本文是一篇英语论文，本文意在通过席勒的“游戏说”理论来分析和梳理作品中的室内和室外的自由游戏，以及在这些具体场景下体现出的游戏精神，以期进一步地了解在僵化冷酷的体制中“麦克默菲们”为了自由、民主、平等、人性而不惜献身，游戏一生的可贵精神，从而让更多人关注这部作品所体现出来的可贵的个人自由精神的力量和“完整的人性”。
Chapter One THE CONCEPT OF SCHILLER’S PLAY THEORY
1.1 The Definition of Play, Beauty, and Play Spirit
Play is one of the most common words in people’s lives. Play is also considered to be a cynical attitude toward life. However, play is an indispensable part of human growth. In the West, since Kant began to think about the theoretical issues of play at the end of the 18th century, the theoretical exploration of games in Western intellectual circles has been continuous.
In ancient Greece, the essence of play was reflected in social life; that is, although artistic and recreational activities are full of competition and honor, this does not contradict the essence of games. The play is to seek happiness, and the play itself is to obtain happiness by winning through equal competition. Heraclitus and Plato’s theory represents the opening of game theory in Western. In the modern age, the representative characters of game theory are Kant and Schiller, whose theories reveal the essence of human freedom (Luo Shuang 30). When aesthetics is understood as freedom, play becomes the regulation of beauty. Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man delves into the concept of “beauty,” which is derived from an abstract analysis of human nature, and the play impulse’s object is a living shape. This notion refers to Beauty in its broadest meaning and includes all aesthetic characteristics of phenomena (Schiller 76). “Man plays when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing” (Schiller 80). Schiller discusses beauty from the abstract analysis of human nature. He idealizes the ancient Greek world and believes that only complete human nature exists in ancient Greece, and modern society causes a complete loss of human nature. This relation between beauty and human nature is based on German reality. Schiller believes that changing the decadent social reality is the key to changing human nature.
1.2 The Dialectical Relationship Between Sensuous Impulse and Rational Impulse
People have three natures and impulses: sensibility, reason, and play, and their comprehensive unity constitutes a whole person, but people will only tend to one of them at a specific time, thus distinguishing special human nature. In Schiller’s understanding, the “sensuous impulse” (material impulse) and the “rational impulse” (form impulse) in human beings have a dialectical relationship. They are both necessary for the whole human nature and reveal themselves by means of the other. Schiller argues that people are driven by two opposing forces, sense and ration, which pushes people to achieve their respective goals. Schiller calls this driving force an impulse so there are two kinds of impulses in man, sensuous impulse and rational impulse:
The sense impulse excludes from its subject all spontaneity and freedom, the form impulse excludes all dependence, all passivity. But exclusion of freedom is physical, while exclusion of passivity is moral, necessity. Both impulses therefore compel the mind, the former through laws of Nature, the latter through laws of Reason. So the play impulse, in which both combine to function, will compel the mind at once morally and physically; it will therefore, since it annuls all mere chance, annul all compulsion also, and set man free both physically and morally (Schiller 66).
Sensuous and rational impulses influence and limit each other, and they are interdependent at the same time. Schiller believes that there is only one possibility: to be a whole man, where he can be aware of himself both as free and as alive, where he can feel himself as material and recognize himself as spiritual. That is play.
Chapter Two BIG NURSE: AN OPPONENT OF THE SPIRIT OF FREE PLAY
2.1 A Cog of the Machinery
Schiller decries the current system of over-rationality and regulations, which has rendered each person a mere lifeless part of it, a mere fragment of the whole. Entertainment has been isolated from labor, means from objectives, and effort from recompense. Man, bound to a single, minuscule fragment of the entirety, became nothing more than a fragment; the incessant clamor of the wheel he drove in his ears never allowed him to cultivate the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity on his essence, he became merely the imprint of his profession, of his science (Schiller 27). The mechanisms of excessive authority and rationality alienate and eliminate human sensitivity, thus becoming part of the mechanism. The Big Nurse is a member of the Combine that maintains the operation of this mechanism, just like her name--Ratchet, just a cog in the operation of the machine, stiff, rigid, and rational. To keep the ward as organized and normal as possible, all she needs to do is make sure the machine functions properly.
She is responsible for maintaining the order and the rules of the lunatic asylum. Time is originally fair to everyone, but the Big Nurse’s control of time fully proves her desire to manipulate those patients, deliberately making patients miserable, and patients live in such a rigid hospital like a clock. Schiller directly criticizes the disadvantages of over-rationality in the thirteenth letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The pernicious effects of sense superiority on our thinking and actions are easily seen by everyone. However, the deleterious effects of rational superiority on our knowledge and behavior are not easily seen. “The Big Nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine” (Kesey 31).
2.2. A Rule Maker
“The ward is a factory for the Combine. It is for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is so” (Kesey 36). The purpose of the Combine and the Big Nurse is to turn acute patients who can act and want to act into a pile of materials without any impulse, that is, chronic patients. Ruckly and Elis came into the hospital as acute patients, and they stirred up troubles when they first arrived. They also rebelled against the rules of the asylum, clashing with Big Nurse, then Ruckly and Ellis were “treated.” A device was installed in their brain. In a few weeks, these patients, who would have been resistant, are transformed into a work that satisfies the Big Nurse and the Combine. After questioning the pills given to him by the Big Nurse and trying to find out what kind of pills he was taking every day, Taber was fitted with a “delayed reaction button” by the technicians at the asylum so that Taber could obey anyone, and he became a model of excellence for the whole town.
The Big Nurse, governed by over reason, has become a barbarian, and as for her, these “abnormal patients” are faulty parts, and her job is to repair them and turn them into a fully functional new product. “When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, and it brings joy to the Big Nurse’s heart” (Kesey 36). It is evident that the Combine is producing submissive, obedient people for society because, in their eyes, those who disciplined by the system and obeying the rational authority are the normal ones. Furthermore, those who are rebellious and wander to question them and challenge authority are madmen, and once they appeared, the Big Nurse would aspire to “cure them” and thus reconcile them with their environment.
Chapter Three MCMURPHY: A CONSTRUCTOR OF THE SPIRIT OF FREE PLAY ................................. 26
3.1 A Warrior of Free Play in the Hospital .............................. 28
3.2 A Sower of Free Play in the Columbia River ............................. 31
3.3 A Whole Man ................................. 33
Chapter Four BROMDEN : A FOLLOWER OF THE SPIRIT OF FREE PLAY . 35
4.1 A Bystander Lost in the “Fog” ...................................... 35
4.2 A Passive Participator in Free Play ..................................... 38
4.3 The Successor to McMurphy ................................................ 39
Chapter FIVE A SOCIAL ALLEGORY OF THE SPIRIT OF FREE PLAY .......... 43
5.1 McCarthyism in Cold War: A Repressive Background ..................................... 44
5.2 Hippie Movement as a Counter-force ....................................... 46
Chapter FIVE A SOCIAL ALLEGORY OF THE SPIRIT OF FREE PLAY
5.1 McCarthyism in Cold War: A Repressive Background
McCarthyism is the term used to describe the period of time in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy organized a number of hearings and investigations in an effort to reveal alleged communist espionage in various branches of the US government. Since then, this term has come to be used as a shorthand for character or reputation defamation based on publicly publicized, indiscriminate accusations, especially those that lack any supporting evidence (Achter 2020). McCarthyism was like a white fog hanging over all aspects of the United States, the cultural and academic circles also being influenced by the negative effects of McCarthyism.
n many places of the United States, a number of books were banned and burned. In 1953, the list of books that should be burned in San Antonio included not only sculptures, wines, buildings, and even detective stories, but also Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. If anyone wanted to rebel, their books would be put a bold red mark on the inside cover, then they also would be branded as pro-communist authors, awaiting trial. Any analysis of One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest should consider the societal-historical context of the time period when Kesey wrote the novel. Cold War tension was at its height (MacFarlane Scott 40). In this campaign, there is a change in the way of getting along with others, people are getting suspicious, wary of each other, even exposing each other. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the author Ken Kesey uses a “pecking game” as a metaphor for McCarthyism. The Big Nurse encourages the patients to reveal their secrets to each other in order to get the qualification for a late night-sleep and an early rest. The so-called group talk therapy is like a cockfight. One or two of the chickens are spattered with blood in the melee, so they become targets, and then they are pecked to death, a whole flock of chickens could be killed by pecking game in a few hours.
CONCLUSION
The game ruled by the Big Nurse and the Combine is a way of controlling patients, but it is not the game advocated by Schiller, and the purpose of Big Nurse in suppressing McMurphy is to suppress his humanity and free spirit. Furthermore, McM urphy’s free activities that went through from indoor to outdoor activities is the true free play. He tries to inspire the patients’ spirit of “the whole man” with different activities. Ken Kesey wants to build a kingdom full of beauty and freedom with the help of McMurphy’s spirit in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, just as Schiller also wants to build an aesthetic kingdom with the help of culture to eliminate human’s alienation and achieve the perfection of human nature. Their beautiful vision was only an unrealistic idea in society at that time, but it was with the enlightenment of culture and thought that more people could realize the value of freedom and beauty.
McMurphy, a positive and aggressive player in the chaotic and rigid world, strives to pursue the nature of the whole man, but he cannot control and change his own destiny. Because of the spirit of these deviant “madmen” who are desperate to pursue freedom, more and more people find the meaning of existence and the value of freedom in a chaotic and confusing life. In this book, McMurphy inspires Chief Bromden to find his identity and sense of belonging and influences other patients, such as Harding, Cheswick, and Scanlon, whose sense of freedom and rebellion is slowly awakening.
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