Although I have used this blog to discuss topics beyond the novel
A Confederacy of Dunces (
Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole, I like to post at least one entry each year on that topic. Here is this year's entry.
During 2018, I started adding entries to this blog related to Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which might be defined as the application of evolutionary psychology to literary analysis. I have been tinkering with both the theory and practice of such criticism. An example might be my entry from August, 2019. In that entry, I compared the theory of Freudian repression with the theory of Multilevel Selection. I used as an example the novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
It has occurred to me that if I apply ELC to any novel, I should at least subject Toole's Confederacy to this analytical approach. Below is my attempt at an ELC study of Confederacy. One conclusion from this exercise: evolutionary literary criticism does not supersede or negate other forms of literary criticism. This analysis does not replace my other articles about this novel.
General Observations
As I said in my "Dialectic" paper (citations below): Confederacy is on its surface a farce about life on the edge of respectability in New Orleans. Its main character, Ignatius Jacques Reilly, is a lazy, haughty, and clumsy thirty-year-old who has pushed his widowed mother, Irene, to the edge of financial ruin and who maintains a correspondence with an eccentric and difficult young woman, Myrna Minkoff, in New York.
As I further argued in "Dialectic", Confederacy directly satirizes both our modern, liberal, consumerist society and Ignatius's version of a Neoplatonic alternative to it. It also indirectly satirizes a more leftist critique of liberal society through Myrna. Because its slapstick lands blows against liberals and leftists, it is sometimes viewed as conservative in its outlook; however, conservatives do not escape its mockery. My claim in "Dialectic" is that the novel rejects both traditional, religious humanism and modern, secular humanism and points toward a synthesis of them.
For a quick list of other characters: Angelo Mancuso is a luckless police officer who tries to arrest Ignatius. Claude Robicaux is a law-abiding, widowed grandfather whom Angelo does arrest. Santa Battaglia, who possesses a ribald attitude and a baritone voice, is Angelo's aunt. Lana Lee is the owner of a tavern in the French Quarter; Burma Jones becomes her black janitor; and Darlene is Lana's B-Girl, who flirts with customers to encourage them to buy drinks. Gus Levy is the owner of a failing manufacturing company where Ignatius gets a job. Mrs. Levy is Gus's controlling wife. Dorian Green is a gay man who lives in the French Quarter and shares a building with a group of tough lesbians. Ignatius teams up with Dorian later in the book to start what Ignatius thinks is a political party, but which Dorian knows is just a carnival party.
In classic New Comedy style (Menander, Terence), Ignatius, Lana Lee, and Mrs. Levy are blocking characters who prevent the other characters from fully assuming proper roles within the society. Ignatius is the bumbling source of disruptions, disruptions which reorder the social relations, causing the blocking characters to lose status and allowing otherwise blocked characters to gain status. When Ignatius loses status, Irene is freed. When Mrs. Levy loses status, Gus is freed. When Lana is arrested, Darlene and Burma both have new opportunities.
Anti-Feminist Elements
One could argue that the novel is hostile to women's participation in the political and economic order. Two of the three blocking characters, Lana Lee and Mrs. Levy, are women who exercise agency. Lana Lee is a smart business woman who is assertive in her sexuality, but she hates other people and pedals pornography to children. Mrs. Levy is also anti-feminist: her influence over her husband Gus emasculates him and prevents him from engaging with his business, and she becomes a hag when she loses control over him.
Further, Irene, Darlene, Santa, and the almost-anonymous lesbians are not especially positive female characters, either. The farce allows Irene to escape her dependent but domineering son, the third blocking character, and she does gain agency, as symbolized by her bowling shoes. She then plans to marry the older, socially conservative Claude. Darlene is a stereotypic dumb blonde, nurturing but impractical. Santa is a grotesque inversion of feminine qualities, and she advocates child abuse. The lesbians who make a brief appearance are not fully formed characters and are stereotypically negative.
Myrna, the one woman with agency who is not stereotypically negative, is a fool who is easily duped by men. Her progressive ideology, which includes feminism and sexual liberation, is as much of a failure as Ignatius's advocacy for church and monarchy. When Myrna rescues Ignatius, she is again duped. He tricks her into thinking that he has reformed, when he is just looking for a physical escape as the authorities close in. In my paper "Evidence of Influences," I argue that Toole was strongly influenced by Chaucer. He may have shared Chaucer's negative attitude toward women.
Evolutionary Literary Criticism
Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discuss elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This "storytelling as adaptive" perspective relates to the philosophical framework of viewing the world as a social construct. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. This version of evolutionary literary criticism sees the story as an object within an adaptive context. This version relates to reception theory.
ELC1: So how can the major themes of the book demonstrate valid behavioral strategies within evolutionary psychology? Or how do the common themes within its genre do so?
As I argued in my book chapter "Comic Mechanisms" (citation below) humor often functions socially as a mechanism within a social group for lowering the status of an individual or subgroup, or of doing the same for members of an out-group. Laughing at a fellow group member lowers that person's standing within the group without resorting to violence. A higher-status person might use self-deprecating humor to deflect potential jealousy or in-group fighting. Mocking a social group's rivals might build courage to challenge them. Gallows humor helps lessen the debilitating dread of danger.
Confederacy is a farce about life on the edge of respectability. People of a social class that is respected by the authorities are in general much more likely to survive than those living outside and below such a social class. I believe that that is why Romeo is so desperate when he is banished in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: he is about to become a nobody in a society where nobodies are disposable. In the novel Tom Sawyer, the town boys romanticize about Huck Finn's carefree life, but a real-life Huck would have struggled to survive in a way that a real-life Tom would not.
In this novel, Irene spends her insurance money to give Ignatius a university education. Such an action is a rational parental investment in the fitness of her child. Ignatius for his part has a Romantic contempt for working hard to earn money. He portrays himself as belonging to a social class above that of respectable but hard-working people. The narrator and others show that he is instead the recipient of slapstick humiliations and is beneath respectability. Part of the value system of the city of New Orleans is to idealize the upper class and their leisure, but carnival celebrates comic inversions of the social order as well.
Confederacy features many inversions of the heroic or romantic stereotype. Ignatius is not sexually assertive, while Myrna is. Their behaviors violate Buss's Sexual Strategies Theory to comic effect (citation below). Ignatius is neither a dad nor a cad; instead, he is lazy, clumsy, and rude. However, I have commented that Ignatius's bragging letters to Myrna can be seen as a clumsy courtship display (see my blog entry from March, 2024, cited below). He may be unwittingly courting her while denying to himself that he is doing so.
Ignatius does take on the role of a trickster, though. A trickster is a saboteur. He disrupts the normal social arrangements, often trying to take advantage of others. If the current social order is unjust, a disruption might open up the possibility to improve it. If the result of the trickster's actions is an improved social group, then the trickster acts as an altruistic punisher, punishing those who had abused their social status. In this way, the otherwise comically loathsome Ignatius can be seen as heroic.
The climax of the farcical plot causes the individual fitness of several of the novel's characters to improve. Angelo catches Lana Lee's pornography ring and is promoted. The promotion might mean that his children might have better prospects, assuming that he can continue to succeed. Likewise, the denouement allows Gus to lower his wife's domineering status and rejuvenate his business. If Gus succeeds in turning his business around, and if Burma succeeds in working for him, then their life prospects both may improve. Irene might become happy with Claude and his children and grandchildren.
For his part, Ignatius escapes the psychiatric hospital by tricking Myrna. Readers not doubt cheer for him as Myrna drives him away from New Orleans to new adventures in New York.
ELC2: ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives.
The existence of Ignatius Reilly is wrapped up in stories about him. Patteson and Sauret argue that there are three Ignatius Reillys in the book (citation below). The first is the crusader against corruption. This is the story Ignatius tells to others. The second Ignatius is a selfish buffoon. That is how others, including the narrator, see him. The third Ignatius is a sensitive soul who has retreated into a world of illusion after a painful childhood. That world of illusion is a Neverland he occupies.
The first Ignatius claims to be writing a intellectual critique of modern society, but the narrator shows that the second Ignatius writes infantile texts. The first Ignatius claims that he is protecting his mother, but the narrator shows that the second Ignatius is exploiting her and manipulating her so that he doesn't have to leave home.
Ignatius loves the world of the movies, but he also loves to disparage them. The first Ignatius decries the filth of the movies, but the second happily wallows in them as he hurls insults at the screen. The third Ignatius feels safe inside the world of the dark theater.
Ignatius does fool some of the people some of the time. He writes a letter pretending to be Gus Levy which triggers threats of a lawsuit. Then he claims that an addled elderly co-worker, Miss Trixie, has written the letter. She realizes that Ignatius is helping her to retire, so she falsely confesses to writing it. Gus uses that confession both to get out of the lawsuit and to confront his wife.
Ignatius himself is fooled. He sees a pornographic picture of Lana hiding her face behind his beloved Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. He imagines that she is a beautiful Boethian scholar whom he can rescue. Burma Jones convinces him to show up at a striptease show where Ignatius unleashes chaos.
Myrna is tricked also. More than one young man seduces her by telling her stories she wants to hear. One gives her literature that she thinks is radically leftist. It turns out to have been written by the Ku Klux Klan. At the end of the book, she shows up at Ignatius's house. Ignatius convinces her that his previous letters about starting a worker's revolt and trying to found a political party for homosexuals were the products of a delusional mind. Only she can save him from his unhealthy home life. In reality, he needs to escape from the men coming to take him to the psychiatric hospital.
Is it a well-told tale? Yes and no. In overall form, it is a well-constructed farce, just as carefully built as the play "Noises Off." The symbolic system of the book, where Ignatius is connected to the astrological god Saturn (as discussed in my paper "Evidence of Influences"), is also well-executed. The book never mentions New Orleans Carnival, but that cultural tradition permeates it. In these ways, it is well-written.
However, the detailed prose is not especially good and, like the protagonist, can be downright clumsy. According to Ken Toole's friend Joel Fletcher, after Toole's suicide, his mother in her grief destroyed all the revisions of the book and published the original first draft because that was the version she preferred. Whether that is true, the writing sometimes feels like a first draft.
Confederacy can be appreciated in different ways by different audiences. For those who like slapstick, it is a rollicking farce. On a different level, it can be read as a parable of different forms of humanism. It can be read as an homage to New Orleans. There is enough gender ambiguity and sexual transgressiveness in the book, it can be read from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
ELC3: ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution.
I am of the opinion that Toole, in his own understanding of literature, belonged to a school of literary theory that had fallen out of favor by the time he was trying to publish his novel. The ideas behind his fiction fit better with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot than with Joseph Heller or William S. Burroughs. Toole's book has been seen as culturally and politically conservative--both when it was published (Miller) and in the Trump era (Bissell). It does critique leftist ideas as articulated by Myrna, putting them on a par with Ignatius's radically conservative ideas. Women do not do well in the book.
Intellectuals also do not do well in the book. Ignatius is the would-be scholar, and he is a fool who writes drivel. Toole's novel has been more popular with the reading public than with the critics, perhaps because of its belittling of academic culture. As I have noted before, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow has generated an order of magnitude more scholarly criticism than Confederacy, but today, Confederacy has an order of magnitude more sales than Gravity's Rainbow, a half-century after each was published.
As I have pointed out before, Toole had a liberal vision of the world, but not a radical or Marxist vision. When Gus realizes that Ignatius has solved his problems, he watches a ship filled with tractors heading for Liberia.
Bibliography
Bissell, Tom. "The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces" New Yorker (5 January 2021).
Buss, David M. and David P. Schmitt. "Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating." Psychological Review, 100 (1993), 204-232. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.100.2.204.
Leighton, H. Vernon. "The Dialectic of American Humanism." Renascence 64, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 201-215. doi: 10.5840/renascence201264242.
Leighton, H. Vernon. "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." In Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Edited by Leslie Marsh. (Lexington Books, 2020), pp 1-21. doi: 10.5771/9781498585484-1.
Leighton, H. Vernon. "ELC Theory, Part 1: Freudian Repression versus Multi-Level Selection." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted August 1, 2019. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2019/01/
Leighton, H. Vernon. Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer. Version 2.0. Available on ResearchGate. Dated: July 1, 2021.
Leighton, H. Vernon. "Ignatius and Jay Gatsby." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted March 1, 2024. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2024/03/
Miller, Keith D. "The Conservative Vision of John Kennedy Toole." Conference of College Teachers of English Proceedings 48 (1983): 30-34.
Patteson, Richard F., and Thomas Sauret. "The Consolation of Illusion: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." Texas Review 4, no. 1-2, (1983): 77-87.
