Theology and Geometry: the First Half of the Book

In order to correct my own chapter, I was given galley proofs of the entire book, Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, ISBN: 978-1-4985-8547-7, which is due out on February 15th. So I have been slowly reading the rest of the book, admittedly not in its final form, and I am about halfway through.

Among the essays in the first half of the book, the one that succeeded the most in getting me to think differently about Confederacy was the essay by Kenneth McIntyre which is called "Amusingness Forced to Figure Itself Out." He argues that Ignatius can be viewed as an aesthete in the Kirekegaardian philosophical framework. That view of Ignatius is very productive, and I like it.

I would add as an observation that Ignatius might also be seen as an aesthete in the Walter Pater school of aesthetics. In terms of actual influences, in the Toole archives there is evidence that Ken Toole studied the Romantics and subsequent philosophers and artists extensively. There is no evidence that he studied Kierkegaard (though of course an absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence). Toole was influenced by Percy, and Percy was clearly a student of Kierkegaard, so perhaps Toole was directly or indirectly influenced by Kierkegaard. However, Kierkegaard was influenced by the 19th century aesthetics movement, so I think it more likely that Toole and Kierkegaard were both influenced by the same school of ideas. (I know that talking actual influence is intellectually gauche, or even sinister, but my wife is left-handed, so that's okay.)

That having been said, McIntyre has mined a rich vein of ideas in his essay. Kudos.

PS. The pre-order ranking of Theology on Amazon is still at about two million, so the excitement is not building, alas.