By
Jay Fox
Brooklyn,
NY, USA
John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is like a
brilliantly conceived Rube Goldberg machine with a rude, delusional, nihilistic
reactionary named Ignatius J. Reilly serving as its primary catalyst. He is a
mustached, rotund 30-year-old man who despises work, has delusions of grandeur,
delusions of victimization, delusions of
intellectual superiority, and dresses
like a bum. He is also stubborn, rude, bitter, and pessimistic. “I refuse to
'look up',” he tells mother at one point in the novel. “Optimism nauseates me.
It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been
one of misery.”
 |
| Jay Fox |
He may sound like a perverse
millennial, but the novel is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s—at a time
when cities were weird because there was a surplus of amoral weirdos like
Ignatius still there. It was before “they,” as Ignatius proclaims, managed to
fill the asylums with “poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane,
plastic, television, and subdivisions.” He is not a communist, an anarchist, or
an ideologue in any way. He's just a fat malcontent with a big mouth.
Ignatius is not a hero, nor an
anti-hero. Like Don Quixote (or perhaps Walter from The Big Lebowski), he is a comedic figure who is profoundly absurd
and profoundly agitated. Unlike Quixote, he is not an anachronism (though he
would deny this, as his idols seem to be mostly scholars and anchorites from
the Dark Ages). He is just a blundering menace who manages to both connect and
terrorize about a dozen unfortunate souls who seem separated from the likes of
Stella and Stanley Kowalski by blocks instead of years—though, to be fair,
there are no characters as tragic as either (and certainly none even close to
the likes of Blanche Dubois) in Toole's New Orleans, nor are there any
tragedies that are without their ironies. The book's sense of humor comes not
from creating characters that are too absurd to be real, but by mixing several
realistically absurd people into one story arc without venturing into realms of
total fantasy.
To describe the novel as a
chronicle of unfortunate and comedic events would be to undersell it. It is
arabesque depiction of New Orleans. And though it is dense and rather long,
nearly every passage in the 400-page book is a necessary component to a
larger
picture. One could say it has a good sense of geometry, as a single chance
event sets the gears of misfortune spinning until arriving at a ridiculous
denouement that sees Igatius face first in the street in front of a French
Quarter bar out of which he'd been chased by a fascist pornographer, a Latina
grifter, and a stripper whose clothes were supposed to have been ripped off by
a cockatoo. Describing any more of those assembled at this finale would be to
perhaps give too much away. Furthermore, focusing on the plot of this novel
would take up far too much time and prove distracting to some of the more
interesting aspects of the book that tie it together.
 |
| A Confederacy of Dunces |
Some have claimed that Toole's
book, which is similar in tone to Thomas Pynchon's V. and Joseph Heller's Catch
22, failed to initially impress editors because it lacked the overarching
themes that the other two novels possess. This seems unfair. To me, the book
did have a theme. It was largely about the interplay of fate, delusion, and
guilt. The generous number of allusions to The
Consolation of Philosophy, which was written while its author, Boethius,
was in prison, are kind of a dead giveaway to the fate element. That Boethius
was responsible for creating the popular image of the wheel of fortune and that
the novel begins with a clock and regularly references Ignatius' “moribund”
Mickey Mouse watch also alludes to it.
However, those who are capable of
transcending fate in the book are those who believe their own delusions to such
a degree that they manipulate others into believing the hubris they espouse.
There is almost the suggestion that confidence can triumph over the will of the
gods. To believe one's own bullshit to such a degree that others believe it too
is a key to a perverse kind of salvation.
If you jump to the present, this
observation seems more true today than it was when Toole was writing. America
is not suffering from a shortage of people like Ignatius Reilly. This is a
character who eagerly goes to movies to boo them; who obsesses over celebrities
despite his hatred for them; who believes himself to be superior to others even
though any conceivable metric that one could possibly employ to measure success
would place him miles from any winner's circle. This is a man who still lives
with his mother, who can't hold a job, who writes long-winded and nonsensical
diatribes proclaiming the brilliance of a foreign past for no one, and who both
seems incapable of getting over his dead dog and proclaims, “I rather respect
Batman,” with the type of pomposity that one would reserve for an opinion on
Petrarch or Hobbes. To have to live with him would be intolerable, but, as a
reader, it is impossible to not eagerly await one of his bombastic speeches. He
is an amusing train wreck.
In many regards, Ignatius Reilly is
a character from and for the internet. He's not a troll. He is, instead, the
type of character that made and makes the internet weird. To say “great” is a
stretch. If he were alive in 1996, he would have been a nuisance that no one paid
attention to. He would have aroused the ire of a few people who regularly spent
their time on AOL chatrooms, but that's about it. Jump to 2002, and not a lot
would have changed.
By 2006, he would have been known
as the guy who wrote 10,000-word Yelp reviews of random establishments that
would somehow evolve into treatises that included references to Lucretius,
Maimonides, Nonnus, Tiny Toons,
Boethius, Nacho Libre, Dante and
Lindsay Lohan before going into a lengthy non
sequitur concerning the heresies of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, and finally
returning to the issue at hand, which was that his meal at the aforementioned
pizzeria “substandard” and worthy only of one and a half stars. On top of this,
he would have included dozens of hyperlinks in the post, all of which would have
directed you to the type of disturbing porn that you can't unsee. On top of
that, most of the quotes that would have been included would have been
completely made up. Perhaps most importantly of all, he would have never
actually been to or ever anticipated eating at the establishment in question.
By 2009, this figure would have
attracted a loyal fanbase, begun his own website and regularly tweeted insults
at people whom he didn't like for reasons that were unclear. Those fans
probably would have revered him for telling it like it is. They may have
considered him to be knowledgeable because of his obscure references.
As of today, he would be a minor
internet celebrity regularly quoted by people who are stubborn, gullible, and
proudly antagonistic toward “mainstream” journalists, scientists, and theorists
from a massive array of academic disciplines. He would be one of the leaders
the confederacy of dunces against the elitists.
Some may call (and have called)
such a comically ersatz intellectual a neoreactionary. I am inclined to see
such individuals as the new breed of amoralists. These are people who are half
infant, half objectivist, and profoundly dangerous. Like our new president,
alt-right lunatics, and ancient astronaut theorists, this type of person is an
amusing crackpot until normal people begin to take the craziness seriously.
And they have.
In an odd twist of fate, Ignatius
Reilly was not an anachronism—he was a prediction.
Link:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Jay Fox is the author of The Walls and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
