Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  Three who aspired to Candidacy I denied. Ira Hector for years pretended not to mind, so long as Reginald was a Candidate—their own conclusion. At his brother’s death he seemed more concerned; declaring at once that Grand Tutors are humbugs and that I’m holding out on him for a better price, he has determined to outwait me—to outlive me, if necessary. And he shall, Old Man of the Mall; hornier, wrinkleder, and stingier term by term, he will blink and snap there on his bench when I am no more. Rumor has it—perhaps fostered by him—that I owe my survival as much to his covert influence as to Lucky Rexford’s. But he can never pass.

  Neither, I fear, can Croaker and Dr. Eierkopf, though the latter, following my rout of Harold Bray (whom now Eierkopf vowed he’d called ein Fliehender, not ein Fliegender), declared himself converted by the testimony of his eyes to my “cause.” My advice to him was to join Croaker in darkest Frumentius, where together they might accomplish much, despite the imperfections of their partnership. The idea pleased him: certain Frumentian birds, for example, laid eggs the size of a man’s head; he might even rewrite his great treatise, once the fracture in his skull had mended. But in the meanwhile, could I not affirm the Candidacy at least of his roommate? What about the passage from the Scrolls, cut into Croaker’s gut: Be ye as the beasts of the woods, that never fail?

  “They never fail,” I replied, “because they’re never Candidates.” Gently as I could then I denied them, not failing however to thank them for their assistance, without which I could not have passed myself. They went off together to emergent jungle quads and have not since been seen—though I suspect they may be in terms to come.

  Two on the other hand to whom I offered affirmation of their Candidacy refused it: Stoker and Lucius Rexford. Of Stoker little need be said: had he not refused me, I should have had to refuse him; denial is his affirmation, and from that contradiction he—indeed, the campus—draws strength. The Chancellor, to be sure, denies this, along with Stoker’s-imputation of their fraternity. Partly therefore, his image in New Tammany and around the University remains bright, though there are those who maintain that his administration, however brilliant, has accomplished little of practical consequence. The Boundary Dispute continues unresolved, they point out, and the Chancellory has failed to take a clear position on many grave issues—for example, the vexing question of what really happened at Max Spielman’s Shafting. Popular opinion supports Bray’s authenticity and holds me guilty of Grand-Tutorcide; conservatives want me Shafted; even the liberals, though generally skeptical of Grand-Tutorship and opposed to Shafting, wonder at my never being brought to trial, if only to “clear the air.” Having thus alienated both ends of the Tower-Hall spectrum, Rexford finds it harder every term to keep me from the courts and disciplinary committees. His fastidious official neutrality, combined with much tacit support of my hard-oppressed “followers,” has given rise to an ominous coalition of far-left and -right. Not that they care in their heart of hearts about Bray or me; but they see in the “Founder’s Hill affair” an opportunity to lever Rexford out of office. Already the Senate has extended New Tammany’s statute of limitations for “crimes against studentdom,” among the number whereof Grand-Tutorcide is specifically included. My release this time may well spring their trap, and I have not forgotten Rexford’s smiling words on the day I offered to affirm him.

  From the host of my first Tutees, then, only Peter Greene and Anastasia remain to me. Between them they have assumed and divided the work of “spreading the word of GILES”—Anastasia about Great Mall, Greene to the outlying quads of New Tammany and abroad. A fervid enthusiast, Greene has found in extempore lecturing his true vocation, especially among the lower percentiles of the student body. Impressive he is, too, in his beautiful goatskins and fine red beard, when he points to his patchèd eyes and declares, “I have seen Him, brothers and sisters, and woe to them that drop His course! But I’m here to tell every flunkèd one of you today that it’s not too late, reach-Commencement-Gate-the-Gilesian-way-no-matter-how-black-your-transcriptwise! A-plus!” His optimism is boundless; in his mind, “Gilesianism” is already inseparable from “New-Tammanianism,” and he would make enrollment in the “New Curriculum” obligatory for all West-Campus studentdom. His wife, I understand, supports him in this endeavor; is in fact the organizing spirit of the “Gilesian Academy,” that fugitive society of drop-outs, cranks, and idealists which meets clandestinely out in the tracts of the Forestry Department, and into which Greene has put all his wealth and managerial know-how.

  Yet his labors have gained him little except contempt and vilification; even Anastasia, though she openly professes sympathy with his group, declares in private that what he calls “GILES’S Answers” are flunkèd misrepresentations. Her own hopes, more and more, are centered in her son. She has brought him up (in the face of Stoker’s derision) to believe that his mission on campus is one day to drive out what she ominously calls “the false proph-profs,” without mentioning any names, as his “father” once drove out Bray, and to establish “true Gilesianism” in every quad.

  How arbitrate between them? Greene has the advantage of a certain charisma and naïve force, as well as an efficient and affluent organization; Anastasia on the other hand makes much of the fact that while he may claim Candidacy, she is the sole living “Gilesian” Graduate on the campus, not to mention being bearer of “His” son. Daily their points of difference grow; their uneasy alliance, should their influence really spread, might someday turn into a schism as profound as that between East and West Campus. Thus far, my presence in the College, if nothing else, has deterred them from open denunciation of each other, and it was with an affecting display of classmateship that they jointly sponsored the “Revised New Syllabus”—even coerced me, with every show of respect, into this vain, inescapable labor, by threatening to send Tombo “off to school” should I not cooperate. I consented at once.

  Tombo, Tombo! How they hate to bring you to the Visitation Room! How it galls them to see us together, we who know nothing of Gilesianism, New Curriculum, or Revised New Syllabus, but see termless Truth in each other’s eyes! Watch out for Auntie Stacey, Tombo, apparently so doting, actually so jealous on her son’s behalf, who bullies you cruelly in pretended play. Beware Uncle Peter, whom you so resemble: don’t go with him to visit his sawmills; let him not lure you to the tapelift with all-day suckers! “Old Black George’s” daughter’s son, Tombo is; abandoned by his mother the fickle ex-secretary; raised in the Unwed Co-ed’s Nursery of the New Tammany Lying-In; named by me what time I plucked him from that heartless, well-meaning fold and made him my errand-boy. Despite his red hair, it is G. Herrold I hear calling in his fleecèd voice, so deep for a lad’s; his mother to my knowledge never numbered buck-goats among her paramours, but Tombo’s eyes are of the cast of Redfearn’s Tom’s and his noble line—hence my name for him. In those eyes alone upon this campus—not Greene’s, gone; not Anastasia’s, grown so hard; not “Giles Stoker’s,” all gleam and no vision—I see the reflection of myself, my hard history and my fate. He does not know, nor can I teach him, preciousest Tutee though he is; but if fate grant him time enough (he has, alas, neither Greene’s nor G. Herrold’s robust health, nor the wiry hardness of his namesakes or myself), and grant me to spirit him out of peril into some obscure pasturage—he will learn, will my Tombo! Yes, and one day hear, in his far sanctuary, a call, a summons …

  No matter. Tombo’s end is not given me to know, but I know my own, that rushes towards me like Triple-T. The wheel must come full circle; Fate’s pans, tipped a brief while mewards, will tip back, like the pans of history. No one these days need die for the curriculum of his choice, as in terms gone by; alas, would anyone be willing to? The passion that exalts is the same that persecutes; if New Tammany’s new Auditorium has no flogging-room beneath it, neither has it a soaring campanile above. Never was enrollment greater, or the average student less concerned for the Finals. Professors have ceased to kick the child who fidgets while they lecture: is
it not that they also care less strongly than they ought whether he Passes, or believe less strongly that their words will be his Answers? The present Chancellory—by this one praised, by that condemned—has like any other the vices of its virtues, precisely. To gain this, one sacrifices that; the pans remain balanced for better and worse …

  Nay, rather, for worse, always for worse. Late or soon, we lose. Sudden or slow, we lose. The bank exacts its charge for each redistribution of our funds. There is an entropy to time, a tax on change: four nickels for two dimes, but always less silver; our books stay reconciled, but who in modern terms can tell heads from tails?

  And as with the profession, so with the professor; so even with Grand Tutors. I go this final time to teach the unteachable, and shall fail. A handful will attend me, and they in vain. The rest will snore in the aisles as always, make paper airplanes from my notes, break wind in reply to my questions. I know they will steal my lunch, expose their privates in the cloakroom, traffic in comic-books under the seminar-table. My voice grows hoarse; the chalk will break in my hand. I know what Seniors will murmur in the stacks and Juniors chant at their torchlight rallies. A day approaches when the clerks in Tower Hall will draw up forms; Stoker’s iron tools are oiled and ready; it will want but a nod from the Chancellor to set my “advisees” on me in a pack. They will not remember who ordered their schedules out of chaos and put right their college; who routed the false Grand Tutor, showed the Way to Commencement Gate, and set down this single hope of studentdom, The Revised New Syllabus. Those same hands that lovingly one term put off my rags, sponged me in dip—will they not flip a penny for the golden fleece they dressed me in? My humble rank and tenure will be stripped from me, as were Max’s; my protégés—aye, Tombo, even you, even you!—will curse the hour I named them beneficiaries of my poor policy. Naked, blind, dishonored, I shall be coasted on a rusty bicycle from Great Mall. Past Observatory and Amphitheater, Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate, George’s Gorge and intersection—yea, past the remotest Model Silo, beyond the Forestry Camps and the weirs of the Watershed Researchers—I shall make my way, in lowest gear, to the first spring of the last freshet on the highest rise of Founder’s Hill. There, in a riven grove beyond the Shaft, one oak stands in the rock: its top is crowned with vine, its tap-root cleaves to the spring beneath and drives I think to the fiery bowels of the campus. At that day’s dusking, when lights come on in Faculty Row and my enemies raise their liquor, I’ll make a goblet of my hands, drink hot toddies from that spring. My parts will be hung with mistletoe, my cleft hold the shophar fast; the oak will yield, the rock know my embrace. Three times will lightning flash at a quarter after seven, all the University respeaking my love’s thunder—Teruah! Tekiah! Shebarim!—and it will be finished. The claps will turn me off. Passed, but not forgotten, I shall rest.

  POSTSCRIPT TO THE POSTTAPE

  Anticlimax, a vice in dramatic fictions, is clearly no failing in a work of the nature of R.N.S., whereas textual integrity is of the first importance. As agent for Stoker Giles (or “Giles Stoker”), therefore, and aspirant professor of Gilesianism in whatever college may see fit to appoint me, I must observe—reluctantly—that however affecting here and there might be the rhetoric of the document entitled “Posttape” (I myself am unmoved), there is every reason to believe it spurious. An interpolation of later Gilesians, perhaps—more likely of antigilesians—or an improvisation of Wescacus malinoctis, but not the scripture, so to speak, of George Giles, Goat-Boy and Grand Tutor. Nor of His son, whom the document so unfairly and uncharacteristically maligns. I include the “Posttape” with the manuscript proper only because I found it (much soiled and creased) stuck among the pages left in my trust by the Grand Tutor’s son, and feel unauthorized to delete what he so magnanimously let stand. That is, if he even knew of its existence; it was folded crudely and inserted between two random pages, as though in haste. Quite possibly it is the work of some crank or cynic among Stoker Giles’s contemporaries; indeed, the typescript languished unguarded so long on my desk, the “Posttape” might even be some former colleague’s idea of a practical joke.

  In any case, one ought not to take it seriously. Consider the internal evidence against its authenticity: in the “Posttape” the “Grand Tutor” puts quotation-marks around such terms as “My Ladyship” and “Lady Creamhair,” a practice followed nowhere else in the manuscript; also around “Revised New Syllabus” and “Gilesianism”—as if he had grown contemptuous of the terms! More revealingly, he mentions technological and cultural phenomena whose existence is never previously alluded to, such as airplanes and comic-books; and his references to nickels, dimes, and pennies, for example, seem flatly discrepant with the economic system of New Tammany College implied by the rest of the chronicle—and so important to an understanding of the Boundary Dispute. It may be objected by ingenious apologists that in one instance a reference of this sort is preceded by the ambiguous phrase “in modern terms,” which, though it patently means “nowadays,” might be said to suggest in addition a translation—by WESCAC or the Grand Tutor—of His University into our terms. Indeed, there is a sense in which the same may be said of the entire Syllabus—of all artistic and pedagogical conceit, for that matter, especially of the parable kind. But suffice it to say, in reply to this objection, that the Grand Tutor seems nowhere else in the vast record of His life and teachings to resort to this device—only in the gloomy “Posttape.”

  Which brings us to the real proof of its spurious character. Even if none of the above-mentioned discrepancies existed, the hopeless, even nihilistical tone of those closing pages militates against our believing them to be the Grand Tutor’s own. Having brought us to the heart of Mystery, “He” suddenly shifts to what can most kindly be called a tragic view of His life and of campus history. Where are the joy, the hope, the knowledge, and the confident strength of the man who routed Harold Bray, affirmed the Candidacies of His Tutees and readied Himself to teach all studentdom the Answer? “Not teachable” indeed! And the unpardonable rejection of Greene, of Anastasia, of His own son, in favor of a sickly mulatto boy with the improbable name of Tombo—

  But no, the idea is ridiculous. Some impostor and antigiles composed the “Posttape,” to gainsay and weaken faith in Giles’s Way. Even the type of those flunkèd pages is different!

  J.B.

  About the Author

  John Barth was born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland. As a student at Johns Hopkins University he was fascinated by Oriental tale-cycles and medieval collections, a body of literature that would later influence his own writing. He received his B. A. from Johns Hopkins in 1951 and his M. A. in 1952. He has held professorships at Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Boston University. He presently teaches in the English and Creative Writing programs at Johns Hopkins.

  Barths first novel, The Floating Opera (1956), was nominated for the National Book Award. The End of the Road (1958) was also critically praised. In 1960, The Sot-Weed Factor—a comic historical novel—established Barths reputation. Giles Goat-Boy (1966) was a huge critical and commercial success, after which he revised and republished his first three novels. Lost in the Funhouse, a book of interconnected stories, earned him a second nomination for the National Book Award. His other works are Chimera (1972), a collection of three novellas, which won the National Book Award; Letters (1979), an epistolary novel; Sabbatical: A Romance (1982); and The Friday Book (1984), a collection of essays. His latest work is Tidewater Tales (1987).