The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 18

Thesis #18: Joyce's Ulysses and Toole's Confederacy

Okay readers, I am not going to spoon feed you a paper this time. In theses #11, #13, and #14, I investigated the possible relationships among Toole and Waugh and Proust. But I gave so many details, that I virtually wrote an article for you, or at least a paper of a length suitable for the journal Notes on Contemporary Literature, if not longer. So I will truly try to give the idea without giving many details.

In the Toole Papers, the bibliography of Toole's library included both James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Toole also wrestled with Catholicism, gentile poverty, and Irish ancestry. My "Dialectic" paper argues that Toole built a complex symbolic connection between Ignatius Reilly and the Medieval and Renaissance ideas about the planetary god Saturn. As I have argued in Evidence of Influences version 2.0, 30n16, and in the "Dialectic" paper, one can study Confederacy's use of Carnival using the framework of Saturnalia from Frazer's Golden Bough.

Critics have discussed at length the connection between Joyce and Frazer. For example, Vickery devotes five whole chapters of his book on The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough to James Joyce, more than for any other writer. (Admittedly, Vickers wrote after Toole, so Toole could not have been influenced by Vickers himself.) Both in general symbolism and the Frazer connection, Toole seems to be more in the literary school of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce than in the literary tradition of writers like Toole's contemporary Thomas Pynchon.

Thesis: Explore the possible connections and influences of Joyce on Toole's work. If you are ambitious, compare Joyce's Aristotelianism to Toole's dialectic between Neoplatonism and Pragmatic Humanism.

Q: Who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces? A: If not Ken, then Thelma.

I may turn this into part of a scholarly paper myself, but I already have my initial statement out there at the end of my posted script for my lecture called: John Kennedy Toole Papers: A cautionary tale of scholarly research. I think it is worth repeating here. The thought was prompted by a question from the audience. Here is the text from that script:

Question from the audience: Could Walker Percy have written Confederacy?

My answer in the lecture: That is sort of the "grassy knoll" conspiracy theory of Confederacy. (I then explained Giemza's article from Southern Cultures about how the pattern of Percy / Toole is similar to the pattern of Kierkegaard / Kierkegaardian hoax.)

My Ultimate Answer [which I thought of after the audience had left]:  Thelma Toole was obsessed throughout Ken's life that he was a genius. She was the first reader of Confederacy, she loved it, and she was its ultimate editor, as she probably destroyed the revisions Ken had made for Robert Gottlieb and preserved only the original first draft (according to Fletcher). Once it was published, she would be invited to parties and would recite passages from memory. Her notes in the Toole Papers show that she compared the book to the writings of Flannery O’Connor and others. She wrote lyrics called "My Worldview" in which she identified Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and Ben Jonson as predecessors to Confederacy. She immediately understood the quality of the analysis of Confederacy by Patteson and Sauret. The idea that she would not have noticed or would have allowed Percy to change a comma of the text is ridiculous. Thelma is a more plausible candidate for being called the author of Confederacy than is Walker Percy.

My further comment here: I say Thelma may be called an author because some may argue that authorship in the abstract includes the editor. (For more theoretical discussion of textual editing and the nature of the editor in the process of constructing the meaning of a text, see the works of Peter L. Shillingsburg, especially From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts.) If one claims that the editor has a hand in the creation of the text and should therefore be called an author, then Thelma was an author of this text.

(Finally, note the "grassy knoll" tie-in to the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination?)

Web of Knowledge fixed the URL

Since I reported earlier, in Web of Science Botches Citation, that ISI's Web of Science (or rather Web of Knowledge) had mangled my self-citation to my Evidence of Influences paper, I have a duty to report that they have fixed it. I do not know when it was fixed, but I learned about the repair a couple of weeks ago. Thanks Thomson-Reuters.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 17

Thesis #17: Thelma and A Mother's Kisses

This is the first of these occasional ideas that is not directly about A Confederacy of Dunces.

In the Toole Papers, the bibliography of Toole's library included some books published after 1963, the year when Toole wrote most of Confederacy. I did not include those books in the Appendix to Evidence of Influences because they could not possibly have been influences. Nevertheless, one book in particular is very interesting when compared to Toole's own biography.

Though there was no copy of Bruce Jay Friedman's novel Stern in the bibliography (see thesis 15 regarding the influence Stern had on Toole), there was a copy of Friedman's novel A Mother's Kisses. In that book, the mother of the narrator is an oppressively controlling and overbearing person who messes up her son's life. She bears a frighteningly close resemblance to Toole's own mother, as described in Joel Fletcher's memoir Ken and Thelma.

Thesis: Compare Thelma Toole to Meg, the mother in Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #2

As I said in June, 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).

Picking a number two is very difficult, since after the Patteson and Sauret essay, I think there are about a half dozen essays that are in a photo finish for second. In particular, three of them--the ones by Beste, Gatewood, and Williams--are already discussed in my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole's .... Here is the one from MLA Bibliography that I have picked for #2 (among the non-obscure scholarship):

Citation: Dunne, Sara L. "Moviegoing in the Modern Novel: Holden, Binx, Ignatius." Studies in Popular Culture [ISSN 0888-5753] v. 28, no. 1 (2005): 37-47.

Annotation: This article is a well-written exploration of the movie-going connections among Catcher in the Rye, The Moviegoer, and Confederacy. According to Dunne, The Moviegoer "owes much to" Catcher in the Rye (37), and Confederacy can be seen as sharing many important film-related themes and motifs with both of them. Dunne uses Mulvey’s theory of screen gaze to decode Ignatius’s experience of film in Lacanian terms. She offers interpretations of Ignatius’s multi-colored eyes. One could extend her observations to hypothesize that Salinger and Percy actually influenced Toole. Evidence within the Toole Papers at Tulane confirm that Toole was familiar with both writers: Toole explicitly praised Catcher in the Rye in his writings, and he owned a first edition copy of The Moviegoer at the time of his death.

Surprise, surprise, from Google Scholar

I reported last September that because the journal Renascence does not have abstracts to their articles up on their website, they do not conform to Google's requirements for being indexed by Google Scholar. So I thought it ironic that the article that was indexed by Web of Science would not be indexed by Google Scholar.

So I was surprised to discover this month that my article was indexed by Google Scholar. What I had not counted on was that a document delivery firm called Philosophy Documentation Center would load up the Renascence article in order to charge Google Scholar searchers $20 each for the privilege of downloading it. The market has found a way to deliver the content after all. Live and learn.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #1: Patteson and Sauret

Users of my website may be familiar with my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces, wherein I evaluate the quality of Toole scholarship that has not been listed in traditional finding aids such as MLA Bibliography.

In this series, I would like to offer an annotated bibliography, one citation at a time, of the best of the scholarship that is findable via MLA Bibliography. I feel that there is not enough guidance for students of Toole as to which scholarship to read. I will not rank or evaluate my own scholarship, but everything else is fair game.

I will start with the essay that I consider to be, aside from my own work of course, the best. And the winner is:

Citation: Patteson, Richard F., and Thomas Sauret. "The Consolation of Illusion: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." Texas Review [ISSN 0885-2685] 4, no. 1-2, (1983): 77-87.

Annotation: Patteson and Sauret delve into Ignatius’s psychological situation (77 and 85-86). They also chart the plot, showing that the action revolves literally around Ignatius (78). They point out (contra Daigrepont and E. Bell) that Ignatius misunderstands Piers Plowman when he refers to it (80). They discuss the humanity of Darlene, Burma, and Angelo (82). They show that Irene matures away from alcohol to use bowling to control her life (83). They explore the mock-epic and picaresque qualities of the text and compare it to Don Quixote and Zorro (84, 89). They discuss the theme of imprisonment (85). Unlike Pat Gardner, they warn the reader not to put too much stock in Ignatius’s final gesture, kissing Myrna’s pigtail (87). Especially interesting is the fact that Kenneth Holditch had obtained a copy of the lecture version of this text and sent it to Thelma Toole. In a letter in the Toole Papers at Tulane dated January 10, 1983, Thelma wrote to Patteson and Sauret, stating, "It is the most engrossing analysis of ‘Confederacy of Dunces’ that I have read, so far" (See Toole Papers at Tulane, Box 9, Folder 10). Thelma was right on the money.