The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 10

Tennessee Williams and Toole

In the Toole papers, there is only one mention of Tennessee Williams in the papers from pre-1963. In an undergraduate assignment (see Evidence of Influences version 2.0, page 11), when Toole discussed Chaucer's Wife of Bath, he compared her to Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Joel Fletcher, a college friend of Toole and confidant to Thelma toward the end of her life, argued in his memoir that Confederacy parodies A Streetcar Named Desire (Ken and Thelma, p. 26). In a critical essay, Robert Siegel argued that in Williams's work, the flesh and the spirit "seek, test, and do battle with each other" ("The Metaphyics of Tennessee Williams," in Magical Muse, 2002, page 112+). In Roger Boxill's Tennessee Williams (1987), Brick is described as "a child in a world of adults" (117).

Castration is also a theme common to Williams and Toole (to say nothing of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer). Boxill sees a castration theme in "Three Players" (115), a short story which represents an early draft of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Castration is a theme in the symbolism of the planetary god Saturn and in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, which Young claims was a predecessor to New Orleans Carnival.

In Confederacy, Ignatius spouts Boethian ideals while clearly himself being very carnal. He is also treated and acts like a child, though he is thirty.

Thesis: Compare the carnal/spiritual split in Toole and Williams, and the issues of immaturity and castration.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 9

Gore Vidal again, Greek this time

In the Toole Papers, Faust's bibliography of Toole's library includes Gore Vidal's Thirsty Evil (see Evidence of Influences version 2.0, page 42). That short story collection was discussed in Thesis #3. In this thesis, I want to draw attention to the story called "The Ladies in the Library." According to Robert Phillips essay called "Gore Vidal's Greek Revival" (Notes on Modern American Literature, 6, no. 1, item 3), Gore's story is a comtemporary version of Virgil's Aeneid. The Parker sisters are in fact the Parcae, or the Fates. Walter's sister "Sybil is the Cumaean Sibyl who guided Aeneas in his descent to the underground" (1). Phillips explains why a contemporary author would write such a modern allegory: "The parallels raise the story from the particular to the universal, and the story becomes not only that of the misfortune of Walter Bragnet, or of Aeneas, but of all men" (2).

As I have argued in Evidence of Influences, Ignatius displays Saturnine qualities, both in his role as an agent of disorder and in his role as a Saturnalian Lord or Misrule.

Thesis: Compare Toole's use of classical symbolism to Gore's use of the same. Was Toole motivated by the need to distill the universal into the particular, as Phillips claims Gore was, or by some other motivation?

Update to Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole

Yesterday, I uploaded version 1.3 of the Critical Annotated Bibliography of some of the more obscure scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and the novel A Confederacy of Dunces.

I am now scraping pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. Previously, I had included all of the theses that were listed in Dissertation Abstracts (DA). This time, I have added annotations to theses that were cataloged in WorldCat, but which were not in DA. I also added annotations to other works that gave brief or tangential references to Toole. One good item added was Giddings's thesis. That thesis was good enough to cause me to come out with version 2.0 of Evidence of Influences. The essay by Simpson is a critique of Confederacy, but it does little to explicate details of the text. de Caro and Jordan discuss Toole's work in their investigation of the use of folklore by literature. It is neither criticism nor interpretation, but it had enough substance to include it.

One source that I reviewed and did not include was Lupack's Insanity as Redemption. That book does mention Toole and Confederacy, but only in passing, and the little that she said indicates that she did not read Confederacy very carefully.

On reviewing this blog, I see that I failed to announce version 1.2 of this same bibliography. That version added annotations for the theses of Kunze and Perkins. One could argue that Kunze is not obscure because it is freely available on the Internet, but it is not in DA and I have not seen it discussed in the scholarly literature. I liked Kunze, and I did not like Perkins. The annotations explain why.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 8

Falstaff and Ignatius

[This could be a large paper.] In many of the reviews of Confederacy and even in Percy's introduction, Ignatius is described as "falstaffian." In the Toole Papers, there is a college assignment that establishes that Toole was familiar with Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 (Evidence of Influences version 2.0, 12-13). Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton 1959) investigated the connection between Shakespeare's plays and Saturnalian ritual (see especially pages 205 and 206, which connect Falstaff to Frazer's Golden Bough). From 1900 to 1917, one of the Krewes of New Orleans Carnival season was called The Falstaffians (Perry Young, Mistick Krewe, 1931, p. 265).

Thesis: Investigate the connection between Ignatius and Falstaff, especially at the level of both being a Saturnalian Lord of Misrule. There is no evidence that Toole was familiar with Barber's work, but even if he did not read it, the ideas could have been discussed in Toole's circle. Note in Henry IV Part 2 that Falstaff courting Doll is referred to as Saturn courting Venus (II, iv). Note also that Barber ties this theme to Freudian psychology, and there is evidence in the Toole Papers for his knowledge of Freudian psychology and literary criticism. (To pursue this point, you would have to visit Tulane and study the Toole Papers.) Tie them all to New Orleans Carnival, of course. What are some reasons why the parallel might not be actual influence?

New edition of Evidence of Influences, version 2.0

A new edition of the Evidence of Influences paper has been posted. There were several reasons for this update. First, I had read two more studies of Confederacy, by Simpson and by Giddings respectively, and I wanted to add them. For Giddings, I had added a section on the picaresque novel. Also, I had earlier shoved some oblique references into a large footnote. I have now pulled the discussions of Spenser, Milton, Melville, and T.S. Eliot into the main text. I have also shortened some of the long-winded discussion of the literature. I have suggested to the reader how to skip what has turned into a catalog of the Toole Papers. Finally, I have had another paper tentatively accepted at a peer-review journal, and in that article, I want to cite the most recent version of Evidence of Influences.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 7

Education of Philosopher-King

In the Toole Papers at Tulane, there is a folder of college assignments from Philosophy (in 2009, it was box 2, folder 8). There is an assignment there dated 9 January 1956 submitted by Toole to Dr. Ballard in Philosophy 101. Leaf two of the assignment discusses the proper education of Plato's Philosopher-King. At age 17, the future king should engage in a ten-year study of geometry, solid geometry, astronomy and harmonics. At age 30, the student should have mastered mathematical forms and be ready to rationalize and not depend on the visible. In Confederacy, Ignatius, who is 30 years old, has toiled for many years as a student in isolation, and the plot of the novel shows him trying to go out into the world and take action.

Thesis: Discuss Ignatius as a parody of a budding Platonic Philosopher-King.

Occasional Series now a fixed web page as well as in blog

I noticed that, going on a year, no one has been following this blog, so I decided to create a version of the occasional series as a fixed web page. I published the page on the Web on April 6th, and just today (April 18th) Google found it, without me having placed a link to it in this blog. It is Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the Occasional Series.