Her South: Connecting Visions of John Kennedy Toole and Flannery O’Connor–Lauren Coleman

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” –Socrates

“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.” –Christian Morgenstern

It is no small matter that much of the observable world has been formed out of turmoil. Just as pearls owe their existence to irritants that grind against soft tissue, so fiction is often born out of friction. Such has been and is still the condition of the American South, which, in the wake of the 2008 Presidential Election, is struggling to protect what many Southerners perceive as its distinct regional identity amidst a looming promise of change. While the generally hospitable inhabitants of South have been known to welcome outsiders into their complex system of family-centered values displayed through heightened Christian rhetoric and observance, any outside individual seeking this culture’s acceptance must not only possess an acute sensibility to the cultural South’s fears of and contempt for infiltration and destruction, but must also act accordingly so as not to provoke this reaction.

The South, predominantly comprised of a conglomeration of states marked by a bolstering of “red” values and camaraderie during election season, once again exhibited its adherence to the preservation of Conservative tradition—with the exception of a few “Southern” states (Virgina, North Carolina, and Florida) that saw their electoral votes cast for the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. Regardless, the sea of red still speaks. For the President-Elect, being branded as out of touch with the values with which the vast amount of Southerners aligns themselves carries dangerous and divisive implications. Despite the degree to which these recently birthed fears might or might not find their basis in reality, these marked concerns often lend themselves to artistic extrapolation as British poet and critic A. Alvarez emphasized in the mid-twentieth century in his comments that “the ubiquitous violence which threatens to devour us in this age has been internalized by the artist who works out in the microcosm of his [or her] self the destructive potentiality of the time” (qtd. in Katz 54). Through this observation, Alvarez establishes that “ubiquitous violence” is first internally addressed by an individual through the perception of a problem and the formation of a personal worldview. Once internalized, the writer then “projects his [or her] own corresponding impulses onto the macrocosm, shaping through his [or her] fictions a world which reflects his [or her] specific inner vision” (54). The sense of “imminent destruction” (54) described here has similar echoes to the political discontents currently being voiced.

While the South’s predominantly Republican vote alone conveys a cultural backlash in response to the perceived threat of an “outsider” with whom many Southerners are reluctant to trust, defending the socio-political ideals that figure so heavily into the cultural South is more complicated than extrapolating on the merits of tradition. Instead, understanding the cultural psychology of the South involves examining the climate in which tradition and fragmentation coexist in conflict as well as scrutinizing the intense anxiety connected to the preservation of social structures that purposefully do not permit outsider access. Such examinations stem from the consideration of insider-outsider tropes present in cultural Southern literary apologia, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and the collective works of Flannery O’Connor. As an additional consideration, the parallels present in Toole and O’ Connor offer some insight into acknowledging why, aside from their commonality of being identified as ‘Southern writers,’ these two authors might be studied within the same course. Although René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy reveal in the biography Ignatius Rising that John Kennedy Toole had a great admiration for the Southern Grotesque fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor (42) little scholarship exists that further correlates the two Southern writers. As a result, this work offers the provocative suggestion that Toole and O’Connor may have shared a similar vision of an inescapable South as their literature reveals.

As literature and history demonstrate, Southerners often define themselves through a clear rejection of the things they are not, most notably, intellectual elitists. This aversion to intellectual elitism finds its way into studies of rhetoric, political or not. Indeed, many Southerners are suspicious of anyone who speaks a little too well, which perhaps has led to an undeserved dismissal of well-intending individuals who remain outsiders because of either a hasty exclusion of vernacular, a wholesale dismissal of it, or unconvincing usage. These considerations may account for the appeal of Republican politicians such as George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. The assumption that often follows is that because these individuals speak in a manner that imitates familiar vernacular, they also share the cultural values that comprise the heart of Southern ideology. Remarkably, neither Bush nor Palin can actually claim a regional Southern heritage (Bush is from the Southwest; Palin is from the extreme Northwest), and yet they have been welcomed into the warm insider niche of Southern acceptance. The bending and indeed blending of cultural spheres to encompass outsiders is based on a tightly-regulated system in which the ‘rules’ must be followed for the outsider to gain a comfortable admission. Interestingly, this supposition is furthered in an example from Toole’s own life as described in Ignatius Rising. During his years in primary school, Toole composed a classroom essay with a prefacing letter exhibiting what his mother denounced as intellectual snobbery. In this note, Toole writes:

To my dear reader,

This intellectual volume of learning I proudly present. It helps those who are too dumb to go to school. I find myself highly learned and smart. I have been praised so many times in my 10 years of life that this epic should speak for itself. So the intellectual beings and highly cultured prodigies that read this great tome will feel that they may speak freely to another highly intellectual friend. (Nevils and Hardy 26)

Concerned that he would not he would not have any friends if he continued to speak and write in this displayed elevated manner, his mother chastised him for his writing (26). However, as Nevils and Hardy point out, this essay may have been Toole “experimenting with self-parody” at a young age (26). If his early writings were actually self-parody, then Toole had acknowledged the implications of his above-average intelligence. In short, he would have known that such intelligence could lead to social ostracism, moving him from insider advantage to ridicule as an outsider. Rather than conceal this understanding of Southern society’s contempt for intellectualism that smacked of elitism, however, Toole chose to immortalize it through fiction.

In spite of this thematic selection, neither Toole nor O’Connor allow their fictionalized, elitist characters to emerge unscathed. For example, Toole crafts the king of pseudo-intellectuals in the character Ignatius J. Reilly, a thirty year-old medievalist who spends most of his days locked in his room penning his counterfeit philosophies in red crayon on Big Chief tablets that lay in piles around his room. Because Ignatius “[spends] [his] youth in seclusion, meditation and study in order to perfect [his] craft of writing” (100), he ends up forfeiting chance after chance to develop a civil relationship with the world outside his bedroom. As a result, when he is forced into the working world to pay off the damages caused by his mother’s vehicular accident, Ignatius muddles chances to learn appropriate conversational tone when interacting with New Orleans locals. Due to his self-positioning as an outsider, though rightfully he is an insider by birth, the exchanges between every day folk on the streets of New Orleans in response to the absurdity of Ignatius J. Reilly gain even more critical mileage. The tragicomedy becomes apparent when a woman in the crowd exclaims “Ain’t that awful? Where do they get them [sic] hot dog vendors from?” (162), and her inquiry is met with another’s insult, “Bums. They [sic] all bums” (162). Further vernacular send-ups of Ignatius accusingly declare, “Wine is what it is. They [sic] all crazy from wine if you ast [sic] me” (162). The locals do not position themselves as outsiders within their own system like the self-contradictory Ignatius, who refuses to sell a hotdog to a young man because he [Ignatius] is disgusted by gluttony and yet is a glutton himself. The locals do not mark this distinction; instead, they mistake Ignatius’ strange language for the typical drunkenness displayed by the “bums” associated with the hotdog vending industry. Taking insult, the culturally oblivious Ignatius bellows: “Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand […] or are you mongoloids really talking about me?” (162). Through this exclamation, Toole displays Ignatius’ falsely-earned sense of superiority in a humorous way while conveying a serious mockery of outsider elitism. As an additional and metacritical point, the inclusion of the bracketed Latin sic, which is exclusively in the language of academia and not Southern vernacular, might also be construed as a form of intellectual elitism at work, but that is strictly an unavoidable irony.

Meanwhile, as Ignatius attempts to distance himself from an urban Southern society through his intellectual ‘superiority,’ he is still inseparably glued to it. As critic Hugh Ruppersburg emphasizes in his article, “The South and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces,” “ridiculous and deluded […] [as Ignatius] is, he believes in tradition, morality, and human dignity” (118). While the waddling-contradiction known as Ignatius may not seek a sense of community with other individuals in his immediate society—the type of interconnectedness espoused as a Southern value, he does express a vested interest in improving the cultural atmosphere of his surroundings through promotion medievalist worldviews. Indeed, Ignatius is an “anomaly [of] Southern protagonists” (120). Though he claims to be “contemptuous of progress, science, industry, and the American work ethic” (121) in a manner similar to Southern agrarians like John Crowe Ransom who were hostile to the progressivism that was perceived as a threat to Southern culture and tradition, as an outsider, Ignatius enjoys the material benefits of society while simultaneously denouncing everything and everyone in it.

The audacity of Ignatius’ arrogance only further positions him as an outsider. An individual, whether insider or outsider, who opted to live in the South but attempted to dole out only cold criticism while leaching the fruits of the cultural climate would most certainly either be run out of town or labeled a social pariah. It then becomes understandable why Southerners might find overt displays of intellectual bravado suspect. Regardless of a reader’s assessment of Toole’s intended degree of humor illustrated through Ignatius, the tragic reality is that:

Ignatius has no relationship to his society. He is a total anachronism. Despite his pretense of dedicated medievalism, the contradictions, hypocrisies, and delusions of his being isolate him from any cultural tradition […] He is the essence of modern man—disembodied, alienated, deluded, spiritually disenfranchised, fundamentally absurd. (Ruppersburg 124)

At the close of Toole’s novel, the reader is confronted with the concept of an inescapable South. Despite the validity Ruppersburg’s contention that Ignatius remains an isolated, alienated individual, Ignatius cannot entirely escape the South because he has not processed the implications of leaving the cozy womb-like structure in which he has been coddled. This “womb-like” encapsulation is multi-faceted: the womb of the bedroom in which Ignatius composes his pseudo-intellectual drivel and entertains unorthodox sexual fantasies about his childhood pet, Rex, is merely one of several cocoons he physically flees at the novel’s close. Expanding this scheme, New Orleans itself is a womb for the culturally obtuse Ignatius; he lives in dread of leaving the city, evident by what has become religious routine—his horrific retelling (if not overdramatization) of his trip to Baton Rouge in a Greyhound Scenicruiser. “Leaving New Orleans […] frightened me considerably” (Toole 11), Ignatius informs his audience at the bar: “Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins” (11). Scaling out even further, Ignatius runs from the womb of the South to the unfamiliar New York. As a final self-pronouncement of his own selfish ignorance, Ignatius whines, “I certainly hope it isn’t snowing up north. My system simply will not function under those conditions” (393). Myrna Minkoff, Ignatius’ pseudo-savior, then replies, “All at once I think I’m making a very big mistake [in rescuing you]” (393). The puerile Ignatius J. Reilly only physically leaves the South but likely carried the demand for inadequate replacement wombs with him. In such, the comforts of a familiar system are inescapable. Whether he flourishes or flounders in the environment in which he is supposedly transplanted is subject to immense speculation because Toole never penned a sequel.

If A Confederacy of Dunces is a comprehensive reference on Toole’s judgment of the educated, who are often promoted as the saviors of society and hope for the future, his theory concludes with a dismal state of affairs. If intellectual salvation is an oxymoron as Toole might wish us to believe, the solution is unpromising for it seems as though none is offered.

While Toole ridicules pseudo-intellectualism through Ignatius, O’Connor’s fiction warns against this uninformed ‘intelligence’ that she perceived as a spiritual battle against evil in the world as she expounds in an essay on being a novelist as well as a believer wherein she states: “Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a Devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy” (Mystery and Manners 168). By examining the devils present in Toole’s and O’Connor’s literature, not only is a stronger critical exchange between the two possible, but also critical correlations illuminate distinct influences on contemporary Southern thought.

Indeed, O’Connor’s expression exposes similar inside-turned-outsiders in her fiction; however, O’Connor is not content to simply reproach these pseudo-intellectuals for their detachment from cultural tradition. Forthcoming overtures of the need for Christian redemption prevent a basic reading of O’Connor’s works as texts intended to ridicule cultural inconsistencies. While her fiction is teeming with flawed inside-to-outsiders “divorcing themselves from the real world around them” (1143), as John McCarthy states in “Human Intelligence Versus Divine Truth: The Intellectual in Flannery O’Connor’s Works,” the gravity of O’Connor’s tone and inundation of religious imagery deflects partial comprehension. For example, O’Connor reveals the insider-outsider sickness of pseudo-intellectual Joy-Hulga Hopewell in “Good Country People” who attempts to forcefully remove herself from her Southern heritage by cutting herself off from the joy of the world and realigning herself with a new cultural identifier—Nihilism. However, O’Connor forces an ironic situation upon Joy-Hulga when she tests the strength of Hulga’s newly-fashioned ideological identifier. Much like her efforts to “stump[…] into the kitchen in the morning” (Complete Stories 275) with her artificial leg—an action that Mrs. Hopewell is “certain” Joy-Hulga does purposefully “because it was ugly-sounding” (275)—so Joy-Hulga clunks around in Nihilism because it suits her to be foul toward everyone. Unlike her physical disability, Joy-Hulga is in denial of her cultural disability, and O’Connor sees fit that this unawareness does not persist. In the end, Joy is outdone by a traveling Bible salesman, Manley Pointer, the undetected outsider, who has learned the art of marauding to Joy’s unfortunate surprise. While Joy is unable to achieve a true cultural-divorce because her intellectual re-positioning fails, what is equally as important is the preservation of the South’s own. As mentioned previously, the South might have little sympathy for even an insider who unduly criticized the system without positive societal contribution or support. Nonetheless, there is no textual assurance that Joy-Hulga is ever rescued from helpless abandonment, nor is it really critical that she be rescued. O’Connor paints Joy-Hulga as a warning against self-seeking pseudo-intellectualism. Perhaps in this moment of desperation, Joy-Hulga should invoke the redemptive promise of her given surname, and “hope well.” Her inability to escape that which is internally coded within her goes beyond cultural reconciliation. Solving the system requires sacrifice of lofty aspirations and confrontation with the demon known as self. Because “O’Connor’s intellectuals […] frequently attempt, with the power of their minds, to be God, […] they are lost because they refuse to recognize the divine scheme of redemption” (McCarthy 1143). Here, Joy-Hulga meets the violence of grace head-on.

There is an undeniable literary contribution to a Southern cynicism for intellectual pursuit beyond tradition. However, rather than regard this as a collective consensus that governs intelligence, purveyors of Southern culture who follow the model set forth by O’Connor seem more interested in the integrity of the whole metered through necessary humility. Therefore, the inherent devil of self-promotion is a sickness that cannot remain unattended, according to O’Connor.

In time of uncertainty, cultures often establish unifying structures from whence they can draw their strength for survival. For this reason, it can be said the South has a continued cultural legacy entrenched in the Christian faith, which “represents a fixed and unchanging set of beliefs, a moral position that remains uncontaminated by the frailties and the betrayals inherent in ordinary human intercourse” (Gillespie 29). Like almost any ingrained aspect of Southern culture, religious mores permeate not only the highly social sphere but also color the worldviews of its adherents. However, such considerations do not imply that all Southerners are guaranteed to embrace the dominant religious structure, Southern Protestantism. In fact, in many cases, the commanding presence of Southern Protestantism can be conceivably equated with the ever-ominous Big Brother of Orwell’s nightmarish dystopia. To presume that a Southerner outwardly and readily identifies with the Christian church would be a mistake, of course. On the other hand, the Church’s sphere of cultural influence extends beyond a physical structure, or in this case, house of worship or practice. Such interplay of religious tensions is present, unsurprisingly, in the fiction of Toole and O’Connor as Michael Patrick Gillespie demonstrates an article that explores Baroque Catholicism the works of O’Connor, Toole, and Walker Percy.

Gillespie reinforces an inescapability of and indeed a dependency on cultural influence in that “each writer seeks some version of the church if Christ without Christ […] At the same time, each also shows a reluctance to abandon the stability and direction derived from the church” (29). While Southerners in general may grapple with the two-in-one Hyde-Jekyll blessing/curse of a dominant religious establishment that directs daily Southern living, in reality, overt displays of Christianity are not an irritant for most Southerners. This fact accounts for the theological move against complacency; symbols can have a numbing effect on an entire population with frequent, prolonged exposure. Furthermore, readers can be almost certain that writers are met with the same frustrations with approaching this overarching structure in their literature—if such is their choice— without having pointed religious imagery remain unnoticed.

Directly illustrative of this point is Flannery O’Connor who, in the late 1950s, observed that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural” (Shinn 59). This assessment best informs the work of O’Connor and the Southern Gothic, but it could also be true of John Kennedy Toole’s work. Conversely, the other side to O’Connor’s findings was such that as a result of a culture of over-saturation, “[the writer] may well be forced to take an even more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience” (59). While O’Connor accordingly demonstrates, grace is linked inextricably to pain. As O’Connor’s stories reveal, often a character posited as a pitiable object of his or her own incompetence is violently rebuked. For instance, a physical reprimand in the form of a book to the eye silences Ruby Turpin’s selfish thoughts in the short story “Revelation.” Additionally, Ruby’s physical reproach is followed by a verbal castigation when the girl who hurled the book Human Development screams at her to “‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog’” (CS 500). The inescapability of grace metered through punishment finds Ruby Turpin. Her revelation occurs as direct consequence of verbal and physical denouncements of her spiritual disability of self-righteousness. Similarly, in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Sheppard is verbally rebuked for selfish folly. However, the physical lesson comes at the price of a life: his neglected son hangs himself in despair. Despite the devastation O’Connor purposefully employs, these scenes of suffering that inform salvation have become embedded in the Southern tradition. Although Ruby and Sheppard must face different devastations, each story moves toward recognition, admission, and repentance of sin. Therein lies deliverance from well-intentioned yet flawed worldviews. However, O’Connor is reluctant to guarantee that good ultimately stems from these scenes of violence that illuminate the need for grace. The path may be laid forth, but surefire salvation framed in formulaic happy endings risks a detrimental lapse back into the mundane. Even though we may long for sunshine amid O’Connor’s grotesque, few people are deluded into believing that life is really that simple.

Because Toole’s only two published works are fiction and came into print posthumously, ascertaining his world views, let alone the function of religious themes, is increasingly more difficult than observing O’Connor’s vision. Thus, any attempt to understand Toole’s cultural vision involves no small amount of dedication to sifting through the fraught-with-satire mock-up, A Confederacy of Dunces, or through the O’Connoresque first novel of Toole’s, The Neon Bible.

Convenient dichotomies offer that Toole must have enjoyed a hearty laugh at the world due to the clear comedy present in A Confederacy of Dunces. Yet rarely are dichotomies as convenient at all. Critic Pat Gardner in Midst Great Laughter expresses satisfaction with simple definitive structures of either x or y, calling Toole’s best-known novel a Christian comedy marked by a celebration of disorder and crawling with absurdities and impossible redemptive figures (87). Gardner makes this assertion while simultaneously acknowledging that “the sixties almost certainly would have failed to see the compatibility [between disorder and redemption]” (87). Gardner then submits a regard for the era; just as the sixties celebrated disorder and “seemed more dedicated to knocking down heroes than to proclaiming them” (87), so Toole’s strategies seem to coincide with the views of his day. If such is the case, Toole has more in common with O’Connor than previously examined. For the chance of redemption to appear amidst turmoil would link themes inextricably within Toole and O’Connor’s fiction.

Clearly, Ignatius—or, as Walker Percy refers to him: “[the] grotesque anti-hero—indeed a ‘slob extraordinary’” (qtd. in Bell 16) is incapable of offering salvation through his self-proclaimed glory, but this gross inability and lack of touch with reality does not dissuade him from posing as a false savior. In fact, Ignatius offers himself up as a centripetal, cohesive Christ-figure, emphasizing the benefits of his elevated outsider knowledge to save a culture submersed in its own filth. While Southerners may be hostile to infiltration or the idea that an “outsider” can offer salvation or bring insight, the exception might be granted to an accepted Christ-figure. However, Ignatius is not one despite his inflammatory insistence that his mother is a Judas-figure who “sold a memento of [his] childhood for thirty pieces of silver, so to speak” (Toole 25). Such a proclamation may conjure laughter, but also may lend itself to serious social and religious commentary that is often expressed in the genre satire.

If we question the extent to which comedy is intended in Toole’s satire, O’Connor’s critical echoes return. Indeed, “[the writer] may well be forced to take an even more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience” (Shinn 59). When applied to Toole’s text, the humor disappears, especially when looking at how Toole elected to conclude. If the vision that Toole set forth to convey through his writing of A Confederacy of Dunces was not one of salvation, then it would have been damnation. This theme would then coincide with Toole’s fate, suicide. As a correlating fictional point, Ignatius is “never […] able to function in the real world […] hopelessly inept in his personal involvements and relationships […] he constantly denies the magnitude—or even the existence—of his problems” (Bell 21). Ignatius refuses the only help or solace the novel suggests [assimilation through psychiatric care], and […] dooms himself to repeat the fiascos and torments of this past life” (21). What appears to be freedom—or an ‘out’ from the culture he dismisses—is only another shackle to the inescapability of cultural impression. Only through painful confrontation can one aspire to cope with the burden of society, but often this confrontation comes at great cost as demonstrated by “Toole [who] saw himself as inevitably one of the dunces doomed to the deceptions and vagaries of a hostile world” (Bell 22). Nonetheless, an answer of with whom redemptive power rests as posited by Toole is unanswered, though many critics have tried their hand at finding conclusive textual evidence either way. Gardner argues that because “no one hero [is] capable of bringing about the requisite happy ending [to Toole’s novel]” (90), it can then be assumed that redemptive strength is granted by Providence and not found in humanity. Yet, by looking at the aesthetic white space, we can ascertain what is. Whereas moments spent in solitary contemplation are necessary for a character to grapple with grace in O’Connor’s works, in Toole, being detached from society is problematic, which ties into an invocation of Southern family and community values.

Arriving at a fragmented conclusion as Toole likely did is not as disheartening as it may seem, for the hallmark of the Grotesque is a collection of fragmented things. Although “[the novelist] may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by” (168), as O’Connor comments in Mystery and Manners, the South still boasts a thriving culture.

Ours is a culture bred from the “redemptive suffering” that comes about through existence (Heinrich Zimmer qtd. in Shinn 60). Out of violent tensions springs an inescapable Southern culture that must remain in constant phases of fragmentation to avoid permeation by the well-intending but ignorant outsider.

Works Cited

Bell, Elizabeth S. “The Clash of World Views in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.” Southern Literary Journal 21.1 (1988): 15-22.

Gardner, Pat. “Midst Great Laughter.” The Southern Quarterly 34.2 (1996): 87-90.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “Baroque Catholicism in Southern Fiction: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole.” Traditions, Voices, and dreams: The American Novel Since the 1960s. Ed. Melvin J . Friedman and Ben Siegel. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1995. 25-47.

Katz, Claire. “Flannery O’Connor’s Rage of Vision.” American Literature 46.1 (1974): 54-67.

McCarthy, John F. “Human Intelligence Versus Divine Truth: The Intellectual in Flannery O’Connor’s Works.” English Journal 55.9 (1966): 1143-1148.

Nevils, René Pol and Deborah George Hardy. Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

O’ Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971.

—. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970.

Ruppersburg, Hugh. “The South and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.” Studies in American Humor 5.2.3 (1986): 118-126.

Shinn, Thelma J. “Flannery O’Connor and the Violence of Grace.” Contemporary Literature 9.1 (1968): 58-73.

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove Press, 1980.