Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[hughesl6363 AT aol.com]

I'd love to hear the speaker's argument. I think Percy's sense of humor is often overlooked. He has such a playful, facetious attitude. Who hasn't laughed out loud at places in Love in the Ruins? When Conde Nast Traveler asked him to write a piece on Southern cuisine, he didn’t wax poetic about New Orleans restaurants; instead, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to tell them about his favorite eatery, the Covington-area Waffle House.

I discovered an extended case of his playfulness some years back when I began to see in The Moviegoer many references to, of all things, The Great Gatsby, despite his frequent remarks about his influences being mainly European. (Check out the Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4. Please!)

I thought about chasing down the possibility Percy may have written Toole’s masterpiece myself, but I ran into skeptics, but consider the similarity of these two images:

“There came Perry [Como], seventy years young and snowy-thatched but hale as old Saint Nick himself, still wearing his open cardigan, color off a bit, face orange, lips violet, but all in good 3-D.”—Love in the Ruins, p. 97.

“ ’Perry Como’s face is all green,’ Mrs. Levy said with great hostility. ‘He looks like a corpse. You’d better take this set back to the shop.’ “—A Confederacy of Dunces, p. 82.

Percy couldn’t have been alluding to Toole, since Love in the Ruins was published before he ever saw Toole’s book. It just seems to me that such oddly specific references have to be more than coincidental.

It’s not really hard to imagine the writer who sent Colonel Ringo’s sidekick flying off that bridge astride his Harley-Davidson in Love in the Ruins might have conjured up the comical antics of Ignatius Reilly.

--Leonard Hughes
Hyattsville, MD

On Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at 08:19:37 PM EDT, Karl M. Terrell <kterrell AT stokeswagner.com> wrote:

I agree. Knowing Percy’s writing style and interests, it is hard to imagine Percy sitting down to write Confederacy of Dunces.

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 16, 2024, at 7:27 PM, RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com> wrote:

 Hmmm reminiscent of the Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare camp (but inverted) or something like it?Confederacy of Dunces, to my remembrance, shares little with Percy’s fiction stylistically or thematically. Nor was it Percy’s humor. Percy was sly and clever typically, not scatalogical in the way Toole is with Ignatius Reilly’s farting or broad in the way buffoonery is used to such effect by Toole. What do all y’all think?

Rhonda

  

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 16, 2024, at 2:03 PM, Michael Martin Serafin <michael_serafin AT hotmail.com> wrote:



I just saw that a featured speaker at the upcoming Percy Weekend event alleges that Percy may have written "Confedeacy of Dunces" rather than Toole. Percy supposedly hints at this in his archival papers. What to make of this?

Michael Martin Serafin

Chicopee, MA.

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