Undoubtedly, as a modern equivalent to a historically specific form of humor,
Dunces falls squarely into Bakhtin’s spectrum of folk humor, but can this kind of modern
carnival also work as real satire? That is, can it be more than just absurdity? Lowe
argues that we must think of it as more: “We begin to run into problems, however, when
we try to confine this baggy monster to only one of our existing literary categories. […] A more productive route might be to think about the book’s multiple contributions to
American culture as a whole; how exactly does its humor work and does it do more than
amuse us?” (159). Similarly, Bakhtin claims that most modern scholarship on folk humor does not correctly conceive of its complexity—its necessary “ambivalence”—and labels it as either “purely negative satire” or “gay, fanciful, recreational drollery deprived of philosophic content” (12). Dunces stands as an exception to the rule. We are meant to enjoy our time with Ignatius and all the other dunces just as much as, and maybe more than, we are meant to stand in harsh judgment of them. The book is chock-full of terribly flawed and, simultaneously, very entertaining fools; it would be too difficult and
depressing to read otherwise. Absolutely, Dunces is satirical, but it is not merely that. Its morality, like much of its humor, is implied and must come from the reader, engaged in
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the experience of the humorous event. It does not offer an easy or clear solution to the miasma of human existence presented in the narrative, the closest it comes perhaps is
Ignatius’s escape from New Orleans. Like Voltaire in Candide and Swift in Gulliver’s
Travels and A Modest Proposal, Toole’s judgment can seem harsh in the text because the reader is not offered any breathing room, a space of sanity and morality and proportion— the point being, perhaps, that any such space would be just as much of a fiction as the exaggerated events and characters in the work. In the world of Dunces, all is incongruity, which supports the idea that Ignatius is not really much more absurd than any of the other characters, he just happens to be a different flavor of absurd. If any resolution to the
incongruity in Dunces is to be found, it must spring from the reader because Toole’s
masterpiece maintains its ambivalence to the end. There is never a clear inside and outside—all is within the play-frame—which is the key aspect of the grotesque, but usually not of Southern humor.
Which leads us, inexorably, to the final question:138 is Dunces really an example of Southern humor? The answer is a conditional “yes.” While it shares many of the key textual and thematic aspects of traditional Southern humor, its refusal to be easily categorized and subsumed into the Southern humor fold makes it unusual among the popular Southern humor of the last thirty years. Hugh Ruppersburg makes a strong case for Dunces Southern chops, arguing that Toole presents us with a, fittingly ironic, image of the urbanized agrarian mindset in Ignatius; like the Southern agrarians of I’ll Take My
Stand, Ignatius seeks a return to God, and art, and symbolic form. While their
geographies are strikingly different, the principles they lobby for are not far apart at all.
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Itself a narrowed-down version of the big question from the first chapter, “What is Southern humor, anyway?”
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In addition, as the epigraphs to the novel illustrate, Dunces, as a work and representation of Southern culture, is obsessed with classifying and reveling in its own sense of
uniqueness and specialness. While Toole doubtlessly plays with and satirizes this tendency, in doing so, at the same time he gets to generate his own catalogue of the
unique and special “thing” that is New Orleans. However, the key aspect of Dunces’
conditional Southern-ness is also the quality that makes it difficult to discuss. As Silver argues, most Southern humor only temporarily puts on the appearance of the oppressed “as a means of policing the boundaries of class and race even while experiencing the thrill of transgressing them” (189). There is an invisible line that separates Southern humor that contains nothing but weak, ready-made, and readily-forgotten incongruities (this is the majority), from the Southern humor that attempts, like Dunces, to engage in a discourse that truly puts the status quo into question. This humor creates the kind of cultural contact zone opportunities that Morris describes as equal to the work and pursuit of scholars. The problem is that it can be difficult to tell these two types of Southern humor apart. One is safe and one is risky, but they both can create laughter. One uses incongruity to prop up the power of the symbolic order, while the other “deflates” it using similar techniques. Consequently, perhaps the only way of telling the difference between
the two humors is to look for what Pearson terms139 “comic tension,” which is the
disparity “between what the world purports to be and what it actually is. […] There is the ideal of culture, and then there is the far less wholesome reality” (54). What makes matters confusing is that the Southern “ideal” does not always seem terribly wholesome
139Pearson references works by Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O’Connor, among others; too often Toole’s is left out of such discussions.
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or ideal. Nonetheless, we should be suspicious of any humor event that doesn’t end with
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