A Confederacy of Dunces

Words cannot adequately express how much I love A Confederacy of Dunces . I first learned of it about 20 years ago while an undergrad. A friend I had met in a creative writing course (appropriately enough) detected my appreciation for the wry and recommended it. He would try to describe portions but would always take awhile, as he couldn't stop laughing. In later years I would have the book recommended to me again and again by other wiseacres. I eventually joined the cult.

I've avoided composing an appreciation/review for some time because it's difficult to explain how wonderful I believe it truly is. It's one of those books that not only does not allow you to put it down, but also creates a welling excitement as you read. Excitement that you are watching a plot gel with inventive mischief. A mad narrative that gets better and better as it develops. Full bloom creativity, with each section topping the previous for sheer comic genius. You feel the electricity of an artist in full command of his medium. Confident writing that manages to be side-splittingly funny and heady all at once. This is a perfect example of a head-on collision of the high- and lowbrow. I wonder if the writing of it wasn't as much fun?

Authored by the late John Kennedy Toole in the early 1960s, A Confederacy of Dunces, is a rare bird that manages to be a literary classic that could be, I think, enjoyed by many who find many "classics" a chore. Not since The Catcher in the Rye (another sarcastic classic) has something so revered been so enjoyable to read. The book falls into a category of lit that some will deem insane brilliance, while others will find trivial and silly. What is undeniable is how inspired in its lunacy it is. Dunces is a big, caustic, broad, erudite, gross, eminently quotable and altogether spectacular farce detailing the daily exploits of a guy called Ignatius T. Reilly, a portly (and ever expanding) 30 year-old cretin who lumbers around New Orleans filled with loathing, considerable condescension, verbose insults, and ferocious gas.

Ignatius is an oaf, but he is likely the most educated and articulate oaf in the history of print fiction. He did have 10 years of higher education, after all. His put-downs of his mother (with whom he lives), her friends, the police, and every single other character are great "erucatations" not only of a closed pyloric valve, but also of undeniable wit and a startling command of the English language.

After each of his absurd adventures, Ignatius rushes home to fill his writing pad with epic entries of his musings on the ills of society, the lack of perspective of his contemporaries, and his plans for shaping the opinions of others to mirror his own. His verbal attempts of the latter don't fare so well, as he is met with scratched heads and/or illiterate retorts. It is such a cross to bear, being the only Enlightened One among droves of mediocrity.

Ignatius is especially disgusted with his being born in the 20th century, a time period he finds quite offensive. He in turn clutches the philosophy of Boethius, a 6th century Roman best known for Consulation of Philosophy (the structure of which Confederacy mimics), a pre-Thomas Aquinas tome of Middle Ages classicism.

As Ignatius recommends to another character.....

"....you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,....Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books."

Despite his disdain for modern conveniences and pop culture, he indulges in them quite liberally. These vulgarities have their place, things for him to mock with rich superiority. Frequenting the local cinema for the latest Hollywood aberration, as an example, it may be said that the very things Ignatius spits upon serve to give him purpose.

Social Note: I have sought escape in the Prytania on more than one occasion, pulled by the attractions of some technicolored horrors, filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency, reels and reels of perversion and blasphemy that stunned my disbelieving eyes, the shocked my virginal mind, and sealed my valve

His windmill tilting (and cutlass wielding) would be in vain if not for the burgeois and frequently gaudy world around him. Adversaries abound, from corporate heads to hot dog cart entreprenueurs.

His world is the year-round carnival known as New Orleans. If you've ever meandered around the French Quarter, Chartres Street and therabouts, you know the scene. Every imaginable character parades by, day or night. A real cultural stew, to boot. Illicit activity is not hard to find. Even in the early 60s. Like his protagonist, Toole grew up in and attended school in this mysterious city. He creates a vivid evocation of local color, so lush and ripe, and this sentiment is echoed by many longtime NO residents, past and present. Ignatius' character has even been immortalized with a statue in the Quarter. I visited the city only once, in the late 90s, but its imagery stayed with me, even as seen through gin soaked memories. I seemed to note a strong prescence of the black arts while there, and curiously this is one area Toole does not explore very thoroughly in his novel.

Ignatius is no reveller, not prone to participate in the debauchery about him, but rather he sees himself as a crusader. When the patently unemployable man is forced to seek employment after his mother causes some damage with her vehicle, he seizes the opportunities not to be an efficent company player, but rather an instrument of activism. At Levy Pants, he attempts to rally the minority factory workers to revolt, with hilarious complications and results. For all of Ignatius' haughty airs, he still seems to give a whit about the oppressed, including a black vagrant named Jones who is exploited at the Night of Joy bar by its owner, a steely woman named Lana. How Ignatius eventually engineers social change for every single character (mostly by accident) in the grand finale is ingenious.

There are many characters in Confederacy,, all well drawn and hysterical. There's Sgt. Mancuso, a beat cop reduced to wearing a series of humiliating disguises by his chief until the former actually makes an arrest. There's also Damian, an outrageous local frimping queen who Ignatius enlists to throw a party in the name of political uprising (though the guests would rather just dance and be merry and um, gay).

Toole also includes trio of rowdy lesbians, a very confused co-worker of Ignatius' named Miss Trixie, a waitress who is trying to get Lana to allow her to do her bizarre stage act with a cockatoo, Gus Levy, the harried CEO of Levy Pants, and Myrna Minkoff, Ignatius' former college chum (and sort of girlfriend) who engages in a series of one-uppsmanship written correspondences with him throughout the novel. Myrna is a prototypical beatnik constantly organizing meetings and rallies against the Establishment. She believes, much to the dismay of our protagonist, that sex is the cure for many ills, too. This quite interestingly prefaces the real-life 70s tomes of Erica Jong and others of her mindset. There has been some criticism of the way Toole portrays Myrna, the one female character who seems empowered with social awareness. Critics state that much like the other women in this tale, she is drawn as a buffoon. I disagree; her character sketch allows room for as much self-importance as is afforded everyone else. Check the book's title if you have questions.

Toole also quite adeptly writes in misspelled dialect for certain characters, much like Twain did. Latter day readers might find this wildly un-PC novel filled with offensive caricatures, but its quite evident what Toole is up to. A consideration of the time period: the end of segregation, the rise of Civil Rights, growing political unrest, explains the point-of-view, a savage response to status quo America. Yet, before anything gets too sanctimonious, Ignatius, our certifiably unlikeable, boorish "hero" is viewed as the obnoxious ass that he is, despite his piety. Perhaps Toole is turning the firehose on himself, as well. Perhaps the best example of what Toole is lampooning comes in the form of Dr. Talc, Ignatius' and Myrna's former college professor, seen as a pretentious fraud.

This novel is a great treasure trove of comic gold, but as Southern author extraordinaire Walker Pearcy says in his forward for Dunces, a tragic pall hangs over it. When we reach the final scenes, the manic comedy continues but a sense of bittersweetness adds a most unexpected poignancy as well. Knowing that the author committed suicide at the age of 32 also infuses the reading of A Confederacy of Dunces with an unavoidable twinge of sadness. Every page is stained with tragedy, despite the highly comedic scenarios. The authord never saw his work become published. Knowing that NO would be wrecked by Hurricane Katrina over 40 years later also adds a quaintness to the proceedings. And another, perhaps unexplainable layer of sadness.

Toole's mother had later found the smeared manuscript for Dunces in a drawer and spent the 1970s trying to get it read and published. Pearcy finally relented to the mother's requests for a reading and in 1980, this insane masterpiece was finally unleashed. A year later, it would win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Another novel, The Neon Bible, penned when Toole was 16, remains unread by me but not for too much longer. I can only imagine what other amusing works we could have seen had Toole stuck around.

Subsequently, several filmmakers (from Harold Ramis to Stephen Soderbergh)have attempted to bring A Confederacy of Dunces to the big screen. None have succeeded thus far (there was a live stage reading with Will Ferrell as Ignatius a few years back). There are theories that the project is cursed. Maybe so, as I feel this book almost adapts itself. It's so vivid in its charcterizations and scenarios, a more cinematic book I don't recall ever reading.....