The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 13

Evelyn Waugh and Toole, part 2, Neoplatonism

As described above, Toole read Waugh, especially Brideshead Revisited. Beyond the theme of ritual scapegoat, Confederacy shares other themes with Brideshead. For example, Waugh plays with the theme of homosexuality (bk 1 chap 2) and its relation to the medieval and renaissance Neoplatonic ideas that love for another human is a foretaste of human love for God (bk 2 chap 4). Confederacy plays with roughly the same connection between homosexuality and love of ones fellow man in the "Save the World Through Degeneracy" campaign. See my paper "The Dialectic of American Humanism" regarding Toole's use of Ficino and Neoplatonism.

I have tried to find a literary study of Brideshead from prior to 1961 (when Toole started planning Confederacy) that discusses the Neoplatonic elements of Brideshead, and I have not found it. So one cannot point to a critical text as a possible inspiration to Toole to use Neoplatonism in his own novel. I have found the Stopp book, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of the Artist (Princeton, 1958), to be useful. A more recent study that does discuss the Neoplatonic elements of Brideshead is the book by Robert M. Davis called Brideshead Revisited: the Past Redeemed (Boston: Twayne, 1990).

One huge difference between Waugh and Toole is that Waugh embraced Neoplatonism, while Toole critiqued it by making Ignatius a Carnival version of Ficino's philosophy. In his book The Creative Element (Hamish Hamilton, 1953), Stephen Spender examines Brideshead in chapter 9. He argues that the main character, Ryder, is ultimately shallow. The essay ends, "It is when [Waugh] identifies his prejudices with a moralizing religion that qualities anachronistic and absurd in his view of life--intolerance, bigotry, and self-righteousness--work against his talent, and even tend to caricature the very ideas he is supposed to be supporting" (174) Toole could have been aware of the contents of Spender's essay.

Thesis: Discuss the Neoplatonic aspects of both Confederacy of Dunces and Brideshead Revisited. Include a comparison of their approaches to Neoplatonism and homosexuality.

Dialectic is now in Expanded Academic ASAP

Regarding my last posting, Gale Cengage has finally added the vol. 64, no. 2, issue of the journal Renascence to their online library database. If you are on a college campus and your college subscribes to Gale's "Expanded Academic ASAP" database (check your library's website), you should be able to access the article by searching that database for "Dialectic of American Humanism" in quotation marks. Thanks, Gale! (But Gale still has not added the issue of Notes on Contemporary Literature that contains "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" to its "InfoTrac Student Edition" database. So a muted thanks.)

Library Databases: Negligence or Conspiracy??

My scholarly studies of John Kennedy Toole seem to have picked up some of the "curse of John Kennedy Toole," though obviously not as much of the curse as Toole himself or the actors lined up to star in the movie version of Confederacy of Dunces.

I published an article in the January, 2012, issue of the journal Notes on Contemporary Literature. That journal is aggregated full text in the database "Gale InfoTrac Student Edition." However, Gale skipped over the issue in which my article appeared (volume 42, number 1) and has gone on to load the two subsequent issues. The database "MLA Bibliography" from the Modern Language Association is also supposed to index the contents of Notes on Contemporary Literature, but they also have skipped over issue 42, number 1. Google Scholar likewise has not indexed that issue of that journal. So my article "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" is unfindable to those searching in online library databases. (Fortunately, it is mostly an extract from my freely available study "Evidence of Influences".)

Next, I published an article in the Spring, 2012, issue of the journal Renascence (volume 64, number 2). For this journal, the full text is supposed to be available in both EBSCO's database "Academic Search" and Gale's "Expanded Academic ASAP." It has become available via "Academic Search" (thank you EBSCO!), but the Gale database once again skipped over the issue in which my article appears. The issue has also not yet been indexed in "MLA Bibliography" or in "Google Scholar." ISI's "Web of Science" has also indexed that issue of Renascence (thank you Thomson Reuters!). So my article "The Dialectic of American Humanism" is available, but only in two out of five databases.

(In a side note, EBSCO created a decent abstract and subject headings for my Dialectic article, but I have my own unpublished abstract for the article.)

It's almost enough to get you to suspect foul play, though negligence on the part of the creators of library databases is the more likely source of the problem.

A full text link to "The Dialectic of American Humanism"

If you are on a college campus, and if your library subscribes to EBSCO's Academic Search Premier library database, then click here for the full text of this article. NOTE: The following link will not work if you are off your campus. It might not even work from the campus dorms. It does not use your local proxy server.

Revision of Obscure Bibliography, now version 1.5

Because of my changed understanding of Confederacy, I have already mentioned in this blog that I have changed my attitude toward Coles' essay "Gravity and Grace." I have just updated the entry in my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces. It is now up to version 1.5.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 12

Minor Saturnine Characters

Now that my paper on Toole, Ficino, and Kristeller has been published, I am more free to discuss topics that brush up against its thesis. As I have argued in Evidence of Influences version 2.0, 30n16, one can study Confederacy's use of Carnival using the framework of Saturnalia from Frazer's Golden Bough. Ignatius displays Saturnine qualities, both in his role as an agent of disorder and in his role as a Saturnalian Lord or Misrule. But other, minor characters also display Saturnine qualities. To research this topic, you might want to consult a book by Walter C. Curry called Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences. This book was very familiar to Lumiansky, who was Toole's Chaucer professor. This book discusses the qualities of the planetary god Saturn. Hints: the popular book by di Palma on Carnival points out that Saturn reputedly reigned over a Golden Age. Curry: Saturn is associated with coldness. Frazer: Saturnalia was also a feast of the dead.

Thesis: Discuss the positive Saturnine qualities of Claude and Clyde. Ignatius and Trixie are linked by green head gear. Discuss that connection and Trixie's Saturnine qualities, especially her symbolic connection to death.

Note: I call this 12, because the suggestions on this blog were not numbered the same as the numbering on my fixed webpage version of this series of ideas.

Two addenda to my "Dialectic of American Humanism" Paper

In my recent paper in the journal Renascence, I argue that Toole's Confederacy of Dunces forms a dialectic in which two competing versions of "humanism" are the thesis and the antithesis. In reviewing notes, I have decided that I would have liked to have added two more details to the paper.

First, although I cited and discussed David McNeil's 1984 paper on Confederacy ("A Confederacy of Dunces as Reverse Satire: The American Subgenre." Mississippi Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1984): 33-47), I had forgotten that he had in that article called Confederacy an "hegelian dialectic" (43). He never said what the thesis and the antithesis of the dialectic were, and Ficino was not on his radar, but I should have acknowledged his observation as the first to use that term.

Second, I ought to have cited and given a bit of credit to Robert Coles for his essay on Confederacy from 1983 (Gravity and Grace in the Novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Lafayette: Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, 1983). In that essay, Coles argued that Ignatius was the corrupted Roman Catholic Church, and that Myrna was secular humanism rescuing the church from its own corruptions. I argue that Ignatius is a carnival inversion of Ficino's Catholic philosophy and humanism. But I ought to give credit to Coles for his point that Myrna represents a form of humanism.

No doubt there will be more corrections to follow.