by John Barth
“You’re too severe,” Dr. Sear protested mildly. We strolled towards the Amphitheater. “I grant you I can’t go along with anybody’s Answers I’ve heard of yet, but that’s their fault, for always being half true. Founderism! AntiFounderism! Look at Greene here, with all his blather about Good Old NTC, and Let the Chips Fall Where They May. Don’t you agree it’s just simple-mindedness, this business of having principles?”
Greene whinnied merrily and jerked his head a number of times. “I swear, I can’t keep up with you!” He gave the tickets to a uniformed attendant, to whom also he made known how interesting he found it that “these old-time thee-aters,” after which NTC’s was patterned, had no balconies reserved for darkies, though even a country boy like himself knew that there’d been slavery in both Lykeion and Remus Colleges in their golden days. It all went to show, he maintained, what high-minded folks those old fellows were, who never regarded a man as inferior just because he wasn’t as good as they were. He thumped the ticket-taker’s chest congratulatorily as if he were himself not only an ancient Lykeionian but the designer of unbalconied amphitheaters, and the fellow acknowledged the tribute with a gracious grunt. Then we entered the great bowl of seats, already mostly filled, and were ushered down towards those reserved for us. I turned my attention from the cordial dispute between Max and Sear on the difference between simple, strong, and narrow minds to survey the dark stone stage and humming crowd. Though I knew the huge enrollment-figures of the College I had no appreciation yet of its size, and having met one acquaintance by sheerest chance already, I searched the audience in hopes of glimpsing Anastasia, or even Lady Creamhair—whom I was determined to seek out and make amends to for my bad manners, if she still lived in New Tammany. But there was no sign of them. Greene bought from a passing vendor five cartons of popcorn, pleasant stuff, whereof he and I took each a box and Croaker three, Max and Dr. Sear declining. The latter, enraptured by the carving on my stick (which he identified as a first-chop example of late-transitional mandibulary carving in the East Frumentian polycaryatidic tradition except for the shelah-na-gigs—seldom to be found in the work of mandibulary artists by reason of strictures extended from taboos against certain kinds of oral heteroerotic foreplay—and the now completed intaglio vine, obviously an extraquadrangular influence since both viniculture and oenology were unknown in the East-Frumentian “colleges”), declared to Max with a sigh that after all he sometimes regarded the absolutely unself-conscious, like Croaker, to be the only real Graduates—“using the term figuratively, of course …”
“Pfui!” Max replied, and Sear conceded at once that he didn’t really believe anything of the sort, though he certainly did admire spontaneity and animal innocence above all human qualities, despite his contempt for them.
“Who’s nearer to being passed?” He included in a wan wave of the hand Croaker, Peter Greene, and myself. “Them or us?”
It seemed to me an improper question, presupposing as it did not only the evident similarity between the two professors but something significantly common to us eaters of popcorn. But I let it pass, both because Max himself promptly challenged it and because my eye was caught by a photograph of The Living Sakhyan and his retinue in a discarded newspaper near my feet.
“Innocence, bah,” Max said.
“I agree, I agree!” Sear protested. “But it’s sweet, all the same. Oh well, it’s not, but it seems so to us ravaged post-Pre-Schoolists. I suppose we’re the innocent ones, when we speak of great rascally simpletons like Greene there as being innocent.”
Greene winked above a cheekful of popcorn. “Say what you want.” I was impressed again by his strange combination of attitudes: I’m okay, his wink declared—but with as much supplication as conviction.
“Pfui on innocence,” Max said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Dr. Sear nodded. “I’ll go even further: innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement’s for the disillusioned, not for the innocent.”
Here Max parted philosophical company with the Doctor (who, I learned in time, had moved from the fields of radiology and general pathology into psychiatry, though like Max he was learned in a great many areas beyond his profession), for he regarded Commencement itself as an innocent illusion.
“Ignorant, I mean, not harmless,” he added, much more in the vein of the Max who’d raised me than the fellow who’d met me at the fork in yesterday’s road. I knew by heart his old indictments of any Answer which turned studentdom from realistic work upon the failings of life on campus; and though I was curious to know how he reconciled that point of view with his acknowledgment of my Grand-Tutoriality, I was more interested in scanning the front page of the Tower Hall Times. The photograph represented The Living Sakhyan seated on the grass beside a massive elm-trunk, perhaps on Great Mall, his associates round about, just as I’d last seen him on the beach in George’s Gorge; his palms were pressed together, his eyes closed, and his lips turned slightly upwards at the corners, as if he were placidly amused by the crowd of photographers and curious passersby around him. The caption underneath read LIVING SAKHYAN MEDITATES ON MIDWAY and was followed by a brief account of how he had been rescued from the East-Campus Student-Unionists by his protégés, a flight he’d neither willed nor opposed; how he neither sought nor shunned publicity, but withdrew into meditative trances whenever he saw fit, regardless of time, place, or company. The rest of the page was given over to collegiate and inter-collegiate news: HIGHWAY DEATHS TO BREAK CARNIVAL RECORD, SAFETY COMMITTEE WARNS; REXFORD TO ANNOUNCE NEW EAT-TESTS TO UNIVERSITY COUNCIL; TENSION MOUNTS ALONG POWER LINE; THOUSANDS MASSACRED IN FRUMENTIAN INTRAMURAL RIOTS; FAMINE SPREADS IN T’ANC; FLOODWATERS RISE IN SIDDARTHA; NTC RAPE-RATE UP 4 POINTS. The weather promised to be fair for the last night of the Carnival as well as for tomorrow’s registration and attendant ceremonies, and for that reason the Department of Meteorology urgently reminded everyone to refrain from looking directly at the sun during the annular eclipse predicted for shortly after dawn.
“I respect your position on the social aspects of the Commencement question,” Dr. Sear was saying to Max, “but not on the phenomenon of personal Graduation. One good medical therapist might be worth a hundred professors of Enochism, as you say; but a real Grand Tutor’s worth all the medical therapists that ever were.”
Max shook his head.
“You believe in Graduation and Grand Tutors, then, sir?” I asked him—rather surprised, but much gratified.
“Of course I do,” he smiled. “If you mean do I believe they exist, of course I do. But I mean something rather special by the terms, that has nothing to do with Founders and Deans o’ Flunks. Even Dr. Spielman agrees that there really are heroes, and that they serve a useful purpose. Why else would he enlist you in this quaint project of his?”
Max objected that to his mind heroes were one thing—even Grand Tutors, whom he regarded merely as a particular variety of heroes—and Graduation was another. “What I believe, certain men are born with a natural talent for the hero-work; they’re no more miraculous than great violinists. It’s a neutral thing: some people are red-haired, some are humpbacked, some are heroes.” And what everyone went through for himself, he went on, more or less profoundly depending on one’s character, Grand Tutors went through on the level of the whole student body: “Every college needs a man now and then to go to the bottom of things and turn us around a corner. That’s what George must do with the WESCAC if he can.” As for Graduation, if Sear meant by the term simply the emotional and intellectual maturity that normally followed the ordeals of adolescence, whether in an individual student or an entire college, then Max was quite ready to affirm its reality; indeed, cyclological theory was founded on such correspondences as that between the celestial and psychic day, the seasons of the year, the stages of ordinary human life, the growth and decline of individual colleges, the evolution and history of studentdom as a whole, the ultimate fate
of the University, and what had we. The rhythm of all these was repeated literally and emblematically in the life of the hero, whose function, Max took it, was the important but prosaic one of helping a college grow up or get out of a particular bind: more than that he denied. And if there was a difference between Grand Tutors and other sorts of heroes, it was that men like Maios, Enos Enoch, and the original Sakhyan taught students how to behave more decently toward one another, while heroes like Anchisides and Laertides actually preserved their classmates from immediate harm, whether by slaying certain monsters or by resettling groups of student refugees threatened with extinction. Me he conceived to be, not destined to save studentdom from being EATen but very possibly designed for that task, as who should call a man uniquely designed to play championship tennis, without implying either a designer or that he will ever take racket in hand. If I chose to regard myself as a Grand Tutor, that was my affair; Max would not split hairs. But if I or Sear or anyone maintained that there was something to herohood or Commencement beyond this unglamorous definition—something magical or transcendental—then we must excuse him, he had no patience with such notions.
“We quite excuse you!” Dr. Sear insisted cordially. “Don’t we, George?”
I confessed I wasn’t sure I grasped Max’s point, and that I considered it anyhow my business less to understand than to perform my task, which was immediately to get through Scrapegoat Grate and then to do what I’d come to the campus for: to pass all or fail all. They both seemed pleased with this reply, and fortunately didn’t ask for an explanation of that dark imperative from my PAT-card, which I could not then clearly have given them. The Amphitheater was quite filled now, and the floodlights dimmed. People hushed and coughed. Dr. Sear lowered his dry voice to remind Max that not much if any of Sakhyan’s Tutoring, for example, had to do with interpersonal relations or the general welfare of studentdom, except indirectly, and that while Anchisides and Moishe had unquestionably led their followers to a new and greater campus, Laertides was the sole survivor of an expedition that benefited no one (even the giant he blinded had scarcely been a public menace, remote as he was from inhabited quadrangles), and among the more primitive heroes of ancient lore it was rather the rule than the exception that their exploits profited no one save themselves. But surely, he protested, Max knew this better than he, and no doubt had in mind a distinction between practical and emblematic heroes, the former being those who in fact or fiction rendered some extraordinary service to studentdom, the latter those whose careers were merely epical representations of the ordinary life-cycle, or the daily psychic round, or whatever—a dramatical metaphor, if we would.
“What do you think Graduation and Grand Tutorhood are?” I asked again, in a whisper. “They must be real things, or I wouldn’t want them so much.”
He smiled at my reasoning. “I imagine you would, in any case. The desire to be a Graduate is normal enough in young people, although in adults it’s a neurosis, often as not. And the itch to be a Grand Tutor—that’s always neurotic, wouldn’t you say?”
“Neurotic means not right in the head,” Max explained, tapping his temple and watching me with interest.
“Well, how about the person who actually is the Grand Tutor?” I demanded.
Peter Greene clapped me on the knee. “Attaboy, George! Don’t take nothing off him!” He had been reading the pages of sporting-news and comic drawings in the newspaper, and joined our conversation now only because the lights had gone too dim to read by.
“Why,” Sear asserted good-humoredly, “he’s necessarily somewhat mad, my dear boy. Enos Enoch, Anchisides—all those hero and Grand-Tutor chaps. Charmingly mad, I grant you. Magnificently mad, if you like. But mad.”
I was the more put out by this remark in view of my infant circumstances and G. Herrold’s state after rescuing me from the tapelift. But fifteen folk in white cotton wrappers, high boots, and masks had filed onto the stage below, and since I scarcely knew how to reply in any case, I turned to them my troubled attention. They carried leafy branches in their hands and sat now here and there upon three long steps in the forepart of the stage.
“Please don’t be offended,” Sear whispered. “Who wouldn’t choose to be mad like Enos Enoch instead of sane like Dr. Spielman and me? Besides, there’s another kind of hero that we didn’t mention: the tragic kind.” I was not consoled. To Max he added, “They never got their due in the Cum Laude Project, either, when Eierkopf had us all working on that flunkèd GILES. But if you ask me, the only sane heroes are the tragic heroes.” He nodded his elegant thin head towards the stage, where now a man taller than the others, with a greatly pained expression on his mask, had stepped forth from a central door in the background to approach the seated gathering.
“There’s the best example of all,” Dr. Sear whispered to me; “that’s Taliped Decanus.”
4.
Taliped’s my name: the famous Dean of Cadmus College. You’re the ad hoc team (department-heads and vice-administrators) whom I named last year as evaluators of our academic posture. Maybe you knew these things already. Notice I’ve come to you in person: that’s because I itch to find out what, if anything, is on your mind, and why you’re camping on the Deanery stoop. You, there: you’re head of the Speech and Forensics Group and closest to retirement; speak without fear or rhetoric: What on Campus brings you here?
“A modern translation,” Max remarked. “I hate it.” But Dr. Sear declared that idiomatic translation of the classics was much in fashion in the College, and that while he agreed that the modernization could go too far, he approved of the general principle. I observed that the line-ends seemed to rhyme, more or less, in pairs.
“Heroic couplets,” Dr. Sear explained. “Nothing modern about them.”
“Ah.”
Now an old chap, not unlike Max in appearance, with white beard and wrapper, spoke for the assemblage:
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Ahem. I am most proud, Dean Taliped and honored colleagues, to have been the head of this, my last committee, whose report and urgent recommendations—
TALIPED: Make it short;
I’ve little time: appointments, letters, lunch with six assistant deans, and then a bunch of meetings until five. Get to the facts.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: [Aside]
Respect for his elders is what this fellow lacks.
[TO TALIPED]
I mean to, Mister Dean. The facts are here in our report: complete, unvarnished, clear—
TALIPED: [Aside]
And laced with purple passages, I’ll bet. Of all the speech-professors that I’ve met, here in Cadmus and back where I used to teach, not one could make a clear, unvarnished speech.
[to COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN]
No need to read it: summarize what’s in it
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: [Aside]
We waste two weeks; he can’t spare a minute.
[TO TALIPED]
Very well, sir; I’II forego analysis of our problems, and of certain fallacies inherent in some proposals for relief—though it’s quite worth hearing. Also, to be brief, I’ll skip our truly moving peroration and read you these last pages of summation, done in a post-Philippic courtroom style …
TALIPED: Let’s skip that too, okay? I swear that I’ll be just as moved to hear in a word what’s what.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: In a word, sir: Cadmus College has gone to pot.
TALIPED: To pot, you say?
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Quite utterly to pot.
Shall I say more?
TALIPED: I know you will. But not in post-Philippics. Lay it on the line.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: [Reads from last page of report]
Item: our fruits are dying on the vine—
TALIPED: So’s the Department of Plant Pathology.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Agronomy reports that there will be another field-crop failure—rusts and blight.
Item: Dairy Research declares we might lose half our stock to hoof-and-mouth disease …
I clu
tched Max’s arm. “That’s terrible!”
“Oh well,” sighed Dr. Sear, “at least the tickets didn’t cost us anything.”
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: That means we’ll lack for beef and milk and cheese.
TALIPED: I know what it means!
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: It means, sir, that we’ll die of malnutrition soon—or plague, if I correctly read those secret, censored portions of the epidemiologists’ report. Item: abortions, both spontaneous and not, are much more common every term; so too are such once-rare events as murder, arson, cheating, robbery, riot, rape, divorce, wife-beating. Morale is low, inflation high; vice thrives; we’re losing accreditation and our wives. Famine, stillbirth, crime, despair, the pox—fact is, sir, Cadmus College is on the rocks.
TALIPED: What else is new?
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Well, sir, to be sure, we understand that, while you’re brilliant, you’re no passèd Founder; that however keen your intellect, after all you’re just a dean—and young besides, in years if not in mind.
TALIPED: [Aside]
And thin-skinned, too, this windy fool will find; I’ll break his contract and revoke his pension, I swear it!
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Mister Dean, sir—your attention? What we mean, sir, is that inasmuch as you contrived to save us from the clutch of that she-monster at our entrance-gate—who quizzed us with her riddle and then ate us when we flunked—since you alone, I say, by some device were able, on that day nine years ago, to get her off our back, you must have had some influence that we lack with the powers-that-be. I don’t think it was
knowledge
(I know more learned men in Cadmus College) or wisdom, either; simply good connections. Therefore, in the subsequent elections you won the Cadmus deanship and your wife, the old Dean’s widow …
TALIPED: Don’t review my life;
