I’m leery of Pulitzer Prize winning books. After having read a number of them over the past few years, it seems the awarding of the Pulitzer is more about politics and popularity, a contest more suited to middle school than the grand stage of world literature. So I’ve come to take the “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” label splashed across title pages as an indicator that someone liked the book and it might worth reading.
I’ve seen A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole in bookstores ever since I got turned on to books. The name jumped out at me, simultaneously charming me and repulsing me. It sounded too cute, too literary, too good. The artwork threw me off too, the cartoonish simpleton brute on the front cover implied a joke of a book (I don’t remember seeing the Pulitzer slogan back then). This was surely a joke of a book, but not in the way I judged from its cover.
Few books with comic elements have made me laugh out loud. When it comes to “serious” literature, there are some downright funny writers, but their comedy is darker, more soul-level so that one finds the humor but also an underbelly to it that’s not funny at all. I think of Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve laughed out loud reading some of his stuff, but usually not. A Confederacy of Dunces had me LOLing a lot, the type of laughter that bursts from you involuntarily, a kind of cleansing laughter that feels so good.
A C of D tells the story of Ignatius J. Reilly, an extremely overweight abrasive absurd Don Quixote. He fancies himself superior to everyone, in his movie tastes (one of his favorite pastimes is going to the movies and exclaiming his negative opinions of the movie for everyone to hear. He often calls the films “abortions.”), and his intellectual ideas. He corresponds with a girl named Myrna who is his only hope of having anything that resembles a normal relationship with a female, but despite the fact that he is obese and doesn’t wash his sheets and can’t keep a job or fully accomplish any of his pursuits because of his laziness (and fear that his “valve” will close) and wears a ridiculous ensemble of green hunting cap, scarf, voluminous tweed trousers, and a flannel shirt (an outfit that “was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life), he refers to her as a “minx” and write letters to her filled with the most abusive language. He is a follower of the medieval philosopher Boethius who advocated his own spin on Fortuna, or Fortune. Ignatius derides Myrna’s radical ideas while holding on to ideas that are about 1400 years out of date. Ignatius is ridiculous and absurd. And you never want to stop reading.
A C of D is a Southern book. Despite the humor and hijinks, it’s about the South. Toole prefaces the book with a quote from Swift’s “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”:
When a true genius appears in the world,
you may know him by this sign, that the dunces
are all in confederacy against him.
Like the South, Ignatius believes in his own absolute rightness. He sees his detractors, in modern parlance, as “haters,” people who are trying to bring him down because of something personal. Or more accurately in Ignatius’ case, because they aren’t smart enough to understand where he is coming from. It’s the old Southern argument regarding slavery and the subsequent treatment of blacks: you’re not from here, so you couldn’t possibly understand. Along with his adherence to an outdated philosophy, Ignatius is the backwards South, blundering along into stranger and stranger adventures because the foundation is so absurd.
It’s possible to read this book and actively dislike Ignatius. He’s a repulsive character in more than one respect. And that’s the comic genius that propels this book, that makes you want to keep reading despite not much happening in a traditional plot-like way. While there are many LOL moments, the rest of the humor is that dark humor that makes you want to laugh, but then gives you pause when you realize just what ugliness the humor is exposing. It’s not easy to create jokes with this humor; it’s even more difficult to write a book supported by it.
I’ve read more than four books so far this year. Just a bit behind. Coming up:
* Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
* Let the Circle Be Unbroken by Mildred Taylor
* The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories
* The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
* Stephen Girdard: The Life and Times of America’s First Tycoon by George Wilson
And if you read this far, maybe you’ll come back tomorrow for my Trayvon Martin post…
Bellicose Blatherings 
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