In 1984, when I was in college, I was knocked sideways by A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s great comic novel about the picaresque adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a bloated, know-it-all misanthrope who regards nearly every human being he encounters as evidence of civilization’s decline. The title comes from Jonathan Swift: “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
I never considered myself a genius, but the second half of Swift’s proposition appealed to me enormously. Perhaps the world really was a confederacy of dolts. Some of my favorite comedians seemed to agree. George Carlin surveyed humanity and found an inexhaustible supply of idiots. David Letterman arrived on television with the weary expression of a man who had already heard your story and regretted it. His grumpy deadpan seemed perfectly suited to the beginning of a new decade. Disco was departing. Good riddance. Disco was for dunces. Deadpan irony was for people who understood things.
At least that was how I saw it.
Misanthropy struck me as a form of intellectual street cred. If you were disgusted with humanity, presumably you had seen through it. Optimists were rubes; cynics had X-ray vision. I imagined becoming a comic novelist with a misanthropic edge, skewering the fools who wandered into my field of vision.
Unfortunately, contempt is a lousy substitute for insight.
My fictional characters tended to be flat and two-dimensional because I had already convicted them before they entered the story. They existed to be mocked, not understood. The expression “punching down” wasn’t part of the cultural vocabulary of the 1980s, but I would have benefited enormously from understanding the concept. Satire without empathy can quickly deteriorate into a bully standing over his victims and congratulating himself on his wit.
Then, through a sequence of accidents that hardly resembled career planning, I stumbled into teaching college writing at twenty-four. In 1987, a friend’s father needed instructors for a Merritt College bridge program at Skyline High School and couldn’t find enough people to teach the classes. I agreed to help.
That temporary job lasted thirty-nine years.
I taught for two years in the Bay Area, seven in Bakersfield, and thirty in Los Angeles. Somewhere along the way, nearly 10,000 students passed through my classrooms.
They ruined my misanthropy.
It is difficult to maintain a sweeping contempt for humanity when humanity keeps arriving in your classroom every semester with names, families, jokes, ambitions, insecurities, talents, disasters, and complicated histories. My students were too intelligent, contradictory, funny, wounded, resilient, exasperating, and generous to fit inside the crude categories of my younger imagination. The closer I looked at people, the less useful my caricatures became.
Perhaps I am biased. An absurdly high percentage of my students treated me with kindness. They forgave me when I arrived with mediocre material and rewarded me extravagantly when I brought something worthwhile. On good days, the room crackled. Students argued, laughed, challenged me, and occasionally produced that rare classroom electricity when everyone seemed to understand that something interesting was happening.
They also discovered that my tortured soul was an excellent source of entertainment.
The more lugubrious I became, the funnier they found me. I could enter class burdened by some private catastrophe, convinced that existence was a bleak corridor leading toward oblivion, and within minutes twenty-five students would be laughing at me. I found this strangely therapeutic. If my despair could become somebody else’s comedy, perhaps despair wasn’t quite as formidable as I imagined. My students taught me, among other things, not to take my suffering entirely at face value.
My empathy deepened again in 2010 when I became the father of twins. Parenthood rearranged my vision. Suddenly, when a student struggled, I could imagine one of my daughters sitting in that chair. The exhausted student, the confused student, the student who had fallen behind and was embarrassed to ask for help—each became somebody’s child in a way I had understood intellectually but not viscerally.
I wish I had possessed that parent-vision when I began teaching. It would have made me a better instructor from the first day. I undoubtedly mistook confusion for laziness, immaturity for indifference, and struggle for lack of character more often than I would like to remember. I cannot travel backward and repair those failures. I can only recognize them.
Now I am retiring.
I will miss my students—all 10,000 of them, give or take a few hundred victims of my arithmetic. The overwhelming majority were kind, intelligent, curious, and hungry for the same things human beings have always wanted: connection, dignity, purpose, and some reasonable measure of happiness.
I ask their forgiveness for the days when my selfish, surly self commandeered the classroom. And I thank them for the laughter, generosity, and encouragement they gave me on the days when my better self managed to show up.
One thing I know after nearly forty years: sustained contact with actual human beings makes serious misanthropy difficult. You can despise “people” in the abstract. It becomes harder when people acquire faces.
I still love A Confederacy of Dunces. I still love Ignatius J. Reilly. But after spending four decades in classrooms, I suspect I understand something that Ignatius never did. The confederacy of dunces is largely an illusion produced by distance. Get close enough to the supposed dunces, listen to their stories, watch them struggle, and allow them to laugh at you for a few decades, and the confederacy begins to dissolve.
Had Ignatius J. Reilly been sentenced to forty years of teaching college writing, even he might have been cured.
Although I suspect his student evaluations would have been spectacular.
