A Confederacy of Dunces
Humor, Pathos, and The New Orleans That Used to Be
John Kennedy Toole's prize-winning novel from 1980 is still fresh today. A sadly comic masterpiece, it also serves up a nostalgic look at the New Orleans that once was.
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head".
As first lines go, this one certainly does crash onto the scene. It is followed by a little more detail:
"The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once".
So starts John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces - a Pulitzer Prize winning comic masterpiece with a real-life back story that has a truly tragic finale.
Toole grew up in New Orleans, a mama's boy of sorts, sheltered and coddled, who took to writing at a early age. He graduated from Tulane University and later went on teach at Hunter College in New York. He was drafted into the Army in 1961 and spent his two-year stint in Puerto Rico teaching English to Army recruits. Returning home to New Orleans, Toole began work on Confederacy. When Simon and Schuster first considered and eventually rejected the novel, Toole gave up. He fell into a depression, losing himself to alcohol and prescription drugs. In 1969, he committed suicide by running a garden hose from the exhaust of his car in through the front window where he sat and calmly waited for the end. He died an unpublished and unrecognized author, and the world lost a genius talent.
It was, in the end, Toole's mother who came through for him. Believing in her son, and believing that A Confederacy of Dunces was truly a masterpiece, Thelma Toole rescued the hand-written manuscript and doggedly promoted it after his death. She wound up, in 1978, on the doorstep of author Walker Percy who grudgingly sat down to read the book and was immediately blown away. He nurtured it along and finally saw it published in 1980. Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, a sadly posthumous tribute to Toole's labors.
While the book is riotously comic, a laugh-out-loud funny tale, it also has tremendous depth and its hero, Ignatius J. Reilly is one of the most memorable literary figures of the twentieth century. Ignatius is larger than life, physically and metaphorically. Grossly fat, and with personal habits so deplorable they take your breath away, Ignatius manages to dominate the world around him, most particularly his mother. He buffoons his way into the most outrageous situations, and is just delusional enough to maintain sufficient momentum to move on to the next disaster. His job hunting efforts are hysterical and his stint as a hot dog vendor glorious.
Confederacy is a complex saga with real substance and depth. It is peopled with richly drawn characters, from Ignatius' bowling-obsessed mother to Myrna Minkoff, his improbable girlfriend. Even a long-absent family dog takes on a startling new life in the mind of our hero.
Playing another major character in Confederacy of Dunces is the city of New Orleans. Now itself a tragic figure, the Big Easy often mirrors Ignatius - raucous and vaguely seedy sometimes, but still bigger than life, glitzy, arrogant and endlessly alive. It is obviously the place Toole knew and loved the best and he paints it well. The undercurrent of sadness that is Toole's legacy, and that lived just beneath Ignatius Reilly's huge bulky surface, has found an added place to dwell now in the rubble of the city destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
If you are easily offended, you might want to pass on this one - but it will surely be your loss. Better you should set aside your sensibilities for a few hours and let Ignatius be your tour guide through his city and into his astonishingly dysfunctional and comic life. You may be disgusted now and then, but you'll laugh till your sides hurt.
