Buried in the Endnotes, part 5: The Quality of Humor is Sometimes Strained

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes of my latest published essay. This is the fifth post in this series.

It is with some irony that in my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I generally do not discuss the quality of the humor in the novel.

Humor is heavily dependent of the mental state of the audience. For example, most people find the comic strip "Family Circus" to be tepid in its humor, but when my daughters were pre-schoolers, they thought it was hilarious and the only strip in the newspaper that was funny.

That having been said, some attempts at humor are more successful with a broader range of persons than others. In my essay, I argue that some people may not appreciate Confederacy's humor because it often uses interpretation concurrence for its comic devices, but in general I do not argue that they do not appreciate the humor because it is not that funny. Here is the buried endnote:

While some readers may dislike Confederacy because they do not appreciate its style of humor, others might dislike it because the comic devices are not always well executed. In this instance, Ignatius reveals unnecessarily that his previous work was written in pencil; the reversal would have been funnier had another character revealed this fact.

Some of Toole's attempts at humor are weak, alas, so some of its failures are due to poor execution.

More on Bakhtin's Carnival

I was reading Eugene Slepov's recent essay on Confederacy (see below for citation). In general, I think it is a good essay and makes good points about nativity as being like ethnicity and about the importance to a character's identity of the time and place from which that character comes (or as the Beowulf poet would say, þæm dæge ond þysses lifes). He makes an important connection between place as a constituent of identity in Percy's Moviegoer as compared to Confederacy. I would have liked for him to have cited the work of Sara Dunne on the act of moviegoing with regard to place in Confederacy, The Moviegoer, and Catcher in the Rye, but that's me.

Slepov begins the essay contrasting his theory of carnival to Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He states that John Lowe, in his essay "Carnival Voices," relied on Bakhtin's theory, whereas Slepov instead sees Ignatius in the role of scapegoat. Here, I sat up and took notice, because I have several times commented on the contrast between Bakhtin's theory of carnival and the earlier tradition that culminated in Frazer's theory of carnival, which features a scapegoat figure.

I even went back and reread Lowe's essay, because I don't think of his essay as being anti-scapegoat. In fact, I think of it as an essay very much in the camp of pro-scapegoat, and one of the few that is pro-scapegoat, so I was surprised by the Slepov's discussion. My conclusion is that Lowe's position is more complex than Slepov suggested.

(Side note: When I had originally read Lowe, I was looking primarily for any comparisons he made between Confederacy and other texts. Rereading it, I see that Lowe articulates a theory of humor. I may study that theory of humor in a later blog entry. In my own writings, I may have borrowed some more ideas from Lowe than I have given him credit for.)

As for Bakhtin himself, Bakhtin seems studiously to ignore the role of the scapegoat in the history of carnival. In his book on Rabelais, he even cites Frazer, but doesn't mention this central feature of Frazer's theory. Why? I think Bakhtin's goal is to create a vision of a utopian "second life" in which all social status and dominance hierarchies are abolished in a revel of immersing ourselves into the regenerative and transgressive potential of the lower bodily stratum and a mythic folk laughter that is not singling any one person out for ridicule.

Bakhtin's supposed folk laughter is primarily ridiculing the "first life" of social orderliness controlled by political authorities. He overlooks the fact that humor is often directed by those of higher status against those of lower status even in a carnival setting. IMHO, Bakhtin's goal is part of a broader agenda of minimizing the fundamental nature of humans as social animals who naturally form interpersonal status hierarchies. I have criticized Bakhtin elsewhere for not having a fully general theory of humor.

It is, of course, impossible to transport oneself back to a previous era and conduct psychological tests to establish that the folk laughter of the medieval times was different than the laughter of, say, the Enlightenment, so many claims that Bakhtin states as obviously true cannot be disproven. His focus on Rabelais is brilliant, because carnival in Rabelais is not typical of carnival traditions generally, which often have a mock social hierarchy and feature a ritual purging of chaos as revelers get back to their lives. Bakhtin's utopian vision has been embraced by literary critics since the 1960s, perhaps in part because of its denial of social status hierarchies in the revolution of the people's laughter.

As for Lowe, he brings in the parts of Bakhtin that do relate to Confederacy, such as Ignatius's grotesque qualities, which wallow in the lower bodily stratum. But the center of Lowe's essay is comparing Confederacy to an ethnic melee, which is a comic drama that often features a scapegoat. So Lowe's approach to Confederacy is much closer to Slepov's than Slepov would lead one to believe. Confederacy features a scapegoat, Ignatius, and he is a figure that the reader is invited to laugh at, the agent of chaos to be celebrated but then expelled as the social order is reestablished, which is a situation very much unlike Bakhtin.

(More awkwardly, Lowe also lists nativity as a form of symbolic ethnicity (page 182), leaving Slepov very little room left to introduce novel points to the discussion. Lowe then goes further than Slepov into the study of ethnicity, making Lowe's essay the stronger of the two.)

Slepov, Eugene. "Singularities of Time and Place: A Study of Nativity as Ethnicity in A Confederacy of Dunces." Southern Quarterly. v. 56, no. 2, (Winter 2019), 8-21.

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 4, The Clown Motif

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number 4: The Clown Motif

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of physical comedy. I had a paragraph that ties physical comedy to clowns. Here it is:

Related to physical comedians are clowns, and Confederacy has a clown motif. Gus’s factory produces what look like clown pants; Irene’s bad makeup is similar to a clown’s; and Ignatius’s hospital gown is “clownlike.” At one point, Ignatius prays to St. Mathurin, the patron saint of clowns. FN: Toole, Confederacy, 83, 100, 291, 197.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 4: Patteson and Sauret's Three Versions of Ignatius

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the fourth post in this series.

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I discuss in the text the comic contrast between how Ignatius portrays himself and how others see him. In the endnote, I explain that Patteson and Sauret describe three Ignatius's. Here is the endnote:

Patteson and Sauret perceptively argue that Ignatius’s situation is more complex that a simple contrast. To them, there are three versions of Ignatius in the book. First, he sees himself as a crusader against corruption; second, the other characters see him as a selfish buffoon; however, the third Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood in order to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation. Ignatius’s outrageously childish behavior insulates the reader from feeling too much pity for him, but this third Ignatius gives the reader some sympathy for him, even as the reader laughs at his humiliations.

The second Ignatius is a comic rebuttal of the false facade of the first, but the third explains how Ignatius became the person he is. This third Ignatius creates in the reader sympathy for him and tinges him with tragedy.

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 3, The Seven Word Summary

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number 3: The Seven Word Summary

I am a fan of the Ig Nobel Prize, organized by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research. The Ig Nobel Prize is a comedy award for scientific research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. An example was the 2018 Prize in Medicine which was given to researchers who used roller coasters to hasten the passage of kidney stones.

The invited lectures at the Ig Nobel ceremony are called the 24/7 lectures, and they have two parts, a clear explanation of the research in 24 seconds, and a summary of the research in seven words.

As part of my early drafts of my "Theory of Humor" paper, I had an abstract which could be read out loud in 24 seconds, and a summary in seven words. The essays in the book do not have abstracts, so I dropped those elements. Here they are:

Full Abstract in twenty-four seconds: A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole uses the comic devices of farce and concurrent incongruities to generate its humor. The overarching incongruity of the book is between how Ignatius Reilly sees himself and how the reader sees him. Ignatius’s primary personality trait is his selfish immaturity, and he is both trickster and tricked. Toole may have drawn on concepts of the trickster and fool available at the time he wrote the novel from thinkers in psychology, sociology, history, and literary studies.

Brief summary in seven words: To understand Toole’s Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 3: The Act of Damning

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the third post in this series.

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I point out that there are three times in the plot where one character damns another character, and those curses seem to carry weight. Here is the endnote:

In this regard, the act of damning seems to be significant, as only the blocking characters in the book are damned. Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius’s mother eventually tells him to go to hell. Toole, Confederacy, 112, 190, 365.

I argue that Toole uses the device of the blocking character, who prevents other characters in the story from developing and rising in status within the social group. There are three blocking characters who through comic comeuppance are displaced from their social blocking posts, and in all three instances, another character tells them to go to hell or says, "Damn you!" I interpret this to mean that Toole took the act of uttering the curse "Damn you" to be important.

Theology and Geometry: the Second Half of the Book

On February 1st, I posted on this blog a discussion of Kenneth McIntyre's essay called "Amusingness Forced to Figure Itself Out." I said that it was the essay from the first half of the book Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces that got me to stretch my thinking most. I then mentioned in my (somewhat self-serving) Amazon review that the essay that got me to stretch my thinking most in the second half was Anthony Cirilla's "Dunces and Dialogue: Ignatius J. Reilly’s Menippean Misreadings and Onanistic Annotations of Boethian Philosophy." I will comment on that second essay here.

Cirilla's essay is rather complicated. One major point made is that Ignatius's masturbation, which is a form of sex which does not communicate with another person, is analogous to his stunted understanding of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. He cannot have a relationship with either a woman or a text. Both feature a failure of responsibility. And that failure is a failure to have true communication, an inability to have a two-way exchange. One nugget of the essay is this: Boethius himself compared a fool chasing lawsuits to a yapping dog. In other words, Boethius, in the very book Ignatius idolizes, anticipates Ignatius's bestial nature. Cirilla also sees Ignatius's intellectual work as a form of masturbation, connecting semen to his seminal work.

One error I discovered in the essay was the misattribution of an idea. Cirilla attributes an idea about Abelman and Cain to my writings, whereas the idea is actually found in Tison Pugh's first version of the essay "It's Polly Fulla Dirty Stories," p. 86. But even here, Cirilla builds on the idea, pointing out that onanism comes from the Genesis story of Onan, whom God kills not for masturbating, but for neglecting the duty to the wife of his deceased brother. He also points out that Ignatius is titillated by seeing the hidden Lana Lee masturbating to Boethius, symbolic of his own approach to the philosopher. Perhaps the best quote from the essay is: "Unlike Lady Philosophy who uses language to marry Boethius’s mind to comforting truths, Ignatius uses his language to uncouple himself from others" (151).

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship (unnumbered): Pugh, Queer Carnivalesque

I started the "Best of" series after I had read almost all of the criticism then available on A Confederacy of Dunces (ca. 2012). I ranked the criticism by my own measure of its relative quality. However, especially with the publication of Theology and Geometry, there are now many studies that would be inserted into my "Best of" list and alter the ordering. So the "Best of" list should now go unnumbered. Perhaps it should have been unnumbered from the get-go.

In February's blog post, I discussed the first half of the new collection of essays on Toole. I noted that the essay which got me to stretch my thinking the most was McIntyre's. In the second half, one essay I found especially interesting was Tison Pugh's study on Toole's queer carnivalesque (or is it his queering of the carnivalesque?). This is Pugh's third essay on the queer aspects of Confederacy (although the second is a revision of the first). All three are solid contributions to the field, and I recommend them. I would like to discuss Dr. Pugh's latest essay here.

Citation: Pugh, Tison. "John Kennedy Toole’s Queer Carnivalesque in A Confederacy of Dunces." In Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Edited by Leslie Marsh (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), pp 105-122.

Annotation: I particularly like this essay in the collection, because Pugh opens by defending the theory of carnival put forward by Bakhtin. In my own essay, I discuss Bakhtin and argue that the theory of carnival put forward in James Frazer's Golden Bough is a better framework for interpreting Confederacy than is Bakhtin's theory. Pugh begins by assuming that Bakhtin's theory of carnival is the correct theory with which to study carnival. He then shows that Bakhtin's theory does not fit Confederacy. He argues that Toole "queered" carnival by portraying it in a way contrary to Bakhtin. So Toole transgressed the theory that carnival is transgressive. In this double negative way, Pugh perhaps unintentionally agrees with me that Confederacy does not fit Bakhtin's theory of carnival.

On a practical level one can see the effect of this implicit rejection: Pugh agrees that the end of the book holds up the theme of rebirth and renewal. He just skips over the fact that that theme supports Fraser's theory of carnival. Thanks Tison!

ELC Theory, Part 2: Humor as a Pro-social Selection Mechanism

This entry I call part two of my evolutionary literary criticism (ELC) series. It could also be entitled "Buried in the Endnotes, part 2," or even the "Theory of Humor Series, part 25." As part of the Theory of Humor Series, it is perhaps my most important entry.

In my new paper, just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I briefly lay out a theory of humor (for a summary, see my blog entry Theory of Humor, part 9). I end the discussion by noting the possible evolutionary function of the social dimension of humor. "Here is what I say in the text: "This social aspect of humor suggests a path for the evolution of laughter and humor as a mechanism for the maintenance of pro-social behavior in our species." Here is the endnote (enhanced with full citations and paragraph breaks):

Human laughter and humor evolved from the pant-hoots that other primates utter during youthful mock aggression. Some theories about this evolution are part of the effort to explain why humans can be altruistic despite our selfish genes. A proposal by Gervais and Wilson comes from “multilevel selection theory.” In that theory, human groups use low-cost social mechanisms for promoting altruistic behavior, and humor is one such low-cost mechanism. See Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter and Humor: A Synthetic Approach,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 80 (2005): 395-430.

Another evolutionary theory is that of the altruistic punisher. An altruistic punisher is a group member who, through personal cost, enforces group cooperation. Other group members then must support and compensate this punisher in order for the dynamic to be evolutionarily stable. William Flesch describes a theory of tragic heroes as altruistic punishers in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). In comedy, both the group member who uses humor to lower the status of other group members and the comic role of the trickster can be seen as altruistic punishers, and the laughter provoked by their efforts can be seen as second order support for them.

These two theories, multilevel selection theory and altruistic punishment, are not incompatible.

The question of altruism was also part of the early discussions of humor; Hutcheson criticized Hobbes for basing his worldview on selfishness, “Now natural affections and kind instincts are banished from philosophy,” in Francis Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter (Glasgow: Baxter, 1750, but originally published serially in 1726), p. 7.

Hurley, Dennett, and Adams use an evolutionary framework for their theory, but they neglect the social function of humor to their detriment. See Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams. Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Not only do I argue for the pro-social evolutionary function of humor, but I show how even in the early 18th century that altruistic aspect of humor was recognized by Hutcheson in rebuttal to Thomas Hobbes. This observation comes under the category of evolutionary literary criticism or evolutionary narratology.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 1: Freud's two theories of humor

This entry could also be entitled the Theory of Humor Series, part 24.

This blog post serves two purposes. First, because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. Second, the idea discussed here was actually someone else's idea, and I did not properly attribute the idea in the paper.

In my new paper, just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I mention Freud's "first theory of humor." In the endnote I explain that Freud over his long career had come up with two contradictory theories of humor. Here is the endnote:

Freud’s first theory of humor, originally published in 1905, deals with the release of desires from the id that were forbidden by the superego, and it is found in Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Norton, 1963). His second theory of humor, originally published in 1928, sees humor as a tool used by the superego to help the ego deal with stress. See Sigmund Freud, “On Humour,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v. 21, ed. Anna Freud and James Strachey. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 160-166.

Freud's first theory of humor is well known, as it had an entire book devoted to it, and it was published early in his career. But he did have a second one, which gives an entirely different explanation for humor. I would argue that my own theory of humor is simpler and can accommodate both of them.

Further point: Sometimes scholars will fail to give credit to the source through which they came upon a fact or idea. I may learn of a fact from a text, let's call it B. B cited the original source, let's call it A. When I publish the fact in my own paper, let's call it C, I may cite its origin in A without mentioning that I learned of it from B.

An example of bypassing attribution can be found in the biography of Isaac Newton. He first developed infinitesimal calculus using concepts and techniques from Rene Descartes's algebraic geometry. But when he went to publish, Descartes had a reputation for atheism, so Newton restructured the proofs of the fundamental components of calculus using the more awkward classical geometry. Descartes's influence was erased from the proofs.

With regard to Freud's two theories, I also made a bypass. I learned of the two theories from the book Bevis, Matthew. Comedy: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2013. I did not even include that book in my bibliography. Instead, I cited the original texts by Freud. This omission is worse than failing to show the path of the idea. Noticing that Freud had two theories may have been an original observation by Bevis. My apologies to Matthew Bevis for not crediting him for the idea. He does deserve the credit (unless he took it unattributed from someone else).

Theology and Geometry: the First Half of the Book

In order to correct my own chapter, I was given galley proofs of the entire book, Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, ISBN: 978-1-4985-8547-7, which is due out on February 15th. So I have been slowly reading the rest of the book, admittedly not in its final form, and I am about halfway through.

Among the essays in the first half of the book, the one that succeeded the most in getting me to think differently about Confederacy was the essay by Kenneth McIntyre which is called "Amusingness Forced to Figure Itself Out." He argues that Ignatius can be viewed as an aesthete in the Kirekegaardian philosophical framework. That view of Ignatius is very productive, and I like it.

I would add as an observation that Ignatius might also be seen as an aesthete in the Walter Pater school of aesthetics. In terms of actual influences, in the Toole archives there is evidence that Ken Toole studied the Romantics and subsequent philosophers and artists extensively. There is no evidence that he studied Kierkegaard (though of course an absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence). Toole was influenced by Percy, and Percy was clearly a student of Kierkegaard, so perhaps Toole was directly or indirectly influenced by Kierkegaard. However, Kierkegaard was influenced by the 19th century aesthetics movement, so I think it more likely that Toole and Kierkegaard were both influenced by the same school of ideas. (I know that talking actual influence is intellectually gauche, or even sinister, but my wife is left-handed, so that's okay.)

That having been said, McIntyre has mined a rich vein of ideas in his essay. Kudos.

PS. The pre-order ranking of Theology on Amazon is still at about two million, so the excitement is not building, alas.

Retinal detachment and Theology and Geometry

I had a retinal detachment about a month ago. This is a minimal blog post to let you know I am still kicking.

Fortunately, despite my vision problems, I was able to check the galley proofs of my book chapter for the upcoming collection: Theology and Geometry, edited by Leslie Marsh. The ISBN will be: 978-1-4985-8547-7. The price is a whopping $90.00 even on Amazon. My apologies for the price, but they may have to break even on just a few sales. (IMHO). I pre-ordered a copy on Amazon, and I may have driven the Amazon ranking down to about two million. If someone else pre-orders, we might get it down below one million. Eat your heart out, Harold Bloom.

The Amazon URL for the book is: Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces