A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole. It was published in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole's mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, and is now considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.
The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
A Confederacy of Dunces follows the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, overweight, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with his mother. He is an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters.
Toole wrote the novel in 1963 during his last few months in Puerto Rico. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his college professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial, and Reilly mirrored him in these respects. The character was also based on Toole himself, and several personal experiences served as inspiration for passages in the novel. While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory. Both of these experiences were later adopted into his fiction.
Plot
Ignatius J. Reilly is an overweight and unemployed thirty-year-old with a master's degree in Medieval History who lives with his mother in New Orleans. He utterly loathes the modern world, which he feels has lost the medieval values of "geometry and theology", and is fascinated with Boethius, feeling his life is influenced by Fortune's Wheel.One afternoon Ignatius is waiting on the street for his mother. He is dressed in a green hunting cap, voluminous tweed trousers, a red plaid flannel shirt and a muffler. He is approached by policeman Angelo Mancuso, who has been ordered to round up "suspicious characters." Affronted and outraged, Ignatius protests his innocence to the crowd while denouncing the city's vices and the graft of the local police. An elderly man, Claude Robichaux, takes Ignatius' side, denouncing Officer Mancuso and the police as communists. Mrs. Reilly arrives and demands that Mancuso arrest Robichaux as the cause of the disturbance. In the resulting uproar, Ignatius and his mother escape, taking refuge in the Night of Joy, a bar and strip club, in case Officer Mancuso is still in pursuit.
At the police station Robichaux meets Burma Jones, a young black man who also was wrongly arrested, he claims, but seems resigned to his fate. The Sergeant tells Mancuso off for arresting Robichaux and punishes him for his uselessness by making him start to wear a different costume every day on the beat, beginning with a ballerina outfit.
At the Night of Joy the bar owner arrives and throws Ignatius and his mother out, saying they are bringing the tone of the place down. Mrs. Reilly has drunk too much. As a result, she crashes her car. The compensation she owes for the accident totals $1,020, a sizable amount of money in early 1960s New Orleans. Ignatius is forced to work for the first time in many years in order to help his mother pay the debt.
At the police station, Jones is told he must get a job or be arrested for vagrancy. He reluctantly starts work as a janitor at the Night of Joy. The owner can get away with paying him below the minimum wage because Jones knows if he loses the job, he will be in jail. Still, Jones continually protests his ill treatment, threatens retaliation, and keeps an eye out for an opportunity to sabotage the business.
Darlene, the bar hostess, has an ambition to perform there as a stripper, and has devised an act involving her pet cockatoo. She has trained the cockatoo to pull off rings that hold her costume together.
Ignatius answers an ad for a position in the office at the Levy Pants factory, run by an absentee but henpecked Gus Levy. Here he performs no useful work, but does arbitrarily throw away several entire file cabinet drawers full of important files. He sends an insulting letter to a complaining customer on official stationery over the owner's signature. He carries out a regular and aggressive correspondence with his college friend Myrna Minkoff in New York. She criticizes his self-centered lifestyle and urges him to join her in radical political agitation. To impress Myrna, Ignatius tries to incite the black workforce at the pants factory into a violent demonstration for better pay.
Dismissed from this job, he chances into employment pushing a hot dog cart. He makes few sales and spends most of his time consuming the stock himself. His boss insists that he wear a pirate outfit to try to entice trade from tourists in the French Quarter.
Ignatius gets the idea to bring about universal peace by infiltrating the U.S. military with gay soldiers who will be too busy tailoring and socializing to fight. To this end, and again to impress Myrna, he attends a wild gay party in the French Quarter looking to recruit members for his new political party, but when he begins to harangue the guests he is thrown out.
He arrives at the Night of Joy to find Jones at the door dressed as a plantation slave and Darlene about to have her opening night stripping as a Southern Belle character. Jones urges him in, hoping that trouble will ensue. When Darlene takes to the stage her cockatoo spies the gold pirate earring dangling from Ignatius’s ear and flies at it, causing chaos. Ignatius spills out into the street and Jones rescues him from being hit by a passing bus. Ignatius faints in the street. Mancuso arrests the Night of Joy's owner for pornography.
After the front page of the newspaper features embarrassing photos of that scandalous evening, Ignatius's mother has had enough and secretly phones for an ambulance to take him away to the mental hospital.
As the novel nears its end, Fortune's Wheel turns. Darlene is offered a new job due to the sensation, Gus Levy is vindicated against his berating wife, Levy and Ignatius both escape the consequences of Ignatius's insulting letter, Jones is slated for a philanthropic award, and Officer Mancuso is vindicated for his detective work. Myrna arrives at Ignatius's door, having driven from New York to rescue him from his lifestyle. Ignatius, having guessed his mother's plot to institutionalize him, urges Myrna to drive him away right then, and on the road they pass the ambulance coming to take him away.
Major characters
Ignatius J. Reilly
Ignatius Jacques Reilly is something of a modern Don Quixote—eccentric, idealistic, and creative, sometimes to the point of delusion. In his foreword to the book, Walker Percy describes Ignatius as a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one". He disdains modernity, particularly pop culture. The disdain becomes his obsession: he goes to movies in order to mock their perversity and express his outrage with the contemporary world's lack of "theology and geometry". He prefers the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and the early medieval philosopher Boethius in particular. However, he also enjoys many modern comforts and conveniences and is given to claiming that the rednecks of rural Louisiana hate all modern technology, which they associate with unwanted change. The workings of his pyloric valve play an important role in his life, reacting strongly to incidents in a fashion that he likens to Cassandra in prophetic significance.Ignatius is of the mindset that he does not belong in the world and that his numerous failings are the work of some higher power. He continually refers to the goddess Fortuna as having spun him downwards on her wheel of fortune. Ignatius loves to eat, and his masturbatory fantasies lead in strange directions. His mockery of obscene images is portrayed as a defensive posture to hide their titillating effect on him. Although considering himself to have an expansive and learned worldview, Ignatius has an aversion to ever leaving the town of his birth, and frequently bores friends and strangers with the story of his sole, abortive journey out of New Orleans, a trip to Baton Rouge on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, which Ignatius recounts as a traumatic ordeal of extreme horror.
Ignatius is portrayed as a monstrously overgrown, overeducated child: self-centered, impulsive, rebellious, mostly asexual, an extravagant daydreamer who is given to wearing a Mickey Mouse watch, reading comic books, writing in crayon, making crude arts and crafts projects, and gorging himself on doughnuts and hot dogs.