Open Access copy of Dialectic of American Humanism

In the middle of 2021, I noticed that EBSCO had removed my Renascence article called "The Dialectic of American Humanism," from their library database called Academic Search Premier.

A while ago, I contacted the editors of Renascence, asking them if I could post a copy of my article in a repository such as ResearchGate. They said that I could post a version of it so long as it did not display their exact formating and layout. I could post a version with the exact text including indications of page breaks, but I could not scan the article and post the exact image of it as it was published in the journal.

After I learned this fact, I still did not post my own copy of the article out of respect for the journal. They do sell a copy for $20 on the Philosophy Documentation Center. I did not want to eliminate their ability to generate revenue on intellectual property. I disagree with the business model of the Internet in which companies give away intellectual property and make money by selling user data to third parties. (Yes, I realize that having this statement on Google's Blogger platform makes me a hypocrite.) Part of the reason Facebook needs to provoke people into hating each other is because they need to generate revenue when their business model does not allow them to charge a fair price for their software, such as What's App.

When EBSCO took down my article, however, colleagues on my own campus could not access a version of it. Therefore, I have decided to post a word processor output of the article on ResearchGate. You can now download the article The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 1: Introduction, Mentalese

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD, published in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. This post starts another series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

In 2020, I was reading Barbara Foley's Wrestling with the Left, which investigates the leftist origins of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In that book, Foley discusses and then uses Kenneth Burke's theory of the dual nature of the scapegoat in ritual, myth, and literature. I thought about writing a single blog entry reinterpreting Burke's theory of the scapegoat in terms of ELC, but as I study Burke more, I believe that I can write a series of entries reframing several of Burke's ideas within the ELC context. This entry begins the series.

NOTE: In the discussion below, I use the convention that the brain is the physical hardware (okay, wetware), and the mind is, roughly, the operating system running in the brain. Steven Pinker wrote a book called How the Mind Works, not How the Brain Works. But the mind cannot do things that the brain does not allow.

Burke's writings are voluminous enough and complex enough to devote a lifetime to teasing out every aspect of his theories and reframing them. I will not devote that much time to the effort, so this series will necessarily lack the scholarly rigor and thoroughness to which I would like to give it. I am heavily relying on C. Allen Carter's book about Burke for this series (below). Hopefully, Carter's interpretation of Burke is a fair one. One aspect of Burke that Foley explores and which Carter does not is his early involvement with communism.

For this first entry, I focus on what I consider to be Burke's position on language in the human mind, which I consider to be foundational to his philosophical outlook. Kenneth Burke is part of a philosophical school that says that all human thoughts worth discussing are handled and stored in the medium of a human language. He acknowledges non-human animals can think and behave, but that the human mind is fundamentally different because we have adopted narrative as a framework for our thinking, and it is a narrative in a human language inside of the mind. Further, that language begins with a moral negative. As C. Allen Carter explains, "According to Burke, the language system evolved as a system of moral negatives that gives rise to guilt. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word said, 'Thou Shalt Not!'" (Carter, 3).

Steven Pinker is one of the major theorists of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), upon which ELC is built. It is not necessary for every advocate of EP to embrace all of the ideas of Steven Pinker, but his approach to how the mind works is an important voice in the field. In that way, I consider any theory of Pinker's to be practically a tenet of EP.

Pinker has argued persuasively that the thoughts within the human brain are not in a human language. Pinker calls the native medium of thought within the brain mentalese. Language is a encryption technique for communicating information between two human minds, not the medium within the brain for handling thoughts. The brain has structures for translating internal thoughts into statements in language. It is literally possible to be at a loss for words.

Pinker is an expert on how the brain processes and constructs linguistic utterances; it is not wise to pick a fight with Pinker over the neurology of linguistic processing. In his most famous book, The Language Instinct, he showed how the abstract universal grammar of Noam Chomsky is implemented within the living mind. He further argues that our ability to adopt a language with a Chomskian structure is instinctual and is built into the human brain. It evolved.

Burke is your typical philosopher, which I mean in a negative way. He takes an interesting idea and universalizes it. Instead of saying that moral reasoning is important, he says that moral reasoning and language are the same thing, and that they are the basis of all human thought. Give him an inch, and he takes the universe. Burke has many valuable ideas, but he supersizes them until they form almost a cult religion. Pinker, by contrast, is well-grounded to evidence coming from neuroscience labs, and in a fair debate, Pinker would tear Burke to pieces.

The reason I have dedicated a series to Burke, though, is because Burke does have many good ideas, and they can be productively reframed within the context of evolutionary literary criticism. Until next time ...

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Foley, Barbara. Wrestling with the left: the making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

ELC Saunders #4, 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 four regarding this book.

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

This month's discussion: Chapter Five: Maladaptive Behavior and Auctorial Design: Huck Finn's Pap

Saunders persuasively makes the argument that Twain helps demonize the institution of slavery in the novel Huck Finn by associating it with the evil character of Huck's father. The story shows that Pap is a bad person in part by showing that he acts contrary to natural parental instincts.

For all animals, including humans, it is in an animal's evolutionary self-interest to invest in its children. Parental caring (especially maternal caring) is hardwired into the brain. The human heart usually quickens at the proverbial story of the mother bear who is willing to risk her own life to guard her cubs. Exploiting your own children and lessening their chances of their own reproductive success is therefore unnatural.

Saunders shows that Twain portrays Pap, the only character deeply committed to slavery and the systematic oppression of blacks, as an unnatural father. Pap tries to steal from Huck, he beats him, and he kidnaps and threatens to kill him. Pap seems to want Huck's money to drink and gamble it away. Saunders makes a strong case that Twain's subtext is that slavery is just as unnatural as Pap's dysfunctional fatherhood.

However, the psychological situation of Pap could be more complicated than Twain lets on. A similar situation is occurring in the politics of the United States today. Poor whites seem to be voting against their economic interests by voting for conservative politicians who implement policies hostile to the immediate interests of the poor. I suspect that those working class whites know their long-term interests better than pundits think they do.

To illustrate the issue, we can modify the story of Huck and Pap. If Pap had many children, and he ran a small business, and if Huck was about to take his money and education and join the interests of larger economic players in the society who threaten to crush Pap's business, say by working for the town bank, then it might be in Pap's evolutionary interests to keep Huck down. Although this scenario is very different from the novel, my point is to show that a parent lowering the potential reproductive success of one child might not be unnatural. Likewise, a group of people on welfare do not necessarily vote against their long-term interests by voting for a politician who cuts funding for welfare. The immediate action may be part of a larger pattern that is in their self-interest.

Saunders's observation is accurate: Twain does seem to portray Pap as unnatural and to link that unnatural behavior to his racism. My point above is that Twain may have been simplifying the portrayal of Pap, both with regard to his parental behavior and with regard to his social and political values.

ELC Saunders #3, 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 three.

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

This month's discussion: Chapter Two: Nepotism in Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux'

This chapter is a solid contribution to the scholarship on this story. When I first read the story, I did not understand it, and this paper allowed me to grasp the story's meaning better. That having been said, I did not find this discussion as eye-opening as the chapters on Wharton and Franklin (discussed in previous blog entries). Further, I do not think that Hawthorne's protagonist's behavior was plausible in an evolutionary sense, which was part of the reason I could not understand the story when I read it years ago.

The basic plot of the story is that a man arrives in a New England village looking for his relative. The relative is a British military officer who controls the political establishment of the town. The protagonist is repeatedly surprised and offended because the townspeople treat him rudely and are not helpful. Because he is related to a powerful person, he expects them to be deferential. At the end of the story, he discovers that, just that night, the revolutionaries had attacked the Major and overthrown his government. The story ends with the sight of the Major tarred and feathered and paraded out of town. Years ago, I was confused by the fact that the protagonist explodes in laughter at the end of the story. Now that I know more about humor, it makes at least a little more sense.

A humorous event is often structured in a way that there are two interpretations of the beginning of the event. The initially dominant interpretation is revealed to be incorrect, and the secondary interpretation quickly reveals itself to be the correct one. A joke often leads by offering an interpretation of a situation; then the punchline reveals the misinterpretation. So, for the statement, "I've had the most wonderful evening, but this wasn't it," the listener is led to believe that the statement is a compliment, only to have the last four words reverse the interpretation. And humor often has an element of social tension that is released in the resolution.

This Hawthorne story is structured like a humorous event: the protagonist cannot understand the behavior of the townspeople until he discovers the overthrow of his relative's power. In a rush, their behavior all makes sense. And there is an aspect of social tension released. Had the Major continued to be in power, the rudeness of the townspeople would not have made sense politically. Because he is gone, their rudeness makes perfect sense. Saunders argues that this political calculation would follow evolutionary logic.

Personally, I think that the protagonist would not have laughed; rather, he should have been fearful for his life. Had the townspeople thought that the protagonist could have reversed his kinsman's fortunes, they might have killed him. The leaders of the French Revolution did not kill the aristocracy en masse until they feared that other monarchies, sending armies to France, might restore the king and the nobility to power. The Hutus did not genocide the Tutsis in Rwanda until they thought that Paul Kigame's army would win the war. The Turks genocided the Armenians in part because they perceived the Armenians as allies of their enemies, the Russians.

In this story, the protagonist seems to join the revolutionaries, so for now, he is safe. In the immediate resolution of the incongruity, laughter is appropriate. While a person such as the protagonist actually might have been in danger, Hawthorne was writing a patriotic story with a positive overtone. If he had added a more realistic hint of murder or genocide, he would have ruined the subtext he was attempting. Nevertheless, in an actual situation like this, the protagonist might have been in as much danger as a child with an evil stepmother.

Digital John Kennedy Toole Papers, Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

I recently learned that the Louisiana Research Center at Tulane University began digitizing the John Kennedy Toole papers back in 2016. Why, back in 2009, I spent an entire week digging through the Toole Papers in person and compiled 42 handwritten pages of notes on its contents (Naturally, in a blizzard, and it was uphill both ways).

When I first heard the news of the digitization, I thought, hey, now no one has to camp out in the Tulane archives. But after some searching, I have decided that the digital project does not make the papers as findable as one might suppose. If you find something online through the digital collection, great, use it. But if you do not find something by searching the digital collection, do not conclude that it is not there. You might just have been unable to find it.

I would give you the URL to the digital collection, but if you go to it, the search engine for the collection is not that good, and you will not find much. I went to the website and conducted several searchs including: a) Lumiansky, b) Coleridge, and c) Theseus. The website's search engine failed to find anything for those three searches. And they are important terms to understanding Toole.

A better way is just to use Google. If you search Google, use this template: tulane john kennedy toole digital [keyword]. By plugging in to the keyword slot a) Lumiansky, you get one good hit. You also get one good hit with b) Coleridge. You get no hits for c) Theseus, even though Toole wrote in an assignment in Prof. Lumiansky's class: "Egens’ [Egeus’s] philosophy is notably Boethian and is not out of context in The Knight’s Tale. After the lists have resulted in almost double tragedy he, as Theseus’ father, attempts to make some ‘consolation’ by suggesting that these events must be accepted. The thread of Boethian runs throughout this tale."

So the new digital collection is better than nothing, but it is no substitute for spending a week at the archives looking through the boxes (so there!).

Invisible Man and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 28

I must confess that my go-to move in literary criticism is to take one work and compare it to another. In particular, I have frequently argued that an earlier work had been read by the author of a later work. That later author was then influenced by the earlier work. Many theorists of literary criticism reject this practice, and this rejection is related to the prohibition on the practice of arguing that something is present in a work because the author intended it to be there.

I recently studied Ralph Ellison's celebrated novel Invisible Man. In addition to attending to the text, I tried to read some of the criticism about it. That is an imposing task: Invisible Man holds the distinction of being the work of African American literature most studied by scholars. Indeed, Ellison spent much of the rest of his career commenting on the book himself and framing the terms of its interpretation. While I am not sure I have much to add, I thought I could weigh in with a comparison to Confederacy (naturally).

Unlike some of my comparisons, I do not claim that Toole was influenced by Invisible Man. (In point of fact, nowhere in the Toole Papers is Ellison or his work mentioned.) Instead, I would argue that Toole and Ellison were both influenced by the ideas of the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropology, the heirs to the ritual ideas contained in James Frazer's Golden Bough. Ellison, in his writings, was quite clear about the influence, citing T.S. Eliot and James Joyce as literary ancestors. He was also friends with Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was a leading critic familiar with that school.

Minor Parallels: During the section of Invisible Man where the invisible man (unnamed) disguises himself to look like Rinehart, he wears dark glasses in the nighttime. He can barely see, and what he does see has a green hue. In Confederacy, Burma Jones always wears dark glasses and can barely see. Confederacy has an entire theme of green (Ignatius's cap is green, Trixie's visor is green). What is the meaning of the green in each text?

Workplace Disasters: Both the invisible man and Ignatius are sources of disaster in the workplace. For the invisible man, when he chauffers a trustee and takes him to a brothel, he gets expelled from college, and on his first day of work at the paint factory, he manages to blow the place up. He is effective in his role as an inspirational speaker within the Brotherhood, but once he is alienated from the Brotherhood, he tries to sabotage it, and Harlem ends up in a race riot and conflagration.

Ignatius is also a source of disasters, though they are more minor and comic. At Levy Pants, he tries to foment an uprising of black workers, which fails. He eats nearly all of his hotdogs as a weenie vendor. His false letter at Levy Pants nearly gets Gus sued, but then allows him to stand up to his wife. The invisible man's failures are catastrophic and do not lead to improved relations within local social groups, while Ignatius's failures are comic, and they allow for changes in the local social order which improve the lives of other characters.

Wheels of History, and Cycles within Cycles: When the invisible man discusses with his colleague Hambro the Brotherhood's decision to sacrifice their position in Harlem, he says, "You mean the brakes must be put on the old wheel of history ... Or is it the little wheels within the wheel?" (chapter 23, page varies among editions). Related to that, the invisible man rejects the Brotherhood's view of a spiral of historical progress in favor of a theory of the boomerang of history: history is not progressive but cyclical, and it can whack you in the head.

In Confederacy, Ignatius sees himself being spun on Fortuna's wheel, but there are wheels within wheels. He writes: "So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible." (1980 edition, p. 66). Ignatius sees history as rising and falling on the wheel of Fortuna. Related to these metaphors, both the invisible man and Ignatius reject leftist politics. This feature is so specific and so central to the meaning of each novel, if there was an actual influence by Ellison on Toole's thinking, it is here.

Boethius: Ellison even alludes to Boethius when he describes the musical tradition of the blues. In an essay first published in 1945 (Antioch Review 3.2, reprinted in Shadow and Act), Ellison writes that the source of the blues "is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." Not by The Consolation of Philosophy. By comparison, within Confederacy, we do not have to go far to have Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy hit us in the head (sometimes literally).

Novelistic Style: Both Invisible Man and Confederacy reference many other works of literature and authors. Invisible Man employs a dark, existentialist humor, while Confederacy's humor is a farce in the much more straightforward, Greek New Comedy style. Barbara Foley, in her study Wrestling with the Left, observes that in the Invisible Man "the invisible man is launched into his career as the protagonist of a half-picaresque, half-bildungsroman memoir" (157). This description could be applied to Ignatius in Confederacy, except in the case of Ignatius one might question whether there is any Bildung going on.

Observing from the Periphery: The invisible man in Invisible Man ends up outside of history, writing his account from a well-lit hideaway in New York City. Ignatius Reilly also sees himself as being on the edge of his society looking from that edge inward to criticize it.

Much Deeper Connections: The invisible man is an example of the sacrificial god-king from Frazer's Golden Bough. Ignatius Reilly is a carnival / saturnalian Lord of Misrule, which is a comic and carnival scapegoat version of that dying and resurrected god.

Thesis: Compare Invisible Man and A Confederacy of Dunces. Their authors both drew on a Cambridge School tradition of meaning. I have found a lot, and there is a lot more to uncover.

ELC Theory, part 3: Evolutionary Psychology Predicts Its Own Marginalization

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a new series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

Evolutionary Psychology (EP), the basis of ELC, has a problem with itself. In particular, Multilevel Selection Theory posits that humans have evolved mechanisms that promote and enforce group selection. For example, leaders can inspire followers to die for a cause. The followers may individually fail to reproduce, but the group that contains those followers may out-compete groups where followers did not die for their causes.

Toward this effort, irrational loyalty to the ideology of the group can be an important pro-group mechanism. The irrational loyalty could be to a religious ideal (kill the infidels), to a nation (for Mother Russia), political ideals (give me liberty or give me death), racism (master race, anyone?), or a number of other causes. I have heard it said that much of the motivation for soldiers to sacrifice is for their fellow siblings-in-arms (pronouns to be determined). Henri Tajfel showed that members of even arbitrary groups display strong group loyalty, so just identifying an arbitrary Us as opposed to an arbitrary Them can get the pro-group juices flowing.

Framing all actions in a rational framework of selection and reproduction, however, throws cold water on the ardor of group loyalty, in much the same way that students trained in modern economic theory tend to be more selfish and less altruistic in their personal lives than the average person. In this way, Evolutionary Psychology itself is a bad ideological mechanism for pro-group loyalty. It should come as no surprise that activists, those trying to rouse others to action that may cost them individually, to fight to the death as it were, are likely to reject EP. Therefore, EP predicts its own rejection because it does not provide a selective advantage.

In last month's blog entry, I discuss Judith Saunders's essay on Benjamin Franklin. Franklin in his autobiography was quite candid about using pro-social behaviors to advance his own personal worldly success. He was disparaged by 19th century intellectuals as a philistine. The rejection of Franklin is very much of a piece with the rejection of evolutionary psychology and, with it, evolutionary literary criticism.