On A Confederacy of Dunces
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - december 11 ]
I love New Orleans, the cloaca of North America, where French-speaking Canadians feel no more at home than if they were in Toronto. To find French speakers in Louisiana, we had to drive out to Thibodeaux in St James Parish, where our three-year-old Charles Pascal got up on a dinner table so he could be seen and heard by all the old Cajuns in the restaurant. Then we happened to meet Beverly Trajan and her friend Jean Edwards at a flea market, and seeing our plight, they treated us to an evening at the Maple Leaf Bar on the Tulane campus, a rowdy dance hall with two Zydeco bands alternating, the music as crude as the Cajun cooking. We might well have been in Sénégal.
When I go to New Orleans, I stay at the Corn Stalk Fence Hotel, where I reserve a room in the old slave quarters there in the Vieux Carrée. Lunch at Galatoire’s, supper a po’boy sandwich in St Louis Square, breakfast at the French Market, that’s what it’s all about. And people watching, locals and tourists. I hereby affirm that reading A Confederacy of Dunces is the equivalent of a visit to the French Quarter. And cheaper.
“Too much dialogue here, not enough action there” was Walker Percy’s first reaction to the novel. The accurate presentation of the peculiar speech of this story is its best feature, and like all great stories it starts in the middle of things and ends in the middle of things, arriving nowhere because it goes nowhere.
Thelma Toole knew in her bones that the book is good. Walker Percy, the literary and religious guru, had been asked by the dead author’s mother to read and appreciate the book left by the young suicide, John Kennedy Toole.
At the end of the story the protagonist of A Confederacy does not wind up on the funny farm, but he might as well end up in a nuthouse wherever he is headed, no matter where he goes, to Baton Rouge or to Morningside Heights. The human situation is no different in Louisiana, New York, or an asylum: everything is a mystery. We are puzzled, and then bored, by life’s confusions and tragedies. Life presents questions with no answers, and problems with no solutions. The experts hide behind only those few questions they can answer and the few problems they claim to solve. Has anyone not died finally lately in misery and despair?
A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) is an ugly book that is not about anything, and paradoxically it is about everything that people considered (fifty years ago) to be Politically Correct and still consider hot topics. It is grotesque, full of indignation and rage. You either love it or hate it. I hated it, yet I felt compelled to keep on reading about those pitifully stupid people. I do not like the novel, but I like to talk about it, for it appeared a generation after it should have, after the Sixties, the time period where it belongs in American culture. It is set in 1963, and should have been published then around 1966 along with other indispensable works that happened the last time America was awake - Catch-22, Cat’s Cradle, Cuckoo’s Nest, Dr Strangelove, Apocalypse Now, To Kill a Mockingbird, Silent Spring, Woodstock, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and so on.
J K Toole killed himself in 1969, one supposes in despair at finding a publisher. His mother persuaded Walker Percy to find someone to put it out, convinced that the book is work of genius.
>This novel by John Kennedy Toole (who he? you ask) would obviously make a hilarious comedy if you took out the repetitions of situation and character and reduced it to a shooting script, keeping in mind the only apparently sane character is a Negro afraid of getting arrested for vagrancy.
>Parts of the book have been acted on stage, and plans were afoot to make a movie of it, but Katrina the Hurricane got in the way.
A Confederacy is painful to read, and then after a while it becomes a compulsion to go on and read and find out if anything happens in this muddy story. The novel is tedious, repetitious, and unpleasant, a slog through unsympathetic characters doing little and amounting to nothing, like Krapp’s Last Tape, and then by the end, the reader doesn’t give a damn about the characters and what happens to them, yet on reflection, and only then, is it funny as hell, just like real life. If life were not funny there would be no need of religion, canned spaghetti in tomato sauce, the hotdogs Ignatius eats instead of selling, or the customers at Lana Lee’s Night of Joy strip club, “who looked like the type of vague, drawn old men who molested children at matinees.”
The book presents an absurdist view of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1963, holding up to ridicule the grotesque and typical folks who lived there. It lambastes several topical trends of the Sixties, although you won’t know until the end that the point of the novel is for the reader to realize and understand the insignificance of everything that people thought was important then and there.
The author catches and preserves the vernacular speech, the creole of working class folks who lived in Uptown New Orleans, in the “Irish Channel” and nearby, a vernacular called Yat, after the greeting, “Where ya at, Hon?
Irish, German, Yiddish, and Creole French and Spanish speakers got along with a little help from their friends and enemies, using a make-do language invented on the spot, as is all speech. In this case the speech has all the fine edges knocked off, including the jive talk of Burma Jones, Miss Lana Lee’s low-paid flunky at the strip club, the Night of Joy.
The one Negro, in the good old Plessy-vs-Ferguson days, Burma Jones, gets shoved into his role as vagrant and comically wise janitor, Whooee! Yassuh. His speech is accurately and lovingly presented always through a cloud of mentholated cigarette smoke, for example, hired as porter for twenty dollars a week, he says, “ The las person working in here musta starve to death... Don worry. I come in regular, anything keep my ass away from a po-lice for a few hour... Where you keep them motherfuckin broom?”
Igatius Reilly, MA, is writing his magnum opus, in bed, in pencil, on Big Chief Writing Tablets. His thesis is, in brief, “with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy.” He mourns the loss of philosophy and geometry in the modern world. He’s nuts, perhaps because, as his mother explains, “I spent all his Grammaw Reilly’s insurance money to keep him in college for eight years, and since then all he’s done is lay around the house watching television.” The educational equivalent of a sub-prime mortgage had soaked Irene Reilly.
Ignatius Reilly is funny, not because he is a solipsistic slob like The Dude, Jeffrey Lebowski, but because he is a lazy hypocrite. He is uncool. He finds fault with everything in the modern world. That’s what he learned in college, to find fault. He and Myra Minkoff, a fellow student, loved to find fault and torture their teachers. Consequently, Ignatius has become a Grand Inquisitor denouncing the world around him, and she is a hippy living on sexual fantasy and folk music.
Ignatius is a Doctor Doctorum, a philosopher of a Jewish sect (Catholicism), stuck in the Sixth Century with Boethius and his Consolations of Philosophy. His joy is watching movies and feeling superior to the fools on the screen.
Ignatius Reilly is a slob and a snob, a fat mama’s boy with too much book learning who gets his kicks bitching about the vulgarity of the world around him, especially the movies to which he is addicted. He sneaks off to the show at every opportunity since he does little work, and that only because his drunken mother crashes her old Plymouth into a building in the French Quarter and has to raise money to pay for the damage.
In the last scene of the book, Ignatius’ friend Myra Minkoff rescues him from the men in white coats with her Renault automobile. Igatius folds himself into the back of the tiny French imported auto because he is too big to sit in the front passenger seat. At that point in the story I was so happy to be finished reading that tedious novel that I cheered as I recalled a Renault Dauphine, a pitifully underpowered and fragile, tiny car, driven by Ted Karras, a very large, robust colleague of mine at Romeo* Michigan High School in 1958. Ted went on to play football as defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears, helping them win the National Football League title in 1963. He is the older brother of Alex Karras, football player, movie actor, and author, a huge man with a big personality, remembered, among many others he has played, for his role as “Mongo” in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” the giant riding an ox, who says, “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”
*Romeo: in 1838, the village was named by Laura Taylor, who said the name was “musical, classical, and uncommon.” She also suggested to Abe Lincoln that he grow a beard.
One day after school, Ted Karras ran to the parking lot to drive to an appointment, jumped into his Renault and crashed through the floorboards onto the ground. Named one of the fifty worst cars of all time by TIME, “It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting.” That could be a scene in A Confederacy of Dunces, the title from Dean Jonathan Swift: “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 novel describes and portrays ignorant old people in their moral decrepitude and avarice. Irene is to marry old Claude Robichaux because he has a railroad pension and owns rental property, as arranged by the aged Santa Battaglia, the worthless Officer Angelo Mancuso’s aunt. Claude suspects that “Communiss” are infiltrating society.
Jewish radicals from New York are typified in the person of sex-therapy-obsessed Myra Minkoff, who would gladly Occupy Wall Street any day. She went to college with Ignatius in Louisiana, yet Ignatius and Myra hate everything the other stands for, and they are the best of friends, both equally daft.
Irene Reilly is the long-suffering, alcoholic mother who puts up with Ignatius’ (the Slob’s) constant, petulant demands.
The bourgeois Mr and Mrs Gus Levy are totally unaware of the concerns of working people in their factory, Levy Pants, except for Mrs Levy’s charity towards the ancient and doddering Miss Trixie, their oldest employee. Mrs Levy is a shrew that hates her husband.
In the course of the inaction, several hot topics of 1963 that remain hot topics today are presented as concerns of various characters through situations concerning the supercilious effect of special knowledge affording false feelings of superiority, the inhuman, greedy nature of business and commerce, law enforcement’s failure to catch the real crooks, higher education and its useless, vacuous results, gay rights: pansies and butch lesbians’ demands for social recognition, and psychology replacing theology as our favorite refuge-and-strength bullshit.
John Belushi would have made a good Ignatius Reilly, and Amy Winehouse a good Myra Minkoff, his girlfriend, but they both overdosed.
