Anybody who says John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel that is about nothing obviously hasn’t put much thought into what they were reading. Saying the opposite, that the book is about evrything, wouldn’t exactly be accurate either, but it would be closer to the truth. One thing that it is specifically about is dysfunctional American families.
A Confederacy of Dunces is a specific style of novel. It is written in the picaresque tradition that originated in Spain. You are in the right if you think this book reminds you of Don Quixote. Picaresque novels are essentially without centralized plots, detailing a string of adventures and misadventures experienced by the protagonist. This non-plot structure is thereby supported by subplots and side-plots of varying relevance. Picaresque novels also tell stories about lower-class characters. A Confederacy of Dunces not only meets all these criteria, but it also incorporates the themes of the 20th century ant-hero, satire, and social commentary. It is modernist in the sense that it portrays an individual who is alienated from his host society. So of you think this is meant to be nothing more than a comedy, you don’t really understand the frameworks that are necessary to wholly comprehend what it entails.
Ignatius J. Reilly is the main character. He is condescending, egotistical, loud, rude, pretentious, histrionic, paranoid, suffering from delusions of grandeur, and mentally ill. (Does this sound like a description of Donald Trump?) He possibly has Asperger’s syndrome or some type of personality disorder. Obese and suffering from a serious lack of fashion sensibility, he bears a passing resemblance to Ron Jeremy from the waist up. He rampages like a hurricane through two jobs, one at the Levy Pants factory, the other as a hot dog vendor in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He is also an intellectual, having been a successful college student and short-term professor. Part of his literary output consists of letters to Myrna Minkoff, a Jewish hippie political activist in New York City who fell in love with him when they were together in university. She gives lectures on the socio-psychological need for free love and sexual liberation then complains because men keep hitting on her. The two of them correspond while she is away. His other literary output is his diary entries which he says he will someday publish as a world-changing work of major importance. Despite this particular delusion of grandeur, Ignatius’s writing is a stark contrast to his social behavior. It is calm, evenly measured, meditative, and reasonable. Even when he expresses bizarre ideas in his writings, they still come off sounding like passages from classic literature. This is a bit of realism since many of the great artists in history have been known for their boorishness, social awkwardness, and offensive, sometimes even baffling, behavior. Ignatius J. Reilly is held up as an example of how art is a product of a diseased mind, flowers that grow in piles of dung.
Aside from Myrna Minkoff, the other important woman in Ignatius’s life is his mother, Irene. Their ambiguous relationship is at the core of this novel’s meaning. After the two of them get drunk at a sleazy striptease bar called the Night of Joy in New Orleans’ French Quarter, she crashes into a house and the owner wants financial compensation for the damages. Thus, Ignatius has to find a job to help her pay for this but being the English major type that he is, he is allergic to work and prefers to stay in his room, reading, writing, and sometimes masturbating rather than digging ditches, wiping asses, or shoveling shit. Does this sound familiar to any of you bookworms? Come on, be honest.
Irene clings tightly to Ignatius because her husband, his father, died when the boy was young. She became an overbearing mother and the more she tries to dominate everything he does, the more infantile he becomes. She is also a depressive alcoholic, always at the end of her rope, and coming to the realization that she can’t live out the rest of her life in peace until Ignatius move out of the house. She is caught in her own trap where she dominates him but wants him to leave. She can’t find her way out of this impasse. This is the main subplot of this picaresque novel.
While Ignatius and Irene are the core family unit of the novel, there are other family units to be considered. In fact, the narrative revolves structurally around family units. The term “family unit” is here operationalized with the broadest possible meaning, incorporating not just traditional family structures but also surrogate families, substitute families, and alternative families.
For example, the family unit of Ignatius and Irene can be expanded into the family of Santa Battaglia, her son Mancuso, and Irene’s prospective husband Claude Robichaux. Santa Battaglia is the head of this group. She is a Sicilian immigrant who acts as a deus ex machina, making arrangements to set things right among her crowd. She attempts to bring Irene and Claude together while trying to convince Irene that she needs to liberate herself by getting Ignatius out of her house. The word “battaglia” is the Italian word for “battle” and in the Italian-American lexicon it carries the connotation of “badass”, “ass-kicker”, or “a person who can get things done” in its positive sense. In its pejorative sense it can connote “domineering”, “difficult to deal with”, “intimidating”, or “controlling”, kind of like the term “battle ax” when applied to a woman. The word “santa”, of course, is Italian for “saint”, a being who can offer assistance when approached in the right way. The meaning of Santa Battaglia’s name is wordplay and depends largely on the context of which character is talking about her. Santa Battaglia prays to the saint of television sets; only those of use with Italian relatives will truly understand how hilarious this is. We are also the ones who will know exactly what kind of person she is.
Another family unit is that of Gus Levy and his wife. Gus is the owner of Levy Pants, the factory where Ignatius goes to work and does nothing but make a mess out of everything. Gus is a middle-aged playboy, unhappy with the business he inherited from his father. Mrs. Levy is just as mentally deranged as Ignatius; she failed a mail-order course in psychology but insists on psychoanalyzing both her husband and Miss Trixie, a senile old lady employed in the Levy Pants management office. Mrs. Levy is also a domineering woman who tries to control her husband but he doesn’t buy into it. Instead they argue a lot . Mrs. Levy takes Miss Trixie into their home and tries to analyze her with the intention of bringing out her fullest potential as an employee. Mrs. Levy’s hidden agenda, however, is to passive-aggressively humiliate her husband. She makes no progress with Miss Trixie and at one point Gus makes the observation that Miss Trixie is just like Mrs. Levy’s mother. The ironic Freudian twists in these subplots are funny, poignant, and profound.
By extending the concept of the family unit, we next come to the employees of the Night of Joy which is also headed by a controlling and unsympathetic mother-figure, Lana Lee. She is the greedy and mean-spirited owner of this dive bar in the French Quarter where she pays attractive women to coax men into purchasing watered-down cocktails as the strippers disrobe on stage. One of these women is Darlene, a kind-hearted woman who has ambitions to bring her pet bird into a burlesque routine. She makes friends with Burma Jones, an African-American man who gets hired to sweep the floors at sub-minimum wage rates. Lana Lee exploits him while also verbally abusing him so he hatches a plan to sabotage her business and bring her down. Lana Lee has a side-hustle, posing for pornographic photos which are sold to high school students.
The final family unit of importance is the alternative family of New Orleans’ gay community. While dressed up as a pirate and pushing his hot dog cart, Ignatius J. Reilly encounters a young man named Dorian Greene. Yes, that is a reference to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian comes from a rich, conventional, and conservative family in Kansas who are embarrassed by his homosexuality. They pay him healthy sums of money to live far away in New Orleans where they don’t have to deal with him. The gay community becomes his surrogate family. At first, Ignatius and Dorian argue but after Dorian makes a joke about politicians and servicemen in the military being sodomites, pederasts, or closeted homosexuals, a cord is truck and the two of them connect. Ignatius suggests starting a new political party made up entirely of gay people with the utopian vision of an end to all wars, a simple nod to the anti-nuclear peace movement of the 1960s. Dorian loves the idea and decides to have a costume party to launch the new movement.
When Ignatius arrives at the party, decked out in his hot dog vendor’s pirate costume, he is welcomed with open arms, although the men there can’t tell if he is supposed to be dressed as a pirate or a Gypsy. This subtle ambiguity is significant because it demonstrates how people do not know exactly what to make of Ignatius. While the gay men are busy drinking, conversing, dancing, and engaging in some light bondage play, it becomes apparent that Ignatius is taking the sodomite political party game a little too seriously. The party-goers think of it as a joke but Ignatius is dead serious. He has failed to read the social situation and leaves out of frustration, heading off to the Night of Joy in a misguided search for a stripper he mistakes for being a highly-educated intellectual.
That is where everything blows up. Ignatius J. Reilly embodies the trickster archetype. His boorish behavior breaks every social taboo and mannerism of decency imaginable. It is by breaking these taboos that he reveals what those taboos are. He tears through every place he goes like the Tasmanian Devil and, in the aftermath, everything gets set to right. His whirlwind of stupidity reveals society’s truth to itself so that the god people move up in life while the bad people get punished, even though Ignatius, in the end, stays the same.
In regards to family units, the idea of matriarchy takes a battering in A Confederacy of Dunces. The mother figures in this novel, Irene, Mrs. Levy, Miss Trixie, and Lana Lee are almost entirely weak or unsympathetic. The exception would be Santa Battaglia who, despite being sympathetic to the audience, is not so much to Ignatius. The least dysfunctional family unit is Dorian Greene’s gay community who thrive with neither a mother figure or a father figure to guide them. The only females in that crowd are three violent, ill-mannered lesbians who spend the whole party segregated in the kitchen. The father figures in each unit are either weak like Gus Levy or non-existent. This should be no surprise because John Kennedy Toole’s father died when he was young, leaving him with an overbearing mother; the author had serious mommy issues. But with the character of Santa Battaglia, the possibility of effective motherhood is left open.
Another literary device of importance in this novel is that of the costume. It is an old adage that a costume reveals a person’s true character. In Ignatius’s case, the pirate get up he wears while vending hot dogs not only reveals something about his personality but also acts as a gateway into an alternate community. The pirate is a traditional symbol of outsider status and outlawry, men who were were forced into a life of crime because they were too clever to conform. In our times, the outlaw biker might signify a similar concept. Later at the party, people mistake Ignatius’s costume as that of a Gypsy, another symbol of outsider status and a community of marginalized people who live by their own rules. It is this pirate outfit that attracts the initial attention of Dorian Greene and other members of the gay scene in the French Quarter. So it functions as a juncture between Ignatius and Dorian’s party crowd, only the people at the party indulge in their masquerade as a means of escaping from themselves, having fun by becoming something else for one night. They liberate themselves by becoming something other than what they are. This is Nietzsche’s rites of Dionysus whereby humans renew themselves through carnavalesque orgies of inversion. Ignatius, on the other hand, takes his pirate-clad outlaw status literally; being unable to read the meaning of the costumes worn by the party-goers. He mistakes the situation as a serious attempt at launching a political movement. Ultimately, he fails in this endeavor, reaffirming his identity as a loner on the margin of society, not even capable of blending in with a crowd of outsiders who have formed their own community.
The other major costume wearer is Officer Mancuso, the mild-mannered but earnest son of Santa Battaglia who, incidentally, has a happy family of his own. Mancuso is bullied by his police sergeant who belittles him for being weak, making him wear ridiculous and transparent disguises for the sake of walking a beat in the French Quarter, looking to fulfill his quota by arresting lowlifes and degenerates. Little does he know that the gay people there secretly admire him even though he gets pushed around by the people he tries to arrest. While Mancuso’s undercover disguises are silly, fooling no one, note should be taken of how his costume becomes more respectable on the night he makes his big bust.
Other costumes of relevance are those of Lana Lee and Miss Trixie. Although Lana Lee poses nude for pornographic pictures, this is a type of costume because she does so in the role of a teacher, sitting next to a globe, in front of a chalkboard, and holding a book. This is subversive in an unsettling way because these photos are sold to boys in a high school. If her porn were being sold to adults, there might not be much to think about, but by posing naked as an authority figure for children, her malevolent attitude to social order is revealed. In another case, Miss Trixie does not choose her costume; rather Mrs. Levy dresses her up in an attempt to make her more attractive. She gives her a wig, a new set of clothes, and a bad makeup job. Gus Levy, when he sees Miss Trixie, remarks that she resembles Mrs. Levy’s mother. Rather than telling us a truth about Miss Trixie, this shows how Mrs. Levy’s poorly thought out psychoanalysis results from a failed attempt at confronting her own Freudian familial complexes.
A Confederacy of Dunces, in the end, reads like a humorous attempt by John Kennedy Toole to confront his own inner demons. Ignatius is a composite character of Toole and his best friend, a corpulent college professor who burped a lot while making self-abnegating jokes about being a fat slob who is lacking in social graces. The parallels between Toole’s and Ignatius’s family life and career trajectory are too precise to be ignored. Otherwise, the idea that this author committed suicide because he couldn’t get his novel published is possibly inaccurate. John Kennedy Toole was a paranoid schizophrenic who was losing control over his own mind and ended up being incapable of holding down a job. It is more likely that he killed himself out of despair over his mental illness.
So who is Ignatius J. Reilly? In one sense he is a hyperbole of the American intellectual who is unable to find his place in an overwhelmingly anti-intellectual society. In another sense, he is an exaggeration of the American rugged individualist. He insists on being who he is at any cost and damn the consequences. In yet another sense, he is camp in the way that Susan Sontag conceptualized that word. He is overblown to the point of self-parody so that no one can take him seriously, maybe a little bit like Divine’s characters in the films of John Waters.
In some ways, Ignatius J. Reilly is a distorted reflection of ourselves. That is possibly why there are two strongly polarized responses to A Confederacy of Dunces. Those who hate it are often people who see themselves in Ignatius, don’t like what tjey see, and react with histrionic declarations of disgust that sound as if they came straight from the mouth of Ignatius himself. Then again, some of the haters might simply be people are too shallow or intellectually dull to really see much in this novel. Those who love it tend to be people who see exaggerated parts of themselves in the character of Ignatius. They are able to feel his poignancy and laugh it away while being healthy enough to laugh at themselves too. But there are also those of us who love this book because we just want to tear the world to shreds and let the pieces fall where they may. In the end, Ignatius J. Reilly is a sad, clueless character; he is gross, offensive, and disgusting which is also true of a lot of other human beings. In the end, though, you don’t actually have to love Ignatius to love A Confederacy of Dunces. It is an examination of American families, marginalized communities, and isolated loners while being a love letter to New Orleans and all its odd characters, albeit one that is fraught with self-doubt and painful insecurities. It reveals the cracks and fissures in the foundation of American society, the family itself. It is also a work of comedic satirical genius, entirely one of a kind.
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. Grove Press, New York: 1987.
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