Faciality and De-facialization in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest: A Deleuze and Guattari’s Semiotic Study

This study offers a re-reading of Ken Kesey’s oeuvre, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, employing Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics of Face and their concept of regime of signs; it tries to map the workings of Face as an impersonal despotic system that emerges from the mixture of two regimes of signs that facilitates surveillance, discrimination and control. It also pinpoints the potentiality and activities of escape from this system, and the emergence of signs of disruptive faciality. Analyzing the facial activities of three characters in the novel, namely, Nurse Ratched, Chief Bromden and Randel McMurphy, the study elaborates on the following facial aspects: the State’s policies of facialization in Nurse Ratched; the schizoid experience of faciality in Chief Bromden and the suspense of the face system in McMurphy. Besides the produced mappings, the reader also meets a set of newly conceptualized functionalities of faces, contributed by the particular signs this context provides, namely, the catatonic face, the synaptic face and the carnivalesque faces.