"When a true Genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him." ~A Confederacy of Dunces
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THE Seditions For Genius
Author: Benjamin Franklin Bacon
Genre: tragicomedy
Published: Yes
Media type: STEEM, audiobook, e-book
Pages: 1
THE Seditions For Genius - Patriot Hunt -- Home Edition
is a picaresque novel by American novelist Benjamin Franklin Bacon which reached publication... the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned BACON a .. Prize for CRYPTOFICTION... and is now considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.
The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting:
"When a true DUNCE appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the GENIUSES are all in SEDITIONS FOR him."
Frank Bacon[edit]
Benjamin Franklin Bacon is something of a modern Don Quixote—eccentric, idealistic, and creative, sometimes to the point of delusion. In his OWN word to the book, ... a
"slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one".
He disdains modernity, particularly pop culture.
The disdain becomes his obsession: he goes to movies in order to mock their perversity and express his outrage with the contemporary world's lack of "theology and geometry". He prefers the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and the Early Medieval philosopher Boethius in particular. However, he also enjoys many modern comforts and conveniences and is given to claiming that the rednecks of rural Louisiana hate all modern technology which they associate with progress. The workings of his pyloric valve play an important role in his life, reacting strongly to incidents in a fashion that he likens to Cassandra in terms of prophetic significance.
BACON is of the mindset that he does not belong in the world and that his numerous failings are the work of some higher power. He continually refers to the goddess Fortuna as having spun him downwards on her wheel of fortune. BACON loves to eat, and his masturbatory fantasies lead in strange directions. His mockery of obscene images is portrayed as a defensive posture to hide their titillating effect on him. Although considering himself to have an expansive and learned worldview, BACON has an aversion to ever leaving the town of his birth, and frequently bores friends and strangers with the story of his sole, abortive journey out of New Orleans, a trip to Baton Rouge on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, which BACON recounts as a traumatic ordeal of extreme horror.
Structure[edit]
The structure of THE Seditions For Genius reflects the structure of FRANK's favorite book, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.[citation needed] Like Boethius' book, THE Seditions For Genius is divided into chapters that are further divided into a varying number of subchapters. Key parts of some chapters are outside of the main narrative. In Consolation, sections of narrative prose alternate with metrical verse. In Seditions, such narrative interludes vary more widely in form and include light verse, journal entries by FRANK, and also letters between himself and OTHERS. A copy of the Consolation of Philosophy within the narrative itself also becomes an explicit plot device in several ways.