Mad Men's Michael Ginsberg and Ignatius Reilly: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 27

In episode two of season seven of the TV show Mad Men, the character Michael Ginsberg walks into an elevator wearing Ignatius Reilly's trademark hunting cap with large ear flaps. He is with Peggy Olson and Stan Rizzo. That scene takes place on Valentine's Day, and he tells Stan that Peggy's calendar says she will be masturbating gloomily. Hmmm. A reference to Confederacy?? What could be more like Ignatius than to masturbate gloomily? (Unrelated to the Ignatius connection, the cap has a button on it that says, "Nixon was Rosemary's Baby.")

In previous episodes, Ginberg starts to look gradually like Ignatius Reilly. He grows a bushy moustache. His clothes gradually become disheveled. Let's go over the ways in which Ginsberg seems to conform to the Ignatius reference and the ways in which the two diverge.

Parallels: Ignatius rails about the evils of the modern office and modern technology and about how modern technology might drive him insane. Ginsberg eventually has a psychotic break after the creative zone of the office suite is replaced by a large computer room. Ignatius is suspected by others, especially Myrna, of having homosexual tendencies. Ginsberg is afraid that the computer is causing him to become a homosexual. He sees Lou and Cutler talking in the computer room and decides that they are homosexuals and that the computer has caused them to commit unnatural acts.

Ignatius is obsessed with his pyloric valve, seeing it as an independent agent, a Cassandra which tells him things. Ginsberg believes that the computer hum in the office is causing pressure to build up in his body which has to be released, so he cuts off one of his own nipples to let the pressure out. At the end of Confederacy, Ignatius barely escapes commitment to a mental hospital. In Ginsberg's last scene he is hauled off to a mental hospital, shouting to Peggy, "Get out while you still can!" Finally, John Kennedy Toole taught for a brief period at Hunter College in New York before he wrote Confederacy, and Michael goes on a date in an earlier episode with a young woman who was graduating from Hunter. Although Confederacy was published at the end of the 1970s, it was largely written in 1963, so it is a period piece of the 1960s, and Mad Men tries to recreate the 1960s.

Differences: First, Ginsberg is actually productive at his job and talented. He is a bit of an eccentric genius; Ignatius only thinks he is a genius. Second, Ginsberg seems to have a genuine psychotic break, whereas Ignatius is more of a picaro, trickster, or fool. Third, the religions are reversed for the characters: Michael is Jewish and Peggy is Catholic, whereas Ignatius is Catholic and Myrna is Jewish. Fourth, Ignatius is a mama's boy, while Michael has no mother. He was born in a concentration camp where his mother died.

More central to the characters, Ignatius's grotesque qualities are important, whereas such qualities are not central to Ginsberg. In my paper "The Dialectic of American Humanism," I show that, in Renaissance astrology, a child of Saturn could be either a genius or a beast. Ignatius sees himself as a genius, but he conforms to all of the negative, beastly qualities of a child of Saturn. Michael does not have that philosophical dichotomy.

Lauren, my wife, made the connection when she saw Ginsberg in the elevator, and she deserves credit for this insight. We have been watching the TV show Mad Men (2007-2015) on DVD. (I highly recommend all of the audio commentaries with Matt Weiner, the creator and auteur of the show.) Thanks, Lauren! oxoxox

I normally like to leave a lot of potential detail out of items in this series, so that you, dear reader, can explore them. However, with COVID-19 stalking the land, I think I will lay out my cards just to prove that I was holding some cards. This item is substantial enough that I thought about sending it to Notes on Contemporary Literature.

Thesis: Compare the Michael Ginsberg character with Ignatius Reilly. IMHO, the likelihood of an intentional reference by Weiner and his team is about ninety percent.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 5: The Quality of Humor is Sometimes Strained

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes of my latest published essay. This is the fifth post in this series.

It is with some irony that in my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I generally do not discuss the quality of the humor in the novel.

Humor is heavily dependent of the mental state of the audience. For example, most people find the comic strip "Family Circus" to be tepid in its humor, but when my daughters were pre-schoolers, they thought it was hilarious and the only strip in the newspaper that was funny.

That having been said, some attempts at humor are more successful with a broader range of persons than others. In my essay, I argue that some people may not appreciate Confederacy's humor because it often uses interpretation concurrence for its comic devices, but in general I do not argue that they do not appreciate the humor because it is not that funny. Here is the buried endnote:

While some readers may dislike Confederacy because they do not appreciate its style of humor, others might dislike it because the comic devices are not always well executed. In this instance, Ignatius reveals unnecessarily that his previous work was written in pencil; the reversal would have been funnier had another character revealed this fact.

Some of Toole's attempts at humor are weak, alas, so some of its failures are due to poor execution.

More on Bakhtin's Carnival

I was reading Eugene Slepov's recent essay on Confederacy (see below for citation). In general, I think it is a good essay and makes good points about nativity as being like ethnicity and about the importance to a character's identity of the time and place from which that character comes (or as the Beowulf poet would say, þæm dæge ond þysses lifes). He makes an important connection between place as a constituent of identity in Percy's Moviegoer as compared to Confederacy. I would have liked for him to have cited the work of Sara Dunne on the act of moviegoing with regard to place in Confederacy, The Moviegoer, and Catcher in the Rye, but that's me.

Slepov begins the essay contrasting his theory of carnival to Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He states that John Lowe, in his essay "Carnival Voices," relied on Bakhtin's theory, whereas Slepov instead sees Ignatius in the role of scapegoat. Here, I sat up and took notice, because I have several times commented on the contrast between Bakhtin's theory of carnival and the earlier tradition that culminated in Frazer's theory of carnival, which features a scapegoat figure.

I even went back and reread Lowe's essay, because I don't think of his essay as being anti-scapegoat. In fact, I think of it as an essay very much in the camp of pro-scapegoat, and one of the few that is pro-scapegoat, so I was surprised by the Slepov's discussion. My conclusion is that Lowe's position is more complex than Slepov suggested.

(Side note: When I had originally read Lowe, I was looking primarily for any comparisons he made between Confederacy and other texts. Rereading it, I see that Lowe articulates a theory of humor. I may study that theory of humor in a later blog entry. In my own writings, I may have borrowed some more ideas from Lowe than I have given him credit for.)

As for Bakhtin himself, Bakhtin seems studiously to ignore the role of the scapegoat in the history of carnival. In his book on Rabelais, he even cites Frazer, but doesn't mention this central feature of Frazer's theory. Why? I think Bakhtin's goal is to create a vision of a utopian "second life" in which all social status and dominance hierarchies are abolished in a revel of immersing ourselves into the regenerative and transgressive potential of the lower bodily stratum and a mythic folk laughter that is not singling any one person out for ridicule.

Bakhtin's supposed folk laughter is primarily ridiculing the "first life" of social orderliness controlled by political authorities. He overlooks the fact that humor is often directed by those of higher status against those of lower status even in a carnival setting. IMHO, Bakhtin's goal is part of a broader agenda of minimizing the fundamental nature of humans as social animals who naturally form interpersonal status hierarchies. I have criticized Bakhtin elsewhere for not having a fully general theory of humor.

It is, of course, impossible to transport oneself back to a previous era and conduct psychological tests to establish that the folk laughter of the medieval times was different than the laughter of, say, the Enlightenment, so many claims that Bakhtin states as obviously true cannot be disproven. His focus on Rabelais is brilliant, because carnival in Rabelais is not typical of carnival traditions generally, which often have a mock social hierarchy and feature a ritual purging of chaos as revelers get back to their lives. Bakhtin's utopian vision has been embraced by literary critics since the 1960s, perhaps in part because of its denial of social status hierarchies in the revolution of the people's laughter.

As for Lowe, he brings in the parts of Bakhtin that do relate to Confederacy, such as Ignatius's grotesque qualities, which wallow in the lower bodily stratum. But the center of Lowe's essay is comparing Confederacy to an ethnic melee, which is a comic drama that often features a scapegoat. So Lowe's approach to Confederacy is much closer to Slepov's than Slepov would lead one to believe. Confederacy features a scapegoat, Ignatius, and he is a figure that the reader is invited to laugh at, the agent of chaos to be celebrated but then expelled as the social order is reestablished, which is a situation very much unlike Bakhtin.

(More awkwardly, Lowe also lists nativity as a form of symbolic ethnicity (page 182), leaving Slepov very little room left to introduce novel points to the discussion. Lowe then goes further than Slepov into the study of ethnicity, making Lowe's essay the stronger of the two.)

Slepov, Eugene. "Singularities of Time and Place: A Study of Nativity as Ethnicity in A Confederacy of Dunces." Southern Quarterly. v. 56, no. 2, (Winter 2019), 8-21.

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 4, The Clown Motif

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number 4: The Clown Motif

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of physical comedy. I had a paragraph that ties physical comedy to clowns. Here it is:

Related to physical comedians are clowns, and Confederacy has a clown motif. Gus’s factory produces what look like clown pants; Irene’s bad makeup is similar to a clown’s; and Ignatius’s hospital gown is “clownlike.” At one point, Ignatius prays to St. Mathurin, the patron saint of clowns. FN: Toole, Confederacy, 83, 100, 291, 197.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 4: Patteson and Sauret's Three Versions of Ignatius

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the fourth post in this series.

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I discuss in the text the comic contrast between how Ignatius portrays himself and how others see him. In the endnote, I explain that Patteson and Sauret describe three Ignatius's. Here is the endnote:

Patteson and Sauret perceptively argue that Ignatius’s situation is more complex that a simple contrast. To them, there are three versions of Ignatius in the book. First, he sees himself as a crusader against corruption; second, the other characters see him as a selfish buffoon; however, the third Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood in order to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation. Ignatius’s outrageously childish behavior insulates the reader from feeling too much pity for him, but this third Ignatius gives the reader some sympathy for him, even as the reader laughs at his humiliations.

The second Ignatius is a comic rebuttal of the false facade of the first, but the third explains how Ignatius became the person he is. This third Ignatius creates in the reader sympathy for him and tinges him with tragedy.

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 3, The Seven Word Summary

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number 3: The Seven Word Summary

I am a fan of the Ig Nobel Prize, organized by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research. The Ig Nobel Prize is a comedy award for scientific research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. An example was the 2018 Prize in Medicine which was given to researchers who used roller coasters to hasten the passage of kidney stones.

The invited lectures at the Ig Nobel ceremony are called the 24/7 lectures, and they have two parts, a clear explanation of the research in 24 seconds, and a summary of the research in seven words.

As part of my early drafts of my "Theory of Humor" paper, I had an abstract which could be read out loud in 24 seconds, and a summary in seven words. The essays in the book do not have abstracts, so I dropped those elements. Here they are:

Full Abstract in twenty-four seconds: A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole uses the comic devices of farce and concurrent incongruities to generate its humor. The overarching incongruity of the book is between how Ignatius Reilly sees himself and how the reader sees him. Ignatius’s primary personality trait is his selfish immaturity, and he is both trickster and tricked. Toole may have drawn on concepts of the trickster and fool available at the time he wrote the novel from thinkers in psychology, sociology, history, and literary studies.

Brief summary in seven words: To understand Toole’s Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Buried in the Endnotes, part 3: The Act of Damning

Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the third post in this series.

In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I point out that there are three times in the plot where one character damns another character, and those curses seem to carry weight. Here is the endnote:

In this regard, the act of damning seems to be significant, as only the blocking characters in the book are damned. Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius’s mother eventually tells him to go to hell. Toole, Confederacy, 112, 190, 365.

I argue that Toole uses the device of the blocking character, who prevents other characters in the story from developing and rising in status within the social group. There are three blocking characters who through comic comeuppance are displaced from their social blocking posts, and in all three instances, another character tells them to go to hell or says, "Damn you!" I interpret this to mean that Toole took the act of uttering the curse "Damn you" to be important.