A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Jonathan Swift—

What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale.

Merchants and charlatans gained control of Europe, calling their insidious gospel “The Enlightenment.” The day of the locust was at hand, but from the ashes of humanity there arose no Phoenix. The humble and pious peasant,

The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self-improvement were to be Piers’ new fate.

And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK.

History as described by Ignatius ...

“I think it’s wonderful you praying, babe. I been wondering what you do locked up in there all the time.” “Please go away!” Ignatius screamed. “You’re shattering my religious ecstasy.”

“I come about that porter job you got

advertise in the paper.” “Yeah?” Lana Lee looked at the sunglasses. “You got any references?” “A po-lice gimme a reference. He tell me I better get my ass gainfully employ,” Jones said

“Sorry. No police characters. Not in a business like this. I got an investment to watch.” “I ain exactly a character yet, but I can tell they gonna star that vagran no visi...

“You got any experience as a porter?” “Wha? Sweepin and moppin and all that nigger shit?”

“Hell, anybody do that, especially color peoples.” “I’ve been looking,” Lana Lee said, becoming a grave personnel manager, “for the right boy for this job for several days.”

This was really a deal, like a present left on her doorstep. A colored guy who would get arrested for vagrancy if he didn’t work. She would have a captive porter whom she could work for almost nothing.

“The pay is twenty dollars a week.” “Hey! No wonder the right man ain show up. Ooowee. Say, whatever happen to the minimal wage?”

“You work six days a week from ten to three. If you come in regular, who knows? You might get a little raise.”

“Where you keep them motherfuckin broom?” “One thing we gotta understand is keeping our mouth clean around here.”

“this place is worse than the army. She just hire you today?” “Yeah,” Jones answered. “She ain exactly hire me. She kinda buyin me off a auction block.”

“Wha she go shoppin for? A whip?” “Don’t ask me. Lana never tells me nothing. That Lana’s a funny one.” Darlene blew her nose daintily. “What I really wanna be is an exotic. I been practicing in my apartment

on a routine. If I can get Lana to let me dance in here at night, I can get me a regular salary and quit hustling water on commission.

Patrolman Mancuso’s love for the motorcycle was platonically intense. The forces of evil generated by the hideous—and apparently impossible to uncover—underground of suspicious characters seemed remote to him this afternoon, though.

Patrolman Mancuso inhaled the moldy scent of the oaks and thought, in a romantic aside, that St. Charles Avenue must be the loveliest place in the world.

Everything looked so calm, so prosperous, so unsuspicious. On his own time he was going up to see that poor Widow Reilly. She had looked so pitiful crying in the middle of that wreck. The least he could do was try to help her.

The address that Patrolman Mancuso was looking for was the tiniest structure on the block, aside from the carports, a Lilliput of the eighties.

The 1946 Plymouth was parked in the front yard, its bumper pressed against the porch, its taillights blocking the brick sidewalk. But, except for the Plymouth and the weathered cross and the mummified banana tree, the tiny yard was completely bare.

Then he climbed the worn brick steps and heard through the closed shutters a booming chant. Big girls don’t cry. Big girls don’t cry. Big girls, they don’t cry-yi-yi. They don’t cry. Big girls, they don’t cry … yi.

Patrolman Mancuso knocked savagely at the shutters. Big girls don’t cry. Big girls don’t cry. “They home,” a woman screamed through the shutters of the house next door, an architect’s vision of Jay Gould domestic. “Miss Reilly’s prolly

in the kitchen.

“Which one you want, the boy or the mother?” “The mother.” “Well, that’s good. You’d never get ahold of him. He’s watching the TV. You hear that? It’s driving me nuts.

“Oh, it’s you,” Mrs. Reilly said after a moment.

“Oh, my God!” Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. “What an egregious insult to good taste.”

“Do I believe the total perversion that I am witnessing?” Ignatius screamed from the parlor. The music had a frantic, tribal rhythm; a chorus of falsettos sang insinuatingly about loving all night long.

Patrolman Mancuso answered, listening to some sort of approaching stampede. “The children on that program should all be gassed,” Ignatius said as he strode into the kitchen in his nightshirt. Then he noticed the guest and said coldly, “Oh.” “Ignatius, you know Mr. Mancuso. Say ‘Hello.’”

“I wish that you wouldn’t bother me with this. That program always increases my anxiety anyway.” He smelled the milk before putting it into the pot. “I would suggest that you telephone that dairy immediately. This milk is quite aged.”

“The ironic thing about that program,” Ignatius was saying over the stove, keeping one eye peeled so that he could seize the pot as soon as the milk began to boil, “is that it is supposed to be an exemplum to the youth of our nation. I would like very much to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these

children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this.”

“A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect tha...

He billowed out again in the direction of the music, the shower shoes flapping loudly against the soles of his huge feet.

“Oh, my heavens!” a voice shouted from the parlor. “These girls are doubtless prostitutes already. How can they present horrors like this to the public?”

“If you do not leave,” Ignatius said to Patrolman Mancuso, who was hooking on his beard, “I shall call the police.” “He is the police, stupid.” “This is totally absurd,” Ignatius said and flapped away. “I am going to my room.”

Mrs. Reilly pounded at the door. “I don’t know what is happening to you, Mother, but I suspect that you are momentarily deranged. Now that I think of it, I am too frightened to open the door. You may have a knife or a broken wine bottle.” “Open up this door, Ignatius.” “Oh, my valve! It’s closing!” Ignatius groaned loudly. “Are you satisfied now that you have ruined me for the rest of the evening?”

“Well, don’t break the door,” he said finally and, after a few moments, the bolt slid open. “Ignatius, what’s all this trash on the floor?” “That is my worldview that you see. It still must be incorporated into a whole, so be careful where you step.”

“It smells terrible in here.” “Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring

efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

Get back on my floor.” “I already finish on your flo. I turnin into a expert on flos. I think color cats got sweepin and moppin in they blood, it come natural. It sorta like eatin and breathin now to color peoples. I bet you give some little color baby one-year-old a broom in he han, he star sweepin his ass off.

you ever try livin on my kinda wage? You think color peoples get grossries and clothin at a specia price? What you thinkin about half

the time you sittin up here playin with your penny? Whoa! Where I live, you know how peoples buy cigarette? Them peoples cain affor a whole pack, they buy they cigarette separate two cent apiece. You think a color mother got it easy? Shit. I ain foolin. I gettin pretty tire of bein vagran or tryina keep my ass alive on this kinda wage.”

George snatched The Consolation of Philosophy from under Patrolman Mancuso’s arm and slammed it into the side of his head. Ignatius had bought a large, elegant, limited edition of the English translation, and all fifteen dollars of its price hit Patrolman Mancuso in the head with the force of a dictionary.

The grandeur of my physique, the complexity of my worldview, the decency and taste implicit in my carriage, the grace with which I function in the mire of today’s world

all of these at once confuse and astound Clyde. Now he has relegated me to working in the French Quarter, an area which houses every vice that man has ever conceived in his wildest aberrations, including, I would imagine, several modern variants made possible through the wonders of science.

[After all, I do not believe that one must necessarily scrape bottom, as it were, in order to view his society subjectively. Rather than moving vertically downward, one may move horizontally outward toward a point of sufficient detachment where a modicum of creature comforts are not necessarily precluded. I was there—on the very rim of our age—when my mother’s cataclysmic intemperance, as you well know, catapulted me into the fever of contemporary existence. To be quite honest, I must say that since then things have been getting worse and worse. Conditions have deteriorated.

The world will someday get me on some ludicrous pretext; I simply await the day that they