This is the second in a three-part series examining depictions of Carnival in fiction. In our last issue, we discussed the works of V.S. Naipaul, a writer from Trinidad. This month we cross the sea – and a gulf- to what has sometimes been called “The northernmost city of the Caribbean.”
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Live oaks in Audubon Park. Music clubs in the Marigny. Sunset over the Mississippi river. These are just some of the charms awaiting visitors to New Orleans. Of course, the city also attracts plenty of tourists who never dream of venturing beyond Bourbon Street. But even ardent devotees of the daiquiri sometimes stumble over to Canal Street, one of the main thoroughfares delineating the French Quarter.
Once there, they may encounter a life-sized statue of a mustachioed figure, adorned with a hunting cap. This is none other than Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole’s brilliantly satirical novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
“Protagonist” is indeed le mot juste. Outside of his own fevered imagination, Ignatius could never be called a hero. Obese, socially inept, and prone to gastric disturbances, the 30-year-old is an unemployed medievalist, living with his hard-pressed mother Irene. Throughout the story he evinces a thorough disdain for the modern world and its inhabitants. This does not extend to foodstuffs, however – he consumes an inordinate quantity of doughnuts and hot dogs, washed down with Dr. Nut brand soda.
When a financial setback threatens their home on Constantinople Street, the rotund Reilly is compelled to enter the workforce. Hilarity ensues. He charts a course through the Big Easy as vividly detailed as James Joyce’s Dublin.
At one point, he derides a police patrolman as a “Carnival masker”. Later, one of Ignatius’ hare-brained schemes inspires him to dress as a pirate. His mother is dismayed and horrified by such a sartorial choice:
“Angelo was right,” Mrs. Reilly cried. “You been out on the streets dressed up like a Mardi Gras this whole time.
“A scarf here, a cutlass there. One or two deft and tasteful suggestions. That’s all. The total effect is rather fetching.
“You can’t go out like that,” Mrs. Reilly hollered.
Such allusions aside, there is no direct descriptions of the Crescent City’s biggest bash. That’s odd, because the book’s events all take place in late winter/early spring. Nevertheless, with its kaleidoscope of characters, slapstick scenes, and humor ranging from raunchy to philosophical, Confederacy is gloriously Carnivalesque.
Over the course of the novel, relations between Ignatius and Irene become increasingly adversarial. Fortunately, John Kennedy Toole’s relationship with his own mother was decidedly more positive – a fact for which lovers of literature are eternally grateful. During his lifetime the author was unable to find a publisher; he died by suicide in 1969, just 32 years old. Finding a copy of her late son’s manuscript, Thelma Toole spent several years praising the book’s merits to anyone who listen.
She finally approached Walker Percy, who was then teaching at Loyola University. Skeptical at first, he was soon enchanted by the “gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy” His advocacy convinced the LSU Press to print the first edition in 1980.
Percy’s own first novel, The Moviegoer, was published in 1962 and won the National Book Award for Fiction. There are enough similarities between the books to suggest that Confederacy was written, at least in part, as a parody of the earlier work. Both are set in midcentury New Orleans. Binx Bolling, narrator of The Moviegoer is roughly Ignatius’ age. Both young men have are enthusiastic patrons of the cinema, although their motives differ:
When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life. Ignatius was about to say this to himself; then he remembered that he went to the movies almost every night, no matter which way Fortuna was spinning…Ignatius ate his current popcorn and stared raptly at the previews for coming attractions. One of the films looked bad enough, he thought, to bring him back to the Prytania in a few days.
In short, going to a show gives Reilly still another opportunity to sneer at the world around him. Binx’s obsession is more benign:
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books…what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in STAGECOACH, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in THE THIRD MAN.
There are many differences of course. For all his education and pretension, it is clear that Reilly’s origins are humble. Indeed, one of great achievements of Confederacy is its rendering of the “Yat” dialect of New Orleans’ white working class.
By contrast, we learn that Binx Bolling was raised in a spacious home, filled with fine antiques and domestic servants. The house is owned by his Uncle Jules and Aunt Emily. These aging relatives took charge of Binx’s education after his father was killed in World War II and his mother remarried.
Such a privileged upbringing seems to have brought little happiness to our narrator. He is gripped by a sense of detachment, an ennui which may or may not be related to a combat wound suffered in Korea. He seems determined to live a life in New Orleans which is not of New Orleans:
For the past four years now I have been living uneventfully in Gentilly, a middle class suburb of New Orleans. Except for the banana plants in the patios and the curlicues of iron on the Walgreens drugstore you would never guess it was part of New Orleans. Most of the houses are either old-style California bungalows or new-style Daytona cottages. But this is what I like about it. I can’t stand the old world atmosphere of the French Quarter or the genteel charm of the Garden District.
Ensconced in Gentilly, Bolling works as a securities broker. It’s a career he enjoys – but it baffles his relatives. We learn that before joining the air force, Binx’s father was a renowned physician. He himself showed an early aptitude for medical science. Percy’s book seems to argue that even if you take the boy out of the Garden District, you can never fully purge the district from the boy. This, inevitably, means Carnival is part of his birthright.
The action takes place in the festive season leading up to Ash Wednesday. While Binx’s malaise prevents him from fully enjoying the celebration, it is a running motif. At one point, Walter – a college buddy betrothed to Binx’s cousin Kate – tries to convince him to ride a float with the Krewe of Neptune:
You may not agree with me, but in my opinion it is the best all-around krewe in Carnival. We’re no upstarts and on the other hand we’re not a bunch of old farts—and…our older men are among the ten wealthiest and most prominent families in New Orleans
Among those older men is Uncle Jules, described as
the only man I know whose victory in the world is total and unqualified. He has made a great deal of money, he has a great many friends, he was Rex of Mardi Gras, he gives freely of himself and his money. He is an exemplary Catholic, but it is hard to know why he takes the trouble.
Emily is particularly vexed by her nephew’s refusal to parade:
My aunt looks at me in disgust – with all her joking, she has a solid respect for the Carnival krewes, for their usefulness in business and social life.
Indeed, Mardi Gras has been big business along the Gulf Coast for well over a century. Anybody with money, time off, and a reasonably healthy liver can visit and enjoy a vacation of orgiastic proportions. But that doesn’t mean all other economic activity ceases in the weeks leading up to Lent. Here’s Binx describing the atmosphere in his brokerage office:
But today there is not much talk of business. Carnival is in full swing. Parades and balls go on night and day. A dozen krewes have already had their hour, and Proteus, Rex and Comus are yet to come. Partners and salesmen alike are red-eyed and abstracted.
The passage contains only a subtle hint at the frenetic jostling for beads and other souvenirs, the fumbling seductions and boozy camaraderie of the season. Percy’s understated prose divulges insights more florid writers might miss. In the pages of The Moviegoer, we see New Orleans’ Carnival as lived by Bollings and Reillys, by Batistes, Nguyens, and all the families in and around that most magical, maddening of cities.
Bolling, Biswas, ... Boethius? My valve!
I haven't read The Moviegoer, but it sounds like I should. I like Faulkner books, but if they don't have it, Octavia Books is a bit of a trip from there but they're good folks.
Will have to read Moviegoer. Is it still.in publication or do I need to travel to The Faulkner Bookstore?