The Sin of Wit

In the Winter 2023 issue of this publication, I addressed briefly the impact of Don Quixote on the author of A Confederacy of Dunces. In that essay, I referred to the latter novel as “a miracle of art, conceived and constructed by genius but founded on scholarship that is still largely unrecognized.” We know as a fact that, during the academic year 1958–59, John Kennedy Toole took a graduate seminar at Columbia University on Augustan satirists. But while the titular and epigraphic connection to Swift is easily acknowledged, little has been said about what else Toole might have learned from him. In this essay, then, I want to explore and comment on Swift’s impact on Toole, for the purpose of advancing Toole’s reputation as a learned author and correcting some convenient misunderstandings. This effort will require some stamina on the reader’s part, and some interest in the finer points of scholarship.