Theology and Geometry: the Second Half of the Book

On February 1st, I posted on this blog a discussion of Kenneth McIntyre's essay called "Amusingness Forced to Figure Itself Out." I said that it was the essay from the first half of the book Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces that got me to stretch my thinking most. I then mentioned in my (somewhat self-serving) Amazon review that the essay that got me to stretch my thinking most in the second half was Anthony Cirilla's "Dunces and Dialogue: Ignatius J. Reilly’s Menippean Misreadings and Onanistic Annotations of Boethian Philosophy." I will comment on that second essay here.

Cirilla's essay is rather complicated. One major point made is that Ignatius's masturbation, which is a form of sex which does not communicate with another person, is analogous to his stunted understanding of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. He cannot have a relationship with either a woman or a text. Both feature a failure of responsibility. And that failure is a failure to have true communication, an inability to have a two-way exchange. One nugget of the essay is this: Boethius himself compared a fool chasing lawsuits to a yapping dog. In other words, Boethius, in the very book Ignatius idolizes, anticipates Ignatius's bestial nature. Cirilla also sees Ignatius's intellectual work as a form of masturbation, connecting semen to his seminal work.

One error I discovered in the essay was the misattribution of an idea. Cirilla attributes an idea about Abelman and Cain to my writings, whereas the idea is actually found in Tison Pugh's first version of the essay "It's Polly Fulla Dirty Stories," p. 86. But even here, Cirilla builds on the idea, pointing out that onanism comes from the Genesis story of Onan, whom God kills not for masturbating, but for neglecting the duty to the wife of his deceased brother. He also points out that Ignatius is titillated by seeing the hidden Lana Lee masturbating to Boethius, symbolic of his own approach to the philosopher. Perhaps the best quote from the essay is: "Unlike Lady Philosophy who uses language to marry Boethius’s mind to comforting truths, Ignatius uses his language to uncouple himself from others" (151).