Sam Jordison of the Guardian recently wrote a brief but interesting article on John Kennedy Toole's remarkable book "A Confederacy of Dunces" and its rejection by the almost legendary editor Robert Gottlieb. I believe Gottlieb was an editor for Simon and Schuster at the time (though Jordison doesn't mention this and I may be misremembering this fact), and though he liked Toole's book and encouraged him, in the end Gottlieb rejected it because it "wasn't really about anything." To most readers today this seems like an irrelevant criticism for a book which not only went on to win a Pulitzer prize but which is one of the most readable and funny books of the 20th century.
Gottlieb was shrewd enough to later admit that his rejection of "A Confederacy of Dunces" was his most "conspicuous failure" as an editor, though he continued to have reservations about the book even after it went on to enjoy the great success that it did - a success that the author was unable to share in since he had committed suicide not long after Gottlieb's final rejection. Though Jordison of the Guardian has mostly unqualified praise for Toole's book, he says that he often hears Gottlieb's criticisms of the novel echoed in contemporary readers. "I've lost count," he tells us, "of the number of times that people have complained that the book doesn't add up to much and that Ignatius J. Reilly doesn't develop as a character." Jordison goes on to assure us that there are "many excellent editors and readers out there who would make the same decisions as Gottlieb."
Jordison's defence of the book is straightforward and timely. He suggests that the book has value on the basis that it is very funny. This is surely true. "A Confederacy of Dunces" is one of the books that stand in my life of reading as notably hysterical, along with Catch 22, Three Men in a Boat, and a number of books by Kurt Vonnegut. But Jordison also mentions that the book is, in fact, about quite a lot. There is a great deal of profundity in Toole's portrayal of the changing values of the 1960s; racism, politics, philosophy are all subjects that Toole deals with in a witting and wise way. I actually think that a good case could be made that "A Confederacy of Dunces" was ultimately rejected not because it was about nothing but because it dealt with the things that it was about in rather raw and provocative ways, ways that probably made Gottlieb uncomfortable and continues to be rather disconcerting to readers today.
And this is the point that I think that Jordison's article, as interesting as it is, misses. The real issue in my mind concerning Gottlieb's rejection of Toole's masterpiece is that it doesn't adhere to certain novelistic standards that were formed largely in the Victorian Era and continue to shape our notion of a "good" novel even today. My argument is this: because the novel as it came to be practiced as an art form grew largely out of the internal landscape of Romanticism and was then injected with a degree of Victoria self-absorption, most successful novels today are stuck in an aesthetic rut. This rut is an image of the novel as a psychological landscape of a character or small group of characters who are expected to psychologically grow (in rather orthodox ways) through the hardship of some social or personal experience. There are, of course, counter examples to this formula, but overall it seems that his has been the MO of the novel as an art form, an art form that I believe is now dying because of the grand social and technological changes facing society. Because of this psychological formula, we have a rather basic Aristotelian view of what a novel should do, how it should proceed in terms of plot and character, and where it should end up to form a proper climax and denouement. "A Confederacy of Dunces" actually fits into this model a great deal more that Gottlieb seemed to think, but it also pushed that boundary in important ways. The main character of the novel Ignatius doesn't grow at all. He doesn't use his hardships as life lessons, but rather as demonstrations and affirmations of all that he thinks is wrong with society in the first place. The other characters in the novel just sort of skirt through life haphazardly the way most of us actually do. There is not much of a lesson or moral in "A Confederacy of Dunces." Rather, it is a more like a French movie than an Anglophone novel, it is a slice of life that gives us a snapshot in time of a twisted degenerate egoist against a backdrop of a racist decaying society which seems to have largely lost its way.
Today we have many writers who have broken the mold of traditional Aristotelian narratives in spectacular ways, not least of who are G.W. Seabald, John Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon. I believe authors like these are, for want of a better expression, the pallbearers of the novel as an art form. The novel grew out of the entertainment needs of the bourgeoise, and society and its entertainment demands are changing in ways that the novel simply is unable to account for. There is no shame in this. Art forms arise and fall as society changes. We no longer mourn the death of the illuminated manuscript as a living art form. We've moved on. Literature will undoubtably survive in new and vital ways. But the demands that society put into an art form, whether it's painting, the novel, or architecture, creates collateral damage. Toole was one of its victims. He wrote a brilliant book that pushed boundaries that many in positions of privilege and authority didn't want pushed, and he eventually committed suicide over it. The important lesson of Toole's book is that when someone says that a work of art isn't "about" anything, its a pretty good bet that it is just "about" the wrong things.
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