Toole and Van Cleve's Assessment of his Homosexuality

During academic year 2016-2017, I had as a colleague Stewart Van Cleve, author of the book Land of Ten Thousand Loves, a History of Queer Minnesota. He had spent a great deal of time studying the LGBTQ archives at the University of Minnesota, and he had used that collection extensively to write his book. I posed to him the question of John Kennedy Toole's sexual orientation. Here is what I took away from that conversation. If I mischaracterize what he said, that is my error.

To preface this, I have to say that I have not studied the current theoretical framework for LGBTQ studies. At one point, I thought that any man who had sex with other men would be called "gay." Now as I understand it that is not the case. Van Cleve indicated that the current umbrella term for all sexual behavior that is not heteronormative is "queer," which used to be a slur people avoided. Gay is apparently a public identity, and to be accurate, one can use the phrase "men who have sex with other men" to describe the behavior.

I explained to Van Cleve that two inexperienced researchers had written the book Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press. In that book, they stated that they had found some individuals who reported knowing Toole and that those individuals knew that he had had sex with other men. That book has been attacked by several individuals who were close to Toole on several grounds. First, the critics charged that the authors had not handled primary sources correctly. They may have taken passages of letters out of context, and they several times did not get permission to quote letters. Second, the persons they found who claimed to knowledge about Toole's sexual behavior were criticized as being the sort of people who might make things up to get attention. They were deemed unreliable. LSU Press stood by the book, despite the criticism.

Van Cleve referenced a book called Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. He explained that especially in the South, there is a long tradition of men who compartmentalized their sexuality. They did not see themselves as gay, but in one compartment of their lives they had sex with other men. New Orleans Carnival encourages people to compartmentalize behavior. What happens during Carnival doesn't count toward who you see yourself as. Again, the term gay is a public identity, rather than a description of behavior. So I posed the question, "Does that mean that we can doubt the accuracy and conclusions of Ignatius Rising?" He indicated that we probably should not reject the book, based on my summary of the situation.

I have until now I have kept my distance from Ignatius Rising and have treated the issue of whether Toole had sex with other men as an open question about which one could not be certain. Based on the opinion of someone who has expertise in the field, I now conclude that it is more likely than not that he did have sex with other men, however you label the behavior, although there still exists the possibility that in fact he did not have sex with other men.

Postscript

This question of how we label and think about John Kennedy Toole gets us into a philosophical exploration of the underpinnings of the historical disciplines. Do the dead have a right to privacy? What is the purpose of historical inquiry anyway? Plutarch, in the beginning of his collection of biographies, stated that each of his stories had a moral. In each case there was a reason that he was writing about the individual in question. When I read that, I thought, yes, but what if further investigation reveals that the subject turned out not to exemplify the moral Plutarch had chosen? What if new evidence shows that Caesar or Cato was completely different than Plutarch wanted him to be? In our own country, what if the DNA proves that Thomas Jefferson really had fathered children by one of his African American slaves, despite the vigorous denials of his supporters? What does that fact do to our understanding of Jefferson?

We live in an era when the dominant social value is to learn about someone, flaws and all. So at funerals, family and friends will get up to reminisce about the departed, even if the memories are a bit embarrassing. My father grew up in a different era, and his father was a funeral director. My father once said, "Well, it was a good thing they brought in a minister who didn't know the man, so that he could say with a straight face that the deceased had been a wonderful person who would be missed." Dignity and respectability were much more important than historical accuracy.

It is clear that Toole was very private about his life. On top of that, according to Joel Fletcher, Toole's mother curated his legacy and selectively weeded the papers that made it into his archival collection. Perhaps also many of his old friends and colleagues do not wish him to be thought of as different than he presented himself. But flawed as it is, the evidence within Ignatius Rising does have to be taken seriously and not dismissed. Unless we just want to give the man his privacy and with it some dignity.

Even giving him his privacy comes with a certain irony. The main character of Confederacy struggles on the edge of respectability and cannot attain it, and fans of the book love Ignatius in part due to his lack of dignity. The humor in the book is disparaging, though not mean-spirited. Many aspects of Ignatius are modeled on Bobby Byrne, whose dignity suffered from the book. Considering that the book is about celebrating the people of New Orleans warts and all, one can argue that it is out of keeping with Toole's own ethos to afford him too much dignity.

Post-postscript

Another thing that Mr. Van Cleve mentioned was that A Confederacy of Dunces was one of his favorite books. I had always wondered how members of the gay community felt about the book, considering that there are stereotyped and caricatured LGBTQ characters in the book. With a sample size of exactly one person, the book is not rejected by the gay community.

Quick Note: Irony

There is some irony to the fact that my blog entry on April Fool's Day did not discuss the theory of humor, much less fools. It is especially ironic, because in the paper that I submitted for the book chapter, I have a section discussing the theory of fools and Ignatius as a fool. So happy foolish May Day, preceded by an April Serious Day.

However, in saying that this situation is ironic, I do not mean the type of irony investigated in Linda Hutcheon's book, Irony's Edge.

The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 25: Psychiatric Hospitals

A Confederacy of Dunces features a protagonist whom many in the book consider to be mentally ill. Several characters encourage his mother to have Ignatius committed to the mental ward at Charity Hospital, and Santa Battaglia even fantasizes that he will be tortured there. At the end of the book, Ignatius narrowly escapes being caught by the ambulance crew sent to take him to Charity.

A recent book by Lone Frank called The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and its Forgotten Inventor, tells the story of Dr. Robert Heath, who was the head of psychiatry at Tulane University beginning in 1949. Heath pioneered the practice of stimulating the brain with electrodes. He experimented on mentally ill patients throughout the 1950s and 1960s in ways that today would be considered unethical.

His most notorious case was that of a man who was mentally ill, abused drugs, lived off the favors of gay men, and was suicidal. While the man was at Charity Hospital, Heath tried to use electrical stimulation of the brain to change him to a heterosexual. The case only became public in 1972, soon after which Heath's work was held up as an example of unethical human subjects research.

This particular instance with its sexual dimension would have been a perfect influence for Confederacy had it been public before 1963; however, there may have been other instances from the 1950s that could have influenced Toole. Heath first presented his electrical stimulation research at a symposium in New Orleans in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, he experimented with combinations of stimulation and hallucinogenic drugs on the mentally ill in New Orleans. If any of this work became public, or was known through gossip, it could have influenced Toole. (Note: the descriptions of actions at Charity in the novel do not include electrical stimulation, so there is no direct reference to the practice in the novel.)

Another possible, even likely, influence on Toole's portrayal of psychiatric treatment was Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published in 1962, just before Toole wrote most of Confederacy in 1963.

Thesis: Explore the public understanding of psychiatry and the treatment of patients at psychiatric hospitals up to 1963. Might the specific culture of psychiatric treatment in New Orleans have made this theme especially relevant to Confederacy of Dunces?

Theory of Humor Series, part 20, Status hierarchies

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

In the theory of humor that I am developing, I argue that there are two fundamental aspects of humor: an incongruity aspect and a social aspect. The social aspect often deals with adjusting status among the members of a social group. The adjustment is often downward, laughing at someone in order to bring that person down a peg, or using self-deprecating humor to deflect envy about one's own high status.

I have been purposefully vague about what status is. When I first started trying to explore the theory of humor, I was well-aware of my own view that humor often adjusts status downward in a group. So I explored the social psychology literature regarding the nature of group status. Two profound facts emerged from what I learned, one, that all groups have emergent status hierarchies and, two, that humans are loyal to groups, even if the group in question is barely a group.

First, from the 1940s onward, Sharif, Harvey, and other social psychologists established that when experimenters place humans together in groups to perform an activity, we will sort ourselves into status hierarchies, often unconsciously. There is basically no such thing as a functioning group that doesn't have at least an implicit status hierarchy. It is also the case that most (perhaps all) social animals exhibit social hierarchies, so the topic is not limited to humans. The term "pecking order" comes from the study of social hierarchy among chickens, who enforce the social structure by pecking each other.

Second, from the work of Henri Tajfel, it has been shown that even the most minimalist groups, groups where the members do not know each other and which have no known shared qualities, exhibit in-group bias and loyalty. So you can never get away from in-group / out-group divisions, no matter how you try to educate people about things like the universal brotherhood of man (to use a particularly gendered version of the idea). Combine these two findings, and we have the conclusion that humans are strongly motivated to belong to groups and to strive for status within those groups.

Within the status literature, one major division is between dominance and power on the one hand and informal social status on the other. Dominance carries a threat of violence, whereby those higher in the pecking order might harm those lower in the order if they do not comply with the rules established by those higher in the group structure.

Social status, on the other hand, might be collectively and unconsciously agreed upon by all group members, and might not carry a threat of violence. All members in the group may confer high status on some members in the genuine belief that those others should have high status, not out of fear. There have been studies of bee hives and other social networks that show that decision-making in groups can come from the bottom-up, not pushed down from powerful members of the group asserting their self-interest. I suspect that the status dynamics within human groups are usually a combination of top-down dominance pecking order and bottom-up hive decision-making.

The difference between hard dominance and a softer social status is also manifest in humor. A social group in which there is the palpable threat of violence often does not feature public humor with the dominant members as targets, but the powerful may ridicule those low in power, and those lower in rank may use humor amongst themselves to lower the stress of being powerless. Indeed, the highest status individuals might take actions which would otherwise invite ridicule, but no one ridicules for fear of punishment. This seems to be supported by the findings of Ruch's 3WD studies, which show that religiously fundamentalist personalities are negatively correlated with appreciating the humorous qualities of jokes. An angry god does not joke around, and certainly not with self-deprecating humor.

For informal social status hierarchies, self-deprecating humor and teasing are not uncommon. Those high in status signal to others, "Hey, I am just one member of the group, even though I have had this status conferred upon me." The status is deserved, it is not maintained by fear. Those high in status are not threatened by criticism of their shortcomings. They deserved their places.

The contrast between power dominance and softer social status may not be a dichotomy. It may be a spectrum, or it may be multi-dimensional. I am not convinced by my modest investigation of the literature that the issue is settled. For example, a military leader may inspire others to follow because that person displays qualities that confer status; however, because the leader has followers, the leader can use that structure to exercise dominance and power.

I suspect that the phenomenon of social status hierarchies is not studied as much as it might warrant is because the idea that social groups are always structured goes against the political ideals of our culture. Also, one way to motivate those lower in the status hierarchy to work hard is to claim that there is no hierarchy, so those high in status in our culture who control the funds for studying social behavior may have a disincentive to prioritize the study of status hierarchies. The claim that there is no hierarchy can come in the form of claiming we are all equally children of God (some traditional religions), or claiming that we all have the liberty to pursue happiness (secular liberalism), or claiming that the dictatorship of the proletariat has transformed us (communism). Take your pick.

Nevertheless, humor does function within this world. Ridicule especially is a powerful tool for social modification of behavior. A group where those who are high in status tolerate or encourage humor at their own expense generally is a stable group which is not maintained by threats of violence.

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 1, Carl Gustav Jung and Psychology

I have decided to start a new series I am calling "The Cutting Room Floor." The reason is because I am finishing up this book chapter on John Kennedy Toole, and there are things I wanted to put in my paper, but which just don't fit. They are slightly off-topic and the chapter is too long anyway, so I am cutting them. But I think that they are worth saying, so I will say them in this series.

Forward: Strange traffic patterns

BTW, I see that I now have two followers. Thanks to both of you.

From December 2018: The blog statistics have a strange trend: most of the traffic is now from an unknown country, and the operating system for the traffic is now ninety percent Linux. What's with that? Is it just an army of bots? Or do most people use Linux now routed through a VPN in Antarctica? Very strange.

From January 2019: The usage this month was concentrated on two days. Those two days had about 200 hits each. The rest of the month had about 30 hits. The two countries the traffic came from were the United Arab Emirates with 198 hits, and Spain at 193 hits. The site from which the most traffic was referred to my blog was a porn site. Most of the traffic is from a Linux platform. Again, very strange. But on to the real topic of this entry.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number One: The psychological validity of the theories of Carl Gustav Jung

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of Jung's essay on the trickster archetype. While reading the essay, I ran across a statement by Jung that to me signals that his system is completely bogus as science. I was going to put it in the footnote to my discussion, but it is just not worth the increase in word count. Here it is:

... Jung's work seems to be worthless as science (to say nothing of its racism), as Jung claims that conflict “is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity” ("On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," 269). Yikes. To say that a proposition is proven valid only if its reverse is valid is crazy talk.

Jungian psychology is bogus. Full stop.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #17: Simmons

I have been using this blog to explore the theory of humor; nevertheless, it is a blog about research on John Kennedy Toole and his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, so I thought I would pause to offer a post about the novel.

As I said in June 2013, I would like to offer an annotated bibliography, one citation at a time, of the best of the scholarship on Toole's Confederacy that is findable via MLA Bibliography (as opposed to obscure). Here is item number seventeen:

Citation: Simmons, Jonathan. "Ignatius Reilly and the Concept of the Grotesque in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." Mississippi Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1989): 33-43.

Annotation: This paper is, as the title indicates, a deep study of the concept of 'grotesque' in relation to Confederacy. Simmons explores the origins of the word grotesque, the Roman caves or grottos, which during the Renaissance were discovered to have images of bizarre and distorted figures. Simmons argues that the medieval era did not have a concept of the grotesque, because thinkers in that era saw the world as carefully ordered by God (36). Needless to say, this ignores examples of the medieval grotesque such as some of the characters in Chaucer’s writings (about which Toole himself was quite familiar, see my own Evidence of influences). Simmons then offers a stereotype of the Renaissance as favoring the grotesque (37). Finally, there is a discussion of Jonathan Swift and a comparison of some of Swift’s themes and images to those of Toole (38-42). This section is well done, and evidence from the Toole Papers back up the hypothesis that Toole knew Swift well. Simmons argues that the animal images of Ignatius point to him being part bear (41-2). While he analyzes those images well, Simmons ignores that they are largely generalized descriptions of a mammal which could apply to a dog just as much as a bear. Considering Ignatius has sexual longings for his deceased dog Rex, the tie to dogs is probably more plausible than the tie to bears. As long as one ignores the simplistic comparison of the Renaissance with the Medieval era, this is a good article.

Because I tend to gloss over the grotesque in this novel, this paper is a good counterweight to my own interests.

Theory of Humor Series, part 19, Gervais and Wilson and the Origins of Laughter

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

I discuss here the following article:

Gervais, M. and D. S. Wilson (2005). The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 395-430.

I like this article and think it is important. Gervais and Wilson review extensive evidence for the evolution of laughter and humor, looking at physiological evidence, neurological evidence, and psychological evidence. While it is not the centerpiece of their paper, they include Wilson's "multilevel selection theory" and the observations that many of the evolutionary benefits of laughter and humor accrue to groups rather than individuals. While in general I agree with them, I think that they do not place enough weight on the social function of humor in adjusting group status hierarchies, which indicates an even larger group-level benefit. In their speculation about how laughter and humor evolved, they do not fully embrace the group-level selection pressure as the primary driving force. I would be willing to go that far.

Gervais and Wilson open their investigation with empirical evidence that laughter is an evolved instinct. Cross-cultural studies show the common feature eliciting Duchenne laughter is incongruity and unexpectedness. This laughter usually involves both a playful frame and a second interpretation of the event, which they call "an alternate type of intelligibility" (398). Here is a quote: "There is thus an intuitive family resemblance among the different proximate causes of Duchenne laughter, such that they can be characterized as sharing a single form or structure: a sudden unexpected change in events that is perceived to be at once not serious and in a social context—that is, nonserious social incongruity" (NSI) (399). NSI includes protohumor such as tickling, play, physical mishaps. This conclusion supports both the incongruity aspect and the social aspect of all humor.

I do not disagree with that view. In fact, the more I study the issue, the closer my own views move toward this conclusion. Back in February, 2018, the sound bite version of my theory of humor was "incongruity plus disparagement." Now, my theory is roughly "incongruity and social / emotional aspects often in a playful context, and the social is often disparagement. The emotions are often incongruous emotions; the motive for producing the humor is often a social function." Not exactly a sound bite. But it can be reduced to a true sound bite: "incongruity plus social." Or Gervais and Wilson's phrase "nonserious social incongruity."

The reason for my focus on disparagement is based on social psychology. The human social environment includes built-in but dynamic status hierarchies. A serious challenge to the status hierarchy can include violence and dehumanization and may cause a social group to split. The fact that most laughter is in a nonserious environment means that there is no direct and violent dominance struggle going on. A playful individual is usually one who is submissive. Because some humor can disparage its target to the point of terrorizing the target or inciting violence, I think that not all humor can be called nonserious, so I prefer my "incongruity plus social."

Gervais and Wilson offer a list of the many positive social functions of humor and laughter (404), including the reduction of in-group aggression, which I consider of huge group-level benefit. They note that laughter is a social lubricant, increasing in-group feelings, etc.

Gervais and Wilson discuss the contagious nature of laughter in relation to mirror neurons and the positive psychology of mitigating tension and building social bonds. They conclude, "Duchenne laughter is essentially a medium for emotional contagion operating through an intersubjective mirror system" (423). But they ignore that the content of much that is humorous has the effect of lowering social status.

They also discuss evolutionary psychology. The central question from this perspective is: why is it adaptive in the presence of NSI to elicit play from an individual? They bring in Wilson's multilevel selection theory. The social bonding benefits of laughter and play accrue to the group level. Laughter incurs low costs for promoting group beneficial behavior.

They offer hypotheses about the origins of laughter, suggesting that laughter developed before language. Reducing stress on the savannah, humor might have been an ersatz grooming activity. Dunbar hypothesized that language was an ersatz grooming behavior, but laughter fits the profile better than language. As the brain developed more sophistication, the positive emotion might become decontextualized from actual play and tickling.

Gervais and Wilson argue that there is a benefit to the stress relief of signaling that the group is in a safe situation. They see the status hierarchy functions of laughter coming late in human evolution. Joyous Duchenne laughter came first; it was then co-opted for hierarchy maintenance by non-Duchenne laughter (418). I disagree with them here. I believe that, for humans, one of the biggest dangers and sources of anxiety is being on the business end of the social hierarchy. So the status deflation of disparagement humor is a huge emotional relief. So humor whose social function is status lowering can be genuine, Duchenne laughter.

In short, I think this is an important paper for pulling together the many threads of evidence in the biological and psychological literature in order to analyze the evolution of laughter and humor. I think that they could have gone further with the group-level benefits, specifically the social function of adjusting status hierarchies, which should have been a major activity as humans evolved into an species capable of altruism due to group-level selection pressures. I think that group-level selection could be the primary driver of the evolution of humor from primitive pant-hoots of primates during mock aggression.