A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Critical Review
I was lucky to have had the chance to travel quite a bit in my youth. You get the travel bug in your blood when you're young and you spend the rest of your life chasing the dragon, thinking about where the next best place to explore might be. I’ve seen a lot of America, but I’ve never been to the complicated and almost imaginary city of New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s up there near the top of my travel destination bucket list. I have it on good authority, from several sources, that my disposition and vices would be well suited to this historically debaucherous place. It’s the birthplace of notable personal heroes of the 20th century such as Truman Capote, William Burrows, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and our subject of the day, John Kennedy Toole.
Everyone and their brother have reviewed Toole’s posthumously published Pulitzer prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. But few I think, appreciate the struggle this young artist endured throughout his short life. His struggles, and the struggles of many of the characters in his story, are with slightly exaggerated variation, many of the same complicated issues all artists of all mediums have to endure having chosen a different kind of life from your regular workaday Joes and Janes. I mean to say that there might be a little bit of the trials and traumas Toole has created for his protagonist, Ignatius J. Riley, in all people who either come to believe, or are raised to believe, that they are special. Lives lived like those of Toole and of the characters in his book, which are in service to creative, inventive or comic impulses, allow for an enormous amount of personal freedom and curiosity, however that freedom and curiosity is often mirrored by a dark reality of disconnection and feelings of drifting out of synchronicity with the rest of the world.
At its heart, Confederacy of Dunces is a tale told by a man consumed by dashed expectations, burdened with a critically thinking mind and in possession of a uniquely inventive comic imagination. Early criticisms of his book were that it had no traditional narrative plot. Disagreements over this issue ultimately resulted in the original publisher passing on publication. That rejection triggered a slow, drawn out spiral of paranoia and despair, that eventually culminated in his death. Perhaps Toole was just a man born into the wrong era. It seems like his dark neurotic sense of humor would have been received quite differently if he had been a contemporary of modern comedians like Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David who were made famous for characters that we all loved to hate. His work foreshadowed a lot of what was to come regarding popular culture and taste in the 21st century. Racial discrimination, LGBTQ rights, worker’s rights and freedom of speech are just a few relevant examples that come to mind. What’s even more interesting is that although the book was written in the 1960’s it wasn’t published until 1980, eleven years after his death by suicide. 1980’s America had a very different character and attitude than it did in the 1960’s. Yet the book holds up even now in 2020. It’s either a testament to Toole’s genius ability to mimic fundamental human personality disorders or to the timelessness endurance of all that which is uniquely of and about New Orleans. I guess when this whole global pandemic is over, I’m going to have to get down to Louisiana to find out first-hand. Until then I’ll have to envision the cityscape backdrop to everyone’s favorite unbearably arrogant, ridiculously mustachioed, cartoon garbage bag of a human being through the inspired imagination of John Kennedy Toole.
