Quick Note: Irony

There is some irony to the fact that my blog entry on April Fool's Day did not discuss the theory of humor, much less fools. It is especially ironic, because in the paper that I submitted for the book chapter, I have a section discussing the theory of fools and Ignatius as a fool. So happy foolish May Day, preceded by an April Serious Day.

However, in saying that this situation is ironic, I do not mean the type of irony investigated in Linda Hutcheon's book, Irony's Edge.

The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 25: Psychiatric Hospitals

A Confederacy of Dunces features a protagonist whom many in the book consider to be mentally ill. Several characters encourage his mother to have Ignatius committed to the mental ward at Charity Hospital, and Santa Battaglia even fantasizes that he will be tortured there. At the end of the book, Ignatius narrowly escapes being caught by the ambulance crew sent to take him to Charity.

A recent book by Lone Frank called The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and its Forgotten Inventor, tells the story of Dr. Robert Heath, who was the head of psychiatry at Tulane University beginning in 1949. Heath pioneered the practice of stimulating the brain with electrodes. He experimented on mentally ill patients throughout the 1950s and 1960s in ways that today would be considered unethical.

His most notorious case was that of a man who was mentally ill, abused drugs, lived off the favors of gay men, and was suicidal. While the man was at Charity Hospital, Heath tried to use electrical stimulation of the brain to change him to a heterosexual. The case only became public in 1972, soon after which Heath's work was held up as an example of unethical human subjects research.

This particular instance with its sexual dimension would have been a perfect influence for Confederacy had it been public before 1963; however, there may have been other instances from the 1950s that could have influenced Toole. Heath first presented his electrical stimulation research at a symposium in New Orleans in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, he experimented with combinations of stimulation and hallucinogenic drugs on the mentally ill in New Orleans. If any of this work became public, or was known through gossip, it could have influenced Toole. (Note: the descriptions of actions at Charity in the novel do not include electrical stimulation, so there is no direct reference to the practice in the novel.)

Another possible, even likely, influence on Toole's portrayal of psychiatric treatment was Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published in 1962, just before Toole wrote most of Confederacy in 1963.

Thesis: Explore the public understanding of psychiatry and the treatment of patients at psychiatric hospitals up to 1963. Might the specific culture of psychiatric treatment in New Orleans have made this theme especially relevant to Confederacy of Dunces?

Theory of Humor Series, part 20, Status hierarchies

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

In the theory of humor that I am developing, I argue that there are two fundamental aspects of humor: an incongruity aspect and a social aspect. The social aspect often deals with adjusting status among the members of a social group. The adjustment is often downward, laughing at someone in order to bring that person down a peg, or using self-deprecating humor to deflect envy about one's own high status.

I have been purposefully vague about what status is. When I first started trying to explore the theory of humor, I was well-aware of my own view that humor often adjusts status downward in a group. So I explored the social psychology literature regarding the nature of group status. Two profound facts emerged from what I learned, one, that all groups have emergent status hierarchies and, two, that humans are loyal to groups, even if the group in question is barely a group.

First, from the 1940s onward, Sharif, Harvey, and other social psychologists established that when experimenters place humans together in groups to perform an activity, we will sort ourselves into status hierarchies, often unconsciously. There is basically no such thing as a functioning group that doesn't have at least an implicit status hierarchy. It is also the case that most (perhaps all) social animals exhibit social hierarchies, so the topic is not limited to humans. The term "pecking order" comes from the study of social hierarchy among chickens, who enforce the social structure by pecking each other.

Second, from the work of Henri Tajfel, it has been shown that even the most minimalist groups, groups where the members do not know each other and which have no known shared qualities, exhibit in-group bias and loyalty. So you can never get away from in-group / out-group divisions, no matter how you try to educate people about things like the universal brotherhood of man (to use a particularly gendered version of the idea). Combine these two findings, and we have the conclusion that humans are strongly motivated to belong to groups and to strive for status within those groups.

Within the status literature, one major division is between dominance and power on the one hand and informal social status on the other. Dominance carries a threat of violence, whereby those higher in the pecking order might harm those lower in the order if they do not comply with the rules established by those higher in the group structure.

Social status, on the other hand, might be collectively and unconsciously agreed upon by all group members, and might not carry a threat of violence. All members in the group may confer high status on some members in the genuine belief that those others should have high status, not out of fear. There have been studies of bee hives and other social networks that show that decision-making in groups can come from the bottom-up, not pushed down from powerful members of the group asserting their self-interest. I suspect that the status dynamics within human groups are usually a combination of top-down dominance pecking order and bottom-up hive decision-making.

The difference between hard dominance and a softer social status is also manifest in humor. A social group in which there is the palpable threat of violence often does not feature public humor with the dominant members as targets, but the powerful may ridicule those low in power, and those lower in rank may use humor amongst themselves to lower the stress of being powerless. Indeed, the highest status individuals might take actions which would otherwise invite ridicule, but no one ridicules for fear of punishment. This seems to be supported by the findings of Ruch's 3WD studies, which show that religiously fundamentalist personalities are negatively correlated with appreciating the humorous qualities of jokes. An angry god does not joke around, and certainly not with self-deprecating humor.

For informal social status hierarchies, self-deprecating humor and teasing are not uncommon. Those high in status signal to others, "Hey, I am just one member of the group, even though I have had this status conferred upon me." The status is deserved, it is not maintained by fear. Those high in status are not threatened by criticism of their shortcomings. They deserved their places.

The contrast between power dominance and softer social status may not be a dichotomy. It may be a spectrum, or it may be multi-dimensional. I am not convinced by my modest investigation of the literature that the issue is settled. For example, a military leader may inspire others to follow because that person displays qualities that confer status; however, because the leader has followers, the leader can use that structure to exercise dominance and power.

I suspect that the phenomenon of social status hierarchies is not studied as much as it might warrant is because the idea that social groups are always structured goes against the political ideals of our culture. Also, one way to motivate those lower in the status hierarchy to work hard is to claim that there is no hierarchy, so those high in status in our culture who control the funds for studying social behavior may have a disincentive to prioritize the study of status hierarchies. The claim that there is no hierarchy can come in the form of claiming we are all equally children of God (some traditional religions), or claiming that we all have the liberty to pursue happiness (secular liberalism), or claiming that the dictatorship of the proletariat has transformed us (communism). Take your pick.

Nevertheless, humor does function within this world. Ridicule especially is a powerful tool for social modification of behavior. A group where those who are high in status tolerate or encourage humor at their own expense generally is a stable group which is not maintained by threats of violence.

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 1, Carl Gustav Jung and Psychology

I have decided to start a new series I am calling "The Cutting Room Floor." The reason is because I am finishing up this book chapter on John Kennedy Toole, and there are things I wanted to put in my paper, but which just don't fit. They are slightly off-topic and the chapter is too long anyway, so I am cutting them. But I think that they are worth saying, so I will say them in this series.

Forward: Strange traffic patterns

BTW, I see that I now have two followers. Thanks to both of you.

From December 2018: The blog statistics have a strange trend: most of the traffic is now from an unknown country, and the operating system for the traffic is now ninety percent Linux. What's with that? Is it just an army of bots? Or do most people use Linux now routed through a VPN in Antarctica? Very strange.

From January 2019: The usage this month was concentrated on two days. Those two days had about 200 hits each. The rest of the month had about 30 hits. The two countries the traffic came from were the United Arab Emirates with 198 hits, and Spain at 193 hits. The site from which the most traffic was referred to my blog was a porn site. Most of the traffic is from a Linux platform. Again, very strange. But on to the real topic of this entry.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number One: The psychological validity of the theories of Carl Gustav Jung

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of Jung's essay on the trickster archetype. While reading the essay, I ran across a statement by Jung that to me signals that his system is completely bogus as science. I was going to put it in the footnote to my discussion, but it is just not worth the increase in word count. Here it is:

... Jung's work seems to be worthless as science (to say nothing of its racism), as Jung claims that conflict “is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity” ("On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," 269). Yikes. To say that a proposition is proven valid only if its reverse is valid is crazy talk.

Jungian psychology is bogus. Full stop.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #17: Simmons

I have been using this blog to explore the theory of humor; nevertheless, it is a blog about research on John Kennedy Toole and his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, so I thought I would pause to offer a post about the novel.

As I said in June 2013, I would like to offer an annotated bibliography, one citation at a time, of the best of the scholarship on Toole's Confederacy that is findable via MLA Bibliography (as opposed to obscure). Here is item number seventeen:

Citation: Simmons, Jonathan. "Ignatius Reilly and the Concept of the Grotesque in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." Mississippi Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1989): 33-43.

Annotation: This paper is, as the title indicates, a deep study of the concept of 'grotesque' in relation to Confederacy. Simmons explores the origins of the word grotesque, the Roman caves or grottos, which during the Renaissance were discovered to have images of bizarre and distorted figures. Simmons argues that the medieval era did not have a concept of the grotesque, because thinkers in that era saw the world as carefully ordered by God (36). Needless to say, this ignores examples of the medieval grotesque such as some of the characters in Chaucer’s writings (about which Toole himself was quite familiar, see my own Evidence of influences). Simmons then offers a stereotype of the Renaissance as favoring the grotesque (37). Finally, there is a discussion of Jonathan Swift and a comparison of some of Swift’s themes and images to those of Toole (38-42). This section is well done, and evidence from the Toole Papers back up the hypothesis that Toole knew Swift well. Simmons argues that the animal images of Ignatius point to him being part bear (41-2). While he analyzes those images well, Simmons ignores that they are largely generalized descriptions of a mammal which could apply to a dog just as much as a bear. Considering Ignatius has sexual longings for his deceased dog Rex, the tie to dogs is probably more plausible than the tie to bears. As long as one ignores the simplistic comparison of the Renaissance with the Medieval era, this is a good article.

Because I tend to gloss over the grotesque in this novel, this paper is a good counterweight to my own interests.

Theory of Humor Series, part 19, Gervais and Wilson and the Origins of Laughter

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

I discuss here the following article:

Gervais, M. and D. S. Wilson (2005). The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 395-430.

I like this article and think it is important. Gervais and Wilson review extensive evidence for the evolution of laughter and humor, looking at physiological evidence, neurological evidence, and psychological evidence. While it is not the centerpiece of their paper, they include Wilson's "multilevel selection theory" and the observations that many of the evolutionary benefits of laughter and humor accrue to groups rather than individuals. While in general I agree with them, I think that they do not place enough weight on the social function of humor in adjusting group status hierarchies, which indicates an even larger group-level benefit. In their speculation about how laughter and humor evolved, they do not fully embrace the group-level selection pressure as the primary driving force. I would be willing to go that far.

Gervais and Wilson open their investigation with empirical evidence that laughter is an evolved instinct. Cross-cultural studies show the common feature eliciting Duchenne laughter is incongruity and unexpectedness. This laughter usually involves both a playful frame and a second interpretation of the event, which they call "an alternate type of intelligibility" (398). Here is a quote: "There is thus an intuitive family resemblance among the different proximate causes of Duchenne laughter, such that they can be characterized as sharing a single form or structure: a sudden unexpected change in events that is perceived to be at once not serious and in a social context—that is, nonserious social incongruity" (NSI) (399). NSI includes protohumor such as tickling, play, physical mishaps. This conclusion supports both the incongruity aspect and the social aspect of all humor.

I do not disagree with that view. In fact, the more I study the issue, the closer my own views move toward this conclusion. Back in February, 2018, the sound bite version of my theory of humor was "incongruity plus disparagement." Now, my theory is roughly "incongruity and social / emotional aspects often in a playful context, and the social is often disparagement. The emotions are often incongruous emotions; the motive for producing the humor is often a social function." Not exactly a sound bite. But it can be reduced to a true sound bite: "incongruity plus social." Or Gervais and Wilson's phrase "nonserious social incongruity."

The reason for my focus on disparagement is based on social psychology. The human social environment includes built-in but dynamic status hierarchies. A serious challenge to the status hierarchy can include violence and dehumanization and may cause a social group to split. The fact that most laughter is in a nonserious environment means that there is no direct and violent dominance struggle going on. A playful individual is usually one who is submissive. Because some humor can disparage its target to the point of terrorizing the target or inciting violence, I think that not all humor can be called nonserious, so I prefer my "incongruity plus social."

Gervais and Wilson offer a list of the many positive social functions of humor and laughter (404), including the reduction of in-group aggression, which I consider of huge group-level benefit. They note that laughter is a social lubricant, increasing in-group feelings, etc.

Gervais and Wilson discuss the contagious nature of laughter in relation to mirror neurons and the positive psychology of mitigating tension and building social bonds. They conclude, "Duchenne laughter is essentially a medium for emotional contagion operating through an intersubjective mirror system" (423). But they ignore that the content of much that is humorous has the effect of lowering social status.

They also discuss evolutionary psychology. The central question from this perspective is: why is it adaptive in the presence of NSI to elicit play from an individual? They bring in Wilson's multilevel selection theory. The social bonding benefits of laughter and play accrue to the group level. Laughter incurs low costs for promoting group beneficial behavior.

They offer hypotheses about the origins of laughter, suggesting that laughter developed before language. Reducing stress on the savannah, humor might have been an ersatz grooming activity. Dunbar hypothesized that language was an ersatz grooming behavior, but laughter fits the profile better than language. As the brain developed more sophistication, the positive emotion might become decontextualized from actual play and tickling.

Gervais and Wilson argue that there is a benefit to the stress relief of signaling that the group is in a safe situation. They see the status hierarchy functions of laughter coming late in human evolution. Joyous Duchenne laughter came first; it was then co-opted for hierarchy maintenance by non-Duchenne laughter (418). I disagree with them here. I believe that, for humans, one of the biggest dangers and sources of anxiety is being on the business end of the social hierarchy. So the status deflation of disparagement humor is a huge emotional relief. So humor whose social function is status lowering can be genuine, Duchenne laughter.

In short, I think this is an important paper for pulling together the many threads of evidence in the biological and psychological literature in order to analyze the evolution of laughter and humor. I think that they could have gone further with the group-level benefits, specifically the social function of adjusting status hierarchies, which should have been a major activity as humans evolved into an species capable of altruism due to group-level selection pressures. I think that group-level selection could be the primary driver of the evolution of humor from primitive pant-hoots of primates during mock aggression.

Theory of Humor Series, part 18, Rhetorical Event by David Wright review

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

In preparing for this study, I discovered a Ph.D. thesis that had a chapter discussing exactly my topic, the humor in A Confederacy of Dunces. I do not want to spend much time in my own paper discussing this dissertation (or perhaps even mentioning it), so this blog will allow me the space to do so. The author and I take very different approaches to the problem. The citation to the thesis is:

Wright, David A. The Rhetorical Event of Modern Southern Humor: A Requisite Element in Discourse. Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2013.

To Dr. Wright:

Please do not worry that my criticism will hurt your reputation. In my online Bibliography of Obscure Toole Criticism, the text I had the lowest opinion of--Ron Bell's thesis on nihilism in Toole--gets the most clickthrough traffic. So I did Bell a favor by criticizing him. Perhaps my criticism will help your exposure, too.

Part I: Theory of Humor

In Wright's dissertation, he begins by reviewing major categories of theories of humor. But rather than selecting one, he declares that the variety of them cannot be resolved into a single, definitive theory of humor. He then says he will use his own rhetorical theory of humor, which he defines as picking and choosing among the categories and using whichever element he finds most useful for the task at hand (10). This untheory is a meta-version of some modern literary theories, which value texts which are unresolvable and transgressive and which violate boundaries of genre, power, and gender. Because Wright sees humor as being elusive and unresolvable to a single theory, the rhetorical untheory of humor is the solution.

To his credit, Wright's rhetorical theory of humor does put the social aspects of humor front and center. Humor does have a social function as a core aspect, and Wright's examination of performers and audiences and how they negotiate the meaning of comic acts is laudable. While I disagree with some of the details of his examination, this focus on the social really is better than the cognitive theory of humor put forward by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams. Better to have some social functions described than no social functions at all.

In surveying existing theories of humor, Wright describes four major categories: 1) incongruity theories, 2) superiority theories, 3) Freudian theories, and 4) cognitive theories. He claims one and four are different. To me, one and four are two parts of the same thing. As for Freud, Freud actually had two different and opposing theories of humor, but the one Wright discusses is a subset of the category of release theories of humor. The theory I use--that humor has two fundamental aspects, incongruity and a social function--can handle most of his categories.

Early in the dissertation, Wright claims that he will devote a chapter each to these four different categories as related to southern humor; however, the dissertation does not focus on them. Instead, it veers off into more of a rhetorical analysis of comic performance. If I had to guess, I would suspect that, when he read Linda Hutcheon's Irony's Edge for chapter two, he shifted the focus away from a catalog of examples of theories of humor and toward an analysis of the relationship between the humor producer and the audience.

For my purposes of defining humor, chapter two's attempt at studying the incongruity within southern humor is worth examining. Specifically, when Wright goes to apply his incongruity theory of humor, both of his examples also strongly feature disparagement, which is more appropriately handled by a theory of humor focused on humor's social function, such as a superiority theory of humor.

The first example of incongruity is the episode of The Beverly Hillbillies where Jethro Clampett is psychoanalyzed. Wright correctly studies the incongruity, but then off-handedly acknowledges that the episode is a put-down of "the pompous psychiatrist" (53), i.e. superiority. The second example is one where Barney Fife of The Andy Griffith Show complains about his status being diminished, but he does it in a way that further diminishes his status (55). While it does feature incongruity, it also features a social lowering, which fits a superiority theory of humor. Thus, in his chapter applying the incongruity theory of humor, Wright uses examples that have both incongruity and the social function of status lowering.

Chapter three studies the persona projected by stand-up comedians, southern comedians in particular. Chapter four examines the role of the audience in the comic performance, both as a passive body reacting to the rhetorical acts of the comedian and as the body passing judgment on those acts. Finally, chapter five studies Confederacy of Dunces in the context of the grotesque and its transgressive qualities.

Part II: Specifically about Confederacy of Dunces

When reading the chapter of the thesis on Confederacy, it struck me that Wright did not understand the book at all. In that sense, Ignatius Reilly has scored a triumph: he has confounded the budding Dr. Wright. And considering that some of the reasoning in the dissertation is similar to logic used by Myrna Minkoff, it is a double triumph for Ignatius. But on to the details.

To start off the chapter, it is obvious that Wright dislikes the book and strongly disapproves of it, quoting a theorist on the potentially harmful effects of humor. He seems not to understand that Ignatius's racism, sexism, and homophobia are being ridiculed by the text, so he thinks the book itself is racist, sexist, and homophobic (139). Because these are cultural positions he opposes, he hates the book. Although he says that Ignatius is hilarious, he also describes him as horrifying, disgusting, and despicable (148). It is doubly ironic that Wright uses Hutcheon's Irony’s Edge, which is a book that warns of the political risk of recipients who misunderstand attempts at irony, because he then proceeds to miss the glaringly obvious ironic gap between Toole and Ignatius.

(I had for years wondered how Confederacy, with its stereotypic portrayal of gays, was viewed by members of the gay community, but in 2017 I had a conversation with Stewart Van Cleve, historian of gay Minnesota, and he opined that Confederacy was one of his favorite novels. Clearly, not everyone shares Wright's view that Toole’s book is harmful to contemporary understandings on race, gender, and sexual orientation.)

Wright tries to use the carnival theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to study Confederacy. First, I will review his use of Bakhtin's comic mechanisms, then I will reflect on Bakhtin in general. For my own study of Bakhtin's theory of humor, see Theory of Humor Series, Part 16.

Wright takes three comic mechanisms from Bakhtin and analyzes Confederacy’s use of them. They are: 1) ritual spectacles, 2) comic verbal compositions, and 3) curses and popular blazons. For the first, he declares, “In a very real sense, Ignatius is one sustained walking, eating, pontificating, belching ritual spectacle that draws the somewhat episodic novel together” (150) Wright focuses on violations of the norms of decorum of the comic form and argues that Ignatius violates those norms both on the high-brow and on the low-brow end of the spectrum.

For the second mechanism, Wright points to Ignatius’s journal entries, letters, and scraps of attempted scholarship as comic compositions. Wright notes “The key to Ignatius’s character, and in some ways the novel as a whole, is that he does not mean this letter or his other writings as jokes whatsoever” (155) His point is valid: while Ignatius acts as a court-fool or Lord of Misrule, he does not see himself performing that role. For the third mechanism, curses and stereotypic labels, Wright compares Ignatius’s profusion of verbal abuse to the circumspect sarcasm of Burma Jones.

Unfortunately, Wright misses part of the point of Bakhtin and ends up supporting theories of carnival that contrast with Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, carnival was a continuous people's revolt against the established political hierarchy. The class inversion that is often featured in carnival-like festivities was not a temporary release that allows the official order to continue. Instead, it is a second life, in which hierarchy is abolished, a parallel reality which reveals itself when it cannot be contained in the town square.

Umberto Eco criticized Bakhtin's ideas and argued that carnival does indeed act as a release valve, allowing the oppressed of society a brief holiday carefully controlled by the social hierarchy. So it is with some surprise that one finds Wright claiming Bakhtin as his theoretical framework but then saying that carnival is a social release valve (149). He calls his chapter "Releasing the pyloric valve," and he sees Ignatius as a release valve for the other characters.

An even older tradition of understanding carnival comes from the school of anthropology that culminated in James Frazer's Golden Bough. That tradition featured an individual who represented the god of agriculture. That god was to die at the end of the year and become reborn, renewing life to the earth for the next planting. Roman Saturnalia was such a tradition, in which an individual was selected as the Lord of Misrule, who oversaw festival inversion of the social order and who was put to death at the end of the festival. Other such traditions featured a scapegoat who was subjected to mock death or who was expelled from the community in order to renew it. I have pointed out in Evidence of influences that Frazer's model was the one available to Toole when he wrote Confederacy, and in fact Ignatius identifies himself as a scapegoat, and he is expelled at the end of the book, as the community is renewed.

Bakhtin's vision of carnival was quite different from this sacrificial scapegoat. His carnival features all participants exchanging abuse, heckling each other in a process of rebirth through the lower bodily stratum, which features the grotesque. There is no expelled or killed representative of a god dying and reborn. Ironically, Wright cites Bakhtin but arrives at Frazer’s conclusion, “For growth and change to happen in this story, in this place and time, the grotesque symbol must be purged”(156-7).

Wright sees Ignatius as a release valve for the rest of the society around him (155). But that is not the case. Ignatius is the agent of chaos, upsetting corrupt social relations, such as those of Mrs. Levy and Lana Lee, so that a healthier social order can occur after he is expelled from the community. Ignatius is the chaos before the rebirth. But Wright is correct that the final renewal occurs because the other characters finally act with agency and purpose (156). And he is correct that Burma Jones is the counterpoint character to Ignatius (159).

Wright ends by saying that any resolution to the novel must come from the reader. Which means that he could not find a resolution in the text itself, despite the fact that the book features a classic comic resolution for everyone except Ignatius. He thinks we are supposed to stand in harsh judgment of the characters in the book (160), when the opposite is true. It is clear that he did not understand what Toole was trying to do, and, as I say, the novel confounded and repulsed him.

Score one for Ignatius Reilly.