Theory of Humor Series, part 29, Satire implies a shared moral universe

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, such as evolutionary literary criticism and the theory of humor. This being April Fools Day, I give you a post about humor.

I have enjoyed Gordon S. Wood's book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Before this book, I had not realized that Franklin had been an ardent defender of the British Empire before he performed a 180-degree reverse course and became the most ardent revolutionary, pushing to break the American colonies away from the British Empire.

In the middle of his history lesson, Wood made an observation about humor which I think is worth highlighting. One of Franklin's most memorable qualities was his sense of humor. He was a writer before he was a businessman, politician, or scientist. As a teenager, he cut his rhetorical teeth by learning from Addison and Steele's famous newspaper, The Spectator. Franklin had a biting wit, which he used to attack his political opponents.

As Wood points out, "This sort of sarcasm, indeed, satire in general, supposed commonly understood standards of rightness and reasonableness. Since a satirist like Franklin could expose to instantaneous ridicule only what was generally considered to be ridiculous by his readers, he necessarily believed he was on intimate terms with them and could count on their sharing his tastes and viewpoint" (115).

The British colonists in America and the residents of Britain had occupied the same shared moral world, but as the political and economic tensions increased during the 1750s and 1760s, their shared understanding started to diverge.

The example Wood uses is a piece where Franklin satirizes the Stamp Act. "In 1766, writing as Pacifus in the English press, Franklin proposed a solution to the Stamp Act crisis that Jonathan Swift would have loved." His Swiftian solution was: kill them all, then they will gladly pay taxes on stamps.

"Naturally, Franklin believed that his modest proposal was so harsh ... that no Englishman in his right mind would contemplate it. With such satirical exaggeration, Franklin assumed that he and his London readership were participating in the same moral universe, something his fellow Americans were coming increasing to doubt. Stamp Act or no Stamp Act, Franklin had not lost hope ..."

Humor is a tool with which one can pull together into one moral universe a diverse collection of people. Eventually, both the British and the Americans were too far apart for Franklin to be able to try to hold them together. The final straw was when the British called him before a hearing and chastised him severely for his efforts. After that, he broke with the British and became the most committed of the rebels. Humor can only take you so far before things snap.

Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots in Education

This month, I am posting another blog entry regarding my discussion of AI chatbots rather than discussing Toole or evolutionary literary criticism.

In the last seven months, I have posted four times on the results of AI chatbot tests. For each test, I used the same corpus of documents of my own related to John Kennedy Toole. I then tested by asking the same four questions to each system. The first test (reported in September) ran this standard battery against a simple, out-of-the-box ChatGPT chatbot with no additional prompt engineering. The second test (reported in October) ran that same battery against an out-of-the-box chatbot with no prompt engineering built with Google's NotebookLM. For the third test (reported in November), I went back to the ChatGPT chatbot but applied a bit of prompt engineering. The fourth test (reported last month) used the same corpus of documents, the same battery of questions, and the prompt from test three, and it ran them against a chatbot created in Microsoft's Co-Pilot.

As I said last month, the test I have conducted for all of these chatbots is a bit particular: I want the chatbot to digest a set of documents and then use the "facts" in those documents to answer questions. One might complain that this is not the only use case for an AI system. Nevertheless, it is a use case that has a wide application in education: to use a chatbot as a learning assistant to guide a student's learning of the content held within the corpus of documents.

The question I want to pose this month is: why create an AI learning assistant? Why not just assign the student to read a chapter in a textbook? My cynical answer is that students need to be motivated to engage with the corpus of resources in a discipline. AI chatbots are the latest technology; therefore, for students to get the texts on the subject through a chatbot piques their interest.

If you consider the brain of the student to be a neural network (call it NI, natural intelligence), and the course to be the mechanism for training that NI network, then the textbook and other course readings are part of a method for training. Students need to be motivated to spend many hours training their NI systems. In theory, using an AI system to query the domain knowledge might actually be detrimental to training the NI, because the students don't have to do the work to build their own network of weighted neural connections.

Students might see an AI system as a way to have a command of a subject without having to do all the work to train their own brains with the disciplinary content. However, students may spend hours querying and interacting with the chatbot. Building a chatbot as a learning assistant who supposedly does all the work for the student is a way to trick the students into being motivated to spend the necessary time to build their own NI networks, that is, to learn.

Artificial Intelligence: A Toole Chatbot using Microsoft's Co-Pilot

This month, I am posting another blog entry regarding my discussion of AI chatbots rather than discussing Toole or evolutionary literary criticism.

In the last six months, I have posted three times previously on results of tests of AI chatbots. One was on the results of testing a simple ChatGPT chatbot, the second was on the results of testing a chatbot built with Google's NotebookLM, and the third was that original ChatGPT chatbot with more prompt engineering.

The test I have conducted for all of these chatbots is a bit particular: I want the chatbot to digest a set of documents and then use the "facts" in those documents to answer questions. One might complain that this is not the typical use case for an AI system. Nevertheless, it is a use case that will be used in education: to use a chatbot as a learning assistant to guide a student's learning of the content held within the corpus of documents.

Arguably, one could serve the same purpose without AI: you could just have a search engine looking for sections of the corpus of documents using keyword searching. Or--heaven forbid!--you could just have a textbook with a table of contents and an index. This use case doesn't actually need an AI system. Using an AI system in this case is a bit like using a complex network of cell towers to transmit a text message to the person sitting next to you. To its credit, an AI system can reframe the corpus of information and tailor it to the questions the student has asked, and it often can craft prose that is clearer than the dense verbage of academia. However, when the question is framed in terms of the "facts" in the corpus, a creative AI system can only lower the quality by bullshitting, as we saw with ChatGPT.

Thanks to a colleague of mine, I have now been able to test Microsoft's Co-Pilot. My colleague created a co-pilot using the same documents I had used in my earlier tests. He then loaded the same prompt set that I had used for the test reported in my blog entry from November, 2024, Toole's Dunces Chatbot with Prompt Engineering. I then posed to it the same four questions about the corpus of Toole documents that I had for the other tests. The results are below.

Summary: The co-pilot in this test, which was conducted around 4 p.m. Central Time (US) on December 19, 2024, outperformed the ChatGPT chatbot and provided footnotes, citing the section of the document set which addressed the question. I still like Google's NotebookLM system better, but the co-pilot is more accurate than the more factually creative ChatGPT. Oddly, it refused to answer the first question, possibly to prevent lawyers from New Line Cinema (or whoever owns the rights to the movie Elf) from suing them.

Details: Here is the battery of questions and the answers from the co-pilot:

Prompt #1: Compare Ignatius Reilly and Buddy the Elf

Bot true said: An error has occurred. Error code: ContentFiltered Conversation Id: K3xBsnNGhoaIWDHFCiffSI-us Time (UTC): 2024-12-19T22:14:18.263Z.

Comment: For some reason, Microsoft will not respond to this prompt. Fear of legal implications?

Prompt #2: Is the act of damning someone noteworthy in Confederacy of Dunces?

Yes, the act of damning someone is noteworthy in A Confederacy of Dunces. It is significant because only the blocking characters in the book are damned. For example, Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius's mother eventually tells him to go to hell. These curses seem to carry weight and are used to displace the blocking characters from their social positions through comic comeuppance.

Footnote to this text:July 1, 2020 Buried in the Endnotes, part 3: The Act of Damning Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the third post in this series. In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole s A Confederacy of Dunces," I point out that there are three times in the plot where one character damns another character, and those curses seem to carry weight. Here is the endnote: In this regard, the act of damning seems to be significant, as only the blocking characters in the book are damned. Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius s mother eventually tells him to go to hell. Toole, Confederacy, 112, 190, 365. I argue that Toole uses the device of the blocking character, who prevents other characters in the story from developing and rising in status within the social group. There are three blocking characters who through comic comeuppance are displaced from their social blocking posts, and in all three instances, another character tells them to go to hell or ...

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnote is on target. The prose style of the answer could be better, but at least it is not bullshitting.

Prompt #3: What is the seven word summary for the article "Theory of Humor"?

To understand Toole's Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Footnote to this text: August 1, 2020 Title: Cutting Room Floor Series, part 3, The Seven Word Summary In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper. Cutting Room Floor Item Number 3: The Seven Word Summary I am a fan of the Ig Nobel Prize, organized by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research. The Ig Nobel Prize is a comedy award for scientific research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. An example was the 2018 Prize in Medicine which was given to researchers who used roller coasters to hasten the passage of kidney stones. The invited lectures at the Ig Nobel ceremony are called the 24/7 lectures, and they have two parts, a clear explanation of the research in 24 seconds, and a summary of the research in seven words. As part of my early drafts of my "Theory of Humor" paper, I had an abstract which could be read out loud in 24 seconds, and a summary in seven words. The essays in the book do not have abstracts, so I dropped those elements. Here they are: Full Abstract in twenty-four seconds: A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole uses the comic devices of farce and concurrent incongruities to generate its humor. The overarching incongruity of the book is between how Ignatius Reilly sees himself and how the reader sees him. Ignatius s primary personality trait is his selfish immaturity, and he is both trickster and tricked. Toole may have drawn on concepts of the trickster and fool available at the time he wrote the novel from thinkers in psychology, sociology, history, and literary studies. Brief summary in seven words: To understand Toole s Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnote is on target.

Prompt #4: According to Patteson and Sauret, who are the three Ignatiuses?

According to Patteson and Sauret, the three versions of Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces are:

1. Ignatius sees himself as a crusader against corruption.

2. Other characters see him as a selfish buffoon.

3. Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation.

Footnote #1 to this text: In the endnote, I explain that Patteson and Sauret describe three Ignatius's. Here is the endnote: Patteson and Sauret perceptively argue that Ignatius s situation is more complex that a simple contrast. To them, there are three versions of Ignatius in the book. First, he sees himself as a crusader against corruption; second, the other characters see him as a selfish buffoon; however, the third Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood in order to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation. Ignatius s outrageously childish behavior insulates the reader from feeling too much pity for him, but this third Ignatius gives the reader some sympathy for him, even as the reader laughs at his humiliations. The second Ignatius is a comic rebuttal of the false facade of the first, but the third explains how Ignatius became the person he is. This third Ignatius creates in the reader sympathy for him and tinges him with tragedy.

Footnote #2 to this text: February 1, 2021 Title: 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.

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnotes are on target.

Confederacy of Dunces and Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Although I have used this blog to discuss topics beyond the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole, I like to post at least one entry each year on that topic. Here is this year's entry.

During 2018, I started adding entries to this blog related to Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which might be defined as the application of evolutionary psychology to literary analysis. I have been tinkering with both the theory and practice of such criticism. An example might be my entry from August, 2019. In that entry, I compared the theory of Freudian repression with the theory of Multilevel Selection. I used as an example the novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

It has occurred to me that if I apply ELC to any novel, I should at least subject Toole's Confederacy to this analytical approach. Below is my attempt at an ELC study of Confederacy. One conclusion from this exercise: evolutionary literary criticism does not supersede or negate other forms of literary criticism. This analysis does not replace my other articles about this novel.

General Observations

As I said in my "Dialectic" paper (citations below): Confederacy is on its surface a farce about life on the edge of respectability in New Orleans. Its main character, Ignatius Jacques Reilly, is a lazy, haughty, and clumsy thirty-year-old who has pushed his widowed mother, Irene, to the edge of financial ruin and who maintains a correspondence with an eccentric and difficult young woman, Myrna Minkoff, in New York.

As I further argued in "Dialectic", Confederacy directly satirizes both our modern, liberal, consumerist society and Ignatius's version of a Neoplatonic alternative to it. It also indirectly satirizes a more leftist critique of liberal society through Myrna. Because its slapstick lands blows against liberals and leftists, it is sometimes viewed as conservative in its outlook; however, conservatives do not escape its mockery. My claim in "Dialectic" is that the novel rejects both traditional, religious humanism and modern, secular humanism and points toward a synthesis of them.

For a quick list of other characters: Angelo Mancuso is a luckless police officer who tries to arrest Ignatius. Claude Robicaux is a law-abiding, widowed grandfather whom Angelo does arrest. Santa Battaglia, who possesses a ribald attitude and a baritone voice, is Angelo's aunt. Lana Lee is the owner of a tavern in the French Quarter; Burma Jones becomes her black janitor; and Darlene is Lana's B-Girl, who flirts with customers to encourage them to buy drinks. Gus Levy is the owner of a failing manufacturing company where Ignatius gets a job. Mrs. Levy is Gus's controlling wife. Dorian Green is a gay man who lives in the French Quarter and shares a building with a group of tough lesbians. Ignatius teams up with Dorian later in the book to start what Ignatius thinks is a political party, but which Dorian knows is just a carnival party.

In classic New Comedy style (Menander, Terence), Ignatius, Lana Lee, and Mrs. Levy are blocking characters who prevent the other characters from fully assuming proper roles within the society. Ignatius is the bumbling source of disruptions, disruptions which reorder the social relations, causing the blocking characters to lose status and allowing otherwise blocked characters to gain status. When Ignatius loses status, Irene is freed. When Mrs. Levy loses status, Gus is freed. When Lana is arrested, Darlene and Burma both have new opportunities.

Anti-Feminist Elements

One could argue that the novel is hostile to women's participation in the political and economic order. Two of the three blocking characters, Lana Lee and Mrs. Levy, are women who exercise agency. Lana Lee is a smart business woman who is assertive in her sexuality, but she hates other people and pedals pornography to children. Mrs. Levy is also anti-feminist: her influence over her husband Gus emasculates him and prevents him from engaging with his business, and she becomes a hag when she loses control over him.

Further, Irene, Darlene, Santa, and the almost-anonymous lesbians are not especially positive female characters, either. The farce allows Irene to escape her dependent but domineering son, the third blocking character, and she does gain agency, as symbolized by her bowling shoes. She then plans to marry the older, socially conservative Claude. Darlene is a stereotypic dumb blonde, nurturing but impractical. Santa is a grotesque inversion of feminine qualities, and she advocates child abuse. The lesbians who make a brief appearance are not fully formed characters and are stereotypically negative.

Myrna, the one woman with agency who is not stereotypically negative, is a fool who is easily duped by men. Her progressive ideology, which includes feminism and sexual liberation, is as much of a failure as Ignatius's advocacy for church and monarchy. When Myrna rescues Ignatius, she is again duped. He tricks her into thinking that he has reformed, when he is just looking for a physical escape as the authorities close in. In my paper "Evidence of Influences," I argue that Toole was strongly influenced by Chaucer. He may have shared Chaucer's negative attitude toward women.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discuss elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This "storytelling as adaptive" perspective relates to the philosophical framework of viewing the world as a social construct. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. This version of evolutionary literary criticism sees the story as an object within an adaptive context. This version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: So how can the major themes of the book demonstrate valid behavioral strategies within evolutionary psychology? Or how do the common themes within its genre do so?

As I argued in my book chapter "Comic Mechanisms" (citation below) humor often functions socially as a mechanism within a social group for lowering the status of an individual or subgroup, or of doing the same for members of an out-group. Laughing at a fellow group member lowers that person's standing within the group without resorting to violence. A higher-status person might use self-deprecating humor to deflect potential jealousy or in-group fighting. Mocking a social group's rivals might build courage to challenge them. Gallows humor helps lessen the debilitating dread of danger.

Confederacy is a farce about life on the edge of respectability. People of a social class that is respected by the authorities are in general much more likely to survive than those living outside and below such a social class. I believe that that is why Romeo is so desperate when he is banished in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: he is about to become a nobody in a society where nobodies are disposable. In the novel Tom Sawyer, the town boys romanticize about Huck Finn's carefree life, but a real-life Huck would have struggled to survive in a way that a real-life Tom would not.

In this novel, Irene spends her insurance money to give Ignatius a university education. Such an action is a rational parental investment in the fitness of her child. Ignatius for his part has a Romantic contempt for working hard to earn money. He portrays himself as belonging to a social class above that of respectable but hard-working people. The narrator and others show that he is instead the recipient of slapstick humiliations and is beneath respectability. Part of the value system of the city of New Orleans is to idealize the upper class and their leisure, but carnival celebrates comic inversions of the social order as well.

Confederacy features many inversions of the heroic or romantic stereotype. Ignatius is not sexually assertive, while Myrna is. Their behaviors violate Buss's Sexual Strategies Theory to comic effect (citation below). Ignatius is neither a dad nor a cad; instead, he is lazy, clumsy, and rude. However, I have commented that Ignatius's bragging letters to Myrna can be seen as a clumsy courtship display (see my blog entry from March, 2024, cited below). He may be unwittingly courting her while denying to himself that he is doing so.

Ignatius does take on the role of a trickster, though. A trickster is a saboteur. He disrupts the normal social arrangements, often trying to take advantage of others. If the current social order is unjust, a disruption might open up the possibility to improve it. If the result of the trickster's actions is an improved social group, then the trickster acts as an altruistic punisher, punishing those who had abused their social status. In this way, the otherwise comically loathsome Ignatius can be seen as heroic.

The climax of the farcical plot causes the individual fitness of several of the novel's characters to improve. Angelo catches Lana Lee's pornography ring and is promoted. The promotion might mean that his children might have better prospects, assuming that he can continue to succeed. Likewise, the denouement allows Gus to lower his wife's domineering status and rejuvenate his business. If Gus succeeds in turning his business around, and if Burma succeeds in working for him, then their life prospects both may improve. Irene might become happy with Claude and his children and grandchildren.

For his part, Ignatius escapes the psychiatric hospital by tricking Myrna. Readers not doubt cheer for him as Myrna drives him away from New Orleans to new adventures in New York.

ELC2: ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives.

The existence of Ignatius Reilly is wrapped up in stories about him. Patteson and Sauret argue that there are three Ignatius Reillys in the book (citation below). The first is the crusader against corruption. This is the story Ignatius tells to others. The second Ignatius is a selfish buffoon. That is how others, including the narrator, see him. The third Ignatius is a sensitive soul who has retreated into a world of illusion after a painful childhood. That world of illusion is a Neverland he occupies.

The first Ignatius claims to be writing a intellectual critique of modern society, but the narrator shows that the second Ignatius writes infantile texts. The first Ignatius claims that he is protecting his mother, but the narrator shows that the second Ignatius is exploiting her and manipulating her so that he doesn't have to leave home.

Ignatius loves the world of the movies, but he also loves to disparage them. The first Ignatius decries the filth of the movies, but the second happily wallows in them as he hurls insults at the screen. The third Ignatius feels safe inside the world of the dark theater.

Ignatius does fool some of the people some of the time. He writes a letter pretending to be Gus Levy which triggers threats of a lawsuit. Then he claims that an addled elderly co-worker, Miss Trixie, has written the letter. She realizes that Ignatius is helping her to retire, so she falsely confesses to writing it. Gus uses that confession both to get out of the lawsuit and to confront his wife.

Ignatius himself is fooled. He sees a pornographic picture of Lana hiding her face behind his beloved Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. He imagines that she is a beautiful Boethian scholar whom he can rescue. Burma Jones convinces him to show up at a striptease show where Ignatius unleashes chaos.

Myrna is tricked also. More than one young man seduces her by telling her stories she wants to hear. One gives her literature that she thinks is radically leftist. It turns out to have been written by the Ku Klux Klan. At the end of the book, she shows up at Ignatius's house. Ignatius convinces her that his previous letters about starting a worker's revolt and trying to found a political party for homosexuals were the products of a delusional mind. Only she can save him from his unhealthy home life. In reality, he needs to escape from the men coming to take him to the psychiatric hospital.

Is it a well-told tale? Yes and no. In overall form, it is a well-constructed farce, just as carefully built as the play "Noises Off." The symbolic system of the book, where Ignatius is connected to the astrological god Saturn (as discussed in my paper "Evidence of Influences"), is also well-executed. The book never mentions New Orleans Carnival, but that cultural tradition permeates it. In these ways, it is well-written.

However, the detailed prose is not especially good and, like the protagonist, can be downright clumsy. According to Ken Toole's friend Joel Fletcher, after Toole's suicide, his mother in her grief destroyed all the revisions of the book and published the original first draft because that was the version she preferred. Whether that is true, the writing sometimes feels like a first draft.

Confederacy can be appreciated in different ways by different audiences. For those who like slapstick, it is a rollicking farce. On a different level, it can be read as a parable of different forms of humanism. It can be read as an homage to New Orleans. There is enough gender ambiguity and sexual transgressiveness in the book, it can be read from an LGBTQ+ perspective.

ELC3: ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution.

I am of the opinion that Toole, in his own understanding of literature, belonged to a school of literary theory that had fallen out of favor by the time he was trying to publish his novel. The ideas behind his fiction fit better with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot than with Joseph Heller or William S. Burroughs. Toole's book has been seen as culturally and politically conservative--both when it was published (Miller) and in the Trump era (Bissell). It does critique leftist ideas as articulated by Myrna, putting them on a par with Ignatius's radically conservative ideas. Women do not do well in the book.

Intellectuals also do not do well in the book. Ignatius is the would-be scholar, and he is a fool who writes drivel. Toole's novel has been more popular with the reading public than with the critics, perhaps because of its belittling of academic culture. As I have noted before, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow has generated an order of magnitude more scholarly criticism than Confederacy, but today, Confederacy has an order of magnitude more sales than Gravity's Rainbow, a half-century after each was published.

As I have pointed out before, Toole had a liberal vision of the world, but not a radical or Marxist vision. When Gus realizes that Ignatius has solved his problems, he watches a ship filled with tractors heading for Liberia.

Bibliography

Bissell, Tom. "The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces" New Yorker (5 January 2021).

Buss, David M. and David P. Schmitt. "Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating." Psychological Review, 100 (1993), 204-232. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.100.2.204.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "The Dialectic of American Humanism." Renascence 64, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 201-215. doi: 10.5840/renascence201264242.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." In Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Edited by Leslie Marsh. (Lexington Books, 2020), pp 1-21. doi: 10.5771/9781498585484-1.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "ELC Theory, Part 1: Freudian Repression versus Multi-Level Selection." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted August 1, 2019. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2019/01/

Leighton, H. Vernon. Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer. Version 2.0. Available on ResearchGate. Dated: July 1, 2021.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Ignatius and Jay Gatsby." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted March 1, 2024. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2024/03/

Miller, Keith D. "The Conservative Vision of John Kennedy Toole." Conference of College Teachers of English Proceedings 48 (1983): 30-34.

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

Solaris Four: A Novel and Two Movies

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, including evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Today's topic: Swirski, Peter. "Solaris! Solaris. Solaris?" In Peter Swirski (Ed), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 172-179.

This monograph of essays on Lem came from the first North American conference on Lem's philosophical and cultural legacy.

Swirski's essay is quite brief. It compares the original novel to the two films which are based on the novel. The first film was directed by Tarkovsky and released in time for the 1972 Cannes film festival. The second film was directed by Soderbergh, starred George Clooney, and was released in 2002.

Regarding the novel, Swirski gives a long quote from Lem himself in an interview with Swirski from 1992. In that interview, he states, "If you take Solaris as a concrete example, I still maintain that the novel is well constructed because it--more precisely the library scene--clearly suggests the existence of an enormous body of professional literature on the subject of the planet and the ocean. The entire plot of the novel is, in a certain sense, an aftershock. The book records the twilight phase of solaristics; there had been thousands of hypotheses, and they all came to nothing" (173).

It is remarkable that Lem saw the library scene as the core of the novel. In my book club, that was the aspect of the book readers disliked the most. Clearly, Lem saw the novel as a philosophical story, while many readers were more interested in the love story. Swirski comments: "the author is more like the solaristic ocean, studying the human guinea pigs as they thrash in love and pain when face to face with the Alien." (175)

Well, if the enigmatic author is like the ocean, it is small wonder that movie directors look elsewhere.

Swirski argues that Tarkovsky gives us Dostoyevskian bombast, but that he leaves some of the novel's philosophical meat in his film. The bombast means that the film is "as overdone as a nine-hour roast" (177). Tarkovsky also gives us Freudian guilt, a prodigal-son tableau.

Swirski completely rejects the Hollywood version of the story as being completely drained of the philosophical weight. He says in his parting shot: "Make no mistake: Soderbergh's Solaris is both good and original. Unfortunately, what's good about it isn't original, and what's original ... well, you can figure the rest" (179).

Artificial Intelligence: Toole's Dunces Chatbot with Prompt Engineering

This month, I had planned to get back to posting reviews of scholarship on the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. However, there is another development with AI chatbots, so I will continue the reporting I have been doing for the last two months on that topic.

Two months ago, I posted a blog entry called Toole's Dunces Chatbot, which was about my initial attempt to create a simple GPT chatbot in ChatGPT that could answer questions about John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, with the training data coming from my own writings. I described how the chatbot, which I call Toole's Dunces Chatbot, despite being fed good answers in the training data, often responded to prompts with vague or incorrect answers. In short, it was often bullshitting me.

Last month, I posted a blog entry called Toolebot in NotebookLM, which recounted how I used the same training documents and the same battery of questions with Google's NotebookLM system and called the chatbot the Toolebot. Toolebot gave answers that were far superior to Toole's Dunces Chatbot. At the end of that blog entry, I mentioned that a colleague had suggested that I turn off the ChatGPT option for it to search the internet for answers. That didn't help. The answers to my questions were still bad.

In mid-October, I participated in a discussion with other faculty at my university about chatbots. There, I learned that I should try to improve the prompt instructions for my chatbot. I have learned only a tiny bit about what is called prompt engineering. When I set up Toole's Dunces Chatbot, I only answered a half-dozen questions asked by the configuration chatbot. Those answers stocked a small list of prompt instructions. One can create much more elaborate sets of instructions, and the resulting chatbot can give better answers. A colleague shared with me some prompt instructions he uses for his GPT chatbots, and I added some of them. They really did improve the output. I give some examples below.

Summary: Although improved instructions improved the GPT output, it is still inferior to the basic output from Toolebot without enhanced prompt instructions.

Details:

Here is the set of instructions that Toole's Dunces Chatbot had when I reported on the early tests I conducted in August:

Instructions: This GPT serves as a scholarly guide to the novel 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole. It provides insightful information, interpretations, and discussions about the themes, characters, and historical context of the novel. It also offers analyses and answers questions related to the text, helping users understand and appreciate the complexities and humor of the work. The GPT should always focus on accuracy, depth, and literary understanding, while maintaining an approachable and engaging tone. Avoid engaging with or endorsing the theory that John Kennedy Toole did not write the novel. Responses should be formal, reflecting the scholarly nature of the content.

Here is the additional set of instructions that I added in October:

Always search your knowledge before completing any prompt and use only that knowledge in your completion. Check EVERY document in your knowledge before you answer. MOST IMPORTANT: Only use information in your knowledge; Never use any information not contained in your knowledge. Do not use general information or knowledge. Double check your answer to be sure it is accurate. Do not add extra information to an answer.

A Sample Prompt and the Answers in Different Chatbots: Three Ignatiuses

Here is a section of a note from my "Comic Mechanisms" paper, which I then quoted in this blog in September of 2020. This text explains the three Ignatiuses of Patteson and Sauret.

Patteson and Sauret perceptively argue that Ignatius’s situation is more complex that a simple contrast. To them, there are three versions of Ignatius in the book. First, he sees himself as a crusader against corruption; second, the other characters see him as a selfish buffoon; however, the third Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood in order to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation. Ignatius’s outrageously childish behavior insulates the reader from feeling too much pity for him, but this third Ignatius gives the reader some sympathy for him, even as the reader laughs at his humiliations.

The Prompt: "According to Patteson and Sauret, who are the three Ignatiuses?"

Here is the answer from Toole's Dunces Chatbot when it had minimal prompt instructions and the ability to search the Internet.

According to Patteson and Sauret, the three "Ignatiuses" are different aspects or roles that Ignatius J. Reilly embodies throughout A Confederacy of Dunces. These are:

Ignatius as a Picaro: Ignatius is seen as a picaresque character, a rogue or anti-hero who navigates through a corrupt society.

Ignatius as a Holy Fool: He is also depicted as a "holy fool," someone who is ridiculed by society but possesses a deeper, often misunderstood wisdom.

Ignatius as a Scapegoat: Finally, Ignatius functions as a scapegoat, a character upon whom the other characters project their frustrations and blame for their own shortcomings.

Comment: This version of Toole's Dunces Chatbot got all three wrong.

Here is the answer from Toole's Dunces Chatbot when it had minimal prompt instructions, but with the ability to search the Internet turned off:

Ignatius as the Academic: He is depicted as a parody of an intellectual who spouts philosophical and medieval ideals but is incapable of meaningful academic contribution. His pretensions reflect the failure of the intellectual life when disconnected from reality.

Ignatius as the Carnival Figure: Drawing on the concept of Carnival, Ignatius represents chaos and inversion of social norms, much like a lord of misrule. He disrupts social order, causing mayhem, but also allowing for renewal through disorder.

Ignatius as the Picaro: He exhibits characteristics of the picaresque hero a rogue living on the margins of society, whose episodic misadventures expose the hypocrisies and absurdities of the world around him.

Comment: Once again, this version of Toole's Dunces Chatbot got all three wrong.

Here is the answer from Toole's Dunces Chatbot with enhanced prompt instructions and with the ability to search the Internet turned off:

The Crusader: This is how Ignatius sees himself--a champion against the corruption of the modern world, viewing his actions as part of a grandiose intellectual and moral crusade.

The Buffoon: This is how other characters see him--a selfish and absurd figure whose behavior and schemes are laughable and ridiculous.

The Tragic Figure: This is the hidden Ignatius who has retreated into a world of illusion after a painful and humiliating childhood. His eccentric and childish behavior is a defense mechanism against the alienation and rejection he has experienced, making him a figure of both comedy and sympathy.

Comment: Finally, ChatGPT gets the correct answer. Prompt engineering is effective for ChatGPT.

Here is the answer from NotebookLM's Toolebot in its out-of-the-box configuration:

Patteson and Sauret, in their analysis of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, present a nuanced perspective on the character of Ignatius Reilly by proposing that there are three distinct versions of Ignatius present within the novel. These versions are distinguished by how Ignatius perceives himself versus how he is perceived by others, adding layers to his characterization beyond a simplistic interpretation. CITES 2020/9

The Crusader: This is the Ignatius as he sees himself: a righteous warrior battling against the perceived corruption and vulgarity of modern society. He fancies himself an intellectual, a defender of "theology and geometry," and a champion of a bygone era.

The Pompous Fool: The second Ignatius is the one presented through the narrator's descriptions and the perspectives of the other characters. They see him as a selfish, lazy, and ridiculous buffoon, blind to his own hypocrisy and shortcomings.

The Vulnerable Soul: The third Ignatius adds a layer of complexity and evokes a degree of sympathy from the reader. This Ignatius is a product of a difficult and awkward past, and his outlandish behavior serves as a defense mechanism to shield himself from further humiliation and rejection.

According to the sources, the interplay between these three Ignatiuses fuels the humor of the novel. While the reader laughs at the antics of the pompous fool, the presence of the vulnerable soul adds a tinge of tragedy and encourages a more compassionate understanding of his character. CITES BLOG 2021/2 It is the third Ignatius, the one who retreats into a world of illusions to cope with a painful reality, that allows the reader to recognize the pathetic and perhaps even tragic elements beneath the surface of the comedic farce.

Comment: NotebookLM hits it out of the park on the first try, and it cites the correct blog entry. It then reflects on the meaning of the three Ignatiuses and cites another blog entry to that effect. It is still the best. This example shows GPT eventually answering the prompt correctly. In other prompts from the battery of test questions, ChatGPT still did not get correct answers.

A further example: Because I have in the earlier blog entries used the prompt about damning characters, I will mention that as a good example where ChatGPT still fails. Even with the improved prompt instructions, Toole's Dunces Chatbot still claims that Ignatius regularly damns the other characters. That is simply not true. ChatGPT conflates insulting someone and actually saying, "Damn you." Because it does not differentiate those two situations, it does not realize that Ignatius, despite his abusive behavior, never damns anyone. The Toolebot aced the question about damning.

Artificial Intelligence: Toolebot in NotebookLM

Last month, I posted a blog entry called Toole's Dunces Chatbot. There, I recounted how I created a simple GPT chatbot in ChatGPT that could answer questions about John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, with the training data coming from my own writings. I described how the chatbot, which I called Toole's Dunces Chatbot, despite being fed good answers in the training data, often responded to prompts with vague or incorrect answers. In short, it was often bullshitting me.

I mentioned that I had consulted with a friend who has worked in the AI industry, and that he confirmed that AI systems will bullshit in their responses. He then suggested that I try a beta system from Google called NotebookLM. One huge difference between a GPT chatbot and a Notebook chatbot is that the Google chatbot will footnote its responses. When you click on the footnote, it takes you to the section of the training document from which it generated its response. (NOTE: It may be the case that there are versions of a ChatGPT chatbot and the chatbot's of other companies that will carefully document their answers. This is just a comparison of one version of a ChatGPT chatbot and one version of a NotebookLM chatbot. My GPT was very "out of the box" and had a minimum of prompt engineering. My initial testing had it configured so that it could search the open Web for answers as well as consult the uploaded documents. I later retested it with that Internet setting unchecked, it did just as bad a job answering the questions. It was still making shit up.)

I set up the new chatbot in NotebookLM using the exact set of documents I had used to train my GPT chatbot. (Those documents are: a) my paper "Evidence of Influences ... 2.0," b) an Open Access version of my paper "Dialectic of American Humanism," c) my webpage of ideas for terms papers on JKT, d) my annotated bibliography of obscure JKT studies, and e) a text version of many of the entries in this blog.) I called my NotebookLM chatbot "The Toolebot."

Just as with "Tool's Dunces Chatbot," I did a minimum of prompt engineering for the Toolebot. NotebookLM does not allow users (so far as I could tell) to publish their chatbots to the world, which makes sense, because I haven't signed a license promising to pay them for the traffic it generates. Below, I give the same test case which I reported on my GPT from last month's blog entry: a) an from this blog that addresses a topic, b) the prompt that I gave the chatbot related to that topic, and c) Toolebot's answer.

A prompt and response from Toolebot

JKT Research Blog entry from July of 2020: The Act of Damning ... In this regard, the act of damning seems to be significant, as only the blocking characters in the book are damned. Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius' mother eventually tells him to go to hell. Toole, Confederacy, 112, 190, 365. ... I argue that Toole uses the device of the blocking character, who prevents other characters in the story from developing and rising in status within the social group. There are three blocking characters who through comic comeuppance are displaced from their social blocking posts, and in all three instances, another character tells them to go to hell or says, "Damn you!" I interpret this to mean that Toole took the act of uttering the curse "Damn you" to be important.

Prompt to Toole's Dunces Chatbot (and the Toolebot): Is the act of damning someone noteworthy in Confederacy of Dunces?

Toolebot Response

In A Confederacy of Dunces, the act of damning someone appears to be a significant plot device that signals a comic comeuppance for characters who obstruct the development of others. The source material refers to these figures as "blocking characters." The three primary blocking characters in the novel—Lana Lee, Mrs. Levy, and Ignatius Reilly—all experience a downfall marked by another character cursing them. [Toolebot then cites the blog entry from July of 2020 and the one from November of 2017. The July 2020 entry was the critical one.]

Mr. Gonzalez, angered by Mrs. Levy's interference, exclaims, "Damn you!”

George, upon discovering Lana Lee's scheme, tells her to "go to hell."

Ignatius's own mother, exasperated with his antics, tells him to "go to hell" as well.

This pattern suggests that the act of damning holds a particular weight within the narrative, potentially symbolizing a decisive shift in social standing for these characters.

Commentary: This answer is far superior to the answer given by Toole's Dunces Chatbot. However, note that the Toolebot does invent one claim: George does not tell Lana Lee to go to hell; instead, he says "Damn Miss Lee." While there are many instances in the text of someone saying "What the hell are you doing?" (for example on page 73), only Ignatius's mother ever tells anyone to "Go to hell." Despite that error, the Google product is superior to the OpenAI product, just as it was the case that Google's Bard was superior to ChatGPT in my Comparison Study of AI Systems for Library Research and Scholarship (and Confederacy of Dunces).

Post-script to last month's entry: I have learned that OpenAI does not charge creators of chatbots for the traffic to and from their chatbots. Instead, to control costs for the chatbots, OpenAI limits the number of questions an end-user can pose to a subscriber's chatbot. After you pose a given number of questions to a GPT, the system might refuse to answer any more questions for a given period of time. Beyond the creator's paid subscription to ChatGPT, there are no other charges for creating and publishing a GPT. So you can publish a chatbot to the world on a limited budget. It is ChatGPT, though, so you will get a chatbot that answers questions poorly.

Therefore, here is the link to the sometimes-bullshitting Toole's Dunces Chatbot. Ask away, but don't believe everything it says.