard as a peeled tree” (69). To Joe Ben he is “unnatural stout,” possessed of arms “like number ten cables” that give him the ability to “hold a double edged axe straight out arm's length for eight minutes and thirty-six seconds” (327). He is one of the “Ten Toughest Hombres this side of the Rockies” (110), able to defeat men like Biggy Newton, who are thirty or forty pounds heavier.

Both Hank and Beowulf must defend their social positions against jealous rivals. Beowulf defeats his primary challenger, Unferth, merely by a flyting, a ceremonial combat of words. Hank and Joe Ben engage in a flyting with Evenwrite and Draeger when the two union men travel to Stamper Hall (358-63). Hank must also defend his status in a more physical and bloody manner. He “always [has] to be goddammit working up to fighting with some-guy-or-other” (460). His bouts with Biggy Newton, only the latest of many opponents, are regular and, despite their ferocity, as stylized as Beowulf's flyting. The two heroes' participation in ritual combat and their public triumphs over seemingly impossible obstacles serve to define and then reinforce their heroic stature in the view of their respective societies.

Hank's and Beowulf's shared characteristics are too closely analogous to be merely coincidental. The traits that Hank possesses link him firmly to the tradition of the unyielding warrior of which Beowulf is the archetype. This warrior, once established by an author or poet, exists to be tested. Many of the tests and trials that Hank undergoes have parallels in the Beowulf story.

THE BATTLE AGAINST CHAOS

Heroes must have mighty opponents in order to demonstrate their greatness. A great hero who merely intimidates and punishes puny mortals does not remain a hero for long. In both Sometimes a Great Notion and Beowulf, the hero's worthy adversary is the untameable power of the chaotic universe. For Beowulf this power is represented by the three monsters he battles, particularly Grendel, the least “civilized” of the three. Hank's challenges are the river and forest, and the resentment of the inhabitants of Wakonda. Both heroes overcome these adversaries only at tremendous cost, both to themselves and their retainers.

Hank's life is one of continual struggle. He loves the forest, but his vocation is to cut it down. Though Hank seems to achieve a kind of satori from his appreciation of nature, what Kesey describes as “Hank's bell” (83), he never wavers in his determination to reduce the chaotic independence of trees to the controllable, useful substance of wood. But the forest is always regenerating itself and encroaching on Hank's world. It is a force with the power to crush humans with its “swinging green fist” (501). The forest's power makes it, according to Porter, “a challenging and worthy opponent” for Hank (40).

Beowulf, too, must struggle through fen and forest to meet his challenges and reaffirm his heroic stature. The forest that surrounds Grendel's mere is a place of darkness and fear where:

Then the tossing waves mount up.
Then the wind stirs to the dark clouds,
hostile weather, until the sky becomes gloomy.
The heavens weep.

(1372-75)

This description is similar to the passages at the beginning of the novel in which Kesey describes the power of the Oregon climate and wilderness to destroy men. The constant, overabundant growth of plants and the unrelenting pressure of the river and the rain drove Hank's grandfather, Jonas Stamper, away from Wakonda. And if the forest does not drive a man away it can make him insane. Kesey describes several suicides in the novel, and most of these take place in the woods.

The natural power that Henry and Hank do battle with is vicious and deadly. Just as the river reaches out and destroys Hank's bobcat kittens, the forest reaches out to kill the people whom Hank loves. On the fateful day when Henry, Hank, and Joe Ben struggle to finish cutting their logging quota, the forest, characterized as a monster, attacks:

[Hank] turns back to the log in time to see a bright yellow-white row of teeth appear splintering over the mossy lips to gnash the saw from his hands … [Henry's arm] waves limp then disappears a second beneath the row of teeth before the log springs on downhill.

(500-501)

Those teeth coupled with the previously mentioned “green fist” combine to deal the Stampers the closest thing to a death blow the clan has suffered. Joe Ben is trapped by the runaway tree and drowned by the river. Henry's arm is torn off, an injury that leads to the old man's probable death. It appears that the great quest, the “impossible-to-meet” logging contract, will not be fulfilled.

Of course the power of the forest to harm the Stampers has been magnified by the poorly directed fury of Evenwrite and the machinations of Draeger. Of the two, Draeger is the more dangerous and damaging. He is a coldly calculating, machine-like man who accomplishes his ends by “rational manipulation of human beings by exploiting their fear” (Tanner 69). He does not attack in the open but rather through patience, subterfuge, and trickery. His is the way of the river patiently undermining the bank beneath the cat cage rather than the runaway tree crashing down the hill. This subtle attack is more painful to Hank than the actual physical punishment that he absorbs. In Kesey's working drafts of Sometimes a Great Notion Draeger's name was originally Drake (Strelow 79), which comes from “draca,” the Old English word for “dragon.” Kesey later changed the name to Draeger, from OE “dreogan,” meaning “to endure.” Since Kesey did graduate work in English at Stanford, it is not unreasonable to suppose that he knew the etymology of these words and changed the name as the character of Draeger and his symbolic purpose became clearer to him. In both One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion Kesey took extreme pains to select names for his characters that held significant hidden meaning (Porter 4). The duality of Draeger's function in the novel is appropriately represented by the two names that Kesey has chosen for him. He is the destructive force that wreaks havoc on the Stampers and, like Beowulf's dragon, represents the “undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad” (Tolkien 21). He is also the less dramatic but more debilitating force of chaos that gnaws at the foundations of strong men.

Both heroes eventually defeat their respective dragons, but their victories are costly. At the conclusion of Sometimes a Great Notion Henry is either mortally wounded or dead, Joe Ben has been drowned, and Viv is lost to both Hank and Lee. The mill has been partially burned and the boathouse dynamited into the river, and there is the possibility that when Hank and Lee return from their trip down the river Evenwrite and his henchmen will have burnt Stamper Hall. Beowulf's victory over the dragon is likewise pyrrhic. Beowulf himself dies in the battle, and we learn from the poet that the Franks, once they learn of Beowulf's demise, will soon attack the now-leaderless Geats. But neither Hank nor Beowulf ever surrenders. To the end they retain their heroic strength and determination, defying unconquerable chaos.

This defiance is represented by the severed arms. The central symbols of both the novel and the poem, they summarize the two heroes' responses to the slings and arrows of a chaotic universe. When Beowulf defeats Grendel in his first battle he wrenches off the monster's arm. The next morning the celebrating troops in Heorot hang this arm from the rafters.

That was a clear token,
a hand which the battle-brave one laid down,
the arm and shoulder. There was all together
Grendel's grip under the high roof.

(833-36)

The display of the arm represents Beowulf's victory in re-establishing the security of the hall as a barrier against the dark and chaotic world outside. It is a gesture of defiance to the powers represented by Grendel, the “march-stepper,” the creature from outside the lighted circle of human control. By hanging the arm, the warriors of Heorot celebrate their triumph even though they know it to be transitory.

Henry's arm is the central symbol of Sometimes a Great Notion, the image around which the entire story revolves.

Twisting and stopping and slowly untwisting in the gusting rain, eight or ten feet above the flood's current, a human arm, tied at the wrist, (just the arm; look) disappearing downward at the frayed shoulder where an invisible dancer performs twisting pirouettes for an enthralled audience.

(2)

Kesey's thought processes in devising the image of the arm are instructive.

Start with the house in the present. Give it a sense of Urgency!

With perhaps a human leg. This is a good grabber, but what does it mean? …

What it is, is defiance on old Henry's part. A grim humorous defiance—of what? The Union for one, joining for another. Weakness for another. …

Perhaps an arm instead, tied around the wrist as the hand seems to be gripping the rope. Holding itself out of the water, the hand gripping as though it would climb out of the water.

Now. … this arm will give me a reason. My reason is to tell about it. …

So the book is on the surface a long exploration of the arm. And why someone would hang such a symbol of defiance. …

And everything has to have bearing on that arm's being there. Everything leads to the hanging of it.

(Strelow 50-52)

Henry loses the arm through the action of overpowering external forces. At the time of the accident the lost arm vividly demonstrates the power of these forces to crush the mere mortals who try to resist them. But Hank appropriates this symbol and turns it into a universal gesture of rebellion. The arm no longer represents the power of nature to destroy, but instead shows the strength of men to defeat temporarily its seemingly unbeatable forces. Hank's ability to make such a gesture even after he has lost almost everything he has loved indicates the extent of his heroism. He is invulnerable to the forces that can destroy lesser humans, and, like Beowulf, he gives hope to those who seek to defy the end mandated by the entropic universe. Hank's apparent defeat has brought the spirits of the townspeople to their lowest point in years.

At the same time, Hank is at his own spiritual nadir. His decision to relent has caused him to lose his identity and power. Effort against such overwhelming forces would surely be absurd. But even at this lowest point Hank can differentiate between absurdity and overwhelming odds, and he explicitly rejects the absurd quest in favor of real action. When Viv drives him to Joe Ben's funeral, Hank looks out at the land and imagines himself grabbing a handful of vines and using them, like steel wool, to “scrub the world to a fare-thee-well” (545). He sees himself scrubbing until he is exhausted, but when he inspects his work he finds that “instead of things getting brighter and clearer, it's just made [things] duller. Like it kind of faded the color” (546). Hank scrubs with greater energy, but his effort only serves to make the world

… bright all right, like a movie-show screen when the film breaks and you got nothing to look at up there but the bright white light. Everything else is gone. I throw away the steel wool; it's fine to brighten things up with once in a while, but too much of it, man, can rub everything away.

(546)

Hank recognizes and rejects the absurdity in trying to brighten “everything.” This waking dream is the first step on Hank's return from fatalism to victory. By rejecting absurdity and willing himself to triumph, Hank breaks out of the Sisyphean, existentialist pattern represented by his struggle against the river. It is safe to assume that his revival and triumph will, even as it angers them, restore to the citizens of Wakonda their hope in life.

BEYOND EXISTENTIALISM

In his notes Kesey wrote that he wanted to “be beyond Xist [existentialism], using it” (Strelow 71). By presenting not merely the grim or absurdly laughing toil, but instead the open, grinning defiance of Hank Stamper, he presents a model of “the exaltation of undefeated will” that Tolkien finds in Beowulf (22). The force of Hank's will is evident in the fight against Biggy Newton when Hank thinks: “Look here, Lee, he can whip me but he can't run me! … And if he don't run me he don't ever really whip me, do you see?” (340-41). Hank's and Beowulf's wills are examples of what Tolkien calls “Northern courage,” which he sees as unyielding bravery in the face of the sure knowledge that “within Time the monsters would win” (25, 27). Tolkien theorizes that even at the time of the Beowulf poet the notion of eternal, inevitable defeat was beginning to be replaced by the Christian conception of the eventual triumph of the good. But Kesey has gone back to the pagan past in which the monsters, the powers of darkness and chaos, will in the end win. Even if Evenwrite and his thugs do not burn Stamper Hall, the river will one day eat away the last bit of bank and bulkhead and sweep the house away. Hank will eventually lose a bar fight. He will one day die.

But the knowledge of the final dissolution of human beings and their works does not impart the gloom to Kesey's novel that is so common in other works informed by existentialism. Instead, the presence and challenge of an unavoidable fate elevates to mythic status those heroes who struggle and, albeit temporarily, succeed against it. Kesey demonstrates that the inevitability of death does not preclude the possibility of victory. Beowulf's triumphs are not lessened because he died and they were undone. Hank Stamper is likewise a triumphant hero regardless of his eventual fate, and through Hank, Kesey demonstrates that a modern sensibility is not incompatible with a belief in the power of human beings to triumph against overwhelming odds through the application of simple, indomitable will.

Notes

1. Bruce V. Roach (1981) makes a connection between Old English literature and Kesey's fiction. But Roach focuses on possible pedagogical uses of the film adaptation of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest in the context of a Beowulf class and only tangentially relates Kesey's work to Anglo-Saxon literature.

2. All references to Beowulf are from Klaeber, third edition. References are to line numbers rather than page numbers. The translations are literal and are my own.

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Kesey, Ken. Sometimes a Great Notion. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Klaeber, Fr., ed. Beowulf: Third Edition. Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Company, 1950.

Porter, M. Gilbert. The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

Roach, Bruce V. “One Flew over the Mere.” Old English Newsletter, 14:2 (1981): 18-19.

Safer, Elaine B. Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.

Strelow, Michael, ed. Kesey. Eugene, Oregon: Northwest Review Books, 1977.

Tanner, Stephen L. Ken Kesey. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Donald K. Fry. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.

Whitelock, Dorothy. The Beginnings of English Society. New York: Penguin Books, 1952.