by John Barth
“Assemble at the Belly-exit,” he exhorted them. “In a little while I will pass judgment on George Giles, and he on me, and WESCAC on us both. And for all mere studentdom can know, one of us may judge falsely, or mistakenly; or both of us may; or neither. For a false Grand Tutor is no wiser than his Tutees, and may in his ignorance sincerely believe himself to be what he is not—or flunkèdly pretend to be. And even WESCAC may be wrong! What is WESCAC, that it should be exempt from error? Why might it not protect and affirm the GILES—truly, falsely, or mistakenly—or confuse a false GILES with the true, or choose by confusion, preference, or error a GILES who is not a Grand Tutor over a Grand Tutor who is not the GILES, or make any other of the varieties of wrong judgments you can imagine, or no judgment at all? Go to the Belly door and wait! See who emerges; hear what he says—then believe and do as you will. Very possibly you will be mistaken, wherefore it is written in the Founder’s Scroll: Many take the Finals, but few Commence. Dear, dear classmates: the flunkèd must always outnumber the passed! A-plus.”
“A-plus!” many of his auditors responded, and though Bray’s elucidation of their plight perhaps dismayed them, they obediently dispersed, the journalists excepted, who lingered to see what might happen next. Bray raised my mother from her knees, listening politely, even with interest, to her prattle of the passèd grandchild she believed to be in Anastasia’s womb.
“Yes,” he went so far as to tell her: “That will come to pass, lady. Without fail.” He then commended her to the keeping of her father, whom he also welcomed back to Great Mall, saying that the chancellory might well require his good offices in the terms ahead, in view of Lucius Rexford’s abdication of responsibility.
“Beardless youth,” Grandfather muttered, not altogether consistently. “Founder knows what they’re coming to; it’s coddle, coddle. If you want a thing done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
Bray patted his shoulder and bade him think well of my recommendation concerning the P.P.F. directorship, among the virtues of accepting which would be the opportunity to re-employ his former receptionist. Then he turned to me.
“Shall we go down into the Belly, classmate?”
7.
Rank as was his reek, even in my tolerant nostrils, I asked his pardon with as much humility as was compatible with dignity.
“As you know, Dr. Bray,” I said, “I used to believe you were a flunkèd impostor. I don’t think you’re flunkèd any longer.”
“But I may yet be an impostor?” he inquired, I think lightly. “No matter. Is it true you no longer regard yourself as a Grand Tutor? You could make a public statement to that effect, you know, and not go through the Belly. I say this purely from concern for your safety; I have no grudge against you.”
I believed him. For one thing, he had no further cause to regard me as a rival, either to his office or to Anastasia’s favors, which I would not seek. But some lingering pride forbade me to do quite as he suggested. He might not be what he claimed to be, I told him, but he was not simply an impostor, as I’d formerly maintained; there was something more to him, I could not say what. And while it was true that I no longer regarded myself as a Grand Tutor, I was not blind to the possibility that this opinion, like others I’d held, was erroneous, or that in my heart of hearts I might be holding it alongside the conviction that Failure is Passage.
“Ah,” he said. “To the Belly, then, by all means!”
I then explained that while I had no fear of WESCAC’s EATing me—which it well might do—I would not acknowledge its right to examine me, or anyone else’s save my own, for reasons that I’d readily set forth to him, but did not regard as the affair of the popular press. To the chagrin therefore of the reporters (some of whom intimated openly that they would “get even” with me) we made our way to the main lobby of Tower Hall, where, as on that fateful night some terms before, a crowd was collecting in the flickerish light, their anxiety nourished by alarums and rumors. Them too Bray urged to wait at the Belly exit; he and I then took the special lift to WESCAC’s Mouth—a lift guarded now by a squad of ROTC cadets in riot-uniform on account of the general emergency.
“What were you saying?” Bray inquired, utterly composed, and pressed the single, recessed button. We went down the dark shaft. During the descent, and in the red-lit antechamber, I described for him my day’s Assignment-work and my present intentions, in a neutral voice, neither asking approval nor inviting argument. I reviewed the conditions of Max, Leonid, Croaker, Stoker, Peter Greene, Ira Hector, Chancellor Rexford, Dr. Eierkopf, Dr. Sear, and Anastasia, my new advice to them and the reasoning behind it, and my confidence that, being all now confirmed in their failings, they were Candidates for Passage.
“I see,” said Bray. “Shall we present our credentials now?”
That was another thing, I declared: it was as inconsistent with the Answer to let WESCAC pass upon my credentials as to take my Assignment or the Finals on its terms. My ID-card was blank, virtually, and the faint GEORGE that a careful eye might discern yet upon it would serve, in my estimation, as well to identify Father and Examiner as Self: I was not born George; I was not born anything; I had invented myself as I’d elected my name, and it was to myself I’d present my card (already “properly signed”) when I had passed by the Finals.
“Passed them by, you say?”
“I’m going to flunk WESCAC,” I said. “Where’s the plug? I’ll pull it.”
Bray very likely smiled as he went to the scanning console among the tape-racks. “Don’t be silly, George; there isn’t any plug. You’d have to cut the Power Lines, or short-circuit them. But do you really think its’s worthwhile to take WESCAC so seriously? It’s only a symbol.”
This assertion I might have quarreled with: had Mother been impregnated by a symbol? Was it a symbol that had EATen the Amaterasus and G. Herrold, and would in all likelihood soon EAT me, if not the entire University? That incorporated in its circuitry all the dreams and definitions that tricked studentdom into believing in its own existence, and in the reality of its flunkage? Some symbol! But Bray clicked his tongue (and sundry buttons on the console) and forestalled these objections by reminding me that, the lift having automatically reascended, there was no way out of the Mouth except through the Belly, and no way into the Belly, as far as he knew, save by WESCAC’s admittance, upon inspection of our credentials. “Why not put your card in the slot?” he suggested. “That doesn’t commit you to anything, especially since you’ve eradicated the signatures. It’s as good a way as any to challenge the computer, if you take that so seriously. Mine’s already in.”
I’d not seen him insert it; no matter; I deliberately jammed my card into the slot, upside down and backwards with reference to its spring-term presentation.
“It seems quite reasonable to me,” Bray said, pulling the side-lever, “that the nature of the card doesn’t influence the opening of the port, but determines what happens afterwards. If we were Nikolayan agents, for example, I imagine the port would still open, but then we’d be EATen. Don’t you agree?”
I was too sobered by the dilation of the iris-shuttered port, like a great black pupil, to reply. I tried to think of My Ladyship, as appropriate to what might be my last moments on campus—but my mind and heart were blank as my ID-card; if Anastasia’s image appeared there at all, I regarded it without emotion. Nothing happened. Bray handed me my card, which had been returned into the console-cup in lieu of reply-cards, I presumed, we having made no inquiries. He pointed out as I pursed it that the exit-port was likewise impregnable; I had, alas, no choice but to reply to WESCAC’s questions—always assuming I was not EATen before they were posed. Naturally I was free to make deliberately “false” replies, to demonstrate either my contempt for the examiner or my conviction that Failure is Passage; he supposed too I might choose to push no buttons at all. He could not but imagine, however, that in that event I would remain in the Belly forever.
If I felt chagrin at this hitch in my plans, or suspect
ed Bray of tricking me after all into changing them, or wondered how he himself would leave the Belly, if I chose not to—I can’t recall it. Neither did I care, as before, whether he came with me or escaped by some secret means, without examination. I stepped through the port and flung myself down the entrance-tube into the warm black chamber, its spongy surfaces athrob. Bray tumbled after and against me at once, identified by his foetor, but we spoke no more. I sticked my way to the little display-screen, already phosphorescent with the inquiry ARE YOU MALE OR FEMALE. They would be, then, the same questions as before. I considered answering Yes, as I had last spring, on the ground that all those previous responses, like their maker, had perforce been wrong, and Failure is Passage. But on second thought I decided to reply more strictly in terms of my new point of view, itself an implicit denial of WESCAC’s authority and the presuppositions of its terminology. Therefore I found and pressed the left-hand button—the No, if Bray’s earlier instructions were correct, and my memory of them was accurate, and the button-box had not been reversed or otherwise altered in the interim—for what were male and female if not the most invidious of the false polarities into which undergraduate reason was wont to sunder Truth?
I think Bray sighed, or else the chamber-lining squished when I stepped to answer.
HAVE YOU COMPLETED YOUR ASSIGNMENT AT ONCE, IN NO TIME
Readily I answered Yes, for the triple reasons that I’d fixed Tower Clock in position, that the passage of time was anyhow a flunkèd delusion, and that, Failure being Passage, my non-completion of the Assignment, last time or this, was not ultimately differentiable from its completion. But after a moment’s further reflection I pressed the other button to change my answer, for on the loftiest view of all there was no I to complete the Assignment, as distinct from an Assignment to be completed, in the timeless, seamless University—which University itself, et cetera. The same reasoning led me, not without trepidation despite my convictions, to press No at appearance of the epithet GILES SON OF WESCAC; for not only were GILES and WESCAC distinctions as spurious as son and father, but, viewed rightly (if after all through the finally false lenses of student reason), the eugenical specimen whereof I was the issue had been drawn as it were from all studentdom, whose scion therefore I was; WESCAC’s role had been merely that of an inseminatory instrument, the tool of the student body. I braced myself to be EATen, and was not.
DO YOU WISH TO PASS, the computer asked finally, and ready for that basic, that ultimate question, with closed eyes and held breath I answered No, and again No, and No No No No No, as though pounding blow by blow into WESCAC’s heart the stake of my refutation! The screen blinked out at the first press and snapped sparks at the others; machinery behind the walls convulsed and roared, pitching me now to the floor, now against the tight-shut exit. Bray it must have been I heard groan. Indeed it looked to be the end, for though I felt nothing as yet in the way of brain-piercing rays (which I imagined must be the pain of electroencephalic amplification), there were arcs and sparks at both ports, which now sprang open; a stench as of burning rubber filled the Belly, and its walls constricted to grip me like Bill’s strait-waistcoat, only bent double. But before I could give last voice to despair, or commend to the Founder my twice-flunkèd mind, a convulsion of the acrid chamber expelled me thunderously, breech-foremost, through the port, out onto the frozen ground. A second blast put Bray beside me; then the port, instead of snapping shut, hung wide and still, quietly smoking. Co-eds squealed and clutched their escorts. The upheaval was not confined to WESCAC: every streetlight I could see behind Tower Hall was sparking, flashing overbright and then popping out like a photographic lamp. The Telerama-crews cursed and scurried, issuing free torches to the crowd. Two of their number came forward with microphones as I picked myself up (Bray had landed on his feet), still dazed by the force of my ejection, the confusion of the scene, and the fact that I had once more, evidently, come through unEATen. There were no anthems this time; the crowd was too alarmed to sing.
Of the first reporter to reach us Bray demanded, “What’s the trouble?” and was told that the East- and West-Campus Power Lines, according to sketchy reports from the scene, had either touched at some point or been moved to such proximity that an arc had flashed between them, short-circuiting at least temporarily the entire Powerhouse and causing no one knew how much damage to WESCAC and the campus generally.
“I see,” Bray said, undisturbed. Light from a mobile generator now fell upon us, and while I endeavored to assess my position—what the net import was of the day’s events, and what I ought to do next—he took the man’s microphone and called for attention.
“Now hear this, ladies and gentlemen! Now hear this, Tutees and classmates! George Giles the Goat-Boy, by his own admission and intent, has Failed All!” An angry cry came from the crowd, but as they moved to seize me Bray bade them stay and drew me to his side, asking cordially behind his hand to borrow my stick for a brief but necessary ritual. I understood: as I had formerly declared myself passed and he me failed, now that I owned myself flunked he would pass and Certify me to the student body, even dub me Grand Tutor with a rap on the scapula—his Assignment on this campus (as he’d told me in March, when things had gone badly) and the explanation of his survival! To be sure, not all was clear; indeed I was assailed by doubts and questions; but my troubled heart surged like the torchèd crowd. Granted, it was for me and no one else to decide my condition, nature, and policy, when circumstances should permit reflection; yet whether in failing I had passed or in thus passing failed, official public Certification would do no violence to the paradox and might serve in that parlous hour to pacify the crowd, for whom difficult truths were best expressed in simple mottoes, simple rites. I surrendered my stick.
“Thank you,” Bray said. “Please kneel.” The crowd hushed; likewise my spirit, strait-waistcoated in contradictions of which, not impossibly, one tap of the stick might free me at last. I knelt.
“This is how it must be,” Bray said, and smote me flat. Over me then, as I fought for breath (the blow had struck me full in the back, else my head would have been crushed), he declared through the public loudspeakers: “George Giles the Goat-Boy, cause and embodiment of all our ills: you are hereby denied admission to the student body. No probation; no reinstatement; no clemency. You shall be deported to the goat-barns at once, forever.” The crowd shouted approval. Still stunned, I was snatched up. “Tomorrow morning,” Bray announced to them, “I go to Founder’s Hill to work certain miracles on the occasion of the scheduled Shafting, which you are all invited to witness. Now I shall retire into the Belly of WESCAC to meditate, but presently I shall come forth, ascend to the Belfry, and beget a son.” He paused. “The Goat-Boy is yours.”
Each of these extraordinary declarations was greeted with astonished hurrahs. At the last of them the crowd set upon me, ignoring my proper sentence, and I saw Bray no more. My jail clothes were torn off, either deliberately or in the general pull and haul. My male equipment, shrinking from the cold, was made rude fun of, and I was pummeled—about the head, in particular, by two short-skirt co-eds whose heavy sweaters bore the initials NTC, as did the megaphones they beat me with. My hair and beard were cruelly pulled by knowledgeable skeptics suspicious of disguise. As in a horrid dream I was fetched round again to the dooryard of the Old Chancellor’s Mansion: already a sidecar was drawn up to the familiar streetlamp (now extinguished), from whose top the noose was rigged. Grandfather Hector shouted orders from the porch, gesturing with his crook at the Telerama-crew already established there, while his loyal receptionist (who had contrived to exchange her library-clothes for military uniform) made checks on a clipboard with a series of pencils which she drew from and returned to her hair. Whether the P.-G. was opposing or directing the lynch I could not tell. I wondered why Mother was not in her place. Stoker’s guards were, rowdy as ever; I saw no sign of their leader, nor any indication that they meant to thwart the mob. The monogrammed co-eds had left off clubbing me in order to
lead the procession; reaching the lamp-post they wheeled about smartly, went down on one knee, and with the aid of their megaphones and practiced gestures, set the crowd to chanting, “Get the Goat! Get the Goat!” As I was lifted to the sidecar-top and prodded with my own stick, I even heard, as in the spring, a voice cry “Rape!” and the familiar consternation at the Mansion-corner. With a bitter sigh and no prompting from my captors I thrust my buckhorn into place and put my head in the noose. Why wait to see My Ladyship rogered yet again, en route to her Belfry-tryst, by a once-more-fallen Peter Greene, and hear the EAT-whistle blow, this time no doubt in earnest? An end to my tiresome history, and the University’s! Once more I’d been all wrong, in what wise I was too miserable to care. What the heck anyhow!
Yet I paused a moment before committing suicide, for it was Hedwig Sear instead of Anastasia who shrieked round from the alley. Dressed in a thin infirmary-gown and clutching a rag-doll, she was pursued not by Peter Greene but by Croaker, whose cure had apparently not taken before Rexford’s amnesty freed them both. And clinging to Croaker’s trouser-top, half running, half dragging, was Dr. Sear himself, identifiable by his white tunic and gauze-bound head. He it was who cried “Rape! Rape!” At sight of the crowd Mrs. Sear stopped short, and as if smitten by modesty, pressed the rag-doll to the bosom of her gown and put a finger in her mouth. At once Croaker overtook her; to my further surprise, Dr. Sear fought—heroically!—in her behalf, but alas, succeeded only in facilitating the assault. For as the three tumbled campuswards his tugging brought down Croaker’s detention-pants. Even so the doctor was not done; he picked himself up, and heedless of the difference in their strength and of his own safety, struck Croaker with both fists. The dread Frumentian had fetched up his quarry’s gown and aimed his weapon; propped on one elbow, Mrs. Sear began to play with the doll, oblivious to her peril. One backhand swat felled the plucky doctor; he lay unconscious. Bucklike then, with a grunt and single slam that the tardy guards could not arrest, Croaker studded Mrs. Sear—back into awareness, one gathered from her cry.