Before reading A Confederacy of Dunces, I vaguely knew that it was a grotesque comedy that became famous posthumously. The author John Kennedy Toole committed suicide after many rejections. His mother sent the manuscript to Walker Percy, who contributed to its publication, and it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. This legendary story has become an unavoidable footnote in the history of American literature. It is easy for people to turn the pages with a sense of tragedy, as if witnessing clear evidence that a genius was let down by the world. But after really reading it, I found that things were much more complicated and disturbing.
The core of the story is a man named Ignatius J. Reilly. He was fat and sloppy. He lived on the sofa in his mother’s house in New Orleans. He claimed to be a medieval philosopher, worshipped Thomas Aquinas, and despised everything in the twentieth century. He always wore a deer-hunting cap, green plaid trousers, and carried a rolled-up umbrella when he went out. He thought that he was confronting the corruption and vulgarity of the world at all times, but in fact, he was more like a spoiled child, gilding his laziness and resentment with complicated words. The smell of dampness and laziness, mixed with the old French and Spanish flavors of New Orleans, happened to be the set of his entire hallucination.
There is no complicated plot in the book. Ignatius was forced to go out to find a job because of his mother’s car accident. He worked briefly at a pants factory and messed things up; caused a revolutionary riot in front of a hot dog cart; got entangled with a group of bottom-level freaks, including anarchists, depraved waitresses, and pirated pornography booksellers. All the clues finally ended in a mess. Ignatius was sent to a mental hospital, and his mother finally lived the decent life she yearned for.
But these plot summaries are misleading in themselves. This book is not about plot. It is a constantly expanding comedy pipeline. Each minor character swells to the limit of his own stupidity, then bumps into another stupidity, making a dull and funny sound.
I often feel an indescribable embarrassment when I read it. Ignatius is undoubtedly ridiculous and hateful. While complaining about the corruption of society, he spent his mother’s money without guilt, wrote a thick notebook full of typos as a diary, and made disgusting comments about women. But Toole didn’t make him a simple villain. He has a real intellectual desire, although it has been completely distorted. He worshipped the order and rigor of the Middle Ages, but his life was disorderly and lazy. This contrast repeats throughout the book: he scolds others as monsters, yet he himself is the most insufferable of all the characters.
Walker Percy said in the preface that the tragedy of this book is that a “great comic character” was created, but the author himself did not see it. I half agree. Percy emphasized Toole’s pain and self-destruction, but I think the real strength of this book lies not in its sad background, but in its merciless observation: each of us lives more or less in a kind of self-consistent illusion, and Toole magnified this illusion to the point where it is impossible to face.
The book’s title, A Confederacy of Dunces, comes from Jonathan Swift’s satire: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Ignatius always thought he was the genius, and all the idiots were besieging him. But as you read, you realize that the real joke is that he is the most loyal member of the confederacy, and perhaps even its leader. He has the vanity of a typical intellectual, believing his cynicism is a form of sobriety, unaware that this cynicism itself has become the biggest laughingstock.
I don’t want to reduce this book to a lesson about “self-righteousness.” What really made me sit on the chair and not want to move after turning pages late into the night was Toole’s almost cruel sense of equality. He didn’t side with Ignatius, nor did he oppose him. Every character—whether a grumpy mother, a pretentious female employee, or a lecherous bar owner—is given the same light: they live hard, clumsily and ridiculously. Toole didn’t laugh at their clumsiness. He just spread this clumsiness out in the sun.
This is not the kind of book that makes you cry and say, “I finally understand tolerance.” On the contrary, it makes people a little uncomfortable, because you find yourself seeing too many things in Ignatius that you don’t want to admit. The method of using grand words to justify oneself, the habit of blaming failure on those around you, the lack of courage to curse the world from a safe place while never really stepping into it—all of this hits close to home.
A Confederacy of Dunces is not just a classic comedy. It is a slice of the southern United States, urban decay, family, and a crazy society, but it is also a mirror. Toole placed the mirror on the street, reflecting everyone’s stupidity and vulnerability, and then he walked away.
We later readers stand in front of that mirror, either seeing a joke or seeing ourselves. Both reactions are what this book truly wants. It’s not here to comfort you; it’s to remind you that you may have submitted your membership application to the Confederacy of Dunces long ago.
