Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin Page A

short essay, “Television is here to stay and soon it may be the world’s chief entertainment.” He was acutely perceptive. Around the time he wrote this paper, the Golden Age of television began, a time of innovation and experimentation in the medium.
    Toole also understood well the language of patriotism, and for his teachers he embraced it in his writing, showing energy and vision. In a short essay on the Louisiana Purchase, he casts the American heartland in picturesque detail:
    On the Great Plains spring up the graceful, golden “gift of God”—wheat. Beneath the fertile surface lay the extensive pools of blue-black oil lying dormant until the greedy drill should pierce their slumber.
    These are the same plains that still bear the wagon tracks of the 1850s in the furious rush westward. Up from the virgin forests have sprung the great industrial and commercial centers. Above the banks of the Mississippi rise the smoke-blacked factory towers representing the nation’s strength....
    At the tip of this cornucopia lies New Orleans, the insuperable gateway to the Mississippi and America’s region of prosperity.
    After surveying the vast regions of the country, he casts New Orleans as the beginning and the end of it all.
    He wrote his high school essays in idealized language about America and American history, which was quite common for the historical narrative offered at the time. In an essay titled “Democracy Is What We Make of It,” the young Toole explores the citizen’s responsibility to uphold the principles of “the greatest nation of the earth” and overcome “Communist tyranny.” Without cynicism or humor he expresses a loyal affirmation of the creed of the country. The overtly patriotic voice he used in his class assignments does not indicate the skepticism he may have felt toward the ideal vision of the United States and the Cold War mentality.
    In college he would directly undermine such idealistic precepts of the nation, a sentiment that eventually culminated in his character Ignatius Reilly whose New Orleans–centric vision of the world is laughable
and who finds the country lacking in “geometry and theology.” And Toole would also mock simplistic notions of government and economies, humorously voiced in Confederacy through the character Claude Robichaux, who is convinced anyone that opposes him is a “comuniss.” While Toole maintained a patriotic line in his classwork, early traces of this cynical tendency appear outside of his schoolwork. In 1951 he joined the staff of the school newspaper, making his entry through a satire edition titled Ess and Bee , presumably an inversion of B.S. Taking on the character of a Russian ring-toss athlete Ivan Vishivsky O’Toole of the Russian institution Liquidate University, he offers testimony of losing to a Fortier student at the world ring toss championship held in “Upper Lower Slobbovia.” O’Toole testifies in his Russian dialect:
    Vhy, oh vhy, does effryting haff to hoppin to me?
    Chust when I t’ought I had der voild’s ring toss championship in der bag, Fortier’s Villie Harrison (dorty capitalist) came from behind to win hands and feets.
    Da, I vas sure dat I had von it, ven dot slob made a beautivul 10-foot toss mit der rink, and I vent down in dorty democratic defeat. Siberia, heer I come.
    This is the first documented instance of his writing in a dialect, and his interest in commenting on current events through satire shines. In this case, he cast the competition between communism and democracy through the ridiculous metaphor of ring tossing. After writing this article, he stayed on with the newspaper until he graduated.
    Toole employed the use of dialect in some of his creative writing in high school as well. In the John Kennedy Toole Papers at Tulane University (called the Toole Papers hereafter), there is an undated manuscript titled “Going Up”