by John Kennedy Toole, Jr.
"When a true
genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are
all in confederacy against him."
–Jonathan Swift
Ignatius J. Reilly recognized himself as one of the great
minds of modern time. A man so far above
the trivial pursuits of humanity that he consumed countless notepads with his philosophies
of life and morality, while reposing on his unmade bed in his filthy room;
suffering the complaints and criticisms of his alcoholic mother. To Ignatius, the material world was a place
of small minds, perversion, and bad fortune; just thinking about it sent his
pyloric valve into a spasm which only a junk-food binge could relieve. As a result, Ignatius J. Reilly was a massive
human specimen whose wardrobe choices served to make him as repulsive to the
world as the world was to him. When
forced by circumstances beyond his control to leave the predictable solitude of
his bedroom and get a job, Ignatius used his own brand of genius to right the
wrongs in the world. Never has a tail
wagged a dog so hard.
As literary figures go, Ignatius J. Reilly has no peer. Walker Percy, the southern author who saved A
Confederacy of Dunces from obscurity, attempted to describe him as “a mad
Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into
one”. As close as that comes, it still
misses what is so essential to Ignatius, namely his extreme cognitive
dissonance. Ignatius considers himself
to be worldly and sophisticated and yet has only ventured out of New Orleans,
Louisiana, on a single occasion, with traumatic results. He disdains movies, but cannot stay away from
theatres out of a need to aggravate other movie-goers with his loud criticisms. Ignatius moves about the world as if he were
an oblivious, crusading king, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in his
wake, rather than a senile knight bent on slaying dragons. He is completely irresistible.
As a scholarship student at Tulane University in New Orleans,
Ignatius had distinguished himself by terrorizing one of his professors for
being a fraud. His co-terrorist, and
only friend, is a young woman from New York, named Myrna Minkoff, who lives to
rebel against the status quo. The two carry
on an impassioned and co-dependent competition through the mail about who is
the most intellectually honest and radically socialist. Myrna is the only one who truly appreciates
and understands Ignatius but she makes him work very hard before she lets him
know this.
Meanwhile, on Bourbon Street the proprietress of a sleazy strip club is up to no good and the smartest character in the book, Burma Jones – an uneducated black man who has been wrongly arrested for stealing cashews, which he hates, and then ordered to get a job or face arrest for vagrancy – decides to investigate with slapstick results. Jones has his reasons for wanting to cause trouble which he shares in his many hilarious monologues about the abuses suffered by Black Americans under the Jim Crow laws in Louisiana. With the unclouded vision of a child, the instincts of a spy, and the freedom of someone with nothing left to lose, Jones sees the dunces for what they are, even the ones with the power to put him in jail.
A Confederacy of Dunces is set in New Orleans during
the early 1960s, a time when Communism was a growing international threat and
racial unrest was beginning to boil under the surface of segregation in the
south. It is a work of comic genius and
social satire which, like Ignatius J. Reilly’s treatise, was written by a young
man who was not at home in the world. John
Kennedy Toole, Jr., was a precocious and talented child whose mother, Thelma,
promoted constantly, some might even say shamelessly. He was intellectually gifted and became
known for his wit and comic timing which served him well as a college English
professor and socialite. For all of his
popularity, however, John Kennedy Toole, Jr., was a deeply disturbed and
alienated individual.
It is quite possible that Toole struggled with his gender orientation because he reportedly never did more than kiss the few girlfriends he had in his lifetime. While stationed in Puerto Rico during his military service Toole found himself in a barracks with an openly gay contingent and this led to ambivalent behavior on his part which created a rift between him and his fellow soldiers. It was during this time that he began writing A Confederacy of Dunces and exhibiting the early signs of mental illness. As he got deeper into the novel, Toole’s behavior changed in a way that suggested he increasingly identified with the self-aggrandizing, obnoxious, unrecognized genius of his own creation.
The Army discharged Toole after two years because his
parents were struggling financially due to his father’s deafness and similarly deteriorating
mental health. He moved back to his
parents’ house and took a part-time teaching position at nearby Dominican
College while he continued to work on his novel. Toole enjoyed the New Orleans party and music
scenes but fell into a deep depression when President Kennedy was assassinated
in 1963. After a few months, Toole rebounded
somewhat and completed his novel. He
then sent it to Simon & Schuster in New York where it entered editorial
limbo. Robert Gottleib, the editor
assigned to Toole’s manuscript, liked many things about the book, but kept
asking for revisions which Toole was not able to make. Eventually, Toole asked for his manuscript
back and placed it on top of the armoire in his bedroom where it stayed until
his mother convinced him to give it to newspaper publisher, Hodding Carter,
Jr., who gave it a quick read and handed it back.
This humiliating rejection took a tremendous toll on Toole who
then entered a phase of mental and physical deterioration. He drank heavily, gained a huge amount of
weight, and exhibited symptoms of paranoia.
In an effort to lift himself up, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at
Tulane University, but the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
King, Jr., sent him spiraling back down into mental illness. By the end of 1968, Dominican College had put
Toole on a leave of absence because of his increasingly erratic behavior. His once doting mother became enraged over
the loss of this teaching job and Toole abruptly left home.
An investigation following Toole’s death several weeks later
revealed that he had driven to California to see William Randolph Hearst’s
mansion, and then to Milledgeville, Georgia, where it is assumed he made a
pilgrimage to the home of his favorite writer, Flannery O’Connor. His final stop was Biloxi, Mississippi, where,
for unknown reasons, he taped one end of a garden hose to the tailpipe of his
car in order to funnel the carbon monoxide fumes emitted by the running engine
into the vehicle’s interior, where he waited for oblivion. The letter he left for his parents on the car
seat next to him upset his mother so much that she destroyed it.
After two years of grief-stricken depression, Thelma Toole discovered
the manuscript on top of the armoire and became determined to see A
Confederacy of Dunces published. To
that end, she sent the manuscript to seven publishers, all of whom rejected
it. In 1976, the renowned author Walker
Percy joined the faculty of Loyola University, adjacent to Tulane. Thelma Toole stalked him relentlessly until
Percy agreed to read the manuscript just to make her stop. Perhaps A Confederacy of Dunces had
been ahead of its time, because Percy recognized its brilliance as a work of
literature and cultural artifact. Not
only was Ignatius J. Reilly a singular character, but the dunces who populated
his world were as well. Toole captured
with a perfectly tuned ear the dialects spoken by white and black New Orleanais
as they shared their views on Communism, racism, nuclear war, sex, and
justice. Even with Percy as champion, A
Confederacy of Dunces languished for more than three years before it was published. After an initial print run of 2,500 copies
and little attention, the book suddenly caught on. In 1981, John Kennedy Toole, Jr., received a
posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Madness and genius – sadly – often go hand-in-hand. John Kennedy Toole, Jr., with his piercing
intelligence and powers of observation perhaps saw too much of the foolishness
of mankind and gave up in despair. More
likely, he wanted to be normal, to be loved, to be himself, but felt
constrained by social norms and conventions.
If Thelma Toole had not destroyed her son’s suicide note, we might have
some insight, but in all likelihood he shared his regret that he never measured
up to her expectations. Perhaps Ignatius
J. Reilly was a mockery of his creator, the mama’s boy who grew up to
disappoint, the golden boy who felt inauthentic, or worse: the son who would never produce the Catholic grandchildren
his mother pined for.
In times of social change, it is the artists who capture the
paradigm shifts. The 1960s saw America
change from “Father Knows Best” to Woodstock.
John Kennedy Toole, Jr., tried to straddle both worlds but fell into the
abyss instead. Had his mental illness
not gone untreated it is likely that he might have understood that a single
intellectually honest voice can sometimes enlighten the dunces. Then again, he might never have written A
Confederacy of Dunces because this work of genius is also the product of a
tragically unquiet mind.
Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved
