A Confederacy of Dunces Index

John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole
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Ignatious J. Reilly is the hero of this tragic-comical novel. Some hero. Ignatious is truly pathetic, arrogant and pretentious.  He regards and treats everyone and everything with haughty contempt. Whatever he does not outright disdain, he finds room for plenty of criticism (humorous at that).  A Confederacy of DuncesHe sees himself as the "Don Quixote of the French Quarter." He still lives with his mother, spends his time writing his magnum opus and only finds a job after a series of events. First, at the Levy Pants Company where he eventually gets himself fired through his own folly and then, as a Paradise Hot Dog Vendor which turns out to be equally disastrous. Ignatious has a logic all his own. 

A Confederacy of Dunces bursts with original characters as it romps about New Orleans lower depths with zany scene after scene of high and low comic adventures. This is one of my top ten recommended must reads of all times.

A Confederacy of Dunces

Pulitzer Prize

Synopsis

A monument of sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern - this is Ignatius J Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. In magnificent revolt against the twentieth century, Ignatius propels his monstrous bulk among the flesh posts of the fallen city, documenting life on his Big Chief tablets as he goes, until his maroon-haired mother decrees that Ignatius must work.

First lines

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full oflarge ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselved, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow yes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H.Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

What we thought

A succession of comic adventures take Ignatius through New Orleans and the sum of this book is less than its parts. The characters are brilliantly drawn but poorly developed, changing not at all, as they travel through the streets of New Orleans and through the book. Undoubtedly funny, the book lacks the plot to pull you along but remains memorable because of its superb language and the images of this city and its people that are conjured up. Eliane

What other people thought

A masterwork of comedy ... A dozen characters bounce off each other, physically and verbally, through a plot of such disarming inventiveness that it seems to generate itself effortlessly ... A pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities ... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.
The New York Times

Witty, exuberant and addictive, a mocking eulogy of life in New Orleans by a modern Rabelais.
The Times

If a book's price is measured against the laughs it provokes, A Confederacy of Dunces is the bargain of the year.
Time

The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredible true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures." --
Henry Kisor in the Chicago Sun-Times

The best books are not always the ones being published at the moment. Periodically, the Review pages will look back at books that we read long ago but never forgot.
 
 It's one of those publishing legends. American novelist Walker Percy was teaching at Loyola University in 1976 when he began getting persistent phone calls from a woman who wanted him to look at a manuscript written by her son, who had killed himself because he couldn't get it published.
 Percy tried but was unable to put her off and she finally showed up in his office with a "badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon" he had no choice but to begin reading. Hoping it would be bad enough to give up after several paragraphs, he read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good."
 The novel was A Confederacy of Dunces, the author the late John Kennedy Toole. Toole had finished the manuscript while serving in the army in Puerto Rico, and submitted it to Simon & Schuster in 1963. He spent another two years revising it, while growing more despondent about it ever getting into print. He disappeared in January 1969, and was found on March 26 of the same year, dead in his car outside Biloxi, Mississippi. He was only 31.
 Percy was able to get Confederacy published by Louisiana State University Press in 1980. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and has been translated into more than 10 languages. Steven Soderbergh reportedly has a movie version in development (it could be wonderful or disastrous; only time will tell).
 Confederacy fans have a cult-like devotion to the book that sometimes scares the uninitiated, but once you read it, you will understand. It came to me through an aunt who discovered it at McMaster University and got the whole family hooked. I have a friend who heard about it while working as a taxi driver; one of his colleagues ("while clutching it reverently to his chest," says Don) refused to lend it to him but insisted he had to read it. (I don't lend it anymore either, because I never get it back.)
 I have reread Confederacy many times over a 12-year period, and the main thing that stands out is how little it has dated. Even though it's full of references to movies and songs of the early sixties and time-specific events like the civil rights movement, it doesn't feel like a period piece. It is also gut-wrenchingly funny -- there are certain passages that never fail to leave me breathless and teary-eyed from laughter, no matter how many times I've read them before.
 The rather unwieldy title is taken from a quote by Jonathan Swift, which opens the novel: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Confederacy is a satire in the caustic Swiftian tradition; possibly one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and certainly the best comic novel ever written by an American.
 Confederacy is set in Toole's native city of New Orleans and revolves around one Ignatius J. Reilly, a character Percy describes as "without progenitor in any literature I know of -- slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." A morbidly obese 30-year-old with an M.A. in Medieval Studies, Ignatius is unemployed and lives with his widowed mother, whom he treats abominably. He has a love-hate relationship with the 20th century, spending his days watching junk TV and going to movies, obsessing about his overtaxed digestive system and writing florid denunciations of modern culture: "Were Hroswitha with us today, we would all look to her for counsel and guidance. From the austerity and tranquility of her medieval world, the penetrating gaze of this legendary Sybil of a medieval nun would exorcise the horrors which materialize before our eyes in the name of television."
 Ignatius also carries on a long-distance relationship with Myrna Minkoff, an obsessively Freudian social activist from the Bronx he met at Tulane University. "Myrna was decidedly masochistic. She was only happy when a police dog was sinking its fangs into her black leotards or when she was being dragged feet-first down the steps from a Senate hearing."
 A drunk-driving charge and fine puts Mrs. Reilly in the unenviable position of convincing her indolent son to get a job to help pay it off. Ignatius, protesting loudly all the while, does find work of sorts; first as a file clerk at Levy Pants, a disreputable garment factory, then as a hot-dog vendor in the French Quarter. He also becomes the epicentre of an increasingly bizarre chain of events that blunders to a surprisingly just conclusion for all concerned.
 I know this sounds insane, but though it be madness, there's method in it. There are people who might find Ignatius too grotesque and misanthropic to be sympathetic, but discerning readers should see the core of truth in his rantings against the modern world. Ignatius' rationale to his mother for staying unemployed has a seductive logic to it: "Employers sense in me a denial of their values. They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe. That was true even when I worked for the New Orleans public library."
 "All you did was paste them little slips in the books. "
 "Yes, but I had my own esthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste three or four and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing. They only wanted another animal who could slop glue on their bestsellers."
 His mother, nearing the end of her patience, suggests at one point Ignatius try a "rest" at a public hospital psych ward, over strenuous objections: "Do you suppose that some stupid psychiatrist could even attempt to fathom the workings of my psyche? They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be a robot!"
 What really propels A Confederacy of Dunces, though, are Toole's strong characterizations. Working-class Italians, members of the French Quarter's thriving gay subculture, bumbling rookie cops, black factory workers, wannabe strippers, Toole captures them all perfectly.
 In the end though, I can only echo Walker Percy's lament: "It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."

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