ELC Saunders #2, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number two.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Saunders's essay on The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin does an excellent job of showing that Franklin taught readers how to be pro-social in a sense of David Sloan Wilson's Multilevel Selection Theory. Franklin has been criticized for seeing no contradiction between gaining wealth and gaining in virtue. One of his saving qualities is the fact that he is so open about his goals and self-deprecating in his candid grasping for worldly success that one cannot accuse him of being underhanded.

Saunders makes a good point that the Franklin system might not work in an economy that is not growing at an exponential rate. In a booming, exponential economy, a reputation for being an honest partner in transations is highly valued and bullying is easily punished by shunning in the market. Franklin's somewhat fictionalized personal story shows his readers how to be evolutionarily successful in a burgeoning industrial economy.

Should one want to study Franklin further in this regard, I would recommend the book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood. Wood does a good job of explaining the social context of Franklin's behavior, in particular why so many Americans of the middling classes in the early Republic idealized him and why many of his contemporaries of the intellectual and elite classes hated him. If you want to be a Romantic who celebrates genius and who stands on a crag staring into the howling wind and fancies yourself to be noble, Franklin is a bounding philistine. The Romantics hated the American cultural values of working hard to amass wealth, so hating Franklin was a way for them to hate the goals common among average Americans in the early 19th century.

To bring this last observation full circle into a discussion of A Confederacy of Dunces, one could point out that Ignatius Reilly can be seen as a parody of such a Romantic genius. He rebels against the idea of being a hard-working young man.

ELC Saunders #1, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. I begin here a short series of entries commenting on a recent monograph in the field, which is:

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

Saunders' collection of essays does not begin with a theory chapter, which I find unfortunate. Saunders does not lay out her framework for analysis. If one spends too much time on theory, one may never get around to applying it, but this volume has the opposite problem. For those who would like to read this book but who are new to evolutionary psychology, I would recommend The Evolution of Desire by David Buss. Buss explores the evolutionary selection pressures on intimate relationships, a common topic in literature. Saunders relies heavily on Buss's text, as her footnotes demonstrate.

I do have to say, I like this collection. My own ELC studies often focus too narrowly on a small set of concepts, such as the heroic altruistic punisher. Saunders studies a wider range of literature than I have, and she applies a wider range of concepts. Kudos.

This month's discussion: In chapter six of the book, Saunders demonstrates that Edith Wharton repeatedly used the theme of competitive female sexual strategies. I have not applied that concept before, and I have read enough Wharton that I could have seen it myself. Briefly, women will try to foil female rivals who are competing for the same men.

The drive to do so may be irrational: the woman who does the sabatoging may herself be infertile, and her efforts may mean that the male of the story fails to reproduce at all. In Ethan Frome, Zeena prevents her husband from starting a relationship with Mattie, even though Zeena seems incapable of having children, while Mattie is described in terms that suggest that she is fertile. Applied to Ethan Frome and other Wharton texts, Saunder's analysis based on female sexual strategy is, if I may say, fruitful.

Ignatius as a Person Being Laughed at

You could call this the second in my series on "the lack of humor in Confederacy."

When I first started doing research on A Confederacy of Dunces, I trudged through all of the Amazon reviews of the book, to see if anyone there had already put forward my ideas about Chaucer's influence on Toole. One of the approximately one thousand reviews argued passionately that Ignatius Reilly was clearly a person with a mental illness. To that reviewer, the book was an extended exercise in laughing at a mentally ill person and his misfortune. Shame on all of us. This perspective is similar to Patteson and Sauret's third Ignatius, as I described in my blog entry of September 1, 2020.

Recently, I had an email exchange with Ron Bell, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Confederacy. He mentioned that he does not find the book funny; rather, he sees it as tragic, and because of that, as well as some other reasons, he argues that Toole himself was a nihilist. While I disagree with his overall argument about nihilism, I do agree with Dr. Bell that the reader is encouraged to laugh at Ignatius. Ignatius is ridiculed and expelled from his community, one step ahead of the guys with the straitjackets. To me, the story would be tragic if he were caught and committed, but he is a slapstick hero who, though humiliated, has escaped to bluster another day.

Toole makes Ignatius just preposterous and difficult enough that we join in the laughter at his expense, but as Patteson and Seurat argue, there are three versions of Ignatius. The first is the crusader for theology and geometry, which is how Ignatius describes himself. Then there is the pompous fool, as portrayed by the narrator. But there is a third Ignatius who is emotionally vulnerable and pitiable. Seen from Ignatius's private point of view, as someone who is hiding from the humiliations of the world, one could read Confederacy and not find it funny.

Special Edition: Bissell's Take on Confederacy

Just this past Tuesday, January 5, 2021, The New Yorker magazine posted on their website an essay on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces entitled The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces. It was in their column "Second Readings," and it situated Confederacy within our present political moment. I would like to share my own thoughts about the essay.

The article points out, correctly, that Ignatius J. Reilly is extremely reactionary in his politics. He doesn't want to take our culture back to the 1950s, he wants to take it back to the 1350s. The article ends by stating that Ignatius was not an anachronism but a prediction, "the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all."

It is certainly true that Ignatius is such a reactionary. Nevertheless, I feel that the narrator makes it abundantly clear that Ignatius's views are being ridiculed in the book. Ignatius is a carnival demon who stirs up chaos, but who is then expelled from the community as it puts itself back together. But there is some question as to what the real-world political implications are even for a fictional position that is being ridiculed. Further, although Ignatius's position is ridiculed, he successfully criticizes the liberal values and institutions of the modern world. The book is, as McNeil said, a reverse satire. Modernity is satirized, but then the position of the satirist is satirized. That having been said, it is rare in literature for modern life to be critiqued not from the left but from the far right.

I feel that Toole's own position was supporting the center, as Bissell himself opines. The part of the ending that is positive is the story of the Jewish factory owner who ends his alienation and rededicates himself to his company. When he does so, he hires the book's Black character. His epiphany occurs when he watches a barge full of tractors being shipped from New Orleans to Liberia. Not exactly a 4chan ending.

In the book, Ignatius is friends with a would-be leftist revolutionary, Myrna Minkoff. They both attack the dominant social order, but from different directions. An interesting parallel in our contemporary society is the fact that the far-right will take ideas and tactics from the left. Trump in 2016 did exactly what Bernie Sanders had envisioned: he activated citizens who were not typically voters. The pollsters got the election wrong because they had not counted votes from this normally alienated demographic group. And many of those voters had Bernie Sanders as their second choice behind Trump. In Confederacy, Myrna's leftist position is portrayed as just as ridiculous as Ignatius's theological authoritarianism. Just as Stephen Jay Gould slammed the thinkers on the Darwinian right by equating them with creationists, Toole slams the radicals on the left by equating them with an advocate for the divine right of kings.

Bissell quotes Rosenbaum's statement that "a fair amount of the author's ridicule and venom is reserved for female liberals and liberationists." I think that is a fair statement. The two blocking characters other than Ignatius whose social status is knocked down in the novel are women: Lana Lee and Mrs. Levy. Mrs. Levy especially is the rich liberal whose well-meaning foolishness causes problems. Lana Lee is the strong, sexually assertive, independent businesswoman, and in the end, she is a corrupter of children who is condemned to a purgatory in jail. Myrna for her part is foolish, but she is actually a decent person, just obtuse. Her schemes fail, but they fail in much the same way that Ignatius's schemes fail. Regarding feminism, the criticism of the book is well-placed.

With regard to the feminine, the critical role played by Southern women in the publishing history of the book is noteworthy. Ken Toole's mother, Thelma, was essential to publication, because she salvaged it and championed it. I have elsewhere argued that because she decided to destroy the later revisions and submit the first draft, her editorial power almost raises her to a level of co-author. (For more details, see Ken and Thelma by Joel Fletcher.) Next, the person at Simon and Schuster who promoted the book was Jean Ann Jollett, the editorial assistant who brought the book to the attention of Robert Gottlieb. (For more details, see Ken and Thelma by Joel Fletcher and Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin.) Third in this chain was Bunt Percy. Thelma may have cornered Walker Percy and demanded that he read the manuscript, but he didn't. Instead, he gave it to his wife, Bunt, and he read it only after she endorsed it. (This is recounted in Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin.) So feminists may come out poorly in the novel, but the text was brought to us by women, and, in particular, Southern women.

One overriding character trait of Ignatius is his immaturity, and one can argue that it is a characteristic shared by the trolls and edgelords within our society. Trump himself seems to be borderline mentally ill in his immature narcissism. He seems unable to understand that the outside world exists. "Being true" in his mind is not being factually accurate to the external world but being loyal to himself. The question is: can we get him into that white Renault and pack him off to New York?

Mad Men's Michael Ginsberg and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 27

In episode two of season seven of the TV show Mad Men, the character Michael Ginsberg walks into an elevator wearing Ignatius Reilly's trademark hunting cap with large ear flaps. He is with Peggy Olson and Stan Rizzo. That scene takes place on Valentine's Day, and he tells Stan that Peggy's calendar says she will be masturbating gloomily. Hmmm. A reference to Confederacy?? What could be more like Ignatius than to masturbate gloomily? (Unrelated to the Ignatius connection, the cap has a button on it that says, "Nixon was Rosemary's Baby.")

In previous episodes, Ginberg starts to look gradually like Ignatius Reilly. He grows a bushy moustache. His clothes gradually become disheveled. Let's go over the ways in which Ginsberg seems to conform to the Ignatius reference and the ways in which the two diverge.

Parallels: Ignatius rails about the evils of the modern office and modern technology and about how modern technology might drive him insane. Ginsberg eventually has a psychotic break after the creative zone of the office suite is replaced by a large computer room. Ignatius is suspected by others, especially Myrna, of having homosexual tendencies. Ginsberg is afraid that the computer is causing him to become a homosexual. He sees Lou and Cutler talking in the computer room and decides that they are homosexuals and that the computer has caused them to commit unnatural acts.

Ignatius is obsessed with his pyloric valve, seeing it as an independent agent, a Cassandra which tells him things. Ginsberg believes that the computer hum in the office is causing pressure to build up in his body which has to be released, so he cuts off one of his own nipples to let the pressure out. At the end of Confederacy, Ignatius barely escapes commitment to a mental hospital. In Ginsberg's last scene he is hauled off to a mental hospital, shouting to Peggy, "Get out while you still can!" Finally, John Kennedy Toole taught for a brief period at Hunter College in New York before he wrote Confederacy, and Michael goes on a date in an earlier episode with a young woman who was graduating from Hunter. Although Confederacy was published at the end of the 1970s, it was largely written in 1963, so it is a period piece of the 1960s, and Mad Men tries to recreate the 1960s.

Differences: First, Ginsberg is actually productive at his job and talented. He is a bit of an eccentric genius; Ignatius only thinks he is a genius. Second, Ginsberg seems to have a genuine psychotic break, whereas Ignatius is more of a picaro, trickster, or fool. Third, the religions are reversed for the characters: Michael is Jewish and Peggy is Catholic, whereas Ignatius is Catholic and Myrna is Jewish. Fourth, Ignatius is a mama's boy, while Michael has no mother. He was born in a concentration camp where his mother died.

More central to the characters, Ignatius's grotesque qualities are important, whereas such qualities are not central to Ginsberg. In my paper "The Dialectic of American Humanism," I show that, in Renaissance astrology, a child of Saturn could be either a genius or a beast. Ignatius sees himself as a genius, but he conforms to all of the negative, beastly qualities of a child of Saturn. Michael does not have that philosophical dichotomy.

Lauren, my wife, made the connection when she saw Ginsberg in the elevator, and she deserves credit for this insight. We have been watching the TV show Mad Men (2007-2015) on DVD. (I highly recommend all of the audio commentaries with Matt Weiner, the creator and auteur of the show.) Thanks, Lauren! oxoxox

I normally like to leave a lot of potential detail out of items in this series, so that you, dear reader, can explore them. However, with COVID-19 stalking the land, I think I will lay out my cards just to prove that I was holding some cards. This item is substantial enough that I thought about sending it to Notes on Contemporary Literature.

Thesis: Compare the Michael Ginsberg character with Ignatius Reilly. IMHO, the likelihood of an intentional reference by Weiner and his team is about ninety percent.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 5: The Quality of Humor is Sometimes Strained

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes of my latest published essay. This is the fifth post in this series.

It is with some irony that in my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I generally do not discuss the quality of the humor in the novel.

Humor is heavily dependent of the mental state of the audience. For example, most people find the comic strip "Family Circus" to be tepid in its humor, but when my daughters were pre-schoolers, they thought it was hilarious and the only strip in the newspaper that was funny.

That having been said, some attempts at humor are more successful with a broader range of persons than others. In my essay, I argue that some people may not appreciate Confederacy's humor because it often uses interpretation concurrence for its comic devices, but in general I do not argue that they do not appreciate the humor because it is not that funny. Here is the buried endnote:

While some readers may dislike Confederacy because they do not appreciate its style of humor, others might dislike it because the comic devices are not always well executed. In this instance, Ignatius reveals unnecessarily that his previous work was written in pencil; the reversal would have been funnier had another character revealed this fact.

Some of Toole's attempts at humor are weak, alas, so some of its failures are due to poor execution.

More on Bakhtin's Carnival

I was reading Eugene Slepov's recent essay on Confederacy (see below for citation). In general, I think it is a good essay and makes good points about nativity as being like ethnicity and about the importance to a character's identity of the time and place from which that character comes (or as the Beowulf poet would say, þæm dæge ond þysses lifes). He makes an important connection between place as a constituent of identity in Percy's Moviegoer as compared to Confederacy. I would have liked for him to have cited the work of Sara Dunne on the act of moviegoing with regard to place in Confederacy, The Moviegoer, and Catcher in the Rye, but that's me.

Slepov begins the essay contrasting his theory of carnival to Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He states that John Lowe, in his essay "Carnival Voices," relied on Bakhtin's theory, whereas Slepov instead sees Ignatius in the role of scapegoat. Here, I sat up and took notice, because I have several times commented on the contrast between Bakhtin's theory of carnival and the earlier tradition that culminated in Frazer's theory of carnival, which features a scapegoat figure.

I even went back and reread Lowe's essay, because I don't think of his essay as being anti-scapegoat. In fact, I think of it as an essay very much in the camp of pro-scapegoat, and one of the few that is pro-scapegoat, so I was surprised by the Slepov's discussion. My conclusion is that Lowe's position is more complex than Slepov suggested.

(Side note: When I had originally read Lowe, I was looking primarily for any comparisons he made between Confederacy and other texts. Rereading it, I see that Lowe articulates a theory of humor. I may study that theory of humor in a later blog entry. In my own writings, I may have borrowed some more ideas from Lowe than I have given him credit for.)

As for Bakhtin himself, Bakhtin seems studiously to ignore the role of the scapegoat in the history of carnival. In his book on Rabelais, he even cites Frazer, but doesn't mention this central feature of Frazer's theory. Why? I think Bakhtin's goal is to create a vision of a utopian "second life" in which all social status and dominance hierarchies are abolished in a revel of immersing ourselves into the regenerative and transgressive potential of the lower bodily stratum and a mythic folk laughter that is not singling any one person out for ridicule.

Bakhtin's supposed folk laughter is primarily ridiculing the "first life" of social orderliness controlled by political authorities. He overlooks the fact that humor is often directed by those of higher status against those of lower status even in a carnival setting. IMHO, Bakhtin's goal is part of a broader agenda of minimizing the fundamental nature of humans as social animals who naturally form interpersonal status hierarchies. I have criticized Bakhtin elsewhere for not having a fully general theory of humor.

It is, of course, impossible to transport oneself back to a previous era and conduct psychological tests to establish that the folk laughter of the medieval times was different than the laughter of, say, the Enlightenment, so many claims that Bakhtin states as obviously true cannot be disproven. His focus on Rabelais is brilliant, because carnival in Rabelais is not typical of carnival traditions generally, which often have a mock social hierarchy and feature a ritual purging of chaos as revelers get back to their lives. Bakhtin's utopian vision has been embraced by literary critics since the 1960s, perhaps in part because of its denial of social status hierarchies in the revolution of the people's laughter.

As for Lowe, he brings in the parts of Bakhtin that do relate to Confederacy, such as Ignatius's grotesque qualities, which wallow in the lower bodily stratum. But the center of Lowe's essay is comparing Confederacy to an ethnic melee, which is a comic drama that often features a scapegoat. So Lowe's approach to Confederacy is much closer to Slepov's than Slepov would lead one to believe. Confederacy features a scapegoat, Ignatius, and he is a figure that the reader is invited to laugh at, the agent of chaos to be celebrated but then expelled as the social order is reestablished, which is a situation very much unlike Bakhtin.

(More awkwardly, Lowe also lists nativity as a form of symbolic ethnicity (page 182), leaving Slepov very little room left to introduce novel points to the discussion. Lowe then goes further than Slepov into the study of ethnicity, making Lowe's essay the stronger of the two.)

Slepov, Eugene. "Singularities of Time and Place: A Study of Nativity as Ethnicity in A Confederacy of Dunces." Southern Quarterly. v. 56, no. 2, (Winter 2019), 8-21.