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.