An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 2: Language as Foundation of Human Relations

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a series of posts reframing the ideas of Kenneth Burke within the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism. This series has little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my 2 followers.

I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter himself admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. Carter himself complained that Burke's theories were not systematic, but a bit scattered. Notwithstanding, I press on.

Chapter one of Carter's book starts off by saying that Burke believes that rhetoric is the basis of human relations and that language is a system of moral negatives. On page three, Carter writes, "Burke once suggested that the study of rhetoric might provide the basis for the study of human relations. Assuming that the dynamics of language were integral to the dynamics of human personality and human society, he sought to isolate the recurring patterns."

Personally, I believe that Burke is fundamentally incorrect in his foundations. Humans have evolved from animals that lived in groups and did not possess language. Sharif and others found that if you put two humans in a room together and give them a task, they immediately sort into a hierarchy with a leader and a follower. The phrase "pecking order" was coined to describe dominance hierarchies among chickens. Therefore, major aspects of human relations precede language.

Human social behavior is much different than many other social animals, especially social mammals, in part because we exhibit a great deal of altruistic behavior. There are not many mammals where one individual will choose to die for the benefit of the group. Sober and Wilson articulated the theory of Multilevel Selection to explain this class of phenomena. Groups have to have ways of enforcing group-level selection benefits.

Burke's identification of language as a means of transmitting moral negatives works well with this theory of group selection. The moral negative often punishes selfish behavior that would put the individual above the group. Language allows for the coordination of pro-social behaviors that counter-action the pressure of selection for individual benefit.

My point is that Burke saw something important, but he inflated it. Language and rhetoric is not the basis of human relations, as he hypothesized, but it is the crucial medium through which mechanisms that promote altruistic behavior can operate. Language itself is not the basis for human relations, but it is an important component of the system that allows humans a range of behavior not found among other social animals.

Once again, my point is that Burke's language-centered philosophy can be reframed in terms of evolutionary psychology and multilevel selection theory.

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Open Access copy of Dialectic of American Humanism

In the middle of 2021, I noticed that EBSCO had removed my Renascence article called "The Dialectic of American Humanism," from their library database called Academic Search Premier.

A while ago, I contacted the editors of Renascence, asking them if I could post a copy of my article in a repository such as ResearchGate. They said that I could post a version of it so long as it did not display their exact formating and layout. I could post a version with the exact text including indications of page breaks, but I could not scan the article and post the exact image of it as it was published in the journal.

After I learned this fact, I still did not post my own copy of the article out of respect for the journal. They do sell a copy for $20 on the Philosophy Documentation Center. I did not want to eliminate their ability to generate revenue on intellectual property. I disagree with the business model of the Internet in which companies give away intellectual property and make money by selling user data to third parties. (Yes, I realize that having this statement on Google's Blogger platform makes me a hypocrite.) Part of the reason Facebook needs to provoke people into hating each other is because they need to generate revenue when their business model does not allow them to charge a fair price for their software, such as What's App.

When EBSCO took down my article, however, colleagues on my own campus could not access a version of it. Therefore, I have decided to post a word processor output of the article on ResearchGate. You can now download the article The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 1: Introduction, Mentalese

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD, published in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. This post starts another series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

In 2020, I was reading Barbara Foley's Wrestling with the Left, which investigates the leftist origins of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In that book, Foley discusses and then uses Kenneth Burke's theory of the dual nature of the scapegoat in ritual, myth, and literature. I thought about writing a single blog entry reinterpreting Burke's theory of the scapegoat in terms of ELC, but as I study Burke more, I believe that I can write a series of entries reframing several of Burke's ideas within the ELC context. This entry begins the series.

NOTE: In the discussion below, I use the convention that the brain is the physical hardware (okay, wetware), and the mind is, roughly, the operating system running in the brain. Steven Pinker wrote a book called How the Mind Works, not How the Brain Works. But the mind cannot do things that the brain does not allow.

Burke's writings are voluminous enough and complex enough to devote a lifetime to teasing out every aspect of his theories and reframing them. I will not devote that much time to the effort, so this series will necessarily lack the scholarly rigor and thoroughness to which I would like to give it. I am heavily relying on C. Allen Carter's book about Burke for this series (below). Hopefully, Carter's interpretation of Burke is a fair one. One aspect of Burke that Foley explores and which Carter does not is his early involvement with communism.

For this first entry, I focus on what I consider to be Burke's position on language in the human mind, which I consider to be foundational to his philosophical outlook. Kenneth Burke is part of a philosophical school that says that all human thoughts worth discussing are handled and stored in the medium of a human language. He acknowledges non-human animals can think and behave, but that the human mind is fundamentally different because we have adopted narrative as a framework for our thinking, and it is a narrative in a human language inside of the mind. Further, that language begins with a moral negative. As C. Allen Carter explains, "According to Burke, the language system evolved as a system of moral negatives that gives rise to guilt. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word said, 'Thou Shalt Not!'" (Carter, 3).

Steven Pinker is one of the major theorists of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), upon which ELC is built. It is not necessary for every advocate of EP to embrace all of the ideas of Steven Pinker, but his approach to how the mind works is an important voice in the field. In that way, I consider any theory of Pinker's to be practically a tenet of EP.

Pinker has argued persuasively that the thoughts within the human brain are not in a human language. Pinker calls the native medium of thought within the brain mentalese. Language is a encryption technique for communicating information between two human minds, not the medium within the brain for handling thoughts. The brain has structures for translating internal thoughts into statements in language. It is literally possible to be at a loss for words.

Pinker is an expert on how the brain processes and constructs linguistic utterances; it is not wise to pick a fight with Pinker over the neurology of linguistic processing. In his most famous book, The Language Instinct, he showed how the abstract universal grammar of Noam Chomsky is implemented within the living mind. He further argues that our ability to adopt a language with a Chomskian structure is instinctual and is built into the human brain. It evolved.

Burke is your typical philosopher, which I mean in a negative way. He takes an interesting idea and universalizes it. Instead of saying that moral reasoning is important, he says that moral reasoning and language are the same thing, and that they are the basis of all human thought. Give him an inch, and he takes the universe. Burke has many valuable ideas, but he supersizes them until they form almost a cult religion. Pinker, by contrast, is well-grounded to evidence coming from neuroscience labs, and in a fair debate, Pinker would tear Burke to pieces.

The reason I have dedicated a series to Burke, though, is because Burke does have many good ideas, and they can be productively reframed within the context of evolutionary literary criticism. Until next time ...

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Foley, Barbara. Wrestling with the left: the making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

ELC Saunders #4, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number four regarding this book.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Five: Maladaptive Behavior and Auctorial Design: Huck Finn's Pap

Saunders persuasively makes the argument that Twain helps demonize the institution of slavery in the novel Huck Finn by associating it with the evil character of Huck's father. The story shows that Pap is a bad person in part by showing that he acts contrary to natural parental instincts.

For all animals, including humans, it is in an animal's evolutionary self-interest to invest in its children. Parental caring (especially maternal caring) is hardwired into the brain. The human heart usually quickens at the proverbial story of the mother bear who is willing to risk her own life to guard her cubs. Exploiting your own children and lessening their chances of their own reproductive success is therefore unnatural.

Saunders shows that Twain portrays Pap, the only character deeply committed to slavery and the systematic oppression of blacks, as an unnatural father. Pap tries to steal from Huck, he beats him, and he kidnaps and threatens to kill him. Pap seems to want Huck's money to drink and gamble it away. Saunders makes a strong case that Twain's subtext is that slavery is just as unnatural as Pap's dysfunctional fatherhood.

However, the psychological situation of Pap could be more complicated than Twain lets on. A similar situation is occurring in the politics of the United States today. Poor whites seem to be voting against their economic interests by voting for conservative politicians who implement policies hostile to the immediate interests of the poor. I suspect that those working class whites know their long-term interests better than pundits think they do.

To illustrate the issue, we can modify the story of Huck and Pap. If Pap had many children, and he ran a small business, and if Huck was about to take his money and education and join the interests of larger economic players in the society who threaten to crush Pap's business, say by working for the town bank, then it might be in Pap's evolutionary interests to keep Huck down. Although this scenario is very different from the novel, my point is to show that a parent lowering the potential reproductive success of one child might not be unnatural. Likewise, a group of people on welfare do not necessarily vote against their long-term interests by voting for a politician who cuts funding for welfare. The immediate action may be part of a larger pattern that is in their self-interest.

Saunders's observation is accurate: Twain does seem to portray Pap as unnatural and to link that unnatural behavior to his racism. My point above is that Twain may have been simplifying the portrayal of Pap, both with regard to his parental behavior and with regard to his social and political values.

ELC Saunders #3, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number three.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Two: Nepotism in Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux'

This chapter is a solid contribution to the scholarship on this story. When I first read the story, I did not understand it, and this paper allowed me to grasp the story's meaning better. That having been said, I did not find this discussion as eye-opening as the chapters on Wharton and Franklin (discussed in previous blog entries). Further, I do not think that Hawthorne's protagonist's behavior was plausible in an evolutionary sense, which was part of the reason I could not understand the story when I read it years ago.

The basic plot of the story is that a man arrives in a New England village looking for his relative. The relative is a British military officer who controls the political establishment of the town. The protagonist is repeatedly surprised and offended because the townspeople treat him rudely and are not helpful. Because he is related to a powerful person, he expects them to be deferential. At the end of the story, he discovers that, just that night, the revolutionaries had attacked the Major and overthrown his government. The story ends with the sight of the Major tarred and feathered and paraded out of town. Years ago, I was confused by the fact that the protagonist explodes in laughter at the end of the story. Now that I know more about humor, it makes at least a little more sense.

A humorous event is often structured in a way that there are two interpretations of the beginning of the event. The initially dominant interpretation is revealed to be incorrect, and the secondary interpretation quickly reveals itself to be the correct one. A joke often leads by offering an interpretation of a situation; then the punchline reveals the misinterpretation. So, for the statement, "I've had the most wonderful evening, but this wasn't it," the listener is led to believe that the statement is a compliment, only to have the last four words reverse the interpretation. And humor often has an element of social tension that is released in the resolution.

This Hawthorne story is structured like a humorous event: the protagonist cannot understand the behavior of the townspeople until he discovers the overthrow of his relative's power. In a rush, their behavior all makes sense. And there is an aspect of social tension released. Had the Major continued to be in power, the rudeness of the townspeople would not have made sense politically. Because he is gone, their rudeness makes perfect sense. Saunders argues that this political calculation would follow evolutionary logic.

Personally, I think that the protagonist would not have laughed; rather, he should have been fearful for his life. Had the townspeople thought that the protagonist could have reversed his kinsman's fortunes, they might have killed him. The leaders of the French Revolution did not kill the aristocracy en masse until they feared that other monarchies, sending armies to France, might restore the king and the nobility to power. The Hutus did not genocide the Tutsis in Rwanda until they thought that Paul Kigame's army would win the war. The Turks genocided the Armenians in part because they perceived the Armenians as allies of their enemies, the Russians.

In this story, the protagonist seems to join the revolutionaries, so for now, he is safe. In the immediate resolution of the incongruity, laughter is appropriate. While a person such as the protagonist actually might have been in danger, Hawthorne was writing a patriotic story with a positive overtone. If he had added a more realistic hint of murder or genocide, he would have ruined the subtext he was attempting. Nevertheless, in an actual situation like this, the protagonist might have been in as much danger as a child with an evil stepmother.

Digital John Kennedy Toole Papers, Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

I recently learned that the Louisiana Research Center at Tulane University began digitizing the John Kennedy Toole papers back in 2016. Why, back in 2009, I spent an entire week digging through the Toole Papers in person and compiled 42 handwritten pages of notes on its contents (Naturally, in a blizzard, and it was uphill both ways).

When I first heard the news of the digitization, I thought, hey, now no one has to camp out in the Tulane archives. But after some searching, I have decided that the digital project does not make the papers as findable as one might suppose. If you find something online through the digital collection, great, use it. But if you do not find something by searching the digital collection, do not conclude that it is not there. You might just have been unable to find it.

I would give you the URL to the digital collection, but if you go to it, the search engine for the collection is not that good, and you will not find much. I went to the website and conducted several searchs including: a) Lumiansky, b) Coleridge, and c) Theseus. The website's search engine failed to find anything for those three searches. And they are important terms to understanding Toole.

A better way is just to use Google. If you search Google, use this template: tulane john kennedy toole digital [keyword]. By plugging in to the keyword slot a) Lumiansky, you get one good hit. You also get one good hit with b) Coleridge. You get no hits for c) Theseus, even though Toole wrote in an assignment in Prof. Lumiansky's class: "Egens’ [Egeus’s] philosophy is notably Boethian and is not out of context in The Knight’s Tale. After the lists have resulted in almost double tragedy he, as Theseus’ father, attempts to make some ‘consolation’ by suggesting that these events must be accepted. The thread of Boethian runs throughout this tale."

So the new digital collection is better than nothing, but it is no substitute for spending a week at the archives looking through the boxes (so there!).

Invisible Man and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 28

I must confess that my go-to move in literary criticism is to take one work and compare it to another. In particular, I have frequently argued that an earlier work had been read by the author of a later work. That later author was then influenced by the earlier work. Many theorists of literary criticism reject this practice, and this rejection is related to the prohibition on the practice of arguing that something is present in a work because the author intended it to be there.

I recently studied Ralph Ellison's celebrated novel Invisible Man. In addition to attending to the text, I tried to read some of the criticism about it. That is an imposing task: Invisible Man holds the distinction of being the work of African American literature most studied by scholars. Indeed, Ellison spent much of the rest of his career commenting on the book himself and framing the terms of its interpretation. While I am not sure I have much to add, I thought I could weigh in with a comparison to Confederacy (naturally).

Unlike some of my comparisons, I do not claim that Toole was influenced by Invisible Man. (In point of fact, nowhere in the Toole Papers is Ellison or his work mentioned.) Instead, I would argue that Toole and Ellison were both influenced by the ideas of the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropology, the heirs to the ritual ideas contained in James Frazer's Golden Bough. Ellison, in his writings, was quite clear about the influence, citing T.S. Eliot and James Joyce as literary ancestors. He was also friends with Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was a leading critic familiar with that school.

Minor Parallels: During the section of Invisible Man where the invisible man (unnamed) disguises himself to look like Rinehart, he wears dark glasses in the nighttime. He can barely see, and what he does see has a green hue. In Confederacy, Burma Jones always wears dark glasses and can barely see. Confederacy has an entire theme of green (Ignatius's cap is green, Trixie's visor is green). What is the meaning of the green in each text?

Workplace Disasters: Both the invisible man and Ignatius are sources of disaster in the workplace. For the invisible man, when he chauffers a trustee and takes him to a brothel, he gets expelled from college, and on his first day of work at the paint factory, he manages to blow the place up. He is effective in his role as an inspirational speaker within the Brotherhood, but once he is alienated from the Brotherhood, he tries to sabotage it, and Harlem ends up in a race riot and conflagration.

Ignatius is also a source of disasters, though they are more minor and comic. At Levy Pants, he tries to foment an uprising of black workers, which fails. He eats nearly all of his hotdogs as a weenie vendor. His false letter at Levy Pants nearly gets Gus sued, but then allows him to stand up to his wife. The invisible man's failures are catastrophic and do not lead to improved relations within local social groups, while Ignatius's failures are comic, and they allow for changes in the local social order which improve the lives of other characters.

Wheels of History, and Cycles within Cycles: When the invisible man discusses with his colleague Hambro the Brotherhood's decision to sacrifice their position in Harlem, he says, "You mean the brakes must be put on the old wheel of history ... Or is it the little wheels within the wheel?" (chapter 23, page varies among editions). Related to that, the invisible man rejects the Brotherhood's view of a spiral of historical progress in favor of a theory of the boomerang of history: history is not progressive but cyclical, and it can whack you in the head.

In Confederacy, Ignatius sees himself being spun on Fortuna's wheel, but there are wheels within wheels. He writes: "So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible." (1980 edition, p. 66). Ignatius sees history as rising and falling on the wheel of Fortuna. Related to these metaphors, both the invisible man and Ignatius reject leftist politics. This feature is so specific and so central to the meaning of each novel, if there was an actual influence by Ellison on Toole's thinking, it is here.

Boethius: Ellison even alludes to Boethius when he describes the musical tradition of the blues. In an essay first published in 1945 (Antioch Review 3.2, reprinted in Shadow and Act), Ellison writes that the source of the blues "is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." Not by The Consolation of Philosophy. By comparison, within Confederacy, we do not have to go far to have Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy hit us in the head (sometimes literally).

Novelistic Style: Both Invisible Man and Confederacy reference many other works of literature and authors. Invisible Man employs a dark, existentialist humor, while Confederacy's humor is a farce in the much more straightforward, Greek New Comedy style. Barbara Foley, in her study Wrestling with the Left, observes that in the Invisible Man "the invisible man is launched into his career as the protagonist of a half-picaresque, half-bildungsroman memoir" (157). This description could be applied to Ignatius in Confederacy, except in the case of Ignatius one might question whether there is any Bildung going on.

Observing from the Periphery: The invisible man in Invisible Man ends up outside of history, writing his account from a well-lit hideaway in New York City. Ignatius Reilly also sees himself as being on the edge of his society looking from that edge inward to criticize it.

Much Deeper Connections: The invisible man is an example of the sacrificial god-king from Frazer's Golden Bough. Ignatius Reilly is a carnival / saturnalian Lord of Misrule, which is a comic and carnival scapegoat version of that dying and resurrected god.

Thesis: Compare Invisible Man and A Confederacy of Dunces. Their authors both drew on a Cambridge School tradition of meaning. I have found a lot, and there is a lot more to uncover.

ELC Theory, part 3: Evolutionary Psychology Predicts Its Own Marginalization

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a new series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

Evolutionary Psychology (EP), the basis of ELC, has a problem with itself. In particular, Multilevel Selection Theory posits that humans have evolved mechanisms that promote and enforce group selection. For example, leaders can inspire followers to die for a cause. The followers may individually fail to reproduce, but the group that contains those followers may out-compete groups where followers did not die for their causes.

Toward this effort, irrational loyalty to the ideology of the group can be an important pro-group mechanism. The irrational loyalty could be to a religious ideal (kill the infidels), to a nation (for Mother Russia), political ideals (give me liberty or give me death), racism (master race, anyone?), or a number of other causes. I have heard it said that much of the motivation for soldiers to sacrifice is for their fellow siblings-in-arms (pronouns to be determined). Henri Tajfel showed that members of even arbitrary groups display strong group loyalty, so just identifying an arbitrary Us as opposed to an arbitrary Them can get the pro-group juices flowing.

Framing all actions in a rational framework of selection and reproduction, however, throws cold water on the ardor of group loyalty, in much the same way that students trained in modern economic theory tend to be more selfish and less altruistic in their personal lives than the average person. In this way, Evolutionary Psychology itself is a bad ideological mechanism for pro-group loyalty. It should come as no surprise that activists, those trying to rouse others to action that may cost them individually, to fight to the death as it were, are likely to reject EP. Therefore, EP predicts its own rejection because it does not provide a selective advantage.

In last month's blog entry, I discuss Judith Saunders's essay on Benjamin Franklin. Franklin in his autobiography was quite candid about using pro-social behaviors to advance his own personal worldly success. He was disparaged by 19th century intellectuals as a philistine. The rejection of Franklin is very much of a piece with the rejection of evolutionary psychology and, with it, evolutionary literary criticism.

ELC Saunders #2, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number two.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Saunders's essay on The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin does an excellent job of showing that Franklin taught readers how to be pro-social in a sense of David Sloan Wilson's Multilevel Selection Theory. Franklin has been criticized for seeing no contradiction between gaining wealth and gaining in virtue. One of his saving qualities is the fact that he is so open about his goals and self-deprecating in his candid grasping for worldly success that one cannot accuse him of being underhanded.

Saunders makes a good point that the Franklin system might not work in an economy that is not growing at an exponential rate. In a booming, exponential economy, a reputation for being an honest partner in transations is highly valued and bullying is easily punished by shunning in the market. Franklin's somewhat fictionalized personal story shows his readers how to be evolutionarily successful in a burgeoning industrial economy.

Should one want to study Franklin further in this regard, I would recommend the book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood. Wood does a good job of explaining the social context of Franklin's behavior, in particular why so many Americans of the middling classes in the early Republic idealized him and why many of his contemporaries of the intellectual and elite classes hated him. If you want to be a Romantic who celebrates genius and who stands on a crag staring into the howling wind and fancies yourself to be noble, Franklin is a bounding philistine. The Romantics hated the American cultural values of working hard to amass wealth, so hating Franklin was a way for them to hate the goals common among average Americans in the early 19th century.

To bring this last observation full circle into a discussion of A Confederacy of Dunces, one could point out that Ignatius Reilly can be seen as a parody of such a Romantic genius. He rebels against the idea of being a hard-working young man.

ELC Saunders #1, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. I begin here a short series of entries commenting on a recent monograph in the field, which is:

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

Saunders' collection of essays does not begin with a theory chapter, which I find unfortunate. Saunders does not lay out her framework for analysis. If one spends too much time on theory, one may never get around to applying it, but this volume has the opposite problem. For those who would like to read this book but who are new to evolutionary psychology, I would recommend The Evolution of Desire by David Buss. Buss explores the evolutionary selection pressures on intimate relationships, a common topic in literature. Saunders relies heavily on Buss's text, as her footnotes demonstrate.

I do have to say, I like this collection. My own ELC studies often focus too narrowly on a small set of concepts, such as the heroic altruistic punisher. Saunders studies a wider range of literature than I have, and she applies a wider range of concepts. Kudos.

This month's discussion: In chapter six of the book, Saunders demonstrates that Edith Wharton repeatedly used the theme of competitive female sexual strategies. I have not applied that concept before, and I have read enough Wharton that I could have seen it myself. Briefly, women will try to foil female rivals who are competing for the same men.

The drive to do so may be irrational: the woman who does the sabatoging may herself be infertile, and her efforts may mean that the male of the story fails to reproduce at all. In Ethan Frome, Zeena prevents her husband from starting a relationship with Mattie, even though Zeena seems incapable of having children, while Mattie is described in terms that suggest that she is fertile. Applied to Ethan Frome and other Wharton texts, Saunder's analysis based on female sexual strategy is, if I may say, fruitful.

Ignatius as a Person Being Laughed at

You could call this the second in my series on "the lack of humor in Confederacy."

When I first started doing research on A Confederacy of Dunces, I trudged through all of the Amazon reviews of the book, to see if anyone there had already put forward my ideas about Chaucer's influence on Toole. One of the approximately one thousand reviews argued passionately that Ignatius Reilly was clearly a person with a mental illness. To that reviewer, the book was an extended exercise in laughing at a mentally ill person and his misfortune. Shame on all of us. This perspective is similar to Patteson and Sauret's third Ignatius, as I described in my blog entry of September 1, 2020.

Recently, I had an email exchange with Ron Bell, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Confederacy. He mentioned that he does not find the book funny; rather, he sees it as tragic, and because of that, as well as some other reasons, he argues that Toole himself was a nihilist. While I disagree with his overall argument about nihilism, I do agree with Dr. Bell that the reader is encouraged to laugh at Ignatius. Ignatius is ridiculed and expelled from his community, one step ahead of the guys with the straitjackets. To me, the story would be tragic if he were caught and committed, but he is a slapstick hero who, though humiliated, has escaped to bluster another day.

Toole makes Ignatius just preposterous and difficult enough that we join in the laughter at his expense, but as Patteson and Seurat argue, there are three versions of Ignatius. The first is the crusader for theology and geometry, which is how Ignatius describes himself. Then there is the pompous fool, as portrayed by the narrator. But there is a third Ignatius who is emotionally vulnerable and pitiable. Seen from Ignatius's private point of view, as someone who is hiding from the humiliations of the world, one could read Confederacy and not find it funny.

Special Edition: Bissell's Take on Confederacy

Just this past Tuesday, January 5, 2021, The New Yorker magazine posted on their website an essay on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces entitled The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces. It was in their column "Second Readings," and it situated Confederacy within our present political moment. I would like to share my own thoughts about the essay.

The article points out, correctly, that Ignatius J. Reilly is extremely reactionary in his politics. He doesn't want to take our culture back to the 1950s, he wants to take it back to the 1350s. The article ends by stating that Ignatius was not an anachronism but a prediction, "the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all."

It is certainly true that Ignatius is such a reactionary. Nevertheless, I feel that the narrator makes it abundantly clear that Ignatius's views are being ridiculed in the book. Ignatius is a carnival demon who stirs up chaos, but who is then expelled from the community as it puts itself back together. But there is some question as to what the real-world political implications are even for a fictional position that is being ridiculed. Further, although Ignatius's position is ridiculed, he successfully criticizes the liberal values and institutions of the modern world. The book is, as McNeil said, a reverse satire. Modernity is satirized, but then the position of the satirist is satirized. That having been said, it is rare in literature for modern life to be critiqued not from the left but from the far right.

I feel that Toole's own position was supporting the center, as Bissell himself opines. The part of the ending that is positive is the story of the Jewish factory owner who ends his alienation and rededicates himself to his company. When he does so, he hires the book's Black character. His epiphany occurs when he watches a barge full of tractors being shipped from New Orleans to Liberia. Not exactly a 4chan ending.

In the book, Ignatius is friends with a would-be leftist revolutionary, Myrna Minkoff. They both attack the dominant social order, but from different directions. An interesting parallel in our contemporary society is the fact that the far-right will take ideas and tactics from the left. Trump in 2016 did exactly what Bernie Sanders had envisioned: he activated citizens who were not typically voters. The pollsters got the election wrong because they had not counted votes from this normally alienated demographic group. And many of those voters had Bernie Sanders as their second choice behind Trump. In Confederacy, Myrna's leftist position is portrayed as just as ridiculous as Ignatius's theological authoritarianism. Just as Stephen Jay Gould slammed the thinkers on the Darwinian right by equating them with creationists, Toole slams the radicals on the left by equating them with an advocate for the divine right of kings.

Bissell quotes Rosenbaum's statement that "a fair amount of the author's ridicule and venom is reserved for female liberals and liberationists." I think that is a fair statement. The two blocking characters other than Ignatius whose social status is knocked down in the novel are women: Lana Lee and Mrs. Levy. Mrs. Levy especially is the rich liberal whose well-meaning foolishness causes problems. Lana Lee is the strong, sexually assertive, independent businesswoman, and in the end, she is a corrupter of children who is condemned to a purgatory in jail. Myrna for her part is foolish, but she is actually a decent person, just obtuse. Her schemes fail, but they fail in much the same way that Ignatius's schemes fail. Regarding feminism, the criticism of the book is well-placed.

With regard to the feminine, the critical role played by Southern women in the publishing history of the book is noteworthy. Ken Toole's mother, Thelma, was essential to publication, because she salvaged it and championed it. I have elsewhere argued that because she decided to destroy the later revisions and submit the first draft, her editorial power almost raises her to a level of co-author. (For more details, see Ken and Thelma by Joel Fletcher.) Next, the person at Simon and Schuster who promoted the book was Jean Ann Jollett, the editorial assistant who brought the book to the attention of Robert Gottlieb. (For more details, see Ken and Thelma by Joel Fletcher and Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin.) Third in this chain was Bunt Percy. Thelma may have cornered Walker Percy and demanded that he read the manuscript, but he didn't. Instead, he gave it to his wife, Bunt, and he read it only after she endorsed it. (This is recounted in Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin.) So feminists may come out poorly in the novel, but the text was brought to us by women, and, in particular, Southern women.

One overriding character trait of Ignatius is his immaturity, and one can argue that it is a characteristic shared by the trolls and edgelords within our society. Trump himself seems to be borderline mentally ill in his immature narcissism. He seems unable to understand that the outside world exists. "Being true" in his mind is not being factually accurate to the external world but being loyal to himself. The question is: can we get him into that white Renault and pack him off to New York?

Mad Men's Michael Ginsberg and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 27

In episode two of season seven of the TV show Mad Men, the character Michael Ginsberg walks into an elevator wearing Ignatius Reilly's trademark hunting cap with large ear flaps. He is with Peggy Olson and Stan Rizzo. That scene takes place on Valentine's Day, and he tells Stan that Peggy's calendar says she will be masturbating gloomily. Hmmm. A reference to Confederacy?? What could be more like Ignatius than to masturbate gloomily? (Unrelated to the Ignatius connection, the cap has a button on it that says, "Nixon was Rosemary's Baby.")

In previous episodes, Ginberg starts to look gradually like Ignatius Reilly. He grows a bushy moustache. His clothes gradually become disheveled. Let's go over the ways in which Ginsberg seems to conform to the Ignatius reference and the ways in which the two diverge.

Parallels: Ignatius rails about the evils of the modern office and modern technology and about how modern technology might drive him insane. Ginsberg eventually has a psychotic break after the creative zone of the office suite is replaced by a large computer room. Ignatius is suspected by others, especially Myrna, of having homosexual tendencies. Ginsberg is afraid that the computer is causing him to become a homosexual. He sees Lou and Cutler talking in the computer room and decides that they are homosexuals and that the computer has caused them to commit unnatural acts.

Ignatius is obsessed with his pyloric valve, seeing it as an independent agent, a Cassandra which tells him things. Ginsberg believes that the computer hum in the office is causing pressure to build up in his body which has to be released, so he cuts off one of his own nipples to let the pressure out. At the end of Confederacy, Ignatius barely escapes commitment to a mental hospital. In Ginsberg's last scene he is hauled off to a mental hospital, shouting to Peggy, "Get out while you still can!" Finally, John Kennedy Toole taught for a brief period at Hunter College in New York before he wrote Confederacy, and Michael goes on a date in an earlier episode with a young woman who was graduating from Hunter. Although Confederacy was published at the end of the 1970s, it was largely written in 1963, so it is a period piece of the 1960s, and Mad Men tries to recreate the 1960s.

Differences: First, Ginsberg is actually productive at his job and talented. He is a bit of an eccentric genius; Ignatius only thinks he is a genius. Second, Ginsberg seems to have a genuine psychotic break, whereas Ignatius is more of a picaro, trickster, or fool. Third, the religions are reversed for the characters: Michael is Jewish and Peggy is Catholic, whereas Ignatius is Catholic and Myrna is Jewish. Fourth, Ignatius is a mama's boy, while Michael has no mother. He was born in a concentration camp where his mother died.

More central to the characters, Ignatius's grotesque qualities are important, whereas such qualities are not central to Ginsberg. In my paper "The Dialectic of American Humanism," I show that, in Renaissance astrology, a child of Saturn could be either a genius or a beast. Ignatius sees himself as a genius, but he conforms to all of the negative, beastly qualities of a child of Saturn. Michael does not have that philosophical dichotomy.

Lauren, my wife, made the connection when she saw Ginsberg in the elevator, and she deserves credit for this insight. We have been watching the TV show Mad Men (2007-2015) on DVD. (I highly recommend all of the audio commentaries with Matt Weiner, the creator and auteur of the show.) Thanks, Lauren! oxoxox

I normally like to leave a lot of potential detail out of items in this series, so that you, dear reader, can explore them. However, with COVID-19 stalking the land, I think I will lay out my cards just to prove that I was holding some cards. This item is substantial enough that I thought about sending it to Notes on Contemporary Literature.

Thesis: Compare the Michael Ginsberg character with Ignatius Reilly. IMHO, the likelihood of an intentional reference by Weiner and his team is about ninety percent.