Article and Book Club Discussion Questions by James Evans
James will lead our First Friday Classic Book Club Discussion of A Confederacy of the Dunces on Friday, June 7, 2019, from 10 to Noon at the North Chesterfield, Virginia County Library 325 N Courthouse Road, North Chesterfield, VA, 23235. To attend, please contact Murray, Coordinator, at ellisonms2@vcu.edu. You may also participate in this discussion, by adding your comment to the dialogue box below this column. See James Evans’ Commentary and Book Review Questions, below:
A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980 by the Louisiana State University Press. The title comes from a quote by 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.” Its author, John Kennedy Toole was born in 1937 and died in 1969, committing suicide eleven years before the book was published.
Toole was born into a middle-class family in New Orleans of creole and Irish ancestry. Very precocious from an early age, his mother doted on him, extolling his talents as a scholar and actor while intimately, obsessively and overbearingly involved with him in his life and career, his father much less so. A gifted student, he was a national merit scholar and editor of his school paper, receiving a full scholarship to Tulane. At the age of 16, he wrote a Southern Gothic novel, The Neon Bible, which he characterized as ‘a grim, sociologic attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South’. It was published in 1989 after a prolonged family fight over ownership and only after Thelma Toole died. (She prevented its publication while she lived, not wanting the proceeds to go to other family members).
During his college years, he accumulated much of the material later appearing in the book; the French Quarter, pushing a tamale cart, exposure to the Haspel Brothers business and the family, models for Levy Pants. In 1958 he graduated from Tulane with honors, got a master’s at Columbia, writing his thesis on the Elizabethan poet John Lyly. While in New York dated Ruth Kathmann, but the relationship didn’t survive his return to New Orleans in 1959. He apparently never developed a sustained relationship with a woman. In this and other aspects of his life, there have over the year been very different reports of who and what Toole was or wasn’t. In the book. Ignatius writes “I always suspected Myrna of being interested in me sensually”, “I did, however, succeed in thwarting her every attempt to assail the castle of my body and mind.” He quotes Myrna Minkoff as saying, “Freud linked paranoia to homosexual tendencies’, to which Ignatius responds, “Filth!” See also the ‘elegantly dressed young man chain-smoking Salem’s and gulping daiquiris who look at Ignatius and his mother and say, “I think I’m in the wrong bar anyway. “The corruption has just begun,” says Ignatius. This goes on for several pages, the young man is clearly gay. P.18-120
He began teaching at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and the next year was a relatively happy one; he was a popular teacher, considered a great wit and mimic at parties, encouraged to perform with his one-liners and sharp stories until the audience was ‘weak with laughter’. But when his mother came to visit he would become sullen and withdrawn. While at SWL he met Bob Byrne, an eccentric English professor, a self-professed slob, who, with his interest in Boethius and Fortuna, is considered the inspiration for Ignatius Reilly, although Byrne felt that Toole was also writing about himself. The faculty at SWL is reported to have both courted and feared Toole for his biting comic talent.
In 1960 he accepted a teaching position at Hunter College, at 22 the youngest professor in Hunter history. At Hunter he found the girls to be pseudo-intellectuals ‘ever watchful for a cause they could throw their liberal zeal behind.’ Ala Myrna Minkoff.
His career in teaching was interrupted by his being drafted into the army in 1961. Toole started writing Confederacy of Dunces while on active duty in Puerto Rico. He turned to writing after an incident in which Toole refused to turn in a gay soldier who attempted suicide, earning him the rebuke of straight soldiers. After two years of service, he turned down an offer to return to Hunter and instead he taught at a Catholic girl’s school and continued writing, stopping after the assassination of Kennedy and falling into a depression and drinking heavily. He was fascinated by other public figures, especially Marilyn Monroe, describing his interest in her as having ‘reached the stage of obsession.’ He completed the novel in 1964 and sent it off to Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster. Over a two year period the editor and author discussed the book, with Gottlieb praising the characterizations and finding it ‘wildly funny’ but ultimately rejecting it as ‘being a brilliant exercise in invention,’ but ‘it isn’t really about anything.’ Toole went to New York to meet with Gottlieb who was out of town and Toole gave a rambling speech to a staffer, returning home feeling he had embarrassed himself. Toole was deeply disappointed. At the encouraging of his mother, he submitted the manuscript to Hodding Carter, who showed little interest in it. He continued teaching, even enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Tulane, in 1968. But in the years following the rejections of his book, he became increasingly erratic in his behavior. Previously a meticulous dresser, he became unshaven, ill-groomed and untidy, his classroom wit, which had made him extremely popular among students turned into rants against the church and state in his teaching, resulting in student complaints, his taking a leave of absence and then being replaced in his position. He developed a collection of paranoid ideas; being spied upon, people plotting against him. His mother was greatly upset and the two had an argument resulting in Toole taking a trip around the country and finally winding up in Biloxi where he attached a garden hose to his car’s exhaust pipe and ran it up through the car window.
It was his mother, Thelma Toole, who never gave up attempting to get the book published and finally got the attention of Walker Percy, but it still took years before the book was published in 1980 with a foreword by Walker Percy. A year later it won a Pulitzer and has been published in 18 languages and spawned several stage plays and movies both about the life of Toole and the book itself. The writing is technically proficient and polished; there is a considerable question about which manuscript was eventually published and how much editing was done by other than Toole.
Questions for A Confederacy of the Dunces from James Evens
- Are Jones and Gus Levy racial and ethnic stereotypes or just other examples of the ribald exaggeration of the many of the other characters in the book? Do you agree that Jones is “without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy”?
- Jones says, “Camniss! Ooo-woo. If I call a po-lice a camniss my ass be in Angola right now for sure.” P.14 Many examples of Jones’ struggle to assert himself in the face of discrimination. Was Toole in his depiction of Jones calling attention to the same issues as Gilbert in “Black Like Me?” Is it equally effective? Ignatius writes to Myrna “In a sense, I have always felt something of a kinship with the colored race because of its position is the same as mine; we both exist outside the inner realm of American society.” And, “Perhaps I should have been a Negro. I suspect I would have been a rather large and terrifying one, continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thigh of ole white ladies in public conveyances …” p. 123
- Is this a ‘Southern’ novel? As in Black Like Me, New Orleans is depicted as being more relaxed about racial issues that surrounding areas. See the Liebling quote in that precedes the first chapter. Ignatius says “Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.” p. 11
- Reilly was an egotistical, lazy, blowhard, full of half-baked ideas about society, religion, philosophy, himself and others; despite his self-professed humanitarianism, he was often indifferent and even cruel to others. His mother tells him, “You learnt everything, Ignatius. Except how to be a human being.” And yet, on a lovability scale of 1 to 10, where would you place him? How about if you had known him personally? Do literary characters earn some exemption for the kinds of judgments we make of similar people in real life?
- Was Toole mocking himself in this book? Many of Reilly’s statements seem to be expressions of Toole’s personal opinions, grossly caricatured and exaggerated.
- There are numerous references in the book about suicide, mental illness, mental hospitals. Although it would be years before his eventual decline, was Toole aware at some level that he might suffer from a mental illness? There is no record of his having sought treatment, although again, numerous references to the need for psychiatric treatment in the book. Could this book have been a way of trying to cope with or take advantage of what he was dealing with mentally?
- Everyone and their cousins are writing books these days; computers make it so easy to erase, edit, move, rewrite and agents and publishers are flooded with submissions. Would this book get published today?
- Is the title of the book intended to refer not only to dunces who oppose a true genius but also the Confederacy, an example of Toole’s disgust with various aspects of Southern culture.
- Are Toole’s mother and Mrs. Reilly the possible subject of a master’s thesis?
- Do you agree that the book ‘isn’t really about anything?
Our Book Club will take a summer break in July. Interestingly, we will discuss the Moviegoer by Percy Walker on August 2. Participate in this discussion by leaving your comments in the dialogue box below:
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