Toole's Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. King Penguin (1981)

Judging by some of the more recent titles to be published under the imprint, one of the laudable aims of the King Penguin series is to resuscitate undeservedly forgotten works and to foster neglected talent. Laudable; but even more praiseworthy if the publishers were more content to let their chosen texts speak for themselves. Instead, the covers of John Kennedy Toole's novel come emblazoned with remarks -- 'I succumbed, stunned and seduced', 'immortal comic caricature', and, inevitably, 'a work of genius' -- which must raise an eyebrow no matter how accustomed we have become to blurb hyperinflation.

The short preface describing the circumstances of publication put one off a little bit more. A vaguely Ern Malleyish odour seems detectable here: we are told about the author himself, whose mild and unremarkable features and primly conventional dress defy the reader to discover anything significant in his photograph; of his Oedipal fixation; his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two from depression over the repeated rejection of his novel; Thelma Toole's obsessive conviction of her dead son's genius; the reluctant academic who was eventually cajoled into reading the dog-eared manuscript; his initial boredom; his awakening interest; at last his surging illumination that here is, yes, genius; his public endorsement of it as 'the gargantuan tumultuous tragi-comedy'; its publication by a minor American university press in 1980 and now again as a King Penguin. After these initial drum-rolls, it's hard to take a square look at Toole's sole literary memorial.

A Confederacy of Dunces is a knockabout comedy set in early Sixties New Orleans. The ambience of this city is carefully evoked and reaches right to the horizons of the novel; indeed, we learn that its hero, Ignatius Reilly -- Oedipal, obese and onanistic -- has passed the city limits only on a single catastrophic occasion. The main plot is pretty rudimentary. Reilly, eternal student and social philosopher manque, is driven by his long-suffering mother out of his frowzy bedroom to find work. He is first received by Levy Pants, a moribund clothing firm which Reilly disrupts (from motives of self-glorification, certainly not political commitment by leading its black sweated labour on a 'Crusade for Moorish Decency'. When this is, naturally, a fiasco, he has a spell as a street vendor with other absurd consequences, before at last bursting the Oedipal bonds and making for New York in the company of one Myra Minkoff, a model liberated lady of twenty years ago. There's a multiplicity of sub-plots as well; one dealing with a school-children's porn ring, another with a much put-upon Italian cop who fancies Ignatius's mother, and which collectively probe amusingly into most levels of detritus of Southern society. This fertile material is shaped only in the very roughest fashion. Nothing is finally or satisfactorily concluded. The second half of the novel has many longeurs and eventually things just grind to a halt.

Ignatius Reilly himself, Toole's anti-hero -- and in some teasing way his alter ego, surely -- is a curious creation. He belches and farts his cumbersome way across the pages, exhibiting at every turn his roaring contempt for every aspect of modern life. When a writer offers the public a fat, gross and comic protagonist, it cannot be long before the adjectives 'rabelasian' and 'falstaffian' obtrude. But Reilly is more of a Billy Bunter than a Sir John. His characteristic utterance is a lament or diatribe rather than a richly obscene belly laugh. His invective fills many a page:

'I always suspected that democracy would come to this.' He painstakingly poured the milk into his Shirley Temple mug. 'A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are living on the edge of the abyss.'

It is hard to know quite what to make of this rant, and the many others like it. Obviously, the inconsistencies and absurdities of his nature are being carefully delineated. His yearning for the tender age of Abelard and Becket, his worship of Fortuna, his reliance on Boethius's stoic philosophy put no restraint on his immoderate consumption of film musicals, hot dogs and bottles of some disgusting beverage called Dr Nut. But if Reilly is a mass of contradictions they are also not very lovable or intriguing contradictions. One feels that, just as in the case of another comic hero, Donleavy's Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield, the patrician arrogance is only just covered over by the rip-roaring farce. And the loathing keeps breaking through. 'Oh, God,' mutters Reilly, watching a movie clinch, 'their tongues are probably all over each other's capped and rotting teeth.' The shudder here is surely the prim Toole's, rather than his eructating, slobbish hero's. The novel's title itself raises the question of where the fire is being aimed. It is taken from an aphorism of Swift's to the effect that whenever genius appears mediocrity will conspire to crush it. Who is the genius in question? Surely not Reilly, who is an intellectual poseur of no mean capacity. Can it be Toole himself, smarting under the blows of publishers' rejections? -- and are we, the readers, the dunces? Is it merely ironic? If so, the irony backfires badly.

The most accomplished parts of A Confederacy of Dunces -- and here perhaps Toole would have agreed, since one of his opening epigraphs alludes to it -- are the extremely skilful renditions of demotic speech, particularly black street speech:

Jones rested his mop against the bar and scouted for the coin, squinting through his sunglasses and smoke.

'Ain this the shit,' he mumbled to himself while the two searched the floor. 'Ooo-wee!'

'I found it,' Lana said emotionally. 'I got it.'

'Whoa! I'm sure glad you did. Hey! You better not be dropping silver dollars on the floor like that. Night of Joy be going bankrup. You be havin trouble meeting that big payroll.'

'And why don't you try keeping your mouth shut, boy?'

'Say, who you callin "boy"?' Jones took the handle of the broom and pushed it vigorously toward the altar. 'You ain Scarla O'Horror.'

Toole is just as capable of rendering New York-Irish-proletarian, Jewish or camp speech with a fidelity that impresses the reader. (Though, oddly, Ignatius himself, New Orleans born and bred, is given a flat and prissy speech manner.)

For the rest, this comedy falls between several stools. Toole's narrative line is broad insistent, never pared down to an ironic skeleton as, supremely, in Waugh. Sometimes it even becomes flat and clumsy. A nightclub hostess is leadenly described as 'a depressed blonde who seemed connected with the bar in some capacity' -- a phrase which Waugh would have been physically incapable of penning. Yet Toole has none of the lavish flights of fancy of Donleavy. The rant he puts on Reilly's lips is never lyrical and more often than not it's just sour. Nor do his construction and pacing have any of the craftsmanship of, say Malcolm Bradbury or Peter de Vries. At a slighter level, I have seen Toole's name linked with Tom Sharpe's. But read a chapter of the former and follow it with a chapter of Wilt or Riotous Assembly. The comparison is painful. Where Toole can be seen pulling strings to involve us in anarchy, Sharpe is effortlessly manic. His ferocious black humour which can even get you laughing at South African policemen is not to be compared with Toole's relentless interest in his hero's pylorus and attendant digestive problems -- a joke which palls very early on. No, A Confederacy is prentice work. It may have been that Toole's talent would have developed much further, though the fact is that comic novelists of real genius tend to arrive fully fledged, as did the authors of Tristram Shandy, Decline and Fall, Lucky Jim. (Nor, pace Swift and Toole, do the dunces unite against them. No one is more heartily welcome than an originally funny writer.) Anyway, Toole's suicide arrests any such speculation. Death, as someone said, is that after which nothing is of interest.

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