The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 12

Minor Saturnine Characters

Now that my paper on Toole, Ficino, and Kristeller has been published, I am more free to discuss topics that brush up against its thesis. As I have argued in Evidence of Influences version 2.0, 30n16, one can study Confederacy's use of Carnival using the framework of Saturnalia from Frazer's Golden Bough. Ignatius displays Saturnine qualities, both in his role as an agent of disorder and in his role as a Saturnalian Lord or Misrule. But other, minor characters also display Saturnine qualities. To research this topic, you might want to consult a book by Walter C. Curry called Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences. This book was very familiar to Lumiansky, who was Toole's Chaucer professor. This book discusses the qualities of the planetary god Saturn. Hints: the popular book by di Palma on Carnival points out that Saturn reputedly reigned over a Golden Age. Curry: Saturn is associated with coldness. Frazer: Saturnalia was also a feast of the dead.

Thesis: Discuss the positive Saturnine qualities of Claude and Clyde. Ignatius and Trixie are linked by green head gear. Discuss that connection and Trixie's Saturnine qualities, especially her symbolic connection to death.

Note: I call this 12, because the suggestions on this blog were not numbered the same as the numbering on my fixed webpage version of this series of ideas.

Two addenda to my "Dialectic of American Humanism" Paper

In my recent paper in the journal Renascence, I argue that Toole's Confederacy of Dunces forms a dialectic in which two competing versions of "humanism" are the thesis and the antithesis. In reviewing notes, I have decided that I would have liked to have added two more details to the paper.

First, although I cited and discussed David McNeil's 1984 paper on Confederacy ("A Confederacy of Dunces as Reverse Satire: The American Subgenre." Mississippi Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1984): 33-47), I had forgotten that he had in that article called Confederacy an "hegelian dialectic" (43). He never said what the thesis and the antithesis of the dialectic were, and Ficino was not on his radar, but I should have acknowledged his observation as the first to use that term.

Second, I ought to have cited and given a bit of credit to Robert Coles for his essay on Confederacy from 1983 (Gravity and Grace in the Novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Lafayette: Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, 1983). In that essay, Coles argued that Ignatius was the corrupted Roman Catholic Church, and that Myrna was secular humanism rescuing the church from its own corruptions. I argue that Ignatius is a carnival inversion of Ficino's Catholic philosophy and humanism. But I ought to give credit to Coles for his point that Myrna represents a form of humanism.

No doubt there will be more corrections to follow.

Dialectic of American Humanism published

I have published a significant peer-reviewed article on Toole and Confederacy of Dunces.

The citation is:

Leighton, H. Vernon. “The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller.” Renascence 64.2 (Winter 2012), 201-215.

The abstract to the article, which was not published in the journal, is:

A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole portrays an interplay between competing definitions of humanism. The one school of humanism—called by some the Modernist Paradigm—saw the Italian Renaissance as the origin of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist views that celebrated science, technology, and individual human freedom. The other school, led by Paul Oskar Kristeller, sought to historicize humanism by establishing that Renaissance writers and thinkers were generally conservative and preserved the philosophical ideas of the medieval era. Kristeller was the President of the Renaissance Society of America and was at the height of his influence at Columbia University during the late 1950s, when Toole studied for his Master's degree there. The main character in Confederacy, Ignatius J. Reilly, presents a parody of Kristeller’s position, which he uses to critique modern society. Ignatius also plays the part of a child of the planetary god Saturn, both by acting out the ancient astrological tradition of associating Saturn with misfortune and disorder and by being a parody of the Renaissance concept of the Genius as a Child of Saturn begun by the Renaissance philosopher whom Kristeller studied most, Marsilio Ficino. Ignatius’s worldview is an antithesis of the Modernist Paradigm. Confederacy is critical of both Modernist humanism with its attendant materialism and its antithesis—Ignatius’s dysfunctional version of Kristeller’s Renaissance philosophy. When the community expels Ignatius as a scapegoat, Toole appears to gesture toward a dialectical synthesis of the two concepts of humanism in the novel’s happy ending.

Dialectic of American Humanism, the lecture

I will be presenting a lecture that has the same name as my forthcoming paper in the journal Renascence, "The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar Kristeller." This lecture is part of the Winter 2012 Presentations for the Minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Mary's University of Minnesota. The lecture will be on Wednesday March 28th, 7:00 p.m., in the President’s Room in the Toner Center at St. Mary’s University. It is open to the public with free refreshments.

Abstract of talk: Viewing the novel A Confederacy of Dunces filtered through the ideas of the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino adds layers of meaning to the text not discussed before. This perspective allows one to read A Confederacy of Dunces as a commentary on the scholarly dispute over the meaning of Humanism that was taking place at Columbia University in the 1950s when Toole was there as a graduate student. This presentation will discuss the investigative principle and methods that were used to discover the connection between Toole’s contemporary novel and Medieval and Renaissance studies.

Finally a scholarly article published

For all the people following this blog .... oh wait, no one is following this blog.
Oh well, in case someone in the future reads this blog, I finally had an article published in a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal, albeit a modest one. The article is pulled out of my study Evidence of Influences. It is the section that examines where in the Toole papers Boethius appears (pages 7 through 9). That was the most important part of Evidence of Influences, because it refuted a claim made earlier in the scholarly literature.

The article is: Leighton, H. Vernon. "A Refutation of Robert Byrne: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Chaucer, and Boethius." Notes on Contemporary Literature 42.1 (January 2012): 11-12.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 11

Evelyn Waugh and Toole, part 1, Ritual Scapegoats

There is solid evidence that John Kennedy Toole was exposed to, and may have been influenced by, the writings of Evelyn Waugh. In Joel Fletcher's memoir about his friendship with Toole, Ken and Thelma, he writes that he and Toole shared a fondness for both Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh (16). Another friend of Toole's, Nicholas Polites, was quoted by Randy Sue Coburn as opining that “Toole’s ambition was to be a Southern Evelyn Waugh …” (Washington Star, 2 June 1980, page D3). Finally, Rhoda Faust's bibliography of Toole's library includes a copy of Brideshead Revisited (Brideshead), which Faust described as "Condition: Very poor, pages darkening and falling out" (see Evidence of Influences 42).

A number of critics have interpreted Toole's vision as dark or nihilistic (see Evidence of Influences 31), but one can be negative about one's own society from a positive religious perspective, which one finds in Waugh's writings.

Sure enough, one can find themes in common between the writings of Waugh and Confederacy. Here I want to call attention to the threads of ritual scapegoat in Brideshead and their homologies in Confederacy. For example, Samgrass's book depicts the noble sacrifice of Lady Marchmain's male relatives as ritual victims "so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his [...] grinning dentures" (bk 1, chap 5). Bridey himself is described in terms of being both partly animal and very alien to the society around him. "Bridey was a mystery; a creature from under ground; a hard-snouted, hibernating animal who shunned the light." Later, "He achieved dignity by his remoteness and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half veteran; there seemed no spark of contemporary life in him; [...] an indifference to the world, which commanded respect" (bk 2, chap 3). In a related theme, Brideshead portrays some women as emasculating men around them (Lady Marchmain and Celia) and gives symbolic weight to the act of male escape from suffocating female dominance: "my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest" (bk 2, chap 2). The ending of Brideshead is positive: the small red flame is a beauty for the soul in the age of Hooper (Epilogue).

In Confederacy, Ignatius is described mostly in animalistic terms (see Evidence of Influences 22). He is alienated from contemporary culture and is treated as a 30-year-old child. At the end of the book, he is a ritual scapegoat, whose expulsion renews the society. Toole may have been referencing the tradition of writers influenced by Frazer's Golden Bough (see Evidence of Influences 30n16), and Waugh was known to have been part of that tradition via the influence of T.S. Eliot. Confederacy features a theme of renewal after throwing off suffocating female dominance (see Evidence of Influences 23-24). Obviously, the ending of Confederacy--comic expulsion of the Saturnalian scapegoat to renew the community-- is much different from that of Brideshead, but the comparison of the two texts shows a more positive side of Confederacy.

Thesis: Compare the scapegoat and Saturnine themes within both Brideshead Revisited and Confederacy.

Revision of the Obscure bibliography

I have revised my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship
on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces. It is now on version 1.4.

The main addition is the work by Julija Potrc. But I have gone through and added links to WorldCat for most of the texts.