by John Barth
No firmer was my purchase on economics, physiology, or moral philosophy, and even my competence in theoretical physics, for example, was pejorated by my attitude. At best I found it moderately poetic that every action had an equal and opposite reaction, or that an embryo’s gestation repeated the evolution of its phylum; for the most part I regarded natural laws with the same provisional neutrality with which one regards the ground-rules of a game or the exposition of a fable, and the reflection that one had no choice of games whatever (when so many others were readily imaginable) could bring me on occasion to severe melancholy. Indeed, if I never came truly to despair at the awful arbitrariness of Facts, it was because I never more than notionally accepted them. The Encyclopedia Tammanica I read from Aardvaark to Zymurgy in quite the same spirit as I read the Old School Tales, my fancy prefacing each entry “Once upon a time …”
Especially did I consider in this manner the Facts of my own existence and nature. There was no birthdate, birthplace, or ancestry to define me. I had seen generations of kids grow to goathood, reproduce themselves, and die, like successive casts of characters, while I seemed scarcely to age at all. I had lived in goatdom as Billy Bocksfuss the Kid, now I meant to live in studentdom as George the Undergraduate; surely there would be other roles in other realms, an endless succession of names and natures. Little wonder I looked upon my life and the lives of others as a kind of theatrical impromptu, self-knowledge as a matter of improvisation, and moral injunctions, such as those of the Fables, whether high-minded or wicked, as so many stage-directions. A fact, in short, even an autobiographical fact, was not something I perceived and acknowledged, but a detail of the general Conceit, to be accepted or rejected. Nothing for me was simply the case forever and aye, only “this case.” Spectator, critic, and occasional member of the troupe, I approached the script and Max’s glosses thereupon in a spirit of utter freedom. Which spirit, though there’s something to be said for its charm and effectiveness, is fraught with peril and makes a student hard to manage. I hold it as responsible as any other thing for the capriciousness of my behavior during this time.
Mornings and afternoons were devoted to my tuition. Indeed the entire day was, and in a sense the night, as shall be shown; not a minute but Max turned to pedagogical account. We rose as always just before daybreak with the herd, and for exercise I forked down hay or did push-ups in the peat. At the same time, while memory was still fresh, I would recount my nightsworth of dreams—of which there were a great many compared to the old days—and we would discuss them with reference both to general human nature and to the character of my particular mind, which was revealed to be a guileful, impious rascal. One night in my twenty-second year, for example, I dreamt of a terrible misfortune: at the sound of the shophar old Freddie stormed into the barn (that troublesome Toggenburger of days gone by, whom I had known only after his castration); he butted Max square in the chest and caused him to fall upon the patent docker, so injuring himself that he could never rise again. Then, fleeced oddly in angora, the brute set out to mount Mary V. Appenzeller, restored to ripe matronage by the dream. In vain her attempt to flee over the pasture fence; in vain my best efforts to defend her with a stick; the brute climbed her unmercifully, and I woke in terror at her short sharp cries. For all the villain Freddie had died eight years since and been gelded long before that, I hurried to embrace my sleeping keeper and assure myself he was not harmed.
Imagine my disgust next morning when, having heard my tearful report of this dream, Max said calmly as I forked: “What that means, you were actually wishing what I did to that Freddie was done once to me. Then I couldn’t take Mary to my stall like you used to see me do. That’s all that part means, Georgie.” Worse, he declared the Freddie of my dream to be no other buck than myself, who had indeed once felled my keeper with a blow to the chest, where no ordinary goat could reach. As for my apparent defense of Mary, it was but the reaction of my new human conscience to my former goatishness—which latter still secretly envied Redfearn’s Tom the circle of does (including Mary) that lustily had crowded round him on the day of his death. It was sufficient to observe that my crook-work in the dream was a vain defense, which in fact had been a deadly successful attack: my final wish, as revealed by this and other details, was that Max be castrated and rendered helpless and my human scruples forcibly put aside, so that buck-like I could mount the doe who’d mothered me!
“That’s an awful thing to say!” I protested. “It’s not so at all!”
“Then something worse is,” Max said. He hastened to add that there was nothing unusual or necessarily wrong about such a wish, nor did the fact of it imply that I hated my keeper and approved of what amounted to incest; the wish might not even be a current one—but its authenticity was as beyond doubt as my disapproval of it. To my question, Why couldn’t the dream just as well mean something admirable, such as that I fervently wished no injury to befall my keeper, and would lay down my life for my dam’s sake if only she could be restored to us? Max replied, “Every man’s part goat and part Grand Tutor; it’s the goat-part does the dreaming, and never mind how he carries on at night, just so we keep him penned up in the daytime! If you didn’t kill me in your dream, someday you might do it for real.”
Clear-seeing keeper in your tomb: forgive me that I disputed your grave wisdom. When I had been most nearly a goat in truth, I argued, I had used to dream straightforwardly, as it seemed to me, of eating willowpeel, butting my rivals, and humping all the nannies in the barn; from these fancied mating-feasts my “mother” was no more excluded (nor on the other hand singled out) than she would have been in fact had I come to proper buckhood during her lifetime, for among the liberal goats one sort of love never precludes another. I no longer dreamed overtly of such pleasures; why could it not be merely that my tastes had changed since the confirmation of my humanness? So far as I could see, I had no more desire for any doe, not even for Hedda of the Speckled Teats, who once had roused me to a deadly human passion. Further, I was mystified by the feeling of terror that I had awakened with: it seemed the effect equally of both actions in the dream, the smiting and the ravishment, yet upon waking it was only Max I’d feared for, not Mary, even in those instants before I realized she was past harming. Which was altogether fit, for that whole latter business made no sense! A buck didn’t “attack” a doe, anymore than a male undergraduate “seduced” a prostitute: he simply availed himself of her. And where attack is meaningless, defense is also; had a rutty buck ever truly got loose in the barn I’d have been quite as anxious on Max’s behalf as I was in the dream, but any concern in the other matter would have been for the proper order of our breeding-schedules, not for so preposterous a notion as a milch-goat’s honor! No, I insisted (rapping my points out firmly with the butt of my hay-fork on the floor), the dream must have some other meaning, and an innocent one, perforce. I had no wish to mate with Mary V. Appenzeller; for one thing, she was dead; anyhow she was not my real mother; even if she were, there would be no evil from goatdom’s point of view in mounting her, unless it lay in singling her out exclusively. It came to this, that I was not wicked: I was good. Undeniably I had struck my keeper once, and had slain my best friend—but those were tragic mistakes, one might almost say accidents; it was unkind even to recall them, proceeding as they had not from a flunkèd heart but merely from suffering ignorance, the same that had assaulted Lady Creamhair in the hemlocks …
“Yes?” Max asked politely. “You remember something else in the dream, Georgie?”
“No. And I won’t tell you any more dreams if you’re going to turn them into something ugly.” The fact was, I suspected Max had guessed more of that particular fiasco than I cared for him to know. Several times I’d seen his face grow thoughtful as I wound my silver watch: no doubt he thought I’d stolen it from Lady Creamhair (which was more nastily human, the concept or the suspicion?) and in his teasing spiteful way had concocted this cynical dream-theory for the purpose of trapping me into some confession
.
I drove my tines deep into the hay. The way Max watched annoyed me further: meekly, warily, yet stubbornly, as if expecting violence—as if inviting it. I pitched more than was necessary into the crib.
“Flunk this psychology of yours!” I cried. “Can’t anything I do be just innocent?”
The retort caught me with my fork poised—at shoulder-height!—to drive again into the hay. I leaned upon it instead (for though I’d learned to stand and even work erect without assistance, I was never to walk far unsupported), and, blushing briskly, made some apology. I was to report in mornings to come more heinous dreams (indeed, once I’d got the hang of interpretation I saw there was no wickedness my night-self didn’t revel in, the grievouser the better, so that where several explications seemed plausible I chose without an eyeblink the flunkingest, as most in character, until Max pointed out to my distress that “a priori concession of the worst,” as he called it, may be as vain a self-deception as its opposite) but none more troubling; in the red light of my blush I saw, not the dream’s full significance yet, but at least the guile and guilt of my bad temper. Blushes and apologies, apologies and blushes—in the monkish book of my tutelage they illuminate every chapter-head and -foot!
Max, of course, only shrugged. “So what’s the maxim for this morning? What it says in the Founder’s Scroll: Self-knowledge is always bad news.”
Our text determined by this or other means, we would discuss over breakfast its manifestations in literature and history, its moral and psychological import, or its relevance to earlier lessons. Such a one as the foregoing, for example, could well have introduced me to the “tragic view of the University,” to the Departments of Philosophy and Drama in ancient Lykeion College, to the Enochist doctrine that thoughts are as accountable as deeds on one’s final Transcript, even to the provinces of medicine or mathematics—for my tutor was nothing if not resourceful, and synthesis, it goes without saying, was his particular genius.
Where in fact it happened to lead us I can say confidently, for it was this same morning, when breakfast was done and we repaired to the pasture for more formal instruction, Max first brought up the fateful subject of Cyclology and Grand-Tutorhood. I have placed the day in my twenty-second spring, very near the end of my preparatory education. Redfearn’s Tom was seven years dead; his dainty Hedda—now middle-aged, plump, and beribboned for her butterfat-yield—had conceived a son by their sole unhappy union, which son himself (“Tommy’s Thomas”) was grown to primy studship: the image of his dad and a champion in his own line, as the late great Brickett Ranunculus had been. In the fullness of time and the freshening schedule it was perfectly in order that the two prizewinners be bred—I had been pleased to assist G. Herrold myself with the first of their matings, just five months previous—and so it came to pass that on the very midnight of this dream there was born into the herd a male kid who would be registered as Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom. None who saw him as we did next morning could have guessed the role “Triple Thomas” was to play in my future—indeed, in the history of West Campus. He was unprepossessing enough then, all hoof and knee and scarcely dry from Hedda’s womb. But see in retrospect how our lives engaged from the first: it was his mother’s labor-cries, very possibly, that set me to dreaming of nannies in distress, and the tragedy of his grandsiring has its place among the dream’s significances; it is the entry of his begetting in the stud-books that establishes a date for this conversation; and it was this conversation—occasioned in its turn first by the dream and again by the relevance of Hedda’s own past to its interpretation—it was this day’s conversation, I say, that like the original crime of my dear pal’s murder, turned me round a corner of my life. The very white-ash staff I chucked the new kid’s beard with, and hobbled upon out to my lesson; this walking-cane that supports me as I speak these words, and will to the hilltop where I shall want no more supporting: you have guessed it was the same I laid about with in my dream. Will you not cluck tongue to learn further, then, that I had whittled this same stick from a broken herdsman’s crook which once lay out in the pens? Dark ties; thing twined to thing!
“Self-knowledge,” Max repeated to begin our lesson, “is always bad news.” But he paused a moment. “You sure there wasn’t something else in the dream?”
Not prepared to bring up Creamhair’s name, and unable to recall anything else, I shook my head.
“So, well,” he said pleasantly. “You thought you couldn’t wish a flunkèd wish; now you know you can. There is a piece of knowledge about yourself, ja?” He began then to describe the contradiction between the old Founder’s Scroll, which exhorted students to accept their ignorance and repose their trust in the Founder’s wisdom, and the dialogues of Scapulas, wherein the tutor Maios declares to his protégés that the end of education is to understand oneself utterly. But he must have observed my inattention, for in the midst of raising the question whether the search for truth remained desirable if the truth was that the seeker is flunked forever, he stopped short.
“You’re not listening, George.”
In truth I was not, and with tingling cheeks confessed as much. After my initial protest against the interpretation of my dream, I remained quite agitated by its several images. Now it was not alarm, distaste, or shame I felt, but a vast ennui: a restlessness which though vague seemed rooted somewhere in what I’d dreamt. I was unable to think about self-knowledge or anything else; it seemed to me that the seven years since I’d struck down my friend had been one long class-period, from which now suddenly I craved recess. Then I had known nothing; now my eyes were open to fenceless meadows of information; I felt engorged to bursting with human lore. This George who dreamt upon a cot and figured logarithms over lunch—he was a stranger to that Billy who had used to prowl the pasture on moonlit nights. And yet some things were the same. Ah, I wondered now whether anything had really changed at all. If my kidship seemed itself a half-remembered dream, the years since were no waking but a deeper sleep, which only now perhaps I had commenced to stir in. My tutor’s voice seemed alien; Max himself did. That old face so familiar I could not have summoned it to my imagination—since our argument over the dream I found myself seeing it, as if for the first time. In particular that stubborn cringe, which suddenly I recognized was characteristic. Here was this growth called Max, utterly other than myself, with shaggy white hair and withered body and quiet old voice; with feelings and life of its own, whose history, nearly finished, consisted of such-and-such events and no others. He had done A, B, and C; X and Y had been done to him; Z, his little fate, lay just ahead. Max … existed! He was, had been, and would for a while yet be a person, truly as I. Very nearly I shivered at his reality, and that of the university of objects which were not myself. The dream had something to do with it: was it that I lingered yet in its sleepish margent? I was filled with an overwhelming sense of the queerness of things, a woozy repugnance, and a flashing discontent.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me!” I said more urgently than I’d meant to, and was alarmed to feel a stinging in my throat. Why, was I going to weep, then?
“Something I don’t understand is this,” I said carefully. “How can a person stand it, not to be … marvelous?”
Max frowned sharply and demanded to know what I meant. But I scarcely knew myself.
“The reason I’m glad I’m not a goat,” I began, “is that I couldn’t ever be like Brickett Ranunculus. But I swear I don’t see any point in being human either if all I can be is a regular person like the ones that come out to the fence. I wouldn’t like being G. Herrold, either, or Dr. Mankiewicz …”
“So who would you like to be like?”
I blushed again, assuming he wanted me to say “Max Spielman” and unable to. For all my spite and ill temper I had no wish to hurt Max’s feelings; neither on the other hand did I want my life and character to resemble his. Indeed it might be said that my spells of contrariness stemmed in part from this frustration; I admired my keeper above all morta
l men I’d seen or heard of, and yet in curious ways despised him as a model. Who could I wish to have been? I could not say Great William Gruff or Enos Enoch the Shepherd Emeritus; I answered, “Nobody I know of.”
Max nodded with some impatience. “Ja, sure, and Nobody’s who you’ll be, with that attitude.” If I was bored with my studies, he said, it was because I was losing sight of their relevance; rather, for want of a clear vocation on my part they had no measurable relevance. Let me but find a life-work, and the problem of boredom would solve itself.
“Never mind what your major is, just so you got one that matters over everything else. Study medicine; study poetry; study road-building—it don’t much matter what a man spends his life at, as long as it’s suited to him and he loves it …” As was his wont, he delivered this observation with a raised finger—the index, necessarily, since it was his maimed right hand. Happening here to catch sight of the mutilation he paused, lowered hand and voice together, and added: “And as long as he don’t hurt people with it.”
Nor should I imagine, he went on to declare, that devoting myself to one project would of necessity cut me off from the rest of the course-catalogue, as it were. On the contrary: the most encyclopedic geniuses in West-Campus history—Entelechus the philosopher, for example, or Leonardi the Professor of Art and Invention during the Rematriculation—had been passionate specialists in their way; their greatness consisted not in declining to commit themselves to specialized projects, but rather in pursuing such projects intensively wherever they led: from ethics to politics to biology; from painting to anatomy to engineering. He himself, Max reminded me, had begun as a student of the violin in Siegfrieder College; his interest in music had led him to study acoustical physics, mathematics, and the psychophysiology of sensation, from which background it had been but a short step—with momentous consequences!—to the sciences of artificial thought and automatic regulation. His flight from Bonifacist anti-Moishianism and his consequent involvement with WESCAC had fetched him deeply into politics and military science; the pressing of a fateful button had plunged him thence into philosophy, proctology (by a route not clear to me then), eventually into herdsmanship, and finally (which was to say currently) into the pedagogical problem of making a Phi Beta Kappa out of a goat-boy. Nor would he regard his career as finished when I left him to commence my own: for one thing, the experience of tutoring me had suggested to him unsuspected avenues in education and epistemology, which he looked forward to pursuing in the future; for another, he did not regard his past as a journey whose each new step left the earlier ones behind, but as the construction of a many-chambered house, in whose “finished” rooms he dwelt and tinkered while adding new ones.