By: Adam Page

I have to be honest from the outset. When someone tells me their favourite novel is A Confederacy of Dunces, I need to know why. Because two types of people love this book, and they exist on opposite ends of a really important spectrum. We have those who see Ignatius J. Reilly as a perfect satire of the intellectually pretentious; a hideous mirror held up to the pompous and self-important. The terminally shaken pseudo-intellectuals who mistake affected erudition for genuine wisdom. Then there are those who relate to Ignatius.

You know the ones I mean. The “well, actually” guys. The Reddit philosophers. Dudes with strong opinions on Ayn Rand and who haven’t held down a job for more than six months. They will describe themselves as “autodidacts” on their dating profiles while living in their mothers basement. In other words? The lit bros.

The devastating and beautiful irony of John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece is it operates as a kind of literary Voight-Kampff test. Tell me how you read Ignatius J. Reilly, and I’ll tell you who you are. Because what Toole created, and maybe without fully realising the prophetic nature of his creation, was a flawless deconstruction of a certain species of male intellectual insufficiency that would metastasise into one of the most annoying cultural phenomena of the 21^st Century.

Let me paint you a picture. Toole definitely did.

Ignatius J. Reilly is a thirty-year-old medieval studies graduate. He lives with his mother in 1960s New Orleans, and weighs somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 pounds. His signature accessory is a green hunting cap with ear-flaps. He wears this year round to protect his ears from abuse. He spends his days writing barely coherent rants against the modern world on Big Chief tablets, stroking his own fantasies of intellectual superiority, and consuming huge quantities of hot-dogs and Dr. Nut soda.

Ignatius believes himself a genius; the only man who understands philosophy, culture and theology in a world that has swapped out Boethius for Elvis. In his own estimation, he is a giant of intellect trapped in a society too stupid to recognise his brilliance. Everyone else? A philistine, a fool, or a homosexual (a category that, in his fevered taxonomy, includes around 90% of humanity and serves as his standard insult for anyone who doesn’t appreciate his magnificence).

He never shuts up. God help anyone in earshot because he never shuts up.

And the thing which makes him uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s spent time in graduate seminars, online forums or book-stores?He’s not completely wrong about everything.

That’s Toole’s devious beauty in his creation. Ignatius isn’t a total idiot. He reads, and can identify logical fallacies. He quotes philosophers. He knows consumer capitalism has major problems, popular culture can be vapid and modern life is usually bankrupt.

But dear God, the delivery system.

What Toole understood, and what creates the perfect dissection of lit bro pathology, is that intelligence without wisdom is another form of stupidity. Erudition without empathy is just barbarism in a tweed blazer. Being able to quote Boethius doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t keep a job at a hot-dog cart without causing a workers uprising and a race riot.

Ignatius’s problem, and by extension the lit bro’s problem, is not that he’s stupid. It’s that he’s weaponised his intelligence in the service of his ego, all the while destroying his capacity for self-awareness, or real human connection. His mind has been turned into a fortress, keeping out two things: personal responsibility and reality.

Just watch how he operates; when he loses a job, at the hot-dog cart, or Levy Pants, it’s never his fault. The world is just too degraded to appreciate his methods. When his attempts to organise factory workers into a “Crusade for Moorish Dignity” result in utter chaos, he lays the fault at their failure to understand his vision. He sabotages his mothers relationship with Claude Robichaux, as he thinks he’s protecting her from the degenerate forces of the modern world, not that he’s a selfish parasite frightened of losing his meal ticket.

That’s the lit bro play-book. Every failure is somebody else’s fault. Every criticism? Evidence of the critics inadequacy. Every rejection shows that the world is just too small for his genius.

Toole even gives us Ignatius’s magnum opus, his masterpiece that will change the world: “The Journal of a Working Boy, or, Up from Sloth.” A rambling, incoherent pile of bilge that exists solely to prove how much better Ignatius is from all the others.

Sound familiar?

It should; it’s the same impulse which drives every self-published “manifesto” on Amazon, or every 10,000 word Reddit post digging into why women just won’t date nice guys, or every Twitter thread starting with “I’m going to explain why everyone else is wrong about [insert topic]”.

We have to talk about Myrna Minkoff, as she’s crucial to understanding how this novel eviscerates a certain type of male intellectual posturing.

Myrna is Ignatius’s pen pal, a political activist in New York, and represents everything he claims to hate: she is a “sex-obsessed”, “Freud-damaged” beatnik. One who believes in social justice and think Ignatius just needs to get laid and his problems would be over. She challenges and pushes back against his bullshit, and is totally unimpressed by his theatrical displays of erudition.

And Ignatius is obsessed with her.

The correspondence we see between Ignatius and Myrna is a masterclass in watching the intellectual pose of someone collapse under the weight of their own insecurity. He writes her rambling, pompous letters about his superiority and her degeneracy. She replies by calling him out on his neuroses and suggesting, not totally inaccurately, that the vast majority of his philosophical positions are just complex defences against dealing with his sexual and psychological hang-ups.

She isn’t wrong. And it drives him crazy.

Because the thing about the lit bro is, underneath all the performative intellectualism, there is usually a churning insecurity about women. All the reading lists and opinions, all that carefully curated taste in film and music, right at the centre it’s an elaborate mating display that has become disconnected from its original purpose, and metastasised into a total world-view.

Ignatius can’t admit to himself that he wants Myrna’s approval, and her refusal to be impressed by his intellectual peacocking hurts him deeply. And so, he builds huge theoretical frameworks about why she represents everything that is wrong with modern society. The lit bro won’t say “I’m hurt because she isn’t interested in me.” Instead, he’ll write a 5,000 word essay on how women who go to college have been brainwashed by cultural Marxist propaganda.

What makes A Confederacy of Dunces a perfect deconstruction is that Toole surrounds Ignatius with a cast of real human beings, all of whom are trying, flawed and fumbling, just to get by in the world. Irene, his mother, is a drunken mess, but she’s trying. Jones is an underpaid nightclub worker in an unjust system, but still maintains his dignity and humanity. Even the more minor characters like Darlene, Burma Jones, Miss Trixie, they have desires, inner lives and fears.

Ignatius sees none of this. Other people, to him, are audiences for his brilliance, obstacles for his comfort or just an abstract concept in his philosophical system. They aren’t real to him. His mother is just “the woman” who gets in the way of his writing time. Jones is a symbol of social decay, and not a real person navigating economic exploitation and racism. The entire world is just a backdrop for the genius of Ignatius J. Reilly.

This is a core delusion of the lit bros. They are fundamentally incapable of perceiving other people to be as real as they are. Anyone else is just an NPC in the video game of their intellectual journey. A woman is just an obstacle to be overcome or a puzzle to be solved. People who disagree with him? Sheep who haven’t done the required reading. All the world’s a stage, and he is the only one who matters.

This absurdity is visible because Toole gives us everyone else’s perspective. We see the growing desperation in Irene as her son pulls her towards financial ruin. We see the sharp intelligence of Jones as he works around a world determined to exploit him. We watch as Myrna tries, with ever decreasing patience, to break through Ignatius’s self-delusional armour.

The joke, devastating and savage, is Ignatius really believes he is the hero in his own story, when he’s the villain of everyone else’s.

And it’s here where Toole’s own erudition comes into play. The title of the novel comes from Jonathan Swift: “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 constantly quotes this. It’s his comfort and shield, and explains why the world can’t recognise his brilliance. He’s the genius, and all those around him are dunces. The fact they are all against him just proves how right he is.

The problem is that Swift was being ironic, and satirising precisely this kind of self-aggrandising delusion. The real dunces are those who think everyone else is in a confederacy against them. A real genius will understand that, just maybe, if everyone around you thinks you’re an insufferable, the problem might be you.

Ignatius styles himself as a defender of Boethius, of medieval scholasticism, and the “geometry and theology” against the chaos of the modern world. But the issue there is that Boethius wroteThe Consolation of Philosophy while in prison and facing execution, meditating on virtue and how to maintain dignity in the face of real suffering. He considered the nature of true goodness, and what the proper relationship between the individual and the divine order should be.

Ignatius uses Boethius as a club to beat other people with while he sits in his mothers house eating hot-dogs and staring at the television. He warps philosophy into a weapon to protect his ego instead of a tool for understanding. And he has mistaken the ability to reference genuinely clever people for the difficult work of actually becoming wise.

In a nutshell, this is the lit bro. They confuse the map for the territory, and the pose for the reality.

I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t read it, I’ll just say this; Toole doesn’t let Ignatius off the hook, but he doesn’t totally destroy him either. There’s a reluctant compassion to how the novel resolves. A sense that, perhaps, being forced out of his comfortable delusions may be the best thing that has ever happened to Ignatius J. Reilly.

Maybe that’s the point; the lit bro isn’t irredeemable. The man who’s turned his intelligence into a defence mechanism, who has built a mental fortress of opinions and references so as not to experience the vulnerability of real human connection and mistakes being well-read for being wise, maybe he isn’t beyond hope.

But he has to want to change, and be willing to see others as real people. He has to let the real world in and accept it’s painful and messy and won’t always appreciate his jokes about Boethius.

John Kennedy Toole’s tragedy is well known. He killed himself aged thirty-one, never seeing his masterpiece published. His mother spent years trying to get the smudged carbon copy published, finally convincing Walker Percy to read it. And expecting to hate it, Percy found himself unable to put it down, writing in his introduction: “The book is a masterwork of comedy… Ignatius is a slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.”

Toole created a character so specific, so perfectly satirical that he predicted a whole species of insufferable male intellectuals long before the internet gave them a breeding ground. He saw the danger which lay in intelligence without humility and opinion without wisdom.

And the perfect, beautiful irony is that every lit bro out there who regards himself as a misunderstood genius just like Ignatius is just proving Toole’s point. The novel isn’t a defence of extraordinary men unappreciated by an uncultured world. It warns you what happens when you let your intelligence become a prison.

You are supposed to laugh at Ignatius when you read A Confederacy of Dunces, not with him. You are supposed to see how absurd his self-importance is and the tragedy of his wasted potential. It is supposed to be sad watching this man turn himself into a monster of ego to avoid the simple, frightening work of being human.

If you finish that novel thinking “Ignatius gets it”, well brother, you don’t get it. And that’s the most Ignatius thing about you.

The dunces were never in a confederacy against Ignatius. He was a confederacy of one, at war with reality. And you will never win that war, no matter how many times you quote Boethius.

Trust me on this one.