Theology by the Slice: Playing the Fool: Auden, Toole and Why a Rat is NOT a Squirrel

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another exciting year of Society of Ss. Peter and Paul, and especially to a promising series of Theology by the Slice presentations.

We kicked off TBTS last Wednesday with a talk by Prof. Lee Oser of the Holy Cross English Department. Prof. Oser earned his doctorate from Yale University and his research interests include religion and literature, modernism, Catholic fiction and American and English literature. Prof. Oser is also a novelist, and his most recent book is The Oracles Fell Silent, published by Wiseblood Books. Proceeding from his literary and professorial work, Prof. Oser delivered a presentation on the vocation of the Catholic novelist, provocatively entitled "Playing the Fool: Auden, Toole and Why a Rat is NOT a Squirrel."

Prof. Oser began by saying that there has been some recent press about the current lack of Catholic novelists. There had been more Catholic authors in the past, such as Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot and, of interest to this presentation, John Kennedy Toole.

John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) wrote a novel around 1964 called A Confederacy of Dunces. Although it was eventually (posthumously) published in 1980 by Louisiana State University Press (and went on to earn a Pulitzer Prize), Toole first attempted to publish it in 1965 at Simon & Schuster. The Editor at the time, however, Robert Gottlieb, decided not to publish it - a decision Prof. Oser believes was the greatest embarrassment of Gottlieb's career.

Prof. Oser also promised that W.H. Auden, the Anglo-American author and poet, would come into the analysis through his 1946 poem "Under Which Lyre."

He then told a story about a joke Frank Sinatra once told. He once quipped that "I went down to the Grand Canyon one day, but it was closed." While this joke would have elicited laughter in the 1940s, the punchline is lost on a modern audience. In Sinatra's time, the idea of nature being closed down was preposterous, but today we have so lost touch with nature that the joke is lost on us.

Sinatra was a part of the Rat Pack, an ethnically and religiously diverse group (though politically liberal) of entertainers. There was equal opportunity for success in the Rat Pack, if one had wit, talent and a tough enough liver. Success was also dependent on one's ability, as Sinatra put it, "to play the fool." Thus, the question: what is the place of the foolish Catholic novelist against the groupthink of secular society at large?

In the tumult of the 1960s, Robert Gottlieb rejected Toole's manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces. He thought that the book wasn't really about anything, and he thought the main character, Myrna Minkoff, was particularly unpleasant. Myrna is a countercultural liberal, consumed by her many campaigns - for sexual liberation, against the Pope, and against the KKK just to name a few, She in fact worships these various projects. Yet, Mynka seems to be wearing different "masks" - that is, hiding behind these various projects that are distinct from who she is. This is central to Toole's writing: people's masks must be broken through, and his Catholicism helps to remove these masks.

Add W.H. Auden into this mix, the Anglican poet who observed the culture wars taking place at Harvard during the 1940s. In his poem "Under Which Lyre" he describes the conflict between the "Apollonians" (the secular, existentialist establishment) and the "Hermetics" (the Christian underground). At the time, Harvard was in turmoil over the controversial Jesuit chaplain Leonard Feeney. Fr. Feeney assisted in the conversion of many Harvard students to Catholicism and was a source of irritation to the Harvard establishment. In him, Auden likely found a kindred spirit, who was strongly opposed to relativism of the time.

Prof. Oser then presented and expounded on these two stanzas from "Under Which Lyre:"

Charged with his [Apollo's] compound of sensational
Sex plus some undenominational
     Religious matter,
Enormous novels by co-eds
Rain down on our defenceless heads
     Till our teeth chatter.

In fake Hermetic uniforms
Behind our battle-line, in swarms
    That keep alighting,
His [Apollo's] existentialists declare
That they are in complete despair,
    Yet go on writing.

The Apollonians create simulated art with their "undenominational religious matter" - a popular heretical brew known to Auden's audience, such as the work of D.H. Lawrence. The Apollonians extend this simulation to themselves, and disguise themselves as Christians in "fake Hermetic uniforms." We also see that the existentialists, while claiming to be scattered and despondent, "go on writing." They do not realize that only Christian existentialists are in touch with reality and can know authenticity when they see it; the atheistic existentialism has no means of discovering the authenticity it seeks.

Returning to Toole, we find a series of correspondences between Mynka and the protagonist Ignatius Reilly. At one point, Myrna describes how she realized that a folksinger she was engaging with and admired was really only interested in bedding her. She likens the incident to a time when she thought she was feeding a squirrel in the park, but it turned out to be a rat. For a long time, the rat could have passed for a squirrel, but she was finally able to see through the deception.

This ability to see through the mask, this sympathy, is the Catholic intuition in Toole's work. It is the job of the Catholic novelist to break through the mask, to tell the difference between a disguised Apollonian and a true Hermetic. In short, he must be able to tell a rat from a squirrel. The catholic novelist plays the fool in the discernment of this truth.

We sincerely thank Prof. Oser for his engaging presentation. It was a pleasure to hear such an erudite perspective from so relevant a topic.