Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  Of late, however, the tensions of the Quiet Riot, alarming rises in the student delinquency and divorce rates, and such exacerbating problems as overcrowded classrooms and the “drop-outs” from EAT-wave testing (which was held to poison the intellectual atmosphere and produce each term a certain number of defective minds)—these anxieties had lent a new signficance to the ancient rites, at least in the eyes of the Enochist Fraternity, who held that only a return to the teachings of the New Syllabus could save the University from self-destruction, and studentdom from final Failure. Many non-Enochists, though they found that particular Answer unacceptable, agreed on the seriousness of the problem, and remembering the Spielman Proviso in WESCAC’s Menu-program, called for a new Grand Tutor to change the AIM and give to contemporary West-Campus culture a fresh direction, a Revised New Syllabus, as Enos Enoch had done in His term.

  “That’s what that Greene meant a while ago,” Max said, “when he said the woods is full of Grand Tutors this time of year. Spring Term is when your old wandering researchers and dons-errant used to appear on campus, or do their big projects.” Furthermore, he declared, it was my selection, as though by chance, of this particular time of year to set out for Great Mall that had finally persuaded him of the possibility that there might be something to my claim to Grand-Tutorhood.

  “Ah, Max!” I broke in at this point. “Even yet you can’t believe me, can you?” My distress was so purely for his sake and not my own (there were tears of concern in my eyes) that he was moved to embrace me.

  “Dear Billy!”

  “George,” I corrected.

  “Suppose you were!” he muttered intensely, much as Peter Greene had done, and repeated the sentiment so familiar to me by now, and irritating: that it was beyond belief that so uncanny a chain of happenstance could be mere coincidence, and yet … By which was meant, I neither talked nor behaved Grand-Tutorially, in his estimation, and so the “chain of happenstance” must be coincidental after all, etc. “But if it’s not you it’s not anybody else around,” he added, as though with clenched teeth, “not in my lifetime; and hard as it is to believe in Grand Tutors and all that daydreaming, I think of Stoker, and I think of Eblis Eierkopf, and I know we’re going to EAT each other up if somebody don’t stop us!”

  He then confessed, excusing his bluntness on the grounds of short time and antiflattery, that he didn’t for a minute subscribe to the hope that any “campus-passing spook” could change the student mind in general—indeed, he was still old-fashioned enough to find such a prospect as depressing as it was unlikely. Nor, he had to admit in all affection, did he regard me as a mental giant: excuse him, he had known prodigious intelligences in his day, in both scientifical and philosophical departments, and they were different from me, no offense intended. Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement—a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with his comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself—and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture—followed demonstrably—in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion—the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman’s Law—ontogeny repeats cosmogeny—and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence …

  “Look how we been acting,” he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; “the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren’t we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University’s a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn’t been so childish, we couldn’t hope it’ll reach maturity.” Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood (“… ancient Lykeion, Remus, T’ang …”) which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naïve general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like—all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max’s description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power—as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred—and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.

  “What brings a boy through?” he asked of his four-fingered hand. “Good guidance, for one thing; a character that’s stronger than its weaknesses, and flexible; and good luck.” The guidance of the University, he reasoned, was such root pedagogical documents as the Moishianic Code, the Founder’s Scroll, the Colloquiums of Enos Enoch, the Footnotes to Sakhyan: they did not of course come from “outside”—one mustn’t overdo the analogy—but from individual students who had matured and Graduated over the semesters—from “inside,” if I pleased; they were the best Answers that studentdom had devised, came early in its “upbringing,” and comprised the strong but inconsistent conscience of the University. The healthy character he judged to be partly a matter of chance and partly of this “early training,” and luck he felt involved the possibility of catastrophic accident: adolescents took chances and were by nature strenuous and impulsive; Campus Riot III might occur after all and studentdom be EATen, as a prep-school boy might resort to delinquency or suicide, or be killed in a motorcycle race.

  “So what are the odds?” he asked further, again rhetorically, and paced me more vigorously back and forth before the darkened Turnstile. I listened intently, for though most of what he said I’d heard many times before—indeed, it seemed to me I’d heard it from the play-pound—it was as if, the events of the past several days under my wrapper, I understood him for the first time. “By George, I think the odds for survival are pretty good. Some kids don’t make it through adolescence, but most do.” Similarly, he said, most reached a fair level of grown-upness—although Commencement was of course another matter, if there was such a thing at all. The University was a big place: when lecturers spoke of East and West Campuses, or the “Nature of studentdom,” they tended to forget the curious colleges in remote corners of the University, which were only beginning to be touched by the Informational Revolution and Applied Research. What was more, though the colleges themselves could be said to have a fair degree of identity and self-consciousness, the University as a whole was barely stirring in that direction. This was not to say that its maturation must be as slow and painful as a college’s: it would have its own growth-rate, sped by the sophistication of individual quads, especially if the rivalry between East and West Campus could be made less negative. Max guessed that the chances for
West Campus’s reaching maturity were good: in the past, the behavior of the colleges towards one another, particularly in disputes, had been at the primary-school level, or worse; but there was evidence of real restraint in the matter of EATing-riot and relevant intercollege policy. The prospect was not hopeless.

  “Pfui,” Max said grimly. “The University will make it if we can ease the worst pressures and not EAT everything up! That’s why you’re important.”

  The immediately urgent thing was to alter WESCAC’s AIM—a feat achievable only by WESCAC itself on its own unlikely “volition,” or by a Grand Tutor: that is, by someone whom WESCAC would recognize as such and admit unEATen into its Belly. And though Max had no use for or credence in other aspects of Grand-Tutorhood, he was familiar enough with WESCAC’s programming in this particular, and Eierkopf’s thinking in the Cum Laude Project, to have a general conception of the prerequisites developed by and fed into the computer, and a general strategy for what lay ahead. What it came to was that I happened to be the animate object most closely correspondent to those prerequisites and thus most suited to take the risk of reAIMing WESCAC; in his view such things as high IQ and new Answers had as little to do with my role as with an athlete’s or riot-squad leader’s: I was the tool designed for the work, nothing more …

  “Don’t be upset,” he begged me firmly; “if there’s more to it, then I’m wrong and studentdom’s better off. If I’m mistaken the other way, you’ll be EATen and I’ll jump off Tower Hall. But you got to get registered before you can do anything, and you can’t register in the usual way without a proper ID-card and lots of other things you don’t have, including more education and something to pay your way with.”

  I was stunned: these were considerations that had never occurred to me. But Max waved them off—along with Peter Greene, who had been approaching with our tickets but lingered now grinning and blinking some meters away, where squatted Croaker.

  “So we forget about the usual requirements,” Max said. He lowered his voice. “If I’m right, what you got to do tomorrow is pass through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate.”

  I looked at him with alarm.

  “It’s part of the Grand-Tutor business,” he whispered. “Like the way G. Herrold found you, so you’ve either been EATen already or for some reason WESCAC didn’t EAT you. That was the first big step, and starting out like you did the other day was the second. Getting past Main Gate is the third.” He then advised me as clearly as he could what lay ahead and how I must deal with it.

  “Be here tomorrow morning before six o’clock,” he said, “and let the others try as much as they want to get through the Turnstile. They won’t make it: they’re not supposed to. Is your watch working?”

  I drew the silver lanyard from the neck of my wrapper; Lady Creamhair’s watch had run down some time ago, and I feared that the water in George’s Gorge might have ruined it, but it began ticking promptly upon my winding the stem a little.

  “Set it when you hear Tower Clock strike the hour,” Max advised. “And at exactly four minutes after six tomorrow morning, no matter what’s going on or who’s in your way, go up to the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate and go through them.”

  I certainly didn’t understand. “Right through?”

  Max shrugged. “Don’t ask me how, but it’s the only way. Keep your eyes open, look around, watch out for whoever it is that’s playing Dean o’ Flunks; it could be an enemy, if word’s gotten around in Tower Hall that you might be the real thing.” He had reason to believe, he said, that supervision of the Trial-by-Turnstile ceremony had been given over to WESCAC since he’d been in exile—there had been such proposals during the debate over the Spielman Proviso, and Max saw above the Turnstile what he believed to be a scanning device. “If you can’t get through, you’re not the man,” he declared. “Even if you found a way to sneak through the Right or Left Gates, they’d never let you near Tower Hall basement, any more than they’d let a Nikolayan read the Menu. So don’t let anything tempt or scare you; don’t listen to anybody or stop to pick up anything you might drop or lose.” He frowned and raised a finger. “No, wait: you might have to give the guard something, I don’t know what. But anything you lose, don’t go back for it: drive on through, and if you make it some way or other—you might be the right one.”

  He went on to say that once through Main Gate I should proceed to the Gatehouse, where, if things were still done as formerly, I would meet the Chancellor himself, Lucius Rexford, who always addressed the new registrants. On the strength of my having passed the Trial-by-Turnstile, I should announce to him my intention to enter Tower Hall and change WESCAC’s AIM, which to Max’s mind meant removing from the computer’s Belly those “Diet”-tapes which were the heart, so to speak, of its Automatic Implementation Mechanism. The Senate, he warned, would do all it could to stop me, in the name of alma-matriotism and common sense, as would the more dangerous (because more secretive) Department of Military Science; what I intended to do amounted to no less than “unilateral fasting,” and I could assume that in most quadrangles I’d be regarded as a Student-Unionist agent or a madman. As Max conceived it, my task would be to rally enough support among the rank and file of studentdom to make myself too formidable for the professor-generals to assassinate and too popular for the Senate to oppose; the best, perhaps the only means to that end was to demand in the Gatehouse my rights as a bonafide Candidate: that is, a statement from WESCAC of whatever requirements I must satisfy to take the Finals, and then administration of the Finals themselves. Once certified (by WESCAC or whomever) not as a mere C.P.F. but as an actual passèd Graduate, I should then proceed to demonstrate my Grand-Tutorship by going into WESCAC’s Belly; when and if I emerged unEATen, I would be in position to demand that Tower Hall instruct me how to locate and remove the Diet-tapes and program WESCAC’s AIM toward such pacific ends as cooperation with Nikolay College and a truly effective supra-collegiate administration: a government of the whole University.

  I was utterly dismayed: what in the barn had seemed a matter of simple courage—like walking into a dark room and turning on the light, or rescuing a kid from a pack of dogs—seemed here an impossibly complex and unlikely task. “How will I ever get all that done?” I cried. “And you talk as if you won’t even be around to advise me!”

  “I hope I may be, Georgie,” he answered gloomily. Then his face brightened for a moment. “Who knows if it’s possible or not? If things weren’t impossible we wouldn’t need Grand Tutors!” He pointed out that when a man found himself in great danger—pursued by a bull, say, or drawn under by a treacherous current—it not uncommonly happened that he discovered in himself extraordinary resources, thitherto unsuspected, with which to rescue himself. Such a resource to studentdom in general, it seemed to him, were those whom men called Grand Tutors: adrenalin for the emperiled student body. “If you get through the Grate you’ll find your way without my help. All I can do is warn you in a general way, from studying how it went with ones like you in the past, and I don’t know how useful that is. Look at yesterday.”

  He smiled somewhat sadly, to let me know he held no grudge, and we rejoined Croaker and Peter Greene. They in turn had been joined by a desiccate gentleman whom I recognized as Dr. Kennard Sear, and who it developed remembered Greene cordially as his patient of some years previously. The two seemed to be on good terms despite the great difference in their natures and the fact that their professional relationship had been unfruitful. Greene had bought an extra ticket for the Doctor and was clapping him on the shoulder as we approached.

  “My dear George,” Sear murmured amiably. “Good to see you again. Pity Hedwig isn’t here; she was quite taken with you last night.”

  I shook the fine dry hand he offered me and then put by my apprehension at the morrow’s prospect to join the general good-fellowship. Dr. Sear was delighted to see Max once more, having been among his admirers and supporters in the troubled past.

  “Kennard Sear …” Max frown
ed. “Ja, sure, the young radiologist with the Cum Laude Project. I thought you were on Eierkopf’s side.”

  “Gracious no!” Dr. Sear closed his eyes in a delicate expression of horror. “That is, I’m on everybody’s side. ‘Tout comprendre,’ all that sort of thing. Bloody bore, taking sides; not my line at all.” He smiled very pleasantly. “But what’s this they’re saying about you and young George here, and all this Grand Tutor nonsense?” The man’s manner was so urbane, his way of saying things so gracious, that Max chuckled at what surely would have affronted him from someone else. He assured Dr. Sear that while age and exile had doubtless taken their toll upon his faculties, on the subject of Founders and Commencements he was still the skeptic he’d been in the Senate. What was more, he declared, he was still as inclined as ever to act in accordance with his beliefs—unlike certain civilized and knowledgeable gentlemen who either had none or else disguised them wonderfully well.