In preparing for this study, I discovered a Ph.D. thesis that had a chapter discussing exactly my topic, the humor in A Confederacy of Dunces. I do not want to spend much time in my own paper discussing this dissertation (or perhaps even mentioning it), so this blog will allow me the space to do so. The author and I take very different approaches to the problem. The citation to the thesis is:
Wright, David A. The Rhetorical Event of Modern Southern Humor: A Requisite Element in Discourse. Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2013.
To Dr. Wright:
Please do not worry that my criticism will hurt your reputation. In my online Bibliography of Obscure Toole Criticism, the text I had the lowest opinion of--Ron Bell's thesis on nihilism in Toole--gets the most clickthrough traffic. So I did Bell a favor by criticizing him. Perhaps my criticism will help your exposure, too.
Part I: Theory of Humor
In Wright's dissertation, he begins by reviewing major categories of theories of humor. But rather than selecting one, he declares that the variety of them cannot be resolved into a single, definitive theory of humor. He then says he will use his own rhetorical theory of humor, which he defines as picking and choosing among the categories and using whichever element he finds most useful for the task at hand (10). This untheory is a meta-version of some modern literary theories, which value texts which are unresolvable and transgressive and which violate boundaries of genre, power, and gender. Because Wright sees humor as being elusive and unresolvable to a single theory, the rhetorical untheory of humor is the solution.
To his credit, Wright's rhetorical theory of humor does put the social aspects of humor front and center. Humor does have a social function as a core aspect, and Wright's examination of performers and audiences and how they negotiate the meaning of comic acts is laudable. While I disagree with some of the details of his examination, this focus on the social really is better than the cognitive theory of humor put forward by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams. Better to have some social functions described than no social functions at all.
In surveying existing theories of humor, Wright describes four major categories: 1) incongruity theories, 2) superiority theories, 3) Freudian theories, and 4) cognitive theories. He claims one and four are different. To me, one and four are two parts of the same thing. As for Freud, Freud actually had two different and opposing theories of humor, but the one Wright discusses is a subset of the category of release theories of humor. The theory I use--that humor has two fundamental aspects, incongruity and a social function--can handle most of his categories.
Early in the dissertation, Wright claims that he will devote a chapter each to these four different categories as related to southern humor; however, the dissertation does not focus on them. Instead, it veers off into more of a rhetorical analysis of comic performance. If I had to guess, I would suspect that, when he read Linda Hutcheon's Irony's Edge for chapter two, he shifted the focus away from a catalog of examples of theories of humor and toward an analysis of the relationship between the humor producer and the audience.
For my purposes of defining humor, chapter two's attempt at studying the incongruity within southern humor is worth examining. Specifically, when Wright goes to apply his incongruity theory of humor, both of his examples also strongly feature disparagement, which is more appropriately handled by a theory of humor focused on humor's social function, such as a superiority theory of humor.
The first example of incongruity is the episode of The Beverly Hillbillies where Jethro Clampett is psychoanalyzed. Wright correctly studies the incongruity, but then off-handedly acknowledges that the episode is a put-down of "the pompous psychiatrist" (53), i.e. superiority. The second example is one where Barney Fife of The Andy Griffith Show complains about his status being diminished, but he does it in a way that further diminishes his status (55). While it does feature incongruity, it also features a social lowering, which fits a superiority theory of humor. Thus, in his chapter applying the incongruity theory of humor, Wright uses examples that have both incongruity and the social function of status lowering.
Chapter three studies the persona projected by stand-up comedians, southern comedians in particular. Chapter four examines the role of the audience in the comic performance, both as a passive body reacting to the rhetorical acts of the comedian and as the body passing judgment on those acts. Finally, chapter five studies Confederacy of Dunces in the context of the grotesque and its transgressive qualities.
Part II: Specifically about Confederacy of Dunces
When reading the chapter of the thesis on Confederacy, it struck me that Wright did not understand the book at all. In that sense, Ignatius Reilly has scored a triumph: he has confounded the budding Dr. Wright. And considering that some of the reasoning in the dissertation is similar to logic used by Myrna Minkoff, it is a double triumph for Ignatius. But on to the details.
To start off the chapter, it is obvious that Wright dislikes the book and strongly disapproves of it, quoting a theorist on the potentially harmful effects of humor. He seems not to understand that Ignatius's racism, sexism, and homophobia are being ridiculed by the text, so he thinks the book itself is racist, sexist, and homophobic (139). Because these are cultural positions he opposes, he hates the book. Although he says that Ignatius is hilarious, he also describes him as horrifying, disgusting, and despicable (148). It is doubly ironic that Wright uses Hutcheon's Irony’s Edge, which is a book that warns of the political risk of recipients who misunderstand attempts at irony, because he then proceeds to miss the glaringly obvious ironic gap between Toole and Ignatius.
(I had for years wondered how Confederacy, with its stereotypic portrayal of gays, was viewed by members of the gay community, but in 2017 I had a conversation with Stewart Van Cleve, historian of gay Minnesota, and he opined that Confederacy was one of his favorite novels. Clearly, not everyone shares Wright's view that Toole’s book is harmful to contemporary understandings on race, gender, and sexual orientation.)
Wright tries to use the carnival theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to study Confederacy. First, I will review his use of Bakhtin's comic mechanisms, then I will reflect on Bakhtin in general. For my own study of Bakhtin's theory of humor, see Theory of Humor Series, Part 16.
Wright takes three comic mechanisms from Bakhtin and analyzes Confederacy’s use of them. They are: 1) ritual spectacles, 2) comic verbal compositions, and 3) curses and popular blazons. For the first, he declares, “In a very real sense, Ignatius is one sustained walking, eating, pontificating, belching ritual spectacle that draws the somewhat episodic novel together” (150) Wright focuses on violations of the norms of decorum of the comic form and argues that Ignatius violates those norms both on the high-brow and on the low-brow end of the spectrum.
For the second mechanism, Wright points to Ignatius’s journal entries, letters, and scraps of attempted scholarship as comic compositions. Wright notes “The key to Ignatius’s character, and in some ways the novel as a whole, is that he does not mean this letter or his other writings as jokes whatsoever” (155) His point is valid: while Ignatius acts as a court-fool or Lord of Misrule, he does not see himself performing that role. For the third mechanism, curses and stereotypic labels, Wright compares Ignatius’s profusion of verbal abuse to the circumspect sarcasm of Burma Jones.
Unfortunately, Wright misses part of the point of Bakhtin and ends up supporting theories of carnival that contrast with Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, carnival was a continuous people's revolt against the established political hierarchy. The class inversion that is often featured in carnival-like festivities was not a temporary release that allows the official order to continue. Instead, it is a second life, in which hierarchy is abolished, a parallel reality which reveals itself when it cannot be contained in the town square.
Umberto Eco criticized Bakhtin's ideas and argued that carnival does indeed act as a release valve, allowing the oppressed of society a brief holiday carefully controlled by the social hierarchy. So it is with some surprise that one finds Wright claiming Bakhtin as his theoretical framework but then saying that carnival is a social release valve (149). He calls his chapter "Releasing the pyloric valve," and he sees Ignatius as a release valve for the other characters.
An even older tradition of understanding carnival comes from the school of anthropology that culminated in James Frazer's Golden Bough. That tradition featured an individual who represented the god of agriculture. That god was to die at the end of the year and become reborn, renewing life to the earth for the next planting. Roman Saturnalia was such a tradition, in which an individual was selected as the Lord of Misrule, who oversaw festival inversion of the social order and who was put to death at the end of the festival. Other such traditions featured a scapegoat who was subjected to mock death or who was expelled from the community in order to renew it. I have pointed out in Evidence of influences that Frazer's model was the one available to Toole when he wrote Confederacy, and in fact Ignatius identifies himself as a scapegoat, and he is expelled at the end of the book, as the community is renewed.
Bakhtin's vision of carnival was quite different from this sacrificial scapegoat. His carnival features all participants exchanging abuse, heckling each other in a process of rebirth through the lower bodily stratum, which features the grotesque. There is no expelled or killed representative of a god dying and reborn. Ironically, Wright cites Bakhtin but arrives at Frazer’s conclusion, “For growth and change to happen in this story, in this place and time, the grotesque symbol must be purged”(156-7).
Wright sees Ignatius as a release valve for the rest of the society around him (155). But that is not the case. Ignatius is the agent of chaos, upsetting corrupt social relations, such as those of Mrs. Levy and Lana Lee, so that a healthier social order can occur after he is expelled from the community. Ignatius is the chaos before the rebirth. But Wright is correct that the final renewal occurs because the other characters finally act with agency and purpose (156). And he is correct that Burma Jones is the counterpoint character to Ignatius (159).
Wright ends by saying that any resolution to the novel must come from the reader. Which means that he could not find a resolution in the text itself, despite the fact that the book features a classic comic resolution for everyone except Ignatius. He thinks we are supposed to stand in harsh judgment of the characters in the book (160), when the opposite is true. It is clear that he did not understand what Toole was trying to do, and, as I say, the novel confounded and repulsed him.
Score one for Ignatius Reilly.
