Conspiracy of the imbeciles

Conspiracy of the imbeciles (original title: has Confederacy Dunces off) is a humorous novel of John Kennedy Toole, not published of alive sound. It is precisely depresses it and exhaustion caused by impossibility of making it publish and the rejection of almost all the American editors who push Toole to be committed suicide in 1969, at the 32 years age. The editor Simon & Schuster, especially specialized for his books of crossed words, to which he had been proposed in 1964, regarded the book as “poor”. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the mother of Toole and the writer Walker Percy, with whom it had made it read, the book was finally published in 1980 by the Louisiana State University Press.

Like underlining the irony of the title, these even which caused indirectly the death of John Kennedy Toole decree him the Prix Pulitzer in 1981. The novel is greeted today like one of the more great classics of the American humorous literature, and like one of the important novels of what is called literature of the South , i.e. literature relating to the States of the South of the United States or writings by authors originating in those.

the Conspiracy of the imbeciles was sold with more than 1,5 million specimens and was translated into eighteen languages. Many attempts at adaptation to the theater or the cinema, struck same curse as the unhappy attempts at Toole to publish its work, fell through or were a limited success.

The title is a reference to a quotation of Jonathan Swift, put forward: “ When a true genius appears in this low world, one can recognize it with this sign which the imbeciles all are leagued against him. ”

The history is at the United States, with La Nouvelle-Orléans (Louisiana), with beginning of the year 60. The main character is Ignatius J. Reilly, a man intelligent but lazy, hypochondriac and equipped with a logic extremely personal, reactionary and inspired by philosophy Scolastique. Impregnated reading of Boèce, Ignatius lives in his/her mother and is devoted to cover books “Big Chief” of its vision of the world. At the 30 years age, it is forced to seek an employment for the first time of its life. It will try during this inevitable confrontation with reality to make the company more “geometrical and theological”, while claiming “to release the world of the half-mongoliens and of degenerated which populate it”.

the Conspiracy of the imbeciles is one of most alive descriptions of the folklore of La Nouvelle-Orléans and its inhabitants.

The structure of the novel is copied on that of the favorite book of Ignatius Reilly, Consolatio Philosophiae of the Christian philosopher Boèce.

The style of Toole finds its echo in the madness Agnostique of a Philip K. Dick, the vitriolic review of America of Chuck Palahniuk or the meticulous liveliness of a Bret Easton Ellis.

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