A Chronicle of the Children the Bleary Mother Bore, Saved, and Devoured
"Welcome to the melting pot of voracity and indulgence. There where the void turns into art, vanity perishes in the murky waters of the river, and mothers and lovers dance in their nighttime delirium with the sheen of silk on their skin and the poison of their spell on their lips."
— Slogan from an advertising billboard salvaged from the frigid waters of the Mississippi River.
A mosaic of profound cultural miscegenation, the cradle of jazz and American music, a redoubt of dark African rituals and wild indulgence set against surrounding puritanism, New Orleans is a living homage to its roots that does not forget its literary children either.
The Adopted Son
In the mid-1920s, the city welcomed the first of them: William Faulkner. He ventured into its Caribbean brothels and savoured the aroma of jasmine and molasses, yet refused to be beguiled by it. Fully aware of the terrain beneath his feet, he adopted its bohemian demeanor while simultaneously mocking its snobbery and emptiness in his novel Mosquitoes (1927). Faulkner belonged to a generation that still retained the clarity of knowing who they were, drawing upon experience to grow and assert their voice in adulthood.
The Children of Absence
Decades later, its two most charismatic sons arrived—the offspring of a broken post-war generation in which the father had either vanished by choice or been crushed beneath the weight of a monstrous matriarch. Yet while one of them—Tennessee Williams—found in New Orleans the indulgent stepmother who allowed him to escape the terror of a toxic and suffocating mother (Edwina, who would ultimately devour his sister Rose), for the other—John Kennedy Toole—New Orleans became the extension of that very same voracious, monstrous mother (Thelma) who annihilated him.
Just as Williams could transform into Tom Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie, 1944), fleeing the deadly embrace of Amanda (Edwina) and leaving Laura (Rose) at her mercy like a broken unicorn trapped in the solitude of her glass menagerie—carrying a guilt that would eventually destroy him as well—Toole, an only child, was forced to be both Laura and Tom simultaneously: Thelma's delirium and its destruction, locked in an impossible contradiction from which his literary genius could not save him.
While New Orleans allowed Williams to establish the necessary distance to flirt with a devilish ambivalence toward his mother —Blanche DuBois— illuminating the darkness and cruelty of real streets populated by men like Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947), Toole—the son Blanche never had in fiction—was consumed by the grotesque arrogance of Thelma's maternal narcissistic delusion. A local incarnation of Blanche, irrevocably fused with Toole's own identity, threatened to annihilate him just as it did his character, Ignatius, should he ever leave the delusional, claustrophobic maternal landscape of his city.
When Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces, 1980 [written circa 1963–1964]) attempts to travel to Baton Rouge —a neighbouring, more modern, and "normal" city— he suffers a panic attack on the bus. Ignatius —Toole's alter ego—can only exist within the toxic womb of New Orleans. His salvation, however, depends entirely on his eccentric friend Myrna Minkoff—the New York hippie with whom he engages in endless debates—rescuing him and whisking him away to New York, fleeing the ambulance that, at his mother's (Irene Reilly) behest, is coming to lock him away forever in an asylum.
In an unexpected turn of the Wheel of Fortune that so obsessed Ignatius, the absent, submissive father manifested himself with the authority he had been stripped of—in the form of the United States Army—and claimed the motherhijacked son for a time (a year of military service in Puerto Rico). This liberated Toole from his oppressive perfectionist prison and spared him a direct confrontation with his all-powerful mother by shielding him from having to display ingratitude or express a desire for independence.
The anonymity of the recruit, subject to a functional, hierarchical institution that cared nothing for who John Kennedy Toole was or whether he fulfilled his mother's frustrated ambitions—an institution concerned solely with his execution of assigned duties—granted Toole the long-sought freedom to gain perspective. It allowed him to rewrite his adolescent novel (The Neon Bible, 1989 [written circa 1954]), which he had previously abandoned, turning it into a new work. In it, his protagonist, David—a helpless teenager at risk of becoming another Laura in the glass menagerie—returns in the skin of Ignatius: a hilarious, egomaniacal, and grotesque figure in constant combat against an equally stupid and absurd environment.
Ignatius served as the ultimate shield against the delusion of an insatiable, devouring mother, who was simultaneously the bearer of sensitivity and a love for culture that became Toole's guiding beacon in the dark—a sweet Blanche DuBois embodied by Aunt Mae in The Neon Bible, now returning transformed into the grotesque figure of Irene Reilly. Ignatius germinated from the same seed as Laura—the desire to please and show gratitude that leads to self-immolation before the voracity of maternal narcissism. Yet he also represents the annihilating catharsis of that exterminating maternal delusion: the unvarnished display of the grotesque monster such a delusion creates, in a desperate attempt at liberation.
Regrettably, the Wheel of Fortune spun once more for Toole, and this time not in his favour. Thelma, from whom Toole had initially hidden the manuscript for fear of destroying her, became the book's most enthusiastic fan. She ultimately proclaimed herself the mother of Ignatius, laying claim to the monster's maternity and irrevocably devastating Toole.
The son who had spent his entire life torn by an insoluble conflict —feeling that to save his mother he had to be an obedient, repressed, asexual, and cultured idiot in the eyes of the world, while to save himself before the world he had to be a traitor in the eyes of his mother— suddenly realized that it had all been a pantomime, a cruel mockery by Dame Fortune. By wholeheartedly embracing Ignatius (Toole's literary creation conceived in the tranquility of Puerto Rico) and his grotesque relationship with his mother (Irene Reilly), Thelma revealed to Toole that she had never truly cared about his goodness, his academic prowess, or his physical and mental suffering. For Thelma, the tyranny of the "perfect son" to which she had subjected Toole required no actual virtue—only the circumstantial condition of being her son, an extension of her ego. Ignatius, the monster born from Toole's pen as an act of vengeance against maternal voracity, was swiftly devoured and elevated within Thelma's delusion as an extension of her own ego that could restore her lost radiance, ultimately displacing Toole himself.
Furthermore, the New York editor—Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster—into whom Toole projected his desire for a Myrna Minkoff figure who would argue with him yet rescue Ignatius from the New Orleans asylum, turned into a new New York version of Thelma. Gottlieb demanded that Toole and his manuscript—his sole defense against total collapse—become the obedient, perfect, and brilliant child dreamed of by the New York publishing market.
Trapped in an unbearable paradox, in a "confederacy of dunces" that revealed itself as a tyranny of idiots, Toole was undone. He had sacrificed his life to be the perfect son for a mother who never cared for genuine perfection, seeking only to exhibit him as an extension of herself. When he attempted to rebel through the grotesque, hilarious critique of his literary creation, he collided with a world demanding the very perfection and neatness he was desperately fleeing. He found himself in a maze with no exit.
Obeying the editor meant submitting once more to the tyranny of the "perfect son." Remaining with his mother meant submitting to the tyranny of being the object of her delusion. Unable to serve two masters opposed to each other—who, beneath different masks, demanded the same thing: the annihilation of his identity—Toole fled into complete solitude toward nowhere, collapsing entirely.
A Confederacy of Dunces ends with Ignatius in the passenger seat, fleeing New Orleans for New York. Toole concludes the work with an exquisitely tender and evocative sentence that breaks through the harsh satire: Ignatius glances sideways at Myrna and, seeing her hair blown by the wind, presses his lips against the palm of her hand in a gesture of unexpected warmth and gratitude.
The Tyranny of Idiots, by contrast, ended with Toole in absolute isolation, suffocated after inhaling the exhaust fumes of his car. Beside him lay a letter addressed to his parents, which Thelma destroyed without revealing its contents after reading it, silencing him forever.
The Daughters of the simulacrum
In the era of television, social media, mass tourism, and the degradation of the landscape through the lens of photographic and literary selfies—when suffering is no longer physical or neurotic, but something aesthetic and decadent— Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles, 1976–2018 [series]) embalmed the decay of her settings in a velvety void that brought her wealth and fame. The streets of New Orleans became populated by nocturnal predators: impossibly rich, beautiful, aristocratic, and sophisticated beings who wander aimlessly, lamenting their immortality and existential emptiness. Suffering became nothing more than the product of a sublime aesthetic idiocy.
Perhaps infected by the same idiocy of the age, an aspiring writer arrived in New Orleans: Ylenia Carrisi. Fleeing, much like Toole, from a family delusion—her parents were Al Bano Carrisi and Romina Power (Ho perdonato mio padre, 2000), the "perfect couple" singing of "Felicità" as the soundtrack to the bourgeois dream—and terrified by the emptiness of the perfectionist expectations of her parents' design, she sought her own delusion in its exact opposite: the committed intellectual who disdains the emptiness of televised plastic and unreservedly embraces the emptiness of street bohemianism. In her blindness, she collided with the reality of the vampire romanticized by Rice—Williams's Kowalski—a street musician and criminal who helped propel her down the dark abyss of her intellectual delusion.
Perhaps Ylenia, who, like Toole, sought to escape the tyranny of the "perfect daughter" by becoming an apprentice to the grotesque Ignatius, found in New Orleans—as did Rice—the ideal stage on which to poetize the void of her era. Yet while Rice grew rich selling that backdrop to the stupidity of others, Ylenia drowned—like Toole in Biloxi—in the void of a scenery orchestrated by the tyranny of idiots.
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