Your Daily Ignatius

I know this is one of your favoritist books of all times, so I checked it out of the library on your reccomendation.

My unsolicited opinion: it's terrible. Just terrible. Besides being an unreadable wandering, the book is vile and gross. The characters are dispicable and I found myself cheering against Ignatius and his miserable mother... until I just put the book down and never picked it up again. I'd have thrown it in the garbage if it didn't belong to the public libary. The part where he's m******bating while thinking of his DOG? Blech.

Sorry Rod. I can't suggest anyone spend any time with this awful book.

Are you going to sit there and accept, as such, this assault upon your magnificence; the grandeur of your being?

(He's prolly a Methodiss. Or worse.)

Regardless of the book, the idea of video blog is great, especially for learners who want to understand not only written English, but also speech. (Played it 2 times and understood more than 50%, that's quite a result!)

I read the book not long ago, and enjoyed it tremendously. Gjoe, one thing that may have bothered you is that this book is definitely written in the great tradition of the Southern Gothic literature of the American South, filled with crudity, violence, the grotesque and carnival-gaudy, under the veneer of Southern manners and the relentless and often unintentionally cruel politeness that ironically characterizes the region.

Some (perhaps most) Southern Gothic writers are striving to produce a fine sense of horror in their readers, but the Catholic Southern Gothic writer like Flannery O'Connor writes in a way that is ultimately redemptive. I would put "Dunces" into this subcategory (though I don't know that Toole practiced any particular religion; it doesn't seem so). But "Dunces" is definitely written in a Catholic spirit, and is, in the end, a comedy--that is, a work that is uplifting--though a distinctly Southern Gothic one.

Reading a book like this one, gjoe, is like being invited into the ruined parlor of a home in New Orleans for tea with a hostess who traces her family tree back so far you get dizzy when she talks about it. Some slight evidence of the former grandeur of the house can be seen, but this grandeur is so heavily caked with dirt and the flotsam of careless generations that the effect is rather like opening a coffin and discovering that the lovely belle interred there has wholly decayed, but that her bright silk dress is mostly (though not entirely) intact. Your hostess is charming but oddly gauche at times, and wholly divorced from reality--you have drunk half the tea she gave you before you realize that the dirty cup from which you are drinking contains, floating at its bottom, the large porcelain fragment that is missing from its upper rim, and the cookies she is pressing you to take are stale and dotted with green mold. Distasteful? Yes, at times--but vivid and true, and more real than you can imagine; you entered the house to learn about her, but you ended up learning about yourself.

That's what a book like "A Confederacy of Dunces" does for its reader. The crudity and ugliness of Ignatius's life, the humor and pathos (and sometimes bathos) of it, the swirling mad cyclone of the other characters whose lives intertwine with his, and the effect he has on each of them--all of it, at its most fundamental level, is a piercing and brilliant dissection of our humanity and our tendency to believe we are both greater and more in control than we really are. The contradictions and paradoxes of the work, as much as its loud circus atmosphere and occasional parodies of polite behavior, cause us to see ourselves for a moment in a funhouse mirror that magnifies all our flaws and distorts even our virtues into what is bizarre and pathetic--which, when we consider ourselves in true humility for a moment, is more like what we actually are than we are comfortable admitting.

The book may not be for everyone; some people can't get past the crudity and ugliness. But if you give it another chance, gjoe, I'd be interested in your impressions after you finish it.

Thanks, Rod! It's nice to put that Lit. degree to work now and again. :)

You've voiced one of the key necessities to reading and understanding a book like "Dunces;" we have to see ourselves in the characters. Many other sorts of literature can be read with anything from kind sympathy to aloof ironic detachment, but if you can't see yourself in a work of Southern Gothic fiction, especially the redemptive kind, then you're going to miss out on the most resonant meanings of the work.

Gjoe, I respect your stated dislike for the literary form. Once a friend who was taking a literary/theology combo class at the college I was attending had to read one of Walker Percy's works, and she came to me very puzzled and upset about some of the elements in the story. I read the book, told her where the literary merit was and interpreted some of it for her, but then strongly encouraged her to take her concerns to her professor at our Catholic college. She did, and he immediately withdrew the book from the required reading list and apologized to those students who found the material morally offensive; he said he didn't think about the suitability of the book for a class mainly comprised of undergrads who probably hadn't encountered works of this type before.

If you can't relate to Ignatius Reilly, then you can't. I could never really enjoy Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth" because I didn't find any of the characters possible to relate to, myself, so I know what you're saying. If I relate to Reilly, it's in that sense of knowing my own nature, and how often I can attempt goodness and achieve sanctimony, attempt concern for society and achieve Pharisaical phoniness, attempt to believe it's my own disconnection with the modern world which makes it strange to me, and fail to realize that it's often just laziness, selfishness, and the disinclination to roll up my sleeves and get to work such as I can.

Is Reilly just a gross buffoon with no redeeming qualities? I think that he's a type of "this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine" in that in our inmost souls many of us, perhaps most of us, are capable of his levels of fallenness, and that, indeed, if we are not so fallen it is less by our merits or worth than by God's grace, undeserved and often unappreciated.

One final thought: I know someone who insists that real "art" can never contain anything ugly or bad in it, that if there is swearing on the part of the characters, for instance, it just proves that the book is trash. The problem with this view, as Flannery O'Connor might put it, is that it is always and everywhere the solemn duty and obligation of the artist to reflect his world as it is, not as he wishes it would be. If "Dunces" rises to the level of art, as I believe it does, it is because Ignatius Reilly is a real, true example of a person of Toole's time, a creation, to be sure, but not an untrue or unreal one. A writer today setting a story in modern-day New Orleans would do his readers no favors to pretend that his protagonist was a thoroughly moral person with no vices to speak of surrounded by noble, upright citizens, honest, hardworking politicians, and selfless, kind clergy members--unless, of course, he's writing science fiction, but then he'd better be darned good at it.

Confederacy is genius and brilliant. It captures the New Orleans of its day perfectly.
But Rod, you need to work on your N'Awlins accents, esp. Mrs. Reilly. Your reading is a little too flat for my taste. Get raucus!

Whoa! Jones rocks.