Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 94

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The Popular Culture Review

The ward is a factory of the Combine. It’s for
fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods in the
schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a
completed product goes back out into society, all fixed
up good as new better than new sometimes, it brings
joy to the Big Nurse's heart; something that came in
all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted
component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel
to behold.
The Big Nurse (1964, p. 181) is the personification of "The
Combine" on the ward, and serves as a front for the "the national
Combine that’s the really big force."
Kesey invests "The Combine" with the self-contained power
that makes it in effect the chief agent of control in the world. "The
Combine" (1964, p. 209) subtly changed men, including Bromden’s
father~a man rooted in nature-an Indian chief, mystifying them
with a fog machine that made them machine like:
They work on you ways you can't fight. They
put things in! They install things. They start as
quick as they see you're gonna be big and go to working
and installing their filthy machinery when you’re
little, and keep on and on till your fixed.
Kesey energizes the metaphor of the machine, introducing a
literal version of the pastoral antimony. Hence reference to the
installation of "filthy machinery" that fixes people so that they are
transformed into an "adjusted component” of society.
In Trout Fishing in America Richard Brautigan is also
concerned with the transformation of pastoralism in industrial
society. Brautigan's trout streams flow through the reality of
institutionalized campgrounds with flush toilets and other
emblematic representation of modem society. In a letter to the
narrator signed in a wobbly handwriting Trout Fishing in America
(1967, pp. 64-65) described the surveillance of a trout stream by two
FBI agents: