When a True Genius Appears in the World

A few weeks back I had to take a trip out to California.  As I have noted here before, I carefully pick my Plane Books—books that look long and not necessarily all that thrilling, but which I really wish I had read.  Planes are the perfect place to read such books. 

This trip I made a horrible mistake in picking a book for the plane trip back.  It doesn’t seem all that hard to pick books which will meet the above criterion, but this time, I was way off.  In fact, I don’t think I have ever made a bigger mistake.

The book:  John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces

The problem:  It was a fantastic book.  I would have ripped right through it even if I wasn’t on a plane.  I wasted a whole plane trip reading a book I would have devoured had I ever read the first page before now.  Indeed, my foremost thought when reading it was, “How in the world is it possible that I have never read this book before?”  That was coupled with, “Where in the world did I ever get the idea that this was one of those dreary, but potentially worthwhile, bits of literature?”  The answers to those two questions are undoubtedly linked, but I have no idea what those answers might be.

This book is funny, very funny.  And thought-provoking.  It is interesting, well written, and has some of the most memorable characters you’ll ever meet.  The main character, Ignatius J Reilly is a modern day Falstaff.  Take Shakespeare’s character, put him amongst the working (or non-working as the case may be) classes of New Orleans in the 1960s and you would have this book.  Brilliantly done.  The cast of supporting characters are also worthy of Henry IV—no small feat, that. 

It’s a sprawling book, with, I suppose, something akin to a plot line, but really a series of minor plot lines weaving in and out.  Uniting the plots is Ignatius’ attempts to navigate a word in which he doesn’t quite belong.  A slothful holder of a Master’s degree in English, holed up in a room in his mother’s house, we see Ignatius simultaneously trying to write the grand philosophical work to end all philosophical works—he runs out of steam every time he gets a paragraph or two or random musings down on paper—and looking for a job to help pay the bills so his mother doesn’t lose the house in which he resides.  Reilly is unsuitable for work—in exactly the same way the Falstaff would have been unsuited for a desk job.  Reilly is larger than work, he is larger than life, there is simply a vast Too Muchness about him.  You would not want to know Ignatius J Reilly; you would think he was an Absolute Loser because, well, he is one.  He Dreams Big, can’t muster the energy for even the most mundane tasks, and yet, despite being everything you would not want your kid to become, it is hard not to secretly, very secretly (you wouldn’t want anyone to hear you think this), admire him a bit because he just doesn’t care that the world does not fit him.  He chalks his misfortunes up to Fortuna, and…well, I was going to say moves through life, but “moves” conveys a bit more purpose than Ignatius is wont to display.

Throughout the book, the other characters serve as a foil for the problems of Reilly—we watch others struggling or giving up the struggle to fit into the world, none of them terribly successful at it.  As Reilly muses toward the end of the novel:

Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen.  Everywhere there lurked pitfalls like Abelman [a customer of the factory in which Reilly briefly worked], the insipid Crusaders for Moorish Dignity, the Mancuso cretin [a policeman], Dorian Greene [a rather campy homosexual], newspaper reporters, strip-teasers, birds, photography, juvenile delinquents, Nazi pornographers. And especially Myrna Minkoff [a wannabe 60s radical].  The consumer products.  And especially Myrna Minkoff [yes, he repeats that sentence—Myrna is a real problem for Ignatius].

It is interesting to think at the end of a novel like this:  how much do I try to fit into the world?  How much of what I do is a deliberate attempt to shape my life so that I seem at home here?  What would be different if I simply woke up every morning, firmly convinced, that the world should fit me, that world should modify itself so that it was at home with me?  Imagine that you really believed that, that you really did wander through life unaware that there was something odd about your attitude toward the world, that it was singularly odd that you actually didn’t understand why you should adapt yourself to the world.  It’s a strange thought experiment.

From there, one gets to wondering why the world is the way it is.  And reading this coming off a semester reading Southern literature in my tutorial, it’s easy to see how there is a logical progression from Faulkner and Agee to Toole. 

And yet…is the world really all that bad?  Is fitting into a world of work and polite social interactions really all that bad?  Are we really living lives of quiet desperation (OK, that’s a Northerner’s line, but even still, it fits)?  I’m not so sure.  I like my computer and my iPod and the easy ability to buy books.  I like microwave ovens and cordless drills.  And is modern industrial life really such a high price to pay for the marvel of being able to read news about the Raiders on the internet while living on the East Coast?