The idiot conspiracy

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The conspiracy of the idiots , English original title A Confederacy of Dunces , also published in German as Ignaz or The conspiracy of the idiots , is a picaresque novel written in 1963 by the then 26-year-old American John Kennedy Toole , who only died in 1980, eleven years after the author's suicide , could appear in the "Louisiana State University Press" publishing house and in 1981 received the Pulitzer Prize / Novel . The title is an ironic quote from Jonathan Swift's essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting from the early 18th century, namely: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him ".

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Fat, lazy, egocentric 30-year-old Ignatius J. Reilly (described by Walker Percy , who made the posthumous publication possible, in the foreword as "crazy Oliver Hardy , fat Don Quixote , perverted Thomas Aquinas united in one person") lives in New Orleans with his widowed mother Irene , whom he terrorizes with his inflated self-presentation and tirades against everything and everyone. In front of the telly he nagging about the program and stuffing himself with sweets and despite having completed his studies, he mainly ponders his digestive problems (especially his pylorus ).

After his mother's car accident, Ignaz, unable to live, has to work to his chagrin, first in the run-down trouser factory "Hosen-Levy", where he tinkers name tags, as an imperturbable anarchist first throws away company correspondence and incites the mostly black factory workers to revolt. After his release, he hired himself out as a hot dog seller at a mobile sausage stand, where he himself became his best customer and reflected on his ludicrous political ambitions. He meets characters who are almost as weird as he is, for example the political New Yorker Myrna Minkoff, who wants to enforce better sex for everyone. The structure of the book is based on Ignaz's favorite work The Consolation of the Philosophy of the Christian Martyr Boethius .

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During his lifetime there was definitely interest in the evil satire, but Toole was severely annoyed by the constant requests for changes made by the publisher Simon & Schuster , so that ultimately nothing came of it. His mother finally managed to win an influential advocate in the novelist Walker Percy, so the story was published 17 years after its creation. In 2011, a celebrated new translation by Alex Capus came onto the market. To this day, various attempts at filming have failed.

Steven Soderbergh commented on the project of a film adaptation that he believed there was a curse on the novel.

In the feature film Sideways , one of the main characters mentions the novel to a failed writer.

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Secondary literature

  • William Bedford Clark: All Toole's Children: A Reading of A Confederacy of Dunces . In: Essays in Literature 14: 2, 1987, pp. 269-80.
  • Joel L. Fletcher: Ken and Thelma: The Story of A Confederacy of Dunces . Pelican, Gretna LA 2005, ISBN 1589802969 .
  • Michael Kline: Narrating the Grotesque: The rhetoric of Humor in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces . In: Southern Quarterly 37: 3/4, 1999, pp. 283-91.
  • H. Vernon Leighton: The Dialectic of American Humanism: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Marsilio Ficino, and Paul Oskar . In: Renascence 64: 2, 2012, pp. 201-216.
  • Richard Keller Simon: Toole and Walker Percy: Fiction and Repetition in A Confederacy of Dunces . In: Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36: 1, 1994, pp. 99-116.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Soderbergh in Vulture . Retrieved January 30, 2013.