The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 11

Evelyn Waugh and Toole, part 1, Ritual Scapegoats

There is solid evidence that John Kennedy Toole was exposed to, and may have been influenced by, the writings of Evelyn Waugh. In Joel Fletcher's memoir about his friendship with Toole, Ken and Thelma, he writes that he and Toole shared a fondness for both Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh (16). Another friend of Toole's, Nicholas Polites, was quoted by Randy Sue Coburn as opining that “Toole’s ambition was to be a Southern Evelyn Waugh …” (Washington Star, 2 June 1980, page D3). Finally, Rhoda Faust's bibliography of Toole's library includes a copy of Brideshead Revisited (Brideshead), which Faust described as "Condition: Very poor, pages darkening and falling out" (see Evidence of Influences 42).

A number of critics have interpreted Toole's vision as dark or nihilistic (see Evidence of Influences 31), but one can be negative about one's own society from a positive religious perspective, which one finds in Waugh's writings.

Sure enough, one can find themes in common between the writings of Waugh and Confederacy. Here I want to call attention to the threads of ritual scapegoat in Brideshead and their homologies in Confederacy. For example, Samgrass's book depicts the noble sacrifice of Lady Marchmain's male relatives as ritual victims "so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his [...] grinning dentures" (bk 1, chap 5). Bridey himself is described in terms of being both partly animal and very alien to the society around him. "Bridey was a mystery; a creature from under ground; a hard-snouted, hibernating animal who shunned the light." Later, "He achieved dignity by his remoteness and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half veteran; there seemed no spark of contemporary life in him; [...] an indifference to the world, which commanded respect" (bk 2, chap 3). In a related theme, Brideshead portrays some women as emasculating men around them (Lady Marchmain and Celia) and gives symbolic weight to the act of male escape from suffocating female dominance: "my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest" (bk 2, chap 2). The ending of Brideshead is positive: the small red flame is a beauty for the soul in the age of Hooper (Epilogue).

In Confederacy, Ignatius is described mostly in animalistic terms (see Evidence of Influences 22). He is alienated from contemporary culture and is treated as a 30-year-old child. At the end of the book, he is a ritual scapegoat, whose expulsion renews the society. Toole may have been referencing the tradition of writers influenced by Frazer's Golden Bough (see Evidence of Influences 30n16), and Waugh was known to have been part of that tradition via the influence of T.S. Eliot. Confederacy features a theme of renewal after throwing off suffocating female dominance (see Evidence of Influences 23-24). Obviously, the ending of Confederacy--comic expulsion of the Saturnalian scapegoat to renew the community-- is much different from that of Brideshead, but the comparison of the two texts shows a more positive side of Confederacy.

Thesis: Compare the scapegoat and Saturnine themes within both Brideshead Revisited and Confederacy.

Revision of the Obscure bibliography

I have revised my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship
on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces. It is now on version 1.4.

The main addition is the work by Julija Potrc. But I have gone through and added links to WorldCat for most of the texts.

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.