I'm always eager to hear someone's take on a book that belongs to my personal canon, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, whether the writer enjoyed it or not. A recent piece in the New Yorker by Tom Bissell is the latest I've come across. On second reading, he still doesn't much like it. I write now because he's yet another reader of the novel who, in rendering his final verdict, disappoints me by missing what happens, mischaracterizing it as a mere barrage of gags leading nowhere. I'm looking for a discussion of the book's meaning, not another declaration that it has none. I intend to prove that it does in hopes that the next writer will start from there already.
Ignatius J. Reilly is a manchild content to live off his mother, a fact that, on its own, makes him nothing if not pathetic. That should be a universal rule. The horrendous injustice inflicted upon him is when he's forced by circumstances to get a job. Except he can't bring himself to work or tolerate others and thus can't hold down a job. His real work, he believes, consists of scattered notes in yellow legal pads, scribbled between masturbation sessions. But the novel's main source of comedy is his calamitous interactions with other people, the dunces. Ignatius can't get through a taxi cab ride without irritating the driver, deems his first boss, upon seeing him, a "blight." In return, everyone, almost without exception, scorns him. Having read all this, and having noted that the character had its origin in a person Toole knew and made fun of, Bissell refers unironically to Ignatius as Toole's "hero." Toole's hero is aggressively ridiculed from every single angle, down to his mammoth yellowed drawers, throughout the entire book. It is a satire and Ignatius is its prime target.
I've had to adjust to the pitch of a writer. For years I could only read about 300 pages of a Dickens novel before setting it aside. Harold Bloom describes his work as an endless festival - tantalizing promotion, fatiguing experience, for obvious reasons. As would be the case with any festival, no matter how deliriously fun, I had to leave. (I finally started small with Hard Times and worked my way up to Bleak House.) Though I allow that Toole's pitch might seem antic, I've never felt the same need to adjust with his novel, as the entertainment provides balance for what would otherwise be a grisly tale of a man on the verge of getting himself thrown into a mental asylum. If the jokes come rapidly, it's a measure of how dire the situation is, how necessary laughter is just to present it. Every joke on Ignatius is a cut.
George Orwell, in his analysis of Dickens, says that there's always an idea behind a joke. It took my own second reading for me to notice the few lines and passages in the book that explicitly reveal Toole's meaning. When I noticed, I thought I glimpsed the mark of a young writer or maybe the imperfection bound to be uncovered in any novel. To contradict Bissell once more, the idea behind Toole's jokes risks seeming too transparent. (But then I observe how often readers seem to miss it and wonder whether it was a deliberate imperfection, highlighting and underlining and circling that still isn't enough. The old story of the clown whose humor is assumed to be empty and lowbrow. And the book opens with a line from Swift, from which the title derives.) A Confederacy of Dunces can be likened to an addiction narrative: a succession of disasters that lead to "rock bottom," to the moment where a choice must be made either to climb out or be destroyed. One or the other. The jokes, the thousand cuts, approximate the granularity of the ordinary life of a noxious person who experiences and - Toole suggests - requires that much punishment to break through a barrier and reach a moment of clarity.
Ignatius gorges on cheap screen entertainments he claims to be appalled by in the manner I suspect many others do, as a distraction from his miserable life and his role in creating it. During a scene at the movie theater, the narrator mentions, in arguably clunky fashion, that he has no interest in watching a foreign film about a man who's lost his soul. There must have been many films Ignatius chose not to watch on one of his many trips to the theater. Why isolate this one? Then, nearing the end of the book, Ignatius and his mother have a dramatic, not comic, shouting match that spills out into the street. Again, that word: his mother accuses him of having no soul.
The book prompts me to ask a couple of questions that are always worth asking: What is a soul? And how is it lost?
If you sit there and consider your greatest fault, it is no abstraction. Adhering to it, if you dare to peer deeply enough, past your defenses, carefully constructed or not, would be the evidence against you, your least heroic moments. There may even be one rending moment in particular in which you couldn't escape the truth of who you are and what you've become. Ignatius has that moment. He's at a party, dressed as a pirate. As usual, he has turned everyone against him and is ostracized. Alone, he remembers a traumatic incident from back in high school, suppressed perhaps until then, when he pissed his pants. There are few more effective means in life at that age to be instantly shunned, to be treated with disgust and be forever branded as preposterous, than pissing your pants in front of your schoolmates, especially if it can't be blamed on alcohol. And Ignatius, recalling it as the crowd edges away from him once more, can't hide behind his defenses, rage and delusions of superiority, as he so often does, any more than if he tried to do so with piss-soaked pants. All he can do is stand there, unsure of what to do with himself, sadly swinging his plastic sword.
No, Ignatius isn't a hero - which makes Toole's last-minute display of compassion after the fusillade of ridicule and pain so remarkable, changing its nature. It's not limited to the act of Myrna Minkoff arriving to save him. It's that Ignatius recognizes that he's been saved. The book closes with him aware of his incredible fortune, grasping irony, expressing actual appreciation for someone, and prepared to venture into the world and its possibilities, thereby recovering his soul. Cormac McCarthy: "If it's not about life and death, it doesn't matter." Ignatius manages to stave off death and cling to life. Toole isn't, as Bissell concludes, simply portending the incel or rightwing troll. He certainly isn't valorizing him. He's not even just demolishing him, though there is that. The wag is a wise man with a message that can broadly apply to anyone who's become unmoored, loathed, and seemingly hopeless but particularly to the guy who today rots in front of a screen, overwhelmed by rage, the victim of a conspiracy, unable to fathom why women aren't intrigued and why the system doesn't conform to his angriest fantasies. Toole's great feat is to issue a comic warning that unites mordancy with humanity. Highly instructive.
