Tony’s Philosophy of “Fornication”

Tony’s Philosophy of “Fornication” is a mock-serious theory of sex as both a measure of human identity and a spiritual practice. Tony Coniglia presents experience, stamina, technique, and affection as evidence for his authority, while the narration lets his extravagant certainty remain visibly at odds with the consequences of his conduct. The philosophy is at once a boast, a running joke, and a vocabulary that Tony and William Henry Devereaux, Jr. carry into academic life.

The Theory and Its Performance

Tony introduces the subject after a racquetball game in which William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s play improves but his defeat grows more lopsided. Tony calls the loss a humiliation; the narrator is unsure how to feel about it. In the shower, Tony sings Rigoletto at full volume, a familiar expression of his victory exuberance. Here the two men are alone, leaving William Henry Devereaux, Jr. as the customary disbelieving audience. The scene’s shift from a lopsided game to sexual theory gives Tony’s claims a performative setting: he speaks with the same uninhibited confidence with which he sings.

While they towel off, Tony says he has been thinking about women and, more specifically, about fornication. He claims he is far better at it now than he was at eighteen, citing greater stamina, desire, and technique, and insists he still has many good years ahead. He treats these claims as observations rather than boasts. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. laughs partly because Tony does not seem to recognize the boasting in what he is saying; Tony, by contrast, regards the subject as something to explore fully, almost as if conducting an analysis.

Tony’s central proposition is that fornication defines people more than any other human activity and is more spiritual than physical. He says that women understand this better than men, then explains his own desirability by claiming that women want everything but often settle for him. His argument moves between universal claims about human desire and self-congratulation: the philosophy makes his sexual confidence sound like a theory, without removing its comic vanity. When he wonders whether women would settle for William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the abstraction turns into teasing between friends.

Claims, Conduct, and Consequences

The narration supplies a concrete counterweight to Tony’s self-description: he has a reputation that includes faculty wives and undergraduate students. He says he waits until students’ final grades are in before dating or bedding them, a boundary presented as professional scruple rather than as an absence of indiscretion. Even so, his conduct has cost him a final promotion to full professor. He accepts that penalty with good grace. The contrast matters: Tony’s account makes experience a qualification and sex a source of spiritual insight, while the university’s decision registers a career consequence that his good-humored presentation does not undo.

Tony also turns the philosophy toward an episode involving a woman and his brother. He says his brother corrected his position, after which Tony returned to the woman and apologized. When William Henry Devereaux, Jr. asks whether she accepted it, Tony refuses to clarify what the pronoun refers to, insisting, “Fornication requires precision.” William Henry Devereaux, Jr. answers, “Not to mention patience,” and Tony adds skill, stamina, and affection before saying that she accepted all of it graciously. The story’s missing referent is not resolved; Tony makes the ambiguity itself part of the exchange. His insistence on precision therefore coexists with a deliberate refusal to specify what, exactly, was apologized for and accepted.

From Bedroom Theory to Departmental Language

After dressing, Tony says that he might welcome some fornication that evening, but has other matters to attend to. One is a request from Jacob Rose that he chair the English department’s internal review. Tony explains that he would otherwise have refused because, as he puts it, the word has come down from above to “fornicate you people.” William Henry Devereaux, Jr. answers within the metaphor, suggesting that the department has already fornicated itself. The exchange converts the term from a description of sex into a comic shorthand for institutional interference and the department’s own difficulties. Tony’s willingness to chair the review sits beside his joke about being subjected to it: the language makes an unappealing administrative task sound like an extension of his favored subject.

The scene briefly returns the banter to its campus setting. As the men leave the gym in the lengthening daylight, they notice a local television station’s van in the visitors’ lot for the dedication of the new Technical Careers Complex. The passing sight does not resolve their discussion, but it places Tony’s private comic vocabulary next to the university’s public events and institutional business. His talk shifts freely between the body, professional consequences, and department politics, refusing to keep those domains in separate registers.

Reuse and Comic Reach

Tony’s vocabulary survives beyond the locker-room conversation. At his house, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. finds Tony’s expensive computer setup unable to work despite efforts by university computer specialists, while Tony has wheeled his old Smith-Corona electric typewriter into the corner. Looking at this apparent retreat from the unusable equipment, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. tells him, “You were fornicated.” The phrase compresses a technological failure into Tony’s sexual idiom: the term now describes being defeated or badly served, not an erotic encounter. Tony then asks whether William Henry Devereaux, Jr. ever wishes he were single and good-looking, and the two grin at each other. The philosophy has become a private language between them, flexible enough to connect sexual boasting, work, frustration, and teasing without ever settling into a systematic doctrine.