The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 16

Thesis #16: Toole, Homosexuality, and Carnival

There have been several critics that have investigated the theme of homosexuality and queering in Confederacy. Hardin examines several passages that can be interpreted as double ententres in the book. Pugh discusses the general queerness of the narrative, and he claims that the book "queers medievalism." (see the Other Works Cited section from my "Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Toole Research" for complete citations).

On the one hand, Toole does include gay and lesbian characters in his novel. On the other hand, gays and lesbians are negatively stereotyped in Confederacy. The lesbian characters are not even two dimensional. In my own study on Toole's use of Neoplatonism ("The Dialectic of American Humanism"), I conclude that Toole used the novel's lesbians to represent the furies who punish Lana Lee ("Dialectic of American Humanism," p. 208). And gay men are not treated much better. The only reason not to view the book as gay-bashing is because all of the characters, not just the gay ones, are preposterous and the main character is even more ridiculous than the gay characters he dislikes.

That having been said, no one in the scholarly literature has pointed out that the gay theme ties into the Carnival theme. The first gay ball in New Orleans history occurred in 1959, two years before Toole began to plan Confederacy. The New Orleans police raided gay Carnival balls in the early 1960s.

The biography of Toole Ignatius Rising discusses in detail Toole's interactions with fellow soldiers in Puerto Rico who were gay, but Fletcher (Ken and Thelma) and others have criticized that biography as poorly researched and unscholarly. Use that biography with extreme caution or not at all. Cory MacLauchlin's biography of Toole, (Butterfly in the Typewriter), is well-researched and scholarly, and it discusses the possibility of Toole being gay, but MacLauchlin does not have the same stories of gay activity in Puerto Rico. Perhaps he could not corroborate them.

In my "Dialectic" paper the long footnote (number ten) has a discussion (point four) of homosexuality in Confederacy related to the writings of Marsilio Ficino.

Thesis: Discuss the role of homosexuality in A Confederacy of Dunces against the background of the history of homosexuality and transgender behavior associated with New Orleans Carnival, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

MLA Bibliography has indexed Dialectic of American Humanism

Yes, it has happened. The bibliographic database MLA International Bibliography has indexed my article in the journal Renascence called, "The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller."

This story is a bit strange, in that I had noticed back in August of 2012 that they had skipped over the entire issue of Renascence within which my article had appeared. I contacted them, and someone from MLA had encouraged me to scan the entire issue into a PDF file and send it to them. I did so, and I had expected that my article would be indexed shortly. It only appeared in the EBSCO-hosted version of MLA International Bibliography between February 9th and February 24th of this year. Because Renascence does not include abstracts, I had written my own abstract and had sent that to MLA also. While the article has appeared, the abstract has not.

To see my abstract for the article, please go to: Dialectic of American Humanism.

Transcript of 2010 Lecture on John Kennedy Toole Papers

Today I posted the script from a lecture I gave in the Spring of 2010 at the Winona State University Library's Athenaeum series on the topic of the John Kennedy Toole Papers, which are housed at the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University. This lecture explained the circumstances around the creation of my online paper Evidence of Influences on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, including Geoffrey Chaucer.

The March 17, 2010 lecture was given before I abandoned the effort to get that paper published in a peer-review journal and before I sought endorsements from other Toole scholars. It was the first announcement of the finding that Toole knew Boethian philosophy and that Robert Byrne was wrong about that knowledge (published finally in Notes on Contemporary Literature). It also presented for the first time evidence that he had read and appreciated Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It showed that Ruppersberg was incorrect about the nature of Lyly's influence on Toole.

Finally, in the question and answer, I answered a question about whether Walker Percy could not have been the author of A Confederacy of Dunces, calling that idea the "grassy knoll" theory of John Kennedy Toole studies. After the lecture, I thought of a much better reason why Percy could not be the author of Confederacy, and that post-lecture answer is in the newly posted script.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 15

1950s Novels of suburban ambition

In Toole's letters to Robert Gottlieb, he mentioned that one of his favorite novels was Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern. Indeed, Toole had decided to send the manuscript of Confederacy to Simon and Schuster because they had published Stern.

Stern is about a Jewish husband from New York who tries to make a go of getting a house in the suburbs. Things go very badly in a darkly comic way. Friedman never hit it big, but he did have a following, and one of his followers, besides Toole, was Woody Allen. Allen then hired Friedman to work on some of his films, and the two have a similar humor about being Jewish in contemporary America.

An earlier novel about a struggle to deal with post-war suburbia was Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In it, a very upper class WASP WWII veteran navigates the suburban 1950s martini culture and achieves emotional and financial stability. One might argue that Stern is a send up of the sort of narrative represented by Flannel Suit.

One thread of Flannel Suit is to warn the reader against devoting ones life to ambition at the expense of ones emotional and social life. In Wilson's novel, the overworked Mr. Hopkins, the president of the United Broadcasting Corporation, is emotionally estranged from his daughter, who is determined to live a wild, carefree life with her wealth. She is convinced that good times will make her more fulfilled than her workaholic father.

Thesis: Compare Stern, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and A Confederacy of Dunces. Note Ignatius's relationship to the owner of Levy Pants. Note the contrast of Hopkins's situation with the situation of Gus Levy. .

MLA Bibliography has indexed Refutation of Robert Byrne

I realize that MLA Bibliography might not be the most well-funded operation on Earth. As chronicled here earlier, they skipped over the issue of the journal Notes on Contemporary Literature in which my article "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" appeared. So I contacted them and even scanned the entire issue into a PDF and sent it to them with my own abstract for "Refutation."

Well, MLA has finally indexed the article. Click here for the record in that database if you are on a college campus that has licensed access to MLA Bibliography through the library vendor EBSCO. That record will not, however, provide you with direct access to the full text of the article, but if your campus has a link resolver, you may be able to link out from the MLA Bibliography record to the actual text in another database. However, MLA did not use the abstract that I provided and they have not yet indexed the issue of Renascence which contains my article "Dialectic of American Humanism." Click here for my abstract for "Refutation," and click here for my abstract of "Dialectic."

Transcript of Lecture "Dialectic of American Humanism" available

When I gave a lecture on the content of my Renascence article "The Dialectic of American Humanism" in March of 2012, I wrote the entire lecture script out. I have now made the script of the lecture available. Click here for the transcript. For the blog announcement of the lecture, click here.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 14

Thesis #14: Toole and Proust via Waugh

In an article on Waugh and Proust ("Remembrance of Things Past: Proustian Elements in Evelyn Waugh 's Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, vol. 18, no. 3, 1984, pp. 1-5), Hodgson discusses Waugh's intertextual references to Proust's work in Brideshead Revisited. For his part, Ignatius in Confederacy declares that he has Proustian qualities.

New Orleans was famous for mocking nobility. (See Tallant's Mardi Gras for an tale about mocking the Russian Archduke, and then read Mitchell's book All on a Mardi Gras Day for a refutation of Tallent's story.) Old families of New Orleans had a sense of entitlement that was fading, but the Carnival element of New Orleans culture simultaneously celebrates that desire for nobility and mocks it. For their part, Waugh and Proust both mourned the loss of the refined, aristocratic culture of the 19th century.

Thesis: How does the relationship between Waugh and Proust alter the burlesquing of a longing for medieval traditions that one finds in Confederacy? One could throw in a discussion of the theme of the visual arts and art criticism from Proust, Brideshead, and Confederacy.