Revisiting A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

By John Kennedy Toole

Grove Press, 405 pages.

★★★★

From time to time I like to re-read favored books from my youth to see how well they hold up. Recently I decided to give A Confederacy of Dunces another whirl. After all, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. Here’s some irony to consider. The book was written in 1963, could not find a publisher, and its author John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide in 1969, allegedly feeling misunderstood and rejected. The book’s posthumous award notwithstanding, A Confederacy of Dunces probably would not find a publisher today, as it is one of the most politically incorrect novels of the past hundred years.

The book takes its title from a Jonathan Swift epigram: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” The open question is whether Toole’s protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly is that genius, or whether we are supposed to believe that Toole is the genius and Ignatius is among the dunces. He is certainly one of the more unique main characters you’ll ever encounter.

If you crossed a street bum with Oliver Hardy, Don Quixote, Falstaff, and Boethius, you’d still be a few weirdnesses short of Ignatius. He fancies himself an erudite man on all subjects and has contempt for the masses, whom he sees as destroyers of good taste, morality, and ancient wisdom. He is also a compulsive eater who is grossly obese and whose pyloric valve opens and closes when he is annoyed, which is pretty much all the time. I won’t make you run to your medical dictionary; a malfunctioning pyloric valve means Ignatius belches like a junkyard muffler and farts like a church bean supper. Food nests in his unkempt mustache, crumbs hang from his clothing, and he seldom ventures out without stuffing himself into a parka, donning a green hunting cap with the flaps pulled down, and a heavy scarf wrapped around his neck. Did I mention that the novel is set in New Orleans?

Ignatius has fewer social graces than a rutting hog, but he does have a big vocabulary and such an unusual way of expressing himself that others often assume he’s well educated. Not that it would take much; A Confederacy of Dunces isn’t populated by the brightest bulbs in the socket. Ignatius lives with his widowed mother, Irene, who still hopes her “boy”–he’s 30–will fulfill his potential. She also has a small drinking problem, which might explain why she thinks Ignatius has potential. He is, to put it mildly, vocationally challenged, as we see in hilarious stints as an office manager at a pants factory and an inventory control and motivationally challenged hotdog vendor.

Toole’s novel is a hoot that’s comedic in ways inspired by slapstick, farce, and bawdy medieval tales. But let’s cut to why this book would disturb those of delicate sensibilities. Among the other characters are a jive-talking black man, Burma Jones, who is street smart but not any other kind, and whose speech Toole writes in exaggerated dialect. There is also Ignatius’ pen pal and sparring partner, Myrna Minkoff, a Jewish beatnik and sexual libertine whom he met in his brief time at LSU and whom he berates as a “whore;” a pair of swishy gay men and several aggressive lesbians; Lana Lee, who purveys porn from her sleazy bar; Darlene, a would-be exotic dancer trying to teach her cockatoo to rip her dress off; Trixie, the dementia-suffering “project” of a factory owner’s wife; the widower Claude who rants about the “communiss;” and patrolman Mancuso, whose captain punishes him by making him wear ridiculous getups and look for perps in places such as bus station bathrooms.

So how did A Confederacy of Dunces hold up for me? I found it even funnier now than when I first read it sometime around 1982. It is safe to say that there simply aren’t many novels that can rival it for surrealism and absurdity. However, I’d advise anyone thinking of teaching it not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Not unless you want to face a pitchfork brigade made up of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, fat rights activists, LGBTQ warriors, and maybe even sex workers and weenie stand promoters! I would argue–though I would get nowhere–that it’s a great book for the Age of Trump in that Ignatius’ world contains more phonies and bloviatrs than geniuses. The safer route, though, would be to buy a used copy, cover it with a cut-up shopping bag, and howl in the privacy of your own home.

Rob Weir

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