The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 26: Post-modernism, Gravity's Rainbow, and Confederacy

I must confess that I am not a big fan of post-modern thought. I actually think, horrors, that science has something to say about the world in which we find ourselves, and that there is a world in which we find ourselves that behaves in a generally consistent manner. I do not find it surprising, for example, that creationists back in the 1980s began to employ reasoning borrowed from deconstructionists to critique biology.

Recently, I was studying Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow (GR). It is a difficult novel, but one that has attracted many scholars and critics. It is definitely a post-modern novel, meaning that Pynchon himself rejected the modernism of such writers as Wallace Stevens. Although there are perhaps many definitions of post-modern, I think one element that GR embodies is a willingness to subvert the reader's expectations for how a narrative plot should be structured. Critics have described the ending of GR as a plot that explodes like an incoming rocket into fragments that do not hold together. One study of Pynchon I would recommend is Molly Hite's book Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, the plot is challenging to summarize or characterize. However, one of the structural themes is to compare the novel to the flight of a rocket. Early in the novel an observer in London watchs the dawn launch of a V-2 (or A4) rocket highlighted by the sun's rays in distant Europe, the rocket heading for London. The novel seems to end with the reader being in the audience of a film version of the novel in Los Angeles as an ICBM comes in to obliterate narrator and reader. Or maybe that is not the plot. Maybe there are a thousand plots. You the reader are left to decide.

One aspect of GR is to challenge the concept of cause and effect. When a ballistic rocket strikes, those nearby experience a seeming reverse of cause and effect: they experience the explosion first, then the sound of the explosion, and then the sound of the rocket coming in. Likewise, at the beginning of the final section, you experience jumbled fragments of stories first, then at the very end of the the final section you hear a nuclear ICBM approaching a cinema in Los Angeles, where presumably you are watching a movie which is also the novel. Maybe.

One of GR's major characters, perhaps the protagonist if one exists, is Tyrone Slothrop. His crazy career through the book occasionally seems to represent that of a fool and scapegoat. At one point, he wears a pig costume and the authorities hunt for the man in the pig suit in order to castrate him.

Philosophically, the traditional narrative forms were becoming passe in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and post-modernism was the avant-garde style blazing a new path. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake tore away at narrative form, but he still looked back to mythological structure to give meaning to his work, perhaps. So one could call him a modernist for trying still to order the universe. Samuel Beckett's work challenged the very concept of meaning and language and a story, so he is post-modernist.

Among intellectuals, GR was very impressive, abandoning the more traditional narrative form, yet using enough pop culture details to help keep the reader. Because it rejects narrative forms and structures that readers find comfortable, it is difficult to read and appreciate. For masochistic readers who want to suffer to prove that they are reading great literature, it is perfect. It repels the philistine, which is part of its attraction. (That is also part of the attraction of James Joyce's later work.)

Some critics have tried to claim that Confederacy of Dunces is post-modern. Kline argued that the plot used comic metynomy instead of cause and effect. In my opinion, that is wishful thinking. The plot of Confederacy is a very traditional comic plot going back to the Greek New Comedy of Menander. There are multiple threads of plot, but no more than one might find in Shakespeare. The chaos is caused by Ignatius, who is not to radically different than a carnival fool, part of the western tradition for centuries. I believe Toole held to an ordered universe and was looking back to modernist writers such as James Joyce and Evelyn Waugh as his guides, rather than to the more radical post-modern movement among his own contemporaries.

Both GR and Confederacy use comic chaos. Both have major characters who embody that carnival inversion of order. But they are quite different texts and different protagonists (presuming that Slothrop is actually a protagonist).

It is worth pondering the reception of the two novels both among critics and the public. Confederacy has not attrached to sort of critical attention that GR has: the number of studies of GR listed in the MLA Bibliography is an order of magnitude greater than the number of studies of Confederacy. So Confederacy is not the darling of the intellectual Elect. But the Amazon ranking of Confederacy is an order of magnitude higher than that of GR, so Confederacy has been better received among the common reading public, the Philistines. (Yes, I know that it is ironic to say that the readers of GR are part of the Elect when GR seems to oppose the Calvinist Elect and to celebrate the rejected Preterite.)

Thesis: Explore Confederacy's relationship to post-modernism as manifest in Gravity's Rainbow. Compare Ignatius to Slothrop. Is Confederacy of Dunces a post-modern novel on the cutting edge of literary theory, or is it, as I maintain, a novel looking back to predecessors and wallowing among comfortable narrative forms, as gruntled as a scapegoat pig in slop?