Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  Needless to say, I heard these things with heavy heart. To pass the Trial-by-Turnstile, even to penetrate Scrapegoat Grate—these were mere physical stunts, however difficult. But to deal with so suddenly established a pretender, to Pass All and not Fail Anything, when I had no firm notion of what Commencement was, or how to achieve it! Yet my distress became determination—stubbornness at least—under Maurice Stoker’s needling.

  “Your friend Bray’s got the edge on you,” he’d whisper, or urge, “Jump up and declare yourself, George, the way Bray did! Eat Lucky’s lecture-notes—that’d shut him up.” The temptation to do some such spectacular thing was strong, the more since I’d seen Bray’s success. And the situation was opportune: Chancellor Rexford’s address was doubtless being broadcast everywhere in New Tammany, perhaps all over West Campus, and my success at the Turnstile not only confirmed that I was no Regular Freshman but lent me a certain notoriety which might be made use of before it passed. So keenly did I wish to seize the moment, in fact, that only Stoker’s urging me to do so kept me from it—and perhaps a disinclination to follow Bray’s pattern. Uncanny, how the man played upon one! No sooner did I shush him than he said, “D’you really think you should sit still just because I tell you to move? That puts you completely in my hands.”

  “You’re not the Dean o’ Flunks, you know!” I told him angrily. “You may not even be flunked yet. Don’t be so proud.” I spoke only to spite him, and he laughed so loudly that the Chancellor had to pause in his speech; indeed, Stoker left the hall, laughing, as though at Rexford’s announcement that the topics of this morning’s address were Brotherhood and Practical Graduation. Yet even when I learned afterwards that this mocking exit, like his performance before the Turnstile, was part of the matriculation ritual (signifying the temporary retreat of the forces of Failure), and that it was only to withdraw at just this point that Stoker had entered the Assembly in the first place, still a redness in his scowl, something shrill in his mock, suggested to me that my words had somehow touched him.

  I sat then and listened quietly, but not at all easy, to the address, wondering whether Stoker truly meant to keep me from Grand Tutorhood, and if so, whether out of private flunkèdness or as agent for some cabal, and if the latter, who my real adversaries were, and why. Yet his mocking but confirmed my resolve and thus abetted me indirectly, even as his avowed contempt for Lucky Rexford only increased the latter’s popularity, and his claim to be Rexford’s brother lent credence to the Chancellor’s mild denial of any such relation. Remembering the advice that Dr. Sear had given me, I speculated whether just this effect was Stoker’s final intention after all; and if so, was it then benevolent, or ought I to frustrate it by yielding to his temptations? A briar-patch of conjecture! I thought with sympathy of Peter Greene’s aversion to mirrors, and to extricate myself repeated that I was okay.

  Chancellor Rexford declared, “A favorite maxim of mine is Entelechus’s remark that Graduation is a matter of degree. I take it to mean that the difference between people like you and me on the one hand and Mr. The Living Sakhyan on the other—perhaps even Enos Enoch—isn’t a difference in kind.” Lest the good Enochists start picketing the Chancellory, he hastened to add, it should be understood that he was speaking empirically, of things observable, not of revealed Answers. As a busy administrator of a large and powerful college dedicated to the principles of University-wide enlightenment and free research, he thought the dictum attractively combined the best aspects of both aristocratic and democratic institutions: it insisted on the real difference in people’s worth—“Let’s face it,” he smiled; “it’s better to be bright, handsome, healthy, and talented than to be stupid, ugly, sick, and incompetent”—while at the same time denying that the gifted were different in kind from their less lucky classmates.

  The play on his nickname drew applause from the audience.

  “I have enough faith in the Founder,” he went on, always smiling, “to believe He’ll give me an A for effort even if my notion of Him is all wrong. So I’ll tell you frankly that my ideas about Commencement are pretty much the same as old Entelechus’s. Graduation, I take it, consists in fulfilling one’s Assignment on this campus. Since studentdom by definition is composed of rational animals, it’s the Assignment of every one of us to have the best mind in the best body he can manage; and the Graduate must be a splendid animal, excellently rational. An All-College halfback, say, with a Ph.D.!”

  I gathered from the audience’s amusement that the remark was meant wittily.

  “Actually, I see the typical Graduate as a man about forty years old—young enough to be vigorous, but old enough to be prudent; he’s physically, intellectually, and materially at the head of his class, excellently brought up and educated. I see him as neither cowardly nor foolhardy, but firmly courageous; neither meek nor arrogant, but justly proud; an enjoyer of all the good things on campus in proper measure: food, drink, love, sport, friendship, art—even learning itself. In the same way I see him as generous, witty, tolerant, philanthropic, gentle, cheerful, energetic, fair-minded, public-spirited, sagacious, self-controlled, articulate, and responsible—and neither too much nor too little of any of those things! In his youth he served in some branch of the ROTC; in his middle years he helps administer his college or department; his later life he’ll devote to research and publication …” Everyone was chuckling by this time at the obvious correspondence of the image to the Chancellor himself. Rexford flashed his grin. “I haven’t decided yet whether it’s absolutely necessary for him to have a riot-wound, a political-science diploma, and a pretty wife. Probably not, if he comes from the right quad and has good connections.”

  More seriously, he said, while it seemed clear to him that men were quite variously endowed with character as well as goods and intelligence, he firmly believed in equality of opportunity. To be Commencèd, then, was in his view a thing somewhat analogous to being talented or comely: each involved an arbitrary native endowment and the good fortune to have that endowment developed, or at least not spoiled, in one’s early youth; but each was also capable of being disciplined and cultivated by its possessor or let go to waste, and became thus a matter of responsibility. Surely it was no student’s fault that he matriculated into this campus crippled or ugly; yet it was the winner of the race we applauded, the lovely face we turned to admire, and though we might praise a runner despite his limp, or love a woman despite her uncomeliness, at least we never normally valued them because of these defects. Never mind whether things should be thus; thus they were. And if it seemed to any of us that he did wrong not to question further these first principles—on which he had constructed his life as well as his administration—he called to our attention those characters in animated Telerama-cartoons who unwittingly walked off cliffs and strode upon the empty air assured and successful—until they looked down, saw what they stood upon, and fell.

  Though I was ignorant of the art-form he alluded to, I saw the point of the image and applauded with the others. In truth I’d felt the limitations of his premises, thanks to Max’s tutelage: to one like myself—a goat, a gimp, Chance’s ward and creature—it was by no means self-evident that my Assignment was to be an athletic intellectual with a handsome face and a charming disposition; or that if it was, Graduation consisted in fulfilling it; or that if it did, fulfillment lay on the middle path between extremes; or that if it so lay, anyone could mark with authority the middle path. But Lucius Rexford was his own best argument, so immediately engaging that my merely logical objections seemed beside the point. If such as he were not Graduates, I reflected, then to be a Graduate was a less happy fate than to be in his fraternity.

  “Now I’ll leave the Philosophy Department and get to my own,” he said, plainly pleased to have been up to the excursion and equally to have it behind him. “Since WESCAC’s AIM will be so much in the news this term, I want to talk about my conception of New Tammany’s aims, as I see them—especially in the Quiet Riot, which my critics think we’re l
osing.” Here his face turned serious: “I believe in light and order, my friends, and in moderation, discipline, harmony, and compromise. Extremism and disorder I conceive to be the enemies of enlightenment, and I despise them—moderately, of course. Now I happen to think it’s West Campus’s Assignment, and New Tammany’s in particular, to make the University such a place that every student in every one of its quads is free to fulfill his own Assignment to the best of his abilities. In fact all men are brothers (perhaps I should say roommates; I’ve never had a brother, but I’ve had plenty of roommates)—fraternity-brothers, let’s say—and they should compete like brothers, in light and order, in spirited but friendly rivalry. NTC will become a Graduate School the day we make that possible.”

  The same analogy, he maintained when we had done applauding, pertained to the several colleges: the competition of East and West Campus for leadership of the University should be like a championship chess-match between brotherly rivals. Indeed it was such a match; what made it fearful, he believed, was not so much the stakes of the game or the awful fact that each side had the weaponry to EAT the other, but the intemperate personality, if he might so put it, of our Student-Unionist brother—the fact that his Answer was not a kind of excellent normalcy and healthy rationality, but something extreme, and counter to student nature: a subordination of means to ends, and of individual Graduations to the Commencement of the Student Body—which was to say, the Student Union. Competing with East Campus was like playing chess with a violent-tempered brother who might shoot you dead to capture your pieces.

  To those well-intentioned liberals in the College who advocated “unilateral fasting” (as Max had), Chancellor Rexford objected that it was necessary for a dangerous brother like East Campus to believe that he’d lose in an EATing-match but win in a Quiet Riot, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to EAT in desperation, campus suicide, or revenge. “A terrible question, that last one,” he remarked, looking up from his prepared text. “Here we are with all this frightful EATing-capacity whose only purpose is to deter Student-Unionist aggression—there’s no really workable ANTEATer yet, you know. Now suppose they really should press their EAT-button one day—Founder forbid! In five minutes we’d all be destroyed, whatever we do. So tell me, do we press our button then? Do we EAT them out of sheer revenge? The answer, unhappily, is yes—WESCAC’s already AIMed to do it, as you know; otherwise there’s no deterrent. But how dreadful it is to have to commit oneself to a policy of revenge, in order not to have to commit the deed!”

  Assuming the deterrent to be effective, the Chancellor saw two grounds for optimism about the outcome of the Quiet Riot: if East Campus should grow more prosperous, it might grow more conservative and moderate; rapprochement might become feasible, and real rapprochement and exchange of students could gradually wither the objectionable aspects of Student-Unionism itself. Something of the sort could be seen occurring in Nikolay College even presently. On the other hand, if the economic situation in East Campus should grow continually more desperate over the semesters, and EATing-riot could be deterred, then their whole academic complex must crumble. The strategy, in that extremely dangerous situation, would be to encourage them up to the very last minute to believe that there still remained hope of their winning; but of these two possibilities, the Chancellor frankly preferred the former, as the less immoderate and perilous.

  “Professor Marcus,” he said lightly, “says that time is the enemy of West-Campus Informationalism. But given the ultimate conditions of the Quiet Riot, WESCAC versus EASCAC, this isn’t necessarily so.” If the future of the University was materially optimistic, he believed, then time was West Campus’s friend, the more so since Eastern teaching held it not to be. “It comes to this apparently cynical thing,” he asserted: “The basic ills of studentdom have been historically on the Student-Unionist side: hunger, ignorance, physical oppression, and the like. But when the basic needs of the student body are satisfied, its secondary drives are on our side, for better or worse: egoism, ambition, and the yen for comfort, as well as the desire for academic freedom and the Graduation of the individual.”

  I sensed a sharp interest in the room: it was that holders of elected office rarely spoke so candidly and unsentimentally on controversial matters, though I did not of course appreciate this fact at the time. But Rexford’s style was to balance conservative action with daring speech: to call all spades spades but not to play them recklessly, and while never losing sight of the ideal, to come to terms wherever necessary with what he called “the flunkèd realities.”

  Now he came to what he called the endgame of his imaginary chess-match: a surprising appraisal of what he saw as the “maximum threat” of Student-Unionism to the West Campus.

  “Suppose all my other Answers are incorrect,” he said. “Suppose the Quiet Riot remains quiet, but time proves to be the friend of Student-Unionism after all, and the much-heralded Decline of West Campus really comes to pass. Indeed, suppose the worst—” His voice was deadly earnest. “Suppose New Tammany College were utterly to lose the Quiet Riot, and were annexed to East Campus. What would happen?” There was strained laughter here and there in the hall, and some shouted, “No! No!” But Chancellor Rexford declared (in a lighter voice) his belief that after the initial dreadfulness of annexation—bloody proscriptions, military occupation of West Campus, a painful drop in the standard of individual student life in New Tammany, radical reorganizations of curricula and administrative machineries, and so forth—there must come gradually, over the terms, a mutual assimilation of East and West. The “free campus” was too vast to hold forever subject to an alien military-science department; a genuine All-University Administration, however repugnant its initial form, would have been achieved; the staggering military-science budget that presently bled the resources of both East and West would be no longer required. Though several generations of undergraduates would be raised on Student-Unionist ideology, the University literacy-rate would improve, as eventually would academic- and living-standards all over the campus. And as literacy, prosperity, and enlightenment advanced in a truly unified University, there could not but be, Dr. Rexford thought, a rematriculation of West-Campus values: of academic freedom, individual dignity, and the liberty of every student to labor at what he took to be his personal Assignment, in quest of his personal Graduation.

  “In short,” he concluded, “my view is the opposite of the tragic view. The author of Taliped Decanus believes we lose even when we win; that there are only different ways of losing. But I believe we’ll win even if we lose!”

  Much applause greeted this statement. Peter Greene especially seemed to share the Chancellor’s optimism: he stamped his feet and whistled through his fingers.

  “However,” Rexford said, “since you and I wouldn’t be here to enjoy that sort of victory, I’d rather win by winning. That’s why I think the true pacifism isn’t unilateral disarming of WESCAC’s AIM, or any other sort of surrender, but military deadlock—stalemate, even. In this chess-game with our dangerous brother, only very long-range strategy will win; when you read about our setbacks in the Boundary Dispute or trouble on the Power Line, remember that pawns and even an occasional Dean or Don-Errant may have to be sacrificed to draw our opponent out of position; to overextend him, so that in the endgame we can turn what appeared to be a stalemate into a checkmate. I happen really to believe it can be done, and for that reason I’m not afraid either of the present or of the future. Thank you very much, and welcome to New Tammany!”

  The close of his address was received with another cheering demonstration, which required some minutes to spend itself. When it was done an aide announced that the Chancellor, as was his custom, would answer a few questions from the floor before turning the registration-procedure over to WESCAC. The man had much impressed me, in particular that cheerful energy which saw WESCAC merely as a useful tool, and spiritedly denied that the student condition was in essence tragic—as Dr. Sear for example had held it to be. To one as subject as
myself to fits of doubt, to buckwheat ecstasies and hemlock glooms; who, fed on hero-tales, conceived the Answer as a thing fetched up from Troll-lands of the spirit, Lucius Rexford’s image was refreshment. Sweet to imagine a Graduation attained by sunny zest; by smiling common sense at work in bright-lit classrooms; by decent wholesome men well groomed and well intelligenced, eminently likable, with handsome wives and pretty children, whose life was unshadowed pleasure to themselves and others! While the demonstration was in progress I regarded Lucky Rexford’s sapphire eyes and thought grimly of Taliped’s—dark in the sockets of his mask and then bloodily extinguished. And Maurice Stoker’s, black-flashing as he bellowed through the Furnace Room, fired by disorder and every flunkèd thing. Even Harold Bray’s, that weirdly glinted when he flunked Dean Taliped from the stage and bid all follow him through the mystery to Commencement. Sear’s mirror then gave back to me my own—brown and burning in an unwashed face, shagged by unbarbered brows, passionate with uncertainty—and moved me to a clear and complex vision: I saw that however gimped and pleasureless my way, rough my manner, crude my tuition, outlandish my behavior and appearance, profound my doubts—I was nearer Graduation than Lucky Rexford, whose lot was so brighter! I could not say what passèd meant, but in an instant I saw that neither he nor Sear nor Greene, nor Stoker, Croaker, or Eierkopf, nor even Max or Anastasia, was passed; they all were failed! Dean Taliped, in the horror of his knowledge, was passèder than they, as was I in my clear confoundment; he was as passèd as one can be who understands and accepts that in studentdom is only failure. If anything lay beyond that awful Answer; if Commencement was indeed attainable by human students; then the way led through the dark and bloody Deanery of Cadmus, there was no getting round it; not through the clean, well-windowed halls of Rexford’s Chancellory. Alas for that!