FYI. This is not something I thought I’d be doing, but don’t mind in the least. Just forgive me if it seems a little haphazard. I didn't really have time to pen a proper review (as I believe was intended.)
For me, the key to tackling this book was the first 150 pages, mainly because I had read them before. In fact, I had read them over three times and then my progress always stalled, the book fell away, and I moved onto other literary pursuits. The same thing tried to happen this time around. However, I forced myself through it and I’m glad I did because, in the end, I really liked Confederacy of Dunces.
It was about a third of the way through that I really began to view the book as a farce. From our friend wikipedia:
A farce is a comedy written for the stage or film which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases, culminating in an ending which often involves an elaborate chase scene. Farce is also characterized by physical humour, the use of deliberate absurdity or nonsense, and broadly stylized performances.
While that definition is certainly limiting and not 100% apt, I think it may be a good starting point for discussion, at least in terms of how the story unravels. Anyway, I’m not really sure how this is going to go or how it is supposed to go, but I figure I’d offer a few thoughts and then perhaps a few questions…
…I don’t know if I can think of a more unlikable (yet entertaining) protagonist in a major novel. Perhaps Humbert Humbert? Even so, no-one even close at least in terms of a comic novel. Toole drew Ignatius’s personality so specifically appalling that I couldn’t help but enjoy hating him and the misfortune he brought upon others. Frankly, Ignatius is an asshole and my favorite manifestation of his character was in his yet-to-be-published “working boy” journals.
…Ignatius seems willing to let fate (or “Fortuna”) determine his courses of action, yet also seems greatly spurred by his nemesis Myrna Minkoff. The blatant sexual politics there were interesting, especially how sex/porn really came into play at the end of the novel. In fact, I found it almost surprising. So, does he let Fortuna guide him? Or not really? Or does that even make sense? Anyway, I thought the ending was perfect.
…I’m glad things seemed to work out for the people in the novel who seemed to have generally good intentions (Jones, Mr. Levy, Darlene, Miss Trixie, Mancuso) and the more immoral supporting characters (Lana Lee, Mrs. Levy, etc) got what was coming to them.
…I was initially struck quite a bit about the books attitude/message toward race (and slavery) but found that seemed to wane a bit as the book went on and it seemed to comment more and more on worker/employer politics in general. Whattya think?
…My favorite scene in the book by far? Ignatius showing up at the exhibit of the Ladies Art Guild with his concession cart and a sign that read “Twelve Inches of Paradise.”
Anyway, I’m not sure what happens next and there is still a lot more to this book that I haven't even begun to touch on here. Why let me do all the work though? Let those comments rip, people.
Posts
(I'm reposting this. Sorry, but my typos annoyed me.)
ReplyDeleteTHANK YOU, Paul. And well put. I have several thoughts rolling through my mind right now regarding this book, but today has left me a bit brain dead, so I thought I might touch on a few things, then maybe come back in a bit after a few more folks have (hopefully) chimed in.
First, unlike Paul, it wasn't until the end of the book that I started feeling tempted to abort. The first chapter was masterful and hilarious, and had me giggling from the first sentence. ("A green hunting cap squeezed the top of his fleshy balloon of a head." Perfect.) But for me, things started to drag a bit around page 275, and when the ending finally came, I found myself ready for it to be over. I liked it. I liked it a lot. But it felt a bit long, is what I guess I'm trying to say. I understand why Toole resisted advice to par it down, however I can't help but wonder if a wee bit of editing might have served it well.
As for the ending, I honestly hadn't made the Myrna/Fortuna connection, so nicely done, Paul. However relatedly, the deeper I got into it, the more interested I grew in the role of women in this novel. Ignatius, despite all his intelligence, is a giant child, so I suppose it makes sense that the major female characters tend to be either nagging mothers or over-sexed seductresses. The man is, after all, a walking, taking Id. I don't know how important all that is, but I suppose it's fitting that after his mother abandons him Ignatius needs another woman to swoop in and save him.
As for the more "controversial" aspects of the book, I can certainly see how writing about alcoholic women, strippers, blacks and homosexuals would have been offensive at the time, but it's hardly so now. Of course, his characters lean towards the stereotype, so I can also see how more critical, modern readers might find reason to object, however it's a comic farce, so creating characters who are more caricature than not is the nature of the beast. Basically, I did not find anything offensive here. How weird is it, however, that stripping was once so taboo. And in New Orleans, of all places.
Finally, I wonder how you guys feel about this novel winning the Pulitzer Prize. Think it deserved it? Me, I haven't quite made up my mind yet...
Hi everybody...
ReplyDeleteI'm with Paul on the fact that the first 150 pages dragged. For me the reason was that I totally, utterly, and almost violently despised Ignatius. The feeling was visceral. He disgusts me. It was only when I realized how much I was enjoying the exploits of some of the other characters (particularly Jones in the NIght of Joy) that I was able to enjoy the book as a whole. Ignatius, though? Not for a moment.
It seemed to me that Ignatius was extremely manipulative and was using his intelligence and education to justify pure laziness. I spent most of the book trying to figure out what he meant by "geometry" and finally decided that a world with "geometry" is one in which he doesn't have to participate in anything, be it work, society, or intimacy. Myrna infuriated him because she demanded participation from him (and from the world in general). I think his actions were all really reactions to Myrna, and that he blamed Fortuna when things went wrong.
But enough with Ignatius. I just loved the other characters! The use of blatant stereotypes was hilarious because it was so over-the-top it was actually tongue in cheek. Of course, that might be the modern interpretation of it, but still my favorite scene was the party in Dorian's flat where the gay men swanned about the living room while the lesbians crushed beer cans on their heads and punched one another in the kitchen.
So there's a few of my two cents on the book. What did you guys decide about "geometry"? Really, it bothered me the whole time I was reading.
Much like our government, Paul has provided a bailout to a bailout, and, like Congress, he did so under physical duress, and that was nice of him.
ReplyDeleteI took a lot away from the book, and though I'm going to focus more on what bothered me about Confederacy (me being me and all), here's a short list of some of the stuff I enjoyed:
--the well-evoked setting. I really got a sense of New Orleans in ways that Tennessee Williams and Anne Rice try to provide but just don't.
--the sex jokes, like "This liberal doxy must be impaled upon the member of a particularly large stallion" (215).
--the valve, especially toward the end, when it was "executing several maneuvers that exceeded in originality and violence anything it had done before" (370).
--story architecture. It's hard to devote what's really not that long of a book to so many hardly-intersecting characters and storylines. It's harder still to have such storylines dovetail effectively to conclusion. It's damn near impossible to do so in ways that satisfy both character arcs AND readers. Yet here we are. With about 40 pages to go, I was all "How's he going to get this all done so quickly?" and by the last page (which is a GREAT last page), I was all "Oh, that's how."
However.
There are two larger issues that nag at me in Confederacy I'd like to discuss (or at least rant at you):
First is what I'll call cultural appropriation. It irks me how Toole goes so far out of his way to make Ignatius, Myrna, and the Levys so eloquent, employing dialogue in spotless standard English. These are the four whitest, most educated characters in the novel bar none, so when such pains are taken to be sure their language is perfectly represented it only accuentates the piss poor "dialect" reserved for Ig's mom, Burma, Claude, Lana, Santa, etc. Given Ignatius' (hilarious) journals, where he appears to champion the causes of African-Americans and then homosexuals, but only under the auspices of more-or-less exploiting stereotypes of those groups, I have to wonder if the line that separates patronage and pandering gets crossed. Achebe called Conrad out on something similar thirty-seven years ago, so there's a part of me that wants to bely the book as racist/homophobic, or at the least inconsiderate to these populations. Anytime a white dude tries to represent "the Other," he's got to be careful--it's one thing for the gay community to reappropriate the word "queer" or for rappers to use the n-word, but it's quite another for the top end of such cultural hierarchies (i.e. we white people) to take such liberties, isn't it? Every time Jones ends an otherwise-thoughtful observation, usually about the nature of the American Dream for blacks, like "That bird been travelin to Night of Joy practicin and tryin,...Shit. You gotta give it a chance, cain treat it like it's color peoples" (170), with an "Ooo-wee!" or a "Hey!" or when Ignatius tells his mother he's "not in the mood for a dialect story" (216), I kinda cringed at what seemed to me to be Toole patting a minority on its well-meaning-but-ultimately-"less-than" head. His "weltanschauung" (51) instills not so much fear and hatred in me, but at least some awkwardness.
This first complaint is also augmented by what I'll call, in a Hegelian sense, Confederacy's teleological metanarrative, it's larger endpoint. In his almost-constant rants and writings and "indictments against our century" (52) (while enjoying the occasional cheese dip), Ignatius longs for a specific past: the time of Boethius, "the very basis for medieval thought" (160), which is to say an idealized balance between faith and reason where men are essentially good and only corrupted by society when they desire (mostly material) goods that distract them from their internal quest for virtue. (To me, Courtney, that's what "geometry and theology" means, a more ordered, reverent society.) On the one hand, such Platonic ethics are worthy goals--nobody's evil, really, we're all just misguided, and who can't get behind that sort of God Is Love ideology? But on the other hand, pointing out how things were better back in the day carries with it the implication that things currently suck. New Orleans/the French Quarter is, or was at the time, one of the most diverse, multicultural celebratory places in America, so to hear Ignatius decry it so often and so specifically is to listen to what amounts to a longer for a "simpler" time," which to me sounds like an era when white folk went about their business unimpeded. In Chapter 3, he lays out as much: "Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery" (59), miseries, implying to me, imposed racial and sexual tolerances, less sublimation to authority (religious or otherwise), and so on. This line of logic--yearning for an idealized past that was never that ideal in the first place--smack of conservative politics or at least resistance to progress and the equality of persons, and that leaves me flummoxed. That's right, flummoxed.
Ooh. I kind of forgot for a second that we were doing this with at least a handful of other lit scholars. Clearly, this ain’t gonna be like my mother’s book club :)
ReplyDeleteAs for the race/sexuality business. I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to at least recognize that an argument can be made that Ignatius the character is a racist homophobe or even that he is the very worst type: a racist homophobe who thinks that he is not. But again, I think this is implicit to the gross nature of Ig’s character. He fundamentally thinks he is better than everyone else in the novel white people included (except perhaps for Myrna who’d I’d like to argue he subconsciously knows is better than him.) My qualm would be in transferring that belief system to Toole (if that’s even what the argument is here.)
Considering that Toole was an educated white dude living in the deep south and coming of age in the 1950s, it was certainly possible that he, intentionally or not, held some semblance of intolerance about him. Also, his suicide clearly can lead us to infer some general imbalances in his character. But, from what I’ve read, one of the reasons this novel is so universally praised particularly by people of New Orleans is because of Toole’s portrayal of the city at that time, the language of it included. While I’m relatively certain Toole himself didn’t speak like any of the characters in the book (Ignatius’s bombastic pedantic speech included), I’m certain that many people living in poorer areas of New Orleans in the early 1960s did speak like Ig’s mom, or Santa, or Jones. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting and, Steve, your argument isn’t to mark Toole or his novel as culturally insensitive but rather to support the claim that certain authors, based on their race/class, shouldn’t be able to write certain types of stories, with certain types of characters, who speak certain ways? That is, that they should limit their own breadth of subject matter? That may be true. I, however, think Toole bails himself out by making his “Hero” such an unbelievable caricature of the pompous high society that once we as readers realize that very fact it allows us to view the whole of that story through that farcical Ignatius-based lens. Yes, there is my greater farce argument again.
It’s too early in the day (yes, at least for me, even at 1pm) to get into discussions of Hegelian teleological meta-narratives, though. However, I think that does touch on the business of “theology and geometry” that Courtney mentioned. I do agree that’s what Ignatius means, a more ordered and reverent society. And his use of such an awkward word, “Geometry,” further elucidates my point about Ignatius as a whole: he’s smart, but he’s full of shit. And, at least in terms of how his world works, he’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, and he hides behind trying to sound as if he is.
Hmm. Interesting stuff, guys. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m really enjoying the chance to share a novel, and then hear everyone’s thoughts. Me like book club. Book club fun!
ReplyDeleteAnyway…
I guess I'd like to start by going back to Steve's point about cultural appropriation. Despite what Ig wrote in his journals, never for a second did I think that he actually cared about the plight of either African Americans or of homosexuals. Ig is lazy, delusional, wholly self-centered, and completely full of shit. He sees himself as the epitome of intelligence and morality, but he’s all talk and no action. Thus, it absolutely didn’t surprise me that he was never able to put his money where his overly verbose mouth is, instead only leaving trouble and chaos in his wake. He’s a supreme contradiction: an insecure narcissist. What else can you expect from such a combination?
And as for the implication that Toole is a racist/homophobe, I just don't see it, and my radar is pretty sensitive to that shit. As Courtney pointed out, the characters were stereotypes, however clearly over-the-top, and for comedic, perhaps even satiric, purposes. I get that Toole’s dialects – particularly Jones’ – might be pushing the boundaries of what we, today, consider politically correct, however I have no idea how street-wise African Americans spoke in 1960s New Orleans. Can I really cry shenanigans? Furthermore, one must remember that there is a difference between what an author actually believes and the thoughts and feelings of the fictional characters he creates. Poe created some pretty violent characters. That does not, however, mean that the author was a violent man. Yes?
And Courtney, I totally get why you had such a strong reaction to Ig, even if I didn’t quite share your sentiments. I couldn’t stand him either, but I also couldn’t take him seriously. It’s hard for me to hate a person who is clearly so very ridiculous. I love that you hated him, though. I can't help but think that Toole would feel complimented that he elicited such a strong reaction.
Some people, when they go to museums, prefer to stand far away from a painting and try to gain a larger perspective of what the artist was getting at. Others like to press their noses up to the painting and focus on individual brushstrokes. I'm of the latter group, so when I read something of merit, I think, more than anything else, about the linguistic choices an author makes to communicate to his reader. This, unfortunately, makes me a bit of a Formalist (or a New Critic, if you had the right English dept. in college), and as such, out of favor with more, let's call them Impressionistic or histrionic ways of reading. Toole chose the words he chose carefully--I imagine him plinking away on CoD on a typewriter (or maybe a Big Chief) in Puerto Rico--and those decisions affect my interpretation and, to a larger extent, my enjoyment of his work. It's nice to imagine what Toole intended, or to bring my own "baggage" to the text, but as my boys Wimsatt and Beardsley pointed out 70 years ago, authorial intent is as irrelevant to a book's meaning as the effect it exacts on readers. Artists lose ownership of their work. Readers put on glasses that are rose-colored by our inescapable experience. The art, itself, hangs on the wall or sits on the shelf and is what it is and it can't be some other thing. At the end of the day, all I have left is the language--and by extension, the oppositional hierarchies, all the top/bottom, white/black, male/female, educated/"street", privledging/shunning that carries with it--of the book. And from that language (concrete examples of which I tried to share previously), I've largely divined that Toole practices a sort of anti-essentialism: regardless of what he set out to do, when I read his "lower" characters speak, it's in terms of assimilative blackface, only because the more privileged characters speak so impeccably. This is an oppositional hierarchy, an unavoidable one, and it's always been there, and it's always going to be there.
ReplyDeleteBut to be clear: I find CoD a wonderful read, very funny, and I'm glad to have read it.
(And to discuss it. Right on, Maggie: book club fun!)
I guess I've just always had a hard time divorcing any piece of art from the context of history. (Maybe it's the poet in me. Try reading The Waste Land in that light). That's probably another reason for the disagreement here. From what I remember, one of the big criticisms of New (or Textual) Literary Criticism is that it doesn't adapt well in all cases, particularly the interpretation of Realism or books that are representational of a certain situation or a certain place in time. By no means in CoD realist, but it's read by many (especially those who are familiar with mid-century New Orleans) as a satirical account of interactions between the variety of socio-racial-sexual classes of that time in that place. If that's at all true, I guess I was just more willing throughout my reading of any dialogue that could be questionably offensive by contemporary standards to write it off as yet another element of the farce Toole was creating.
ReplyDeleteBut, in the end, I don't think it really matters. Like you said, Steve, I as well really enjoyed the end result of whatever Toole was intending and was glad to have read it. Funny funny business.
Any other thoughts on Myrna Minkoff, anyone? I really think she is the sun the universe of the novel really orbits around in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I'm, pretty sure New Critics would just throw out all TWL's footnotes when "encountering" that text, and that'd be hard to do.:) My larger point was...well...it was all that stuff I said. I just like talking about the nature of interpretation, and this is as good a forum as I'm getting these days. It just bugs me when white people appropriate black culture, Beastie Boys excepted of course.
ReplyDeleteMyrna is a great off-screen foil, but in my mind she and Ig more orbited each other than she at the center. Her letters ("Dear sirs" always cracked me up!) revealed her to be if not every bit as delusional as Ignatius, at least in the same zip code. She always seemed to be undertaking some new enterprise not unlike our flannel friend, ones full of ridiculous hopes and unattainable dreams for some far-off utopia, except hers is more beatnik than Medieval. I love how they were essentially polar opposites in terms of world view and worldliness, but they still just endlessly fascinated each other. Complimentary characters, if you ask me.
And there's a New Historian in me that wonders if Toole met a similar sort of hippie chick at Columbia.
I, unfortunately, failed to put my lit crit pants on this morning, so I'll leave the discussion of New Historicism vs. New Criticism to those of us still knocking around university English departments. But, to touch one final time upon the dialect issue, I'd just like to say that I, like Paul, couldn't divorce the setting from the style, thus I didn't have a problem with how characters spoke. I do not, however, think this means that I only looked at the brushstrokes of this metaphorical painting. As I mentioned previously, all the characters were so ridiculous that I viewed them as being satiric caricatures. Thus, it made sense to be that their dialects be exaggerated, Ig's included. That is all.
ReplyDeleteNow, to Myrna. I loved her. I sort of viewed her as the female equivalent of the protagonist, even if they were opposites in many ways (sexuality, in particular). Like Steve pointed out, their attraction to one another seemed to lie in the fact that they fascinated one another. I think it's safe to guess that both of them were motivated by the need to impress the other, and this is largely what fueled their bizarre-o antics.
Actually, and to go back to my previous point, the introduction of her character was one of the first moments when I realized that Toole was, at least in part, writing a satire. If I'm remembering correctly, she was described as a young Jewish heiress from NYC who had spent a summer touring the South, teaching young blacks spirituals she had learned from the Library of Congress. Clearly, no one would be so stupid. This was one of many moments that felt very "Mark Twain" to me in its level of absurdity.
And maybe it's the subversive teenager in me, but after the novel ended I just couldn't stop wondering if she had been able to finally convince him to put out. Although, the idea of Ignatius having sex does leave me a bit nauseated...
P.S. - Hey, Dan. Where you at? What'd you think?
I don't think that Ig would ever put out. I think he's too manipulative; he needed Myrna to rescue him, so he gave her the idea that he might finally adopt HER "worldview" and bang away. But I doubt he'll really do it. Eeeeewww...
ReplyDeleteOh, Dan is still frantically reading the book and hopes to join our discussion by tomorrow.
Maggie, I'm interested in your idea of Myrna as the female equivalent of Ignatius, because I'm starting to see Jones as the foil to Ignatius. I don't want to get too far into this because Dan might want to talk about it once he finishes the book tonight, but it's interesting to me that Jones is the one who actually manages to enact some "sabotage" that results in real change in his small world.
And something else--did anybody find it interesting that Ignatius panics when he is faced with the, uh, "rest hospital"? It seems like a loony bin is just what he'd want: nobody asking him to work for a living, plenty of time to expound on his worldview. Yet he'd rather hang out with Myrna or live on the street. Maybe, deep down, he wants to participate in society after all (which probably means that, yes, Maggie, he and Myrna will eventually have a Freudian experience together). Ew.
OK. Finally Finished! I have read this series of posts and have to comment on them.
ReplyDeleteBut, first, my experience. I began the book laughing at the comic wit and how ridiculous this entire situation was. Maybe a 100 pages in I grew sick of reading about Ig, mostly because I discovered that I was reading about schizophrenia, and I know people like this. I didn't want to know what they do in their private lives. It's all I can do to stand to treat them for 2-3 hours a week. I really felt that Ig should have been committed and gotten some help. I kept reading, and eventually got over it about 50 pages later.
One thing I liked about the book was the imagery. Having been to N.O. to volunteer, meeting it's people, driving it's streets, I could see everything in my mind. I just wished that someone would have stopped at Cafe' Du Monde for some benets and coffee. I could see the alleys, the cathedral, St. Peter's street.
I don't know what Bourbon Street was like back then, I don't think that it was too different than today in that it was still a place for debauchery. I'm sure standards have been relaxed in the last several years (I'm no prude, but it made me kind of sick. Maybe I am a midwesterner). I'm sure there were still strip joints, so the subjects were probably not really taboo in N.O. The beats were also writing in the 50's and look how much sex is in those books.
Steve, I don't know how you can say that this is a racist novel. No book can be taken out of the time context that it was written in, if the intent of the author is to talk about that time period. (I do understand doing it with say Science Fiction that is written in the future, but the intent of that type of book is actually to begin a discussion about the present)
Are Faulkner and Twain racist? Maybe you should read their books again.
This book is a farce. The accents are a further illustration that these characters are very different from each other. Ig may have grown up in his mother's house, but he doesn't speak like her. He went to college and lost his accent. Go to N.O. and talk to people of different backgrounds. There are a lot of people who grew up there who have a funny accent that cannot be described and is difficult to place, there's a french swagger in it. There are others who grew up there and have a midwest accent. The black people who are native and poor speak differently than the white people who are native and poor.
I think that the genius of this book lies in the both the imagery of the book, but also in the way that all of the characters interact and use each other for their own purposes. All of these people are from different places but still interact. Try writing a book about Detroit in the 50's. There wouldn't be much interaction. It would be a white book, or a black book, a rich book, or a poor book. The fact that they interact with each other gives a better picture of how N.O. is. There may be stereotyping, but people use other people to help them to get ahead no matter who they are. An exception to this would be Lana Lee, but we see where she ends up.
I think that this book is also a study in an old belief that education does not necessarily get one ahead in life, so get off your ass and do something. Quit masturbating!
Courtney wanted me to clarify the using people bit. Here are some examples: Ig used the gay people he found to start a political party, they used him as an excuse to have a party(mutually beneficial). Jones used Ig to come and sabotage the Night of Joy(mutually beneficial). Mr Levy used Trixie, getting her to confess to writing the letter as it was mutually beneficial. Where as Lana was not gainfully employing Jones because he was black, and she knew she could get away with it. Most everyone in the book uses other people to get what they want, regardless of race, creed, or sexual preference.
ReplyDeleteOn another note: Myrna is absolutely Ig's reason for being and doing. She is right about his sexual hang ups. They are both nuts. In many ways, polar opposites. Opposites attract? She is adventurous, sexual, Jewish, rich. He is agoraphobic, self sexual, Catholic, poor. Maybe they need each other to complete the other's life experience?
First off, much like the other Paul, I hit a wall at 150 pages. Unlike him, I couldn't make myself slog through another couple hundred pages about a character that I despised just for the brief flashes of interesting, sympathetic characters. Maybe over the holidays I'll have some free time to revisit the book, but I think that Johnny Got His Gun will be a much higher priority on my list. I read a couple pages at the bookstore the other day and it's a much more compelling experience than CoD. It's a bit of an emotional read, though, so that could very well slow me down.
ReplyDeleteHowever, from my impressions of the book, I have to side with Dan and the others disagreeing that the book is in any way racist. As a matter of fact, I think a good argument could be made that the book is almost anti-intellectual, considering that the characters who speak in the most correct manner are generally the most terrible, hypocritical people in the book, especially our "hero" Ignatius.
To put it succinctly: A Confederacy of Dunces is no more racist for its portrayal of the black and poor of New Orleans than The Wire is for its portrayal of the black and poor of Baltimore.
Paul, I agree with you that CoD could be argued to be an anti-intellectual book. Ever since we picked up the dialect/racism/classism thread, I've been tossing Twain around in my head for some reason (probably because I'm teaching Huck Finn right now), so it's funny that Dan brought him up.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to CoD, as many arguments have been made that Twain's depiction of Jim was a racist blackface stereotype as have been made in Twain's defense. I can understand both sides, but I'm currently leaning on the side of Twain's defense. HF's larger lesson is that racism is bad, thus any beef someone might find in his depiction of Jim is forgivable. Furthermore, Jim is the only truly good character in the book, which is something that the "Twain is Racist" camp likes to overlook. He's the standard for humanity. The white characters - regardless of their wealth or intelligence - are largely ignorant and mean. When looking at the piece as a whole (which is how I choose to rock it), I do not find it to be a racist.
Further furthermore, HF is a satire. Satires rely on exaggeration to make a larger point. CoD is satirical as well. Thus, the characters are exaggerations. I agree with Paul K. that the intellectual characters, while the most educated, are also mean, foolish, annoying and lazy. I don't see how anyone can come away from this novel thinking that they are depicted favorably.
And that's the point - no amount of money or education can make someone a good person.