James Seidler is a writer living in Chicago. The editor for the now-defunct humor publication FLYMF, he has now decided to maintain his web presence and smart remarks through this blog.
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Happy to announce that I have a new weird humor piece published in Splitsider! See how rats and pigeons will rule our post-apocalyptic futures with “A Post-Melt Guide to Local Wildlife.”
Humor is at the heart of “A Confederacy of Dunces” as Ignatius J. Reilly rants about society, revealing himself as both clown and jester.
“Good grief. Is this smut supposed to be comedy?” Ignatius demanded in the darkness. “I have not laughed once. My eyes can hardly believe this highly discolored garbage. That woman must be lashed until she drops. She is undermining our civilization. She is a Chinese Communist agent sent over to destroy us. Please! Someone with some decency get to the fuse box. Hundreds of people in this theater are being demoralized. If we’re all lucky, the Orpheum may have forgotten to pay its electrical bill.”
Ignatius J. Reilly is big in every sense of the world, an oversized bundle of misapplied learning and sloth, prone to screaming at movie theater screens, arguing with strangers and aggravating everyone he comes into contact with. As John Kennedy Toole’s novel begins, Ignatius is on the verge on being arrested for just being himself, an incident that sets into motion accidents, debt, workplace revolts, elderly romance, burlesque shows starring birds and a failed attempt to convince the armies of the world to lay down their arms in favor of what was once referred to as the love that dare not speak its name.
“A Confederacy of Dunces” ends up delivering something akin to a plot, but it’s structured as a series of scenes, generally involving Ignatius arriving somewhere, insulting everyone he encounters and having to flee to avoid arrest or violence. He’s an obnoxious character—perhaps the original man-child—and it’s easy to see how some readers could be overwhelmed by him, not wanting to spend several hundred pages in his presence. But Toole realizes his main character is a clown, and if you can laugh at him as well as with him, it’s enjoyable to spend time in Ignatius’ presence and see how he overreacts next.
The writing itself is very skilled, a mixture of Walt Kelly’s florid regional dialogue, and John Barth’s serious-sounding absurdity. Beyond Ignatius, the book introduces a solid range of characters, each with his or her own voice. There’s the bored, absentee owner of Levy Pants, the business where Ignatius is forced to work—and threatens to ruin—to pay off the damages caused by his mother’s drunken car wreck. There’s the owner, janitor and failed erotic performer from the “Night of Joy” a crummy night club that Ignatius ultimately brings to ruin. There’s his long-suffering mother, who picks up a new friend and boyfriend, both of whom advise her to send Ignatius to the insane asylum. Spending as much time with him as we do, we can’t be sure they’re wrong.
Capturing these characters, Toole’s book uses a variety of voices that writers today likely wouldn’t, everything from stylized African American vernacular to a stereotypical “fairy” of the period. At the same time, the characters behind these voices still succeed, maintaining their own bite and personality, arriving at something that’s much more than caricature.
Ignatius himself is the most cartoonish character in the bunch. He has a nasty tone for women and lipstick, and he’s not fully consistent either, acting squeamish throughout about sex but later showing an aptitude for lust and blackmail. Consistency isn’t necessarily the root of humor, though, and Toole is funny throughout, providing you can get past Ignatius’ voice—and his ceaseless, self-centered rage about the world. I laughed a lot reading this. By the end, when Ignatius started getting wound up again, I even looked forward to seeing where the rant would finish.
“You know, manacles and chains have function in modern life which their fevered inventors must never have considered in an earlier and simpler age. If I were a suburban developer, I would attach at least one set to the walls of every new yellow brick ranch style and Cape Cod split level. When the suburbanites grew tired of television and Ping-Pong or whatever they do in their little homes, they could chain one another up for a while. Everyone would love it. Wives would say, ‘My husband put me in chains last night. It was wonderful. Has your husband done that to you lately?’ And children would hurry eagerly home from school to their mothers who would be waiting to chain them. It would help the children to cultivate the imagination denied them by television and would appreciably cut down on the incidence of juvenile delinquency. When father came in from work, the whole family could grab him and chain him for being stupid enough to be working all day long to support them. Troublesome old relatives would be chained in the carport. Their hands would be released only once a month so they could sign over their Social Security checks. Manacles and chains could build a better life for all. I must give this some space in my notes and jottings.”
“Oh, my dear,” Dorian sighed. “Don’t you ever shut up?”
More “A Confederacy of Dunces” Quotes
“It was a neighborhood that had degenerated from Victorian to nothing in particular, a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly—and with very limited funds.”
“I would like very much to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this.”
“Now listen, Darlene. Anybody can insult a tramp. These jerks wanna see a sweet, clean virgin get insulted and stripped. You gotta use your head for Chrissake, Darlene. You gotta be pure. I want you to be like a nice, refined girl who’s surprised when the bird starts grabbing at your clothes.”
[On Ignatius’ contemporary reading program] “I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”
Colum McCann’s “Transatlantic” is a beautiful, lyrical examination of the ties between the United States and Ireland, jumping through time to share the first non-stop transatlantic flight, an abolition tour by Frederick Douglass and Senator George Mitchell’s efforts to resolve “The Troubles.” The different sections hop through time, but we’re gradually introduced to the common characters that unite them, suffering along as a Potato Famine immigrant finds hope and tragedy in the United States and as a family loses their teen to IRA gunfire.
Stylistically, McCann relies on short, impressionistic sentences to take us into each character’s experiences as they happen. As their best–say, in the opening section where pilot Jackie Alcock and navigator Arthur Brown coax a World War I bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland, the style takes you into flight alongside them. But in other instances the approach can fragment, pulling you away from the momentum of the narrative. I found McCann’s writing to be great, but others may be put off by it.
Here’s a sample in the voice of Senator George Mitchell as he leads the Good Friday peace accords:
“It’s the tenacity of the fanatic that he wants to pitch himself against. There is, he knows, something akin to his own form of violence in the way he wants to hang on and fight. The way the terrorist might hide himself in a wet ditch all night. Cold and damp seeping down into the gunman’s boots, right up into the small of his back, along his spine, through his cranium, out his pores, so cold, so very cold, watching, waiting, until the stars are gone, and the morning chatters with a bit of light. He would like to outlast that man in the ditch, outwait the cold and the rain and the filth, and the opportunity for a bullet, remain down in the reeds, underwater, in the dark, breathing through a hollow piece of grass. To stay until the cold no longer matters. Fatigue conquering tedium. Match him breath for breath. Let the gunman grow so cold that he cannot pull the trigger and then allow the silhouette to trudge dejected over a hill. To filibuster the son of a bitch, and then watch him climb out the ditch and to thank him and shake his hand and escort him down the high-brambled laneway with the senatorial knife in his back.”
This introduces us to the other potential issue in the book, McCann appropriating a number of historical figures to tell their stories in his words. It’s an uneasy prospect; was this really how Frederick Douglass felt on his travels to Ireland, or has McCann turned him into a author’s dummy? To whom did the care and remoteness that marks his character belong?
I enjoyed the approach, and I think it’s handled well, but it is tough to judge. Still, I loved how the different stories staked their claims before being bound together in the greater narrative. A wonderful read.
Additional Quotes
“It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world.”
“Two lovely beaming smiles from the front desk. Girls in silk scarves of red, white, and blue. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.”
“She had formed a distrust of men who carried Bibles. It seemed to her that they believed their own voices were somehow embedded there.”
“The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies.”
“Further Joy” by John Brandon is a tightly crafted, well-ranging set of short stories exploring sadness, growth and modern malaise. Set largely in rundown Florida, it takes us through a series of unconnected lives, occasionally veering into the fantastical.
The books’ standout is “Palatka,” which takes us into the life of a young woman for whom responsibility has curdled—and who reacts dangerously to the seeming disappearance of her neighbor. It’s a rich marriage of setting and character, drawing its suspense all the way past its conclusion.
As the story tells us early on, “Pauline felt a mothering urge toward Mal. She had never gone through a wild phase herself, and so Mal’s carelessness fascinated her—her carelessness about things such as nutrition and education, but more so her general carelessness with herself. She didn’t seem to realize that a cute young girl shouldn’t treat her body and soul like they were rented.” But the distance can’t last, as Pauline eventually explores her own carelessness, to fascinating results.
Other highlights from the collection include “The Midnight Gales,” which centers on a religious community organized around mysterious disappearances from the heavens, and “Further Joy,” which paints a composite portrait of a learning, yearning group of high school girls, a la “The Virgin Suicides.”
We also have “Estuary,” which introduces us to a nice guy getting older, someone who’s hit that new millennium wall. “The little city I was living in was a few towns north of Tampa and a few towns south of where I’d grown up,” he tells us. “People wound up here because no one else would have them, because there were already too many lawyers in better towns or too many pharmacists in better towns, because they couldn’t afford to retire in Naples, because, in rare instances, they were born here.” Later he concludes, “I felt like I was using up some kind of capital living with them, all the credit I’d accrued by conducting myself decently. I thought I deserved a soft place to crash because I’d always been fair and forthright. I’d never cheated anybody. I didn’t lie.” But while that all seems to be true, in the end it’s not quite enough.
Like any collection, “Further Joy” has its misses. I never bought the cross-generation seduction at the heart of “The Picnickers,” although the story was successful capturing motormouth, self-centered teen dialogue. Similarly, “Skybound” seemed more a collection of concepts than an actual story.
Brandon has a great voice, though, and a talent for distilling years of observations in a way that feels immediate and believable. He does good work on the outskirts of things, where rough folks fix their cars under lamplight and more genteel people occasionally feel the compulsion to tread.
Additional Quotes
The Midnight Gales
“Prizes are demeaning,” I tell him.
He stays with his thoughts a moment, still gazing upward, then he looks at me. “Who told you that? Is that your mom again?”
“No, my father. He says children are motivated by prizes. ‘If you do real good, I’ll give you a candy.’ He says that’s kids’ stuff. He says I already should’ve outgrown it.”
“Have you?”
“I think so,” I say. “He says if you’re an adult doing adult work, having someone pat you on the head in approval is patronizing.”
The guy nods. He presses his thumb against his front teeth. “It’s patronizing, but it’s also how you secure patronage.”
Palatka
“Best I can tell, you’re a levelheaded girl who likes to sip on a beer in the middle of the day because it makes you feel not so levelheaded. I wouldn’t say you’re happy, but you’ve managed not to have anything bad happen to you yet.”
Estuary
“People who fail a lot wind up with a bunch of new skills.”
