A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
(written in the 1960’s, published in 1980, 11 years after Toole’s suicide)
This book is a broad, rip-roaring farce but it also deals with serious issues of alienation and coping as an outsider. The author took his own life after years of trying to get published with no luck. It was his mother who finally got someone to read the work and realize its genius.
Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of A Confederacy of Dunces, is a morbidly obese, over-educated, indignant misfit who hides his insecurities behind his intellectualism. He is a spoiled, peevish agoraphobic slob who, at age 30, lives with his mother in New Orleans and blames everyone else for all of his problems. He is hostile, gluttonous, scholarly, prudish, delusional, brazen, libidinous, visionary and completely hilarious. Ignatius J. Reilly is my homeboy.
A Confederacy of Dunces was first published in 1980, when I was in high school, but I honestly don’t remember who gave it to me or how I came to read it. It certainly wasn’t required in school and I didn’t take any English classes in college. I remember identifying with Ignatius, with his high-falooting put-downs, his crazy indictments of “modern society”, his harkening back to some golden age of humanity. My adolescence in New York City was pretty rocky, and the comfort of someone with more outlandish problems than my own was welcome.
This book is a broad, rip-roaring farce but it also deals with serious issues of alienation and coping as an outsider. The author took his own life after years of trying to get published with no luck. It was his mother who finally got someone to read the work and realize its genius.
Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of A Confederacy of Dunces, is a morbidly obese, over-educated, indignant misfit who hides his insecurities behind his intellectualism. He is a spoiled, peevish agoraphobic slob who, at age 30, lives with his mother in New Orleans and blames everyone else for all of his problems. He is hostile, gluttonous, scholarly, prudish, delusional, brazen, libidinous, visionary and completely hilarious. Ignatius J. Reilly is my homeboy.
A Confederacy of Dunces was first published in 1980, when I was in high school, but I honestly don’t remember who gave it to me or how I came to read it. It certainly wasn’t required in school and I didn’t take any English classes in college. I remember identifying with Ignatius, with his high-falooting put-downs, his crazy indictments of “modern society”, his harkening back to some golden age of humanity. My adolescence in New York City was pretty rocky, and the comfort of someone with more outlandish problems than my own was welcome.
There is much to love about this novel. It's the story of the spoiled and socially retarded Ignatius and his dysfunctional relationship with his mother, his colleagues and his community, the city of New Orleans, which is a palpable character throughout. Bourbon Street, the Charles River, the bars and stores and streetcars named Desire. Wrought-iron balconies, jazz tunes and steamy decay prevail. The people who live there are a cast of characters indeed: the earnest itinerant, the hard-up cop, the sleazeball barkeep, the miserable neurotic business owners, the useless professor, the cranky old romancer - the list of oddballs is long and they all make up Toole's confederacy of dunces.
Ignatius’s Bible is early medieval philosopher Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, a work which plays a significant role in the unfolding of Confederacy’s plot. Fortuna and her Wheel of Fortune are regularly invoked to take the blame for various twists and turns of fate, or just as often, for the consequences of Ignatius’s deliberate decisions. Ignatius does a lot of blaming, often in very colorful language too. His particular brand of emotional immaturity is a classic: blame someone or something else for every shortcoming, inconvenience or misfortune encountered, including those for which one is personally responsible. His Goddess, Fortuna, allows him to do this with impunity.
Boethius's Consolation is a dialogue between himself and Fortuna which argues that hardship must be endured with philosophical detachment. This is the furthest from how Ignatius reacts to life. Ignatius's pyloric valve, a character in its own right, reacts violently to any stress in his life, dramatically opening and slamming shut in response. Ignatius too, reacts violently to any diversion from his expected plan of non-stop self-indulgence.
Another appealing aspect of Ignatius is his absurdly positive body image. This is a morbidly obese man whose digestion has been utterly ruined by near-constant indulgence in junk food and soda. Nonetheless he refers to his body as "muscular" and "imposing". This may be in part due to a southern tolerance for fat, as several other characters are favorably impressed with his girth. He considers himself to be a likely target of sexual predation by both females and males. While many of the illustrations of Ignatius make him look rather like a bumbling Oliver Hardy, I imagine him more as a portly Oliver Reed, brooding, brilliant, dishevelled and disoriented in everyday reality.
Boethius's Consolation is a dialogue between himself and Fortuna which argues that hardship must be endured with philosophical detachment. This is the furthest from how Ignatius reacts to life. Ignatius's pyloric valve, a character in its own right, reacts violently to any stress in his life, dramatically opening and slamming shut in response. Ignatius too, reacts violently to any diversion from his expected plan of non-stop self-indulgence.
There are a lot of sexual themes in the book, mostly treated in a grotesque or absurdist context. Ignatius is a horny but prudish virgin who has run-ins with the gay scene, a pornography ring, and a "sexually liberated" New York gal who shows him her undercarriage. He has strange fantasies. A lady in my book club thought he had been sexually molested by Professor Talc, due to a comment about "underdeveloped testicles", but that may have just been Ignatius's hallmark, outrageous hyperbole.
The range of characters in this novel is impressive. There's Jones, a young itinerant black dude who is trying to avoid "vagrancy", and who knows he is being exploited by his boss. There is the working class coterie of Ignatius's Mom, Santa, the mom's commie-focused suitor, and the chronically masqueraded cop Mancuso. There are the sleazy denizens and proprietors of the "Night of Bliss" bar. There is a misguided teen, a tow-the-line shopkeeper, a senile secretary, a militant feminist New Yorker, an ineffectual and phony professor, and many more. An entire essay could be written about any of these characters, they are so rich and and contextually provocative.
My book club read this recently and the only thing everyone agreed on was that the the Levys were believable. The Levys are a not atypical, quite dysfunctional bourgeois family that owns a failing and obsolescent pants factory where Ignatius "works". All of us found the members of this family to be very believable, probably because we are familiar with upper-middle-class suburban families and lifestyles. The husband has inherited a business he hates, from a father he resents. The wife is a carping, misguided and utterly ineffectual would-be progressive whose furious and far-fetched calls for social justice might be reminiscent of some Marin "actions for peace" such as taking mass photographs of naked women in trees, etc.
The range of characters in this novel is impressive. There's Jones, a young itinerant black dude who is trying to avoid "vagrancy", and who knows he is being exploited by his boss. There is the working class coterie of Ignatius's Mom, Santa, the mom's commie-focused suitor, and the chronically masqueraded cop Mancuso. There are the sleazy denizens and proprietors of the "Night of Bliss" bar. There is a misguided teen, a tow-the-line shopkeeper, a senile secretary, a militant feminist New Yorker, an ineffectual and phony professor, and many more. An entire essay could be written about any of these characters, they are so rich and and contextually provocative.
My book club read this recently and the only thing everyone agreed on was that the the Levys were believable. The Levys are a not atypical, quite dysfunctional bourgeois family that owns a failing and obsolescent pants factory where Ignatius "works". All of us found the members of this family to be very believable, probably because we are familiar with upper-middle-class suburban families and lifestyles. The husband has inherited a business he hates, from a father he resents. The wife is a carping, misguided and utterly ineffectual would-be progressive whose furious and far-fetched calls for social justice might be reminiscent of some Marin "actions for peace" such as taking mass photographs of naked women in trees, etc.
Some have written that A Confederacy of Dunces couldn't have been published during Toole's lifetime because it is too politically incorrect. It contains controversial portrayals of blacks, Jews and gays and this is considered political plutonium in the New York publishing community. The fact that Toole's own people, working class Irish Catholics (as well as intellectuals and every other character in the book) are shown with all their foolish foibles, should erase any claim of prejudice or bigotry. If anything, this work is very much along the lines of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, in which humanity is likewise seen in all its ridiculous, frenzied striving.
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