Why didnt it get published

>wasnt that good

uwotm8

it's a succession of goofs and gags without much substance to it

So you really didn't get it?

>implying that makes it bad

>"I can't convince anyone I'm smart by reading this book, so it's not good."

Ignatius J. Reilly is the incarnation of Veeky Forums, you, sir, included.

Except that Ignatius comes off as actually having some insight... just underneath a wildly narcissistic and delusional worldview.

This guy seems like a fuckhead

Igniatius is not aware of his insights though, they come in flagrant contrast to his own behaviour; which makes the book so funny.

Because most publishers read the first paragraph of a story and make their decision from there.

So many godawful books have gotten published purely from that.

>it's a succession of goofs and gags without much substance to it

Have to agree with you. Was reading this just today and I keep thinking it's some poorly-abridged version but no.

It's like O'Toole outlined the novel and wrote most of the scenes, then offed himself before actually linking everything together.

>O'Toole
You can't even read the author's name correctly, how can you criticize anything?

Yeah, exactly. Ignatius is basically what I imagine all of you as.

What is there to get aside from a cheap moral?

That's what life is, you fucking retard.

>it's like life, man
>unironically giving the most cliche meaningless reading possible which is usually only ever reserved for the phoned in 3 paragraph essays written by high school freshmen
don't breed

You clearly saw too much of yourself in Ignatius to enjoy it. I would also say "don't breed," but you won't be anyway.

>it's like life

Has anyone actually read The Neon Bible? I bought it last week to complete my O'Toole bibliography and thought it was pretty good, esp. for a 16 year old.

What is life other than a succession of goofs and gags, really? I can read the book just as that and enjoy it, but you can't? Why is that? What exactly were you looking for from it?

I mean this sincerely and with no ill will, please read more.

Seconded.

Life is the period in which a being is.

Because he only showed it to one single agent, who advised that he edit some parts out. I actually agree with this, because there's a lot of shit in the book that flat out doesn't work, like the dumb bar thing. It's a good book as it is, but I can't help to think it would have been an amazing book with some basic editing.

Toole flipped the fuck out, said he would never edit it, and never tried to get it published again, then went into a downward spiral and killed himself.

I think the message here isn't how evil the publishing world is, but how you should really check your own vanity and mental state before they undo you.

I sort of think that Ignacius represents Toole's undiagnosed schizophrenia

reasons it's good:

>Ignacius
>Myra
>Accurate depiction of New Orleans and the type of people you run into if you mill around the quarter

Reasons it's bad:

>Jones
>that scene where Ignacius faps to his dog

I tried to read it 14 or 15 years ago. Never finished it for some reason. It was decent but not good enough, probably... Age doesn't matter, Rimbaud was godlike at 16 years old.

The book is a window on a unique world. Less chapters = less vision.

Junkie by William Burroughs is only 100 pages long and has plenty of ''vision''

Toole's book doesn't work like that. It is a closed universe where every detail is precious. It needs more and not less.

the publishers were actually really kind to Toole and only wanted him to clean it up a bit but Toole turned out to be an autist

He raped his mother, Irene.

Im pretty sure he raped phoebe, not irene.

>You clearly saw too much of yourself in Ignatius to enjoy it. I would also say "don't breed," but you won't be anyway.

I would hazard to guess that most people who will reject the idea that "Confederacy of Dunces" is like life itself actually see little or nothing of themselves in Ignatius.

Speaking for myself, while I see in Ignatius certain postures that I enjoy adopting intellectually to shield myself from reality from time to time, that's all I see in him. The idea he is a realistic character is insane. He is a wacky, comic buffoon.

>implying people like Ignacius dont exist

have you heard of Veeky Forums

>why didnt it get published
It did though.

Great response. You really made an excellent point.

I didn't say that the book itself is supposed to be real to life, only that life itself is often little more than a string of goofs and gags, the joke usually being on ourselves.

This thread is atrocious. People hating on this book without qualifying their hate and attacking arguments nobody is using.

>I hate this funny book because it's got goofs and gags.
>If you like this book you need to read more.
>Lol no I'm not like Ignatius, YOU'RE like Ignatius!

get a load of ignatius over here

And don't even get me started about that bus trip to Baton Rouge.

No, seriously.

The book has a lot of layers and themes which aren't obvious under the gags. Race relations in the mid-century south, the cold war, the futility of education, etc. The Levy pants protest is essentially a miniture communist revolution against the bourgeois capitalist owner. And the fact Ignatius is completely oblivious to all of these points is genius. I think it could have used some editing of poorly developed storylines like his mom's friends and a lot of the weird bar plot.

>The Levy pants protest is essentially a miniture communist revolution against the bourgeois capitalist owner

Oh really...? Wow, I never fucking even thought of that goddamn shit. That's so layery and deep.

The point is that it's more than a running gag real. I'm not saying it's 2deep4u or anything remotely close but that people are mostly turned off because they read it without considering it having anything deeper than fart and masturbation jokes.

all you've done is just described the structure of the picaresque novel, which Dunces is. Guess we're tossing out that entire genre

Becasue it was too absorbed in itself.

or maybe they saw those "layers" you described and found them as skin deep and superficial as the fart jokes and the pinata characters?
I'll give it that it captures the atmosphere of NOLA though

How would you describe something deep then? Or why exactly is it wrong if it's shallow? How can you even tell it's shallow? Maybe the point is that communist revolution is about as substantive as farting and masturbating to a dead dog.

Sure I'll give you something
In Faust a major motif is debt. Obviously this is the main aspect of the story, Faust wagers an agreement of debt with Mephistopheles for his soul, not unlike the wager Mephistopheles makes with God at the beginning of the play (which is right out of Job). So throughout the play there are all these instances, even at the word choice level where you see "debt", "bond", "owing" everywhere. Not only that but a moral vortex starts forming, ie. Mephisto sucks Faust into sin, Faust sucks Gretchen into sin, Gretchen sucks in her brother and so on. The ideas in part I are all interpersonal, or interior and psychological. So when it came to part II, Goethe took everything he was developing at a micro level and applied it outwardly on the macro level. This meant, for one example, Faust falling in love with and pursuing Gretchen in part I turns into Faust falling in love with and pursuing Helen of Troy as the personification of Beauty itself, as the pure platonic form of "beauty." So back to the debt idea, the first couple acts take place at a castle and Faust with Mephisto are acting as advisers to the king who is out of his mind with worry, his kingdom is falling to ruin and he can't do anything for his subjects and land because the kingdom is bankrupt and he has nothing to pay with. So there is debt of king to his subjects, economic debt. But Mephisto and Faust have a plan, they tell the king of a mountain built upon a large reserve of gold. So the king sends people out, they dig dig dig and it's there, heaps of gold, the kingdom is free of debt. But we already know of Mephisto's counterfeit ways, so Faust asks him how did he know and the answer is, of course, the gold is all fake. Worthless rocks Mephisto fools them into thinking is gold. But the economy is saved. Unwittingly, the king establishes an economy based on debt rather than any actual worth (funny enough is how governments run economies today.) The contract is real, but the grounds for the contract isn't. That'll foreshadow what happens with Faust's deal later on. So it's a very simple idea, this debt, but it's interwoven throughout like an intricate skeletal structure from ideas down to the individual word choice across two plays and it is developed, explored from all angles, and elaborates on relevant relatable aspects of the human condition to form connections that we wouldn't have seen otherwise, and elevating them to a poetic profundity.
How's that?

Does every good novel need an all encompassing motif like this? Or are you limiting yourself on what you enjoy by having that expectation?

Of course not, you pinpoint literature on a relative scale. You wanted deep, that's your gold standard. You figure out how well each writer does with where they fall on that scale. As you read more and get older you start really feeling that you get a lot more out of a book when there is a lot to get out of it, so when you read something like this which reproduces a communist rally just for a laugh, it feels almost like a waste. You could get a laugh anywhere else like going to the pub with friends, or better yet, you could get a laugh from someone like Joyce who is both worthwhile and pretty funny at times. Sometimes people just want junk food entertainment and that's perfectly fine, and in fact Confederacy for Dunces is a step above what you would call junk food entertainment, but not nearly enough. See what I mean? Why should we settle for less?

Because a comedic picturesque novel isn't addressing themes, motifs, and ideas through the same means as Faust or a Joyce work? The comedy of Confederacy comes from juxtaposition of vulgarity and normalcy. Its "shallow" and poppy because it's main criticism is the shallow and hypocritical nature of modern life saturated within the south and, by extension, America. It doesn't make sense for Toole to include Faustian levels of depth because it's a comedic work focusing on irony. The ironic nature is largely subverted by the toliet humor because that's so over the top it dominates the novel but it's still present and multifacted. The normies in my class completely missed the underlying irony because the novel was too gross or they related every character to someone they knew in real life. For a gross, toliet humor novel it's earnest, cutting, and subtle which is why it's so highly read.

because there was a guy masturbating to a dog in the beginning, and the publisher didn't have the balls to try to get an unknown author through the hurdles of censorship for such grim possibility of reward.

>being in debt makes you vulnerable to abuse

Do you really need Goethe to tell you this?

I don't mean to judge how you enjoy books, but I've never been moved by this "literary merit means subtext" opinion. Not even teachers are excited to read book reports.

People remembered Faust because it was a good story. Do you really think you can't find some undergrad willing to imbue Confederacy with the same kind of phony depth?

>its main criticism is the shallow and hypocritical nature of modern life

This, and it does so by presenting a wide variety of characters from all races and all classes, all being swallowed and hurt by this nonsensical life, with no hope of finding a way out; all this under the disguise of a funny novel with funny characters. And after all the jokes, a very peculiar kind of sadness remains, which couldn't have been communicated in another way, by another author.

Each of the characters (who are all unforgettable, by the way) could have been something better and less mediocre, indeed, but for what purpose? To impress who, to help who? Even a small character like Dr. Talc--had he been brilliant instead of a hack, wouldn't it have been even worse for him, and even more useless for the world? And Ignatius, could he have been a great man instead of a miserable loser, in a different context? Maybe. But this question itself is pointless, because no one cares, no one wants to work for a better world, and any generous effort is vain. A Confederacy of Dunces is the story of an entire world's wasted potential, culminating with the author's suicide himself.

Yet... it's a funny novel.

It's a shallow critique because he needs to make shallow pinatas to bust apart. Their flaws are too contrived and forced for any meaningful exploration, it's mean spirited and eristic, and it shows in the ways it stoops. Ignatius -almost- escapes this due to how much time Toole spends developing him but that still doesn't address the key problems hanging over it.
that's a bit reductive user.

See here It's by no means the perfect novel but it's nowhere near as shallow as you're presenting it. And the value of novel isn't solely based upon how far you can dive into it. Confederacy has heart, insight, thoughtful observance, humor, and critique all within an (intentionally) rambling and ridiculous world. Toole specifically lampoons people who value complexity and overly intellectual persuits because it's limiting and as ridiculous as Levy's obsession with anything but his business and Minkoffs hypocritical liberalism. The book is great due to it's sincerity and loving depiction of society's worst people while also containing humor and wit.

Because Bennet Cerf was a mind-gaming piece of shit.

Thank God for based Walker Percy

Oh man I think there's common ground here, because Faust deals with the same problem. But see how differently Goethe treats it. Faust has spent nearly his whole life dedicated to study and he turns to magic and forbidden sorcery because he's so completely frustrated with erudition not actually providing any answers to his most burning questions. The question of the limit of knowledge plays into something Mephisto says early on about how no matter how great the man they always fall short of what they're after and come crashing down. So Mephisto comes along to the frustrated Faust and says "hey buddy, I can get you to finally feel satisfied and fulfilled" and Faust says "good luck, you have a bet." Goethe of course was writing during the enlightenment so it's not hard to read Faust as an indictment of the wholesale worship of knowledge and intellect so prevalent during his time. And Goethe puts this on a trajectory. People aren't all corrupted to the core, there's a dialectic involved, a back and forth.
Toole figures he has diagnosed everyone by the time he gets to them. Any moments of greatness, good faith, etc is an entire accident, and everything that is base, wrong, evil stupid, is the inevitable, it's standard, it's inherent. Goethe finds graceful tragedy in man's desire to leap for the highest, only to fall. Toole thinks jumping is stupid to begin with, and everyone's stupid for trying, and thus misses out the other dimensions which Goethe dives into about how people knowing this should compose themselves, be it as a matter of ethics or of spirituality. It's both a more rounded view, and also a more sympathetic one. The only one who mocks is the devil (esp in a pretty great series of scenes where Mephisto dresses up as a professor and toys around with one of Faust's students, telling him fucking girls is the most important area of study and shit).

>Toole figures he has diagnosed everyone by the time he gets to them. Any moments of greatness, good faith, etc is an entire accident

Not really.

ignacius.....easy on the hot dogs

the main vibe i got from the book was that it was about people who we tend to see milling around the inner city but who we dismiss as ''vagrants'' or undesirables out of hand.

>implying Minkoff isn't a relatable character

She's just the anti-Ignacius