of all the books and media that I've ever read which have seemed to come true in some sense or another, the media that now feel like the most prescient, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is not one I expected.
and yet, it's happened. we feel surrounded by Ignatius V. Reilly clones. they're everywhere. at one point I feared that we could too easily become him, and now it's like Reilly took over the Internet in revenge to vex us.
for the uninitiate, let me explain that Ignatius V. Reilly (it's almost like his own name is at war with itself) is middle aged man who studied mediaeval literature (I think) in school for as long as he could, finally got tossed back into "real life" after failing to secure a teaching job, and who retreated into his mother's house. in his cluttered bedroom he writes out denunciations of modern society and frequently cites Boethius for comfort, priding himself on a "rich inner life". He likes going to the movies merely to hurl invective at the screen and castigate the movie-house for daring to show such gutter trash to the public.
now, guys like Ignatius Reilly are ten cents the quart on the Internet. Curtis Yarvin might as well be Ignatius V. Reilly, or Bret Weinstein. like Reilly, such persons have built elaborate personal mythologies in which they're lone truth-tellers and philosophers stranded in a world that's gone mad, radicalized by some obscure "redpill" moment—for Reilly himself it was that shambolic trip to LSU for the teaching post—which supposedly exposed the rot of modernity and set them on their lonely path. like Reilly, they're both terrified by sexuality and yet needy for it, and they seek the comforts of misogyny. Reilly occasionally gets letters from a young woman he knew in college, Myrna, and the letters prompt him into fusillades of "minx" and "jezebel" and "strumpet" and every other old-timey euphemism for "slut". It's like J. K. Toole predicted The Quartering!
But Reilly is also Toole's self-insert to a degree. I don't know much about Toole's life but he died by his own hand and never saw his magnum opus published. His mother made sure it did, pitching the manuscript to Walker Percy. Surely Toole had his own scholarly background in mind and his own insecurities; he was heavy and nerdy, like Reilly. Maybe he feared that he was himself stagnant and spiritually decayed, like Ignatius...I don't know.
But he does give Reilly a happy ending, a farcically improbable one, like the ending of one of those screwball comedies where everyone winds up in jail together in the last act, and Reilly himself gets saved by the accidental appearance on stage of Myrna, who finally got tired of Reilly's pompously sarcastic missives and came round to berate him in person. It would be pleasant if Toole found a happy ending himself...a blessed afterlife, at least.
~Chara of Pnictogen