Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  How did he account then, I demanded, bending near his beak, for his adoption of Anastasia and the open-handedness, so to speak, with which he’d reared her? For his readiness to sacrifice a golden business-opportunity in order to spare her a fate worse than flunking? There was no getting around it: his claim to have spanked his ward for fun and Stokered her for profit—like his claim to have endowed the Unwed Co-ed’s Hospital to gratify his lecherous curiosity and lower his taxes—had an inauthentic ring; whatever other motives were involved, such behavior had in it a streak of magnanimity, even of philanthropy!

  “All lies!” Ira Hector cried. But I had quicked him. He demanded to know where I’d heard those slanders, yet rejected my offer to sell him that information in return for the correct time. Then, wonderfully agitated, he insisted that although he and his brother Reginald were the abandoned get of an unwed freshman girl and some drunken janitor, his establishment of the New Tammany Lying-In and any favors he’d done his brother were purely selfish. Granted he’d fed and clothed young Reginald, pulled strings to get him a cadetship in the NTCROTC, arranged his marriage to the woman whom Ira himself had been courting, financed his campaign for the chancellorship after C.R. II, and appointed him director of the Philophilosophical Fund: his end from the beginning had been simply to profit from his brother’s offices and connections, and profit he had.

  These disclosures were surprising news to me; even so I failed to see what gain there was in losing his fiancée, for example, or endowing the Philophilosophical Fund.

  His smile was chelonian: “Why should I pay for the woman’s keep, when I could get her for nothing anytime I wanted?” Referring to Reginald’s wife, Anastasia’s grandmother.

  “Is that what you did?”

  “It’s what I would have done; but she died when Stacey’s mother was born. There’s always a few investments don’t pay off.” As for the P.P.F. and the lying-in hospital, they were manifold assets, he insisted, providing him with tax write-offs, opportunities for graft and patronage, and such entertainments as playing doctor with patient young ladies when the whim took him. He had, for example, assisted in the delivery-room when his niece, Virginia R. Hector, gave birth, and had quite enjoyed the show even though she’d brought forth neither monster nor GILES, as had been predicted in some quarters, but only Anastasia, a normal baby girl whom he then raised to serve his pleasures.

  “But you did try to help Anastasia,” I said, no longer certain however of my point. “She told me so.”

  Ira Hector winked and licked his lips. “I helped myself, like everybody else! Stoker says he gets a commission on her; I used to get her whole price!”

  Repellent as I found this remark, and its maker, I was skeptical of its truth. For one thing, Anastasia had confessed worse things unabashedly in George’s Gorge, but had made no mention of fees and commissions. For another, I observed that Ira Hector could not speak painlessly of her connection with Maurice Stoker: his neck-cords flexed at the man’s name, and his voice shelled over.

  “You pity her!” I accused him. “You pitied her mother, too, and your own brother when you were kids.”

  “Rot!”

  “And all those unwed co-eds! I think you pity everybody, and you’re ashamed to say so!”

  Now his eyes gleamed. “I pity you, you nincompoop!”

  “I bet you did business with Bray for the same reason Anastasia did,” I said. “Out of charity! You taught her to be the way she is!”

  “Charity be flunked!” Ira hollered. “Every man for himself!”

  It occurred to me to argue, then, more out of spite than out of conviction, that even his vaunted miserliness might be passèd, and its opposite flunked. Enos Enoch, it was true, bade men give all their wealth of information to poor students and become as unlettered kindergarteners, if they would Pass; but it seemed to me that this was to pass at the expense of others, those to whom one’s wealth was given, for nowhere did the Founder’s Scroll say “Passèd are the wealthy.” What nobler martyrdom, then, than to keep from men that which it would flunk them to possess, and hoarding it to oneself, flunk like a scapegoat in their stead?

  “You’re demented,” Ira said. “You think I’m going to pay you for claptrap like that?”

  “I’m not Harold Bray,” I replied. “I can’t be bought.” And seeing I would not get from him what I needed, I walked off.

  “Nobody has to buy you!” Ira cackled after me. “You give yourself away for free! Like Anastasia!”

  His taunt relieved me, giving as it did the lie to his talk of prices and commissions. I walked on. Students were beginning to throng Great Mall now, en route I presently learned to first-period classes, having eaten their breakfast.

  “You got nothing from me!” Ira called again. “I got all you had to offer!” His voice was triumphant, but when I turned to him his old face was fiercely anxious.

  “Then maybe you’ve helped me to pass,” I said, “and yourself to flunk. Thanks.”

  The Living Sakhyan, I observed, smiled as ever from the foot of His elm. I might have upbraided Him for failing me once again (indeed, His condition, reputedly a kind of Commencement, seemed to me little different from Eierkopf’s infantile paralysis. The one was unhelpful, the other helpless; for those in need of help it came to the same thing, and Eierkopf’s at least was not wholly voluntary, though he affirmed it in his relationship with Croaker and his unconcern for the welfare of studentdom); but before I could speak I was hailed by several of the unshaven botherers who’d precipitated the whole encounter. Their attitude was friendly: though indigent, they were not ordinary beggars, I was to understand, but vagabond scholars—“Beists,” in fact, who accepted tuition from Rexford’s grant-in-aid program but contemned the whole academic establishment as mid-percentile and conformist, committed to the intercollegiate power struggle, hostile to art, sex, and the human spirit, and generally, in their vernacular, a drag. They inferred from my appearance that I was of their fraternity; were frankly envious, in fact, of my garment, stick, and bagful of tokens; and while their position, as I understood it, struck me as something wanting in consistency, they were clearly earnest, and I was grateful for their goodwill. However, there was no clarity between us. They knew who I was, but would not accept it that I had truly only one name, for example, and was literally half goat by training. “We dig those symbols,” they assured me. And when I confessed that I couldn’t make out their argot, they thanked me for reminding them that the Answer lay in wordless Being rather than in verbal formulas. Yet their own inclination was plainly towards the latter.

  “How do you go about doing your Assignments?” I asked them. “Mine says Complete at once …” Some homely practical advice was what I sought, as one undergraduate to another; but they responded with disputation as passionate and abstruse as if I’d posed Dean Taliped’s riddle.

  “What is studentdom’s Assignment, when all’s said and done?” they demanded of one another; one asserted that there was none, as there was no Assigner; another, that each student was his own sole Tutor and Examiner; and so forth.

  “Please,” I said. “What I mean is, didn’t WESCAC give you an Assignment? It gave me one.”

  “What He means is the analytical, conceptualizing consciousness,” said one of my new classmates, as if speaking of someone not present.

  “The flunk He does!” another objected. “He’s putting us on, to remind us to be like Sakhyan.”

  “No, man!” insisted the first. “It’s the Form-is-the-Void thing. Like the categories aren’t real, but there they are, and we’re in them even though there’s really no us.”

  A third intently scratched his crotch. “But does WESCAC symbolize Differentiated Reality or the Differentiating Principle?”

  “Neither!” Number Two said contemptuously. “WESCAC symbolizes Symbolization. What He means—”

  “Please,” I said. At once they were respectfully silent. “The Assignment I’m talking about is a list of things I have to do to Pa
ss …”

  “See?” One said delightedly.

  “I’m supposed to Fix the Clock, for example, and End the Boundary Dispute …”

  “I’m with you!” Two muttered: “Space/Time thing!”

  “And I’m supposed to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship, whatever all that means …” “The Transcendence bit!” Three whispered.

  But they could not decide whether I was exhorting them to attack their Assignment (whatever it happened to be) on its own terms, or the terms of the Assignment, or the very concepts of Assigner and Assignee. And did my aphorisms signify that the “Wheel of Passage and Failure”—their term—was to be affirmed, denied, ignored, or transcended? Specifically, for example, should they go to class and take respectful notes, go to class and quarrel with their professors, or cut class altogether? I left them contending beard to beard so heatedly that they took no notice of my departure. For though their debate was incomprehensible to me, and I despaired of getting usable advice from them, their illustration had suggested something to me for the first time: as young Enos Enoch had enrolled in the manual-training course taught by His mother’s humble husband, so would I audit some ordinary professor, the first I came to, in hopes of learning something germane to my task. I would go to class!

  Great numbers of students were hurrying into a large hall not far distant. I joined them—rather, they made way for me, some mocking, others amused, most of them indifferent—in a vast low-ceilinged room divided into stalls by chest-high partitions. Each stall contained one chair and a console of sorts, far simpler-appearing than the ones in the Control Room and the Grateway. I saw no professor, humble or otherwise, but a number of young men in slope-shouldered worsteds and horn-rimmed spectacles were directing students into the stalls and explaining how to operate the consoles.

  “Who’s hazing you, frosh?” one asked me good-naturedly. I found the question meaningless, but identified myself with the aid of my new used card and asked whether I might sit in on the lecture, if there was to be one. The instructor leafed doubtfully through a roster of names on his clipboard, warning me that the class-rolls had just been read out on WESCAC’s printers and might be incomplete, especially in the case of special or irregular students.

  “George your first or last name?” His confidence was not bolstered by my reply; but as it happened there I was, under G: George. “I guess it’s you,” he said. “How the flunk can I tell? Not even a matric-number!” There was, however, a notation after my name to the effect that I was authorized by the Chancellor’s Office to audit any courses offered in the College, though not for credit. The man addressed me more respectfully:

  “Exchange-student, are you? Visiting this campus?”

  I supposed he might put it thus, and he kindly showed me into a stall. The machines were teaching-machines, he explained, one of many varieties in the College, all wired to WESCAC’s Central Instructional Facility. As a rule one addressed the device with one’s “matric-number” and was then instructed individually, the subject-matter, pace, and method being determined by WESCAC’s analysis of the student’s record and current performance, as well as his academic objective. The machines in this particular hall, however, were designed for the orientation of new registrants; the morning’s program consisted of a lecture recorded by the new Grand Tutor for that purpose. Doubtless noting some change of my expression, the instructor acknowledged rather sharply that attendance was voluntary: but he certainly thought it prudent for any new undergraduate to avail himself of the Grand Tutor’s wisdom before commencing his regular course-work and assignments, especially as it was Dr. Bray’s first formal lecture to the public. I had only to address the console (he did it for me, in fact, using the number on my ID-card, before I could decide to leave), don the earphones ready to hand, and press the Lecture-button to begin the recording. Should I desire elaboration of any particular point I was to press a button marked Hold, which stopped the lecture-tape, and another marked Gloss, which provided footnotes, as it were, to the text. Having explained this, he left the stall, a bit ruffled still at the idea that anyone could be uninterested in what after all was a historic event (he was himself a new instructor in the History Department), and went to give instruction to respectfuller students. But for all my disdain I pushed the Lecture-button, curious to hear what my rival conceived to be Grand Tutoring, and wondering too how he’d found time to put together a recorded lecture while partying at the Powerhouse and allegedly going into WESCAC’s Belly. I hadn’t managed yet even to visit Max in Main Detention! Through my headset came the clicking voice I knew—speaking, however, in a somewhat archaic style reminiscent of Enochist harangues:

  “My text today, Classmates,” Bray began, “is the First Principle of Life in the University, which you must clasp to your hearts during Freshman Orientation and never lose sight of after, not for an eyeblink of time, how clamorous or brave soever the voices that deny it …”

  I tossed my head impatiently, considered throwing down the earphones and leaving—but decided to hear what false principle the rascal had sharked up, what platitude or half-truth, the more substantially to contemn him.

  “On all sides,” he was saying, “you will hear platitudes and half-truths—as that the unexamined life is not worth living; that the truth shall make you free; that understanding is its own reward. Cum laude diplomates, even full professors, are not above urging you to greater efforts with such slogans, wherefor I conclude that either like all virtuosi—artists, athletes, yea Croaker himself—they ill understand the secret of their own greatness, or else they find it practical pedagogy to dissemble with you, as a child may best be lured from the cliff-edge by promise of sweets, when in fact his rescuers are candyless and want only to save his life …”

  I endeavored to sneer at the simile, but found it alas rather apt, if elaborate.

  “For whatever the case in Academies of fancy, one thing alone matters in the real University: to avoid the torture of remedial programs, and the irrevocable disgrace of flunking out! In short, to Pass!”

  Obviously.

  “Except this, what has importance? Very well to preach the therapy of swimming for injured legs, or its intrinsic pleasure: thrown overboard, one cares only to reach the shore, whether by sidestroke or astride a dolphin!”

  Which didn’t mean one ought to care for nothing but self-preservation, I thought to myself—but knew I was simply being captious, and recognized besides, not comfortably, a point like one I’d made to Ira Hector. Yet wasn’t Bray as much as inviting dishonesty?

  “To be sure,” he went on, “the Examiners are above corruption and intimidation; no Candidate ever bribed or threatened his way to glory; to attain it he must know the Answers, nothing else will serve. There is the sole and sufficient ground for prizing knowledge: all other preachments are, if not mere sentimentality, hollow consolation for the failed—who are ipso facto inconsolable …”

  I considered demanding a Gloss on ipso facto, a term of whose meaning I was not entirely sure; but my hand was stayed by both the brazenness of Bray’s piety (who had himself made deals with Ira Hector, Lucius Rexford, and Founder knew who else!) and the force of his next remark:

  “Get the Answers, by any means at all: that is the undergraduate’s one imperative! Don’t speak to me of cheating—” The word, I confess, was on my tongue. “To cheat can only mean to Pass in ignorance of the Answers, which is impossible. Otherwise the term is empty …”

  Experimentally, and also as a kind of impudence, I pushed the Hold and Gloss buttons. Instantly a matter-of-fact female voice said, “The term is otherwise empty inasmuch as the end of Passing, on the Grand Tutor’s view, determines all morality: what tends thereto is good, all else evil or indifferent. This Gloss was prepared by your Department of Logic and Philosophical Semantics. Remember: ‘The mind that can philosophize, never ossifies.’ ”

  Automatically the two buttons popped out again at her last word, and Bray’s voice resumed: “As you see,
then, nothing could be simpler in theory than the ethics of Studentensieben …”

  I let the term go.

  “But I don’t suggest that the practice is without its difficulties! In the first place none of you knows for sure what you’ll be asked, or whether your Answers will be acceptable. No two Candidates are quite alike, however similarly trained, and no Graduate, should you find one to consult, can say more than that he himself was asked so-and-so, to which on that occasion and such-and-such reply proved acceptable …”

  The point had not occurred to me, and reluctantly I granted its validity, even its value. And despite my hostility I found myself attending Bray’s next remarks closely.

  “In consequence, you will discover in the terms ahead numerous hypotheses about the nature of Examination, which can be sorted into two general categories: one holds that while the Questions are different for each Candidate, the Answer is the same for all; the other, that while the Question never varies, the Answers do. Whether, in either case, the variation is from term to term or Candidate to Candidate; whether it’s a difference in formulation only, or actual substance; whether it’s radical or infinitesimal; whether the matter or the manner of the Candidate’s response is of more significance, the general tenor or the precise phrasing—these and a thousand like considerations are much debated among your professors, many of whom, one sadly concludes, are more interested in academic questions of this sort than in the ultimate ones which in principle they should prepare you to confront. You undergraduates are to be pardoned (but alas, not necessarily Passed) for being in the main more realistic, if sometimes pitifully wrong-headed. Snatching at straws, you will badger your professors with down-to-campus queries: ‘Will we be asked this on the Finals?’ ‘Does attendance count?’ ‘How much credit is given for class participation, for extracurricular activity, for washing blackboards and beating erasers, for a neat appearance and respectful demeanor, for improvement over bad beginnings?’ Not a few of you are persuaded that independent thinking is the sine qua non, even when naive or erroneous; others that verbatim responses from your lecture-notes are what most pleases. Some, of a cynic or obsequious temper, will openly flatter your instructor’s vanity, hang on his words as on a Grand Tutor’s, turn the discussion to his private specialty, slap your knees at his donnish wit, and rush to his lectern at the hour’s end. ‘What other courses do you teach, sir?’ ‘Is your book out yet in paperback?’ You co-eds, particularly, are often inclined to hope that a bright smile may make up for a dull intelligence, a firm bosom for a flabby argument, a clear peep for a cloudy insight. And (more’s the justice) not one of these gambits but has succeeded—in some cases and to some extent! Given two young ladies of equal merit and unequal beauty, who has not seen the fairer prosper? Who has not observed how renegade genius goes a-begging, is actually punished, while the sycophant’s every doltishness is pardoned? A term’s hard labor in the stacks, an hour’s dalliance in Teacher’s sidecar—they come to the same. Who opens her placket may close her books; she lifts her standing with her skirts; the A goes on her Transcript that should be branded in her palm …”