Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “And cut down the trees, and ruined the rivers …”

  “Say what you want! Say what you want!”

  I did just that, all the way to Great Mall, but in a cordialer tone. First I laid his hostility by assuring him that unlike his wife and some other of his critics I did not regard him as a hopeless flunker, but rather admired what evidence I’d seen of his magnanimity, industriousness, efficiency, and ingenuity.

  “Good old New Tammany know-how,” he declared; and as I had expected, once sincerely praised he began to condemn himself: he had done wrong by O.B.G. and O.B.G.’s daughter, especially in terms gone by, and had yet to make right amends; he had laid waste the wilderness, exploited his mill-hands, sneered at book-learnèd folk and art-majors, been rude to exchange-students, played hooky from school, bribed traffic-policemen and legislators, serviced his private secretary (who however was as flunkèd a durn tease in the first place as O.B.G.’s daughter), subscribed to lewd magazines in plain wrappers, made a fortune in the Second Campus Riot, and cheated on his income tax; and though he’d made efforts lately to redeem in some measure this poor past, he had replaced old failings with new: he manufactured packages intended to disguise and mislead as well as to contain, and plastics designed to break upon the expiration of their guarantee; he spent too much time watching Telerama, for the low quality of which his own Department of Promotional Research was largely responsible; and it was he (that is to say, his staff) who had invented the premium-stamps with which rival departments now lured students into their curricula. But of all the failings for which he had to answer—and he dared say there was no article in the Junior Enochist Pledge that he had left unbroken—he counted none so vile as the desecration of his marriage-vows in the hot-chocolate arms of O.B.G.’s daughter. As well spit on the NTC pennant, become a Founderless Student-Unionist, or be disrespectful of your passèd mother like that immigrant Dean Taliped in the play, as defile purity with impurity! Which, however, wasn’t to say.

  “That’s the only thing keeps Miss Anastasia and me apart, marriage-wise,” he concluded.

  I was astonished. “You mean she’s said she’d let you service her if it weren’t for deceiving your wife? Or what?”

  “I beg you mind what you say!” he said angrily. What he meant, I discovered, had nothing to do with his wife at all (whose existence, like Stoker’s, he seemed unable to keep in mind when his belovèd’s name was mentioned): he simply felt so unworthy of Anastasia’s pristine favors, sullied as his conscience was, that he could not bring himself to speak to her, much less make the proposal he yearned to make.

  I bleated with mirth. “Oh, for Founder’s sake!”

  “Laugh if you want, doggone it,” he said. “When a man’s sunk down to the likes of O.B.G.’s daughter, it plain unstarches him for good girls like Chickie Ann and Miss Anastasia.”

  I assumed his tongue had slipped; it turned out, however, that he’d used one of his pet-names for Mrs. Greene. Unlikelihood! But that memory from buckwheat-days made me dizzy. Sorely I was tempted to inquire about Mrs. Greene’s tastes in verse; judging from Greene’s view of certain people whom I knew also, and my recollection of his tale at the Pedal Inn, I began to wonder whether Miss Sally Ann was quite as guiltless as her husband made her out. But I had no clear evidence, and it seemed more tactful in any case to bring him indirectly to that consideration. Where to begin!

  “Do you think Max is innocent or guilty?” I asked him.

  He considered for a moment—not at all disturbed by the change of subject—and then replied: “You got to have faith.”

  “How about Maurice Stoker? Do you believe he’s as flunkèd as people say?”

  “Well,” he said judiciously, “you know how folks are, supposing-the-worst-instead-of-the-bestwise. Me, I never met a man I didn’t like.”

  We were drawing near Tower Hall, where I meant to have at my first task.

  “ ‘Which ain’t to say,’ ” I mocked.

  “How’s that? Which ain’t to say what?”

  I took his sleeve then, smiling for all my exasperation (we had parked in a lot beside the great hall), and begged him to hear me out for a quarter-hour without interrupting, as a Grand-Tutor-to-be with no motive but his welfare and eventual true Candidacy.

  He blinked and bobbed. “Say what you want. I can tell by looking you’re no slicker.”

  Without mitigation or abridgement then I reviewed for him what I knew of Anastasia, her husband, and others of our mutual acquaintance, both first-hand and by hearsay. I told him of the wondrous spankings, the boys in Uncle Ira’s house, the rape in George’s Gorge, and the Memorial Service. I repeated Stoker’s avowed suspicion, which I myself could not entirely discredit, that Anastasia like Max had a talent for being victimized, possibly even throve on it; and further recounted what I’d witnessed and heard of Stoker’s own diversions and abominations: his malice towards all, his delight in subverting every order and indulging every flunkèd impulse of the student mind. I described Dr. Sear’s amusements and Dr. Eierkopf’s, what I had seen in the buckwheat-meadow and done with dear departed G. Herrold; how I had bit Anastasia in the sidecar and watched her tickee the false Grand Tutor. Next I enlarged upon the divers failings of New Tammany College, past and present, as revealed to me by Max and partially confirmed by my own reading and observation: its oppression of Frumentians, its lawless Informationalism, its staggering wastefulness, its pillage of natural resource and despoil of natural beauty, its hostility to learning and refinement, its apotheosis of the lowest percentile, its vulgarity, inflated self-esteem, self-rightousness, self-deception, sentimentality, hypocrisy, artificiality, simple-mindedness, naïve optimism, concupiscence, avarice, self-contradiction, ignorance, and general fatuity …

  “Which ain’t to say!” Greene could not help crying out; but his face had passed from crimson to white.

  “Which isn’t to say other colleges don’t have their failings,” I agreed. “Or that NTC doesn’t have its passèd aspects too.” What mattered, I declared, was that one not confuse the passèd with the flunked, or see no failure where failure was. All very well to Certify someone’s Candidacy on the ground of Innocence, a no doubt passèd opposite to Culpability; I too might make such a Certification; but not unless the innocence were truly innocent, purified as well of ignorance as of guilt. “If I were your advisor, Mr. Greene—”

  “Pete,” he said dejectedly.

  “My advice would be to get a pair of high-resolution glasses like the ones Dr. Eierkopf gave me, to help you see the difference between things. And Dr. Sear’s mirror, to take a closer look at yourself in.”

  He picked glumly at a pimple. “I got a thing about mirrors.”

  “Let Dr. Sear be your mirror, then,” I suggested. “If there’s anybody who sees the other side of things, it’s Dr. Sear.” To Greene’s objection that his previous connection with Dr. Sear had been profitless, I replied that this time his aim would not be therapy, but sophistication, and that for Knowledge of the Campus Dr. Sear was reputed to have no equal. I repeated Dr. Sear’s observation in the Amphitheater: that while Commencement no doubt involved vision, it had nothing to do with illusions, which must be got rid of absolutely.

  Greene swallowed a vitamin-pill and scratched his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Then you ought to find out,” I said, and urged him further to drop in on the doctor immediately, as I would need no more chauffeuring for the present: when I’d fixed the clock I meant to call on Chancellor Rexford, just across the Mall, to see what might be done about the Boundary Dispute; thereafter I’d most probably stop at the Infirmary myself to seek Dr. Sear’s interpretation of my third and fourth tasks, which I did not clearly understand; I could meet Greene there if he wished to assist me further.

  “Hey, that’s where Miss Stacey works, isn’t it?”

  I affirmed with a sigh that Mrs. Stoker was indeed Dr. Sear’s chief assistant, and wondered whether her presence—which I’d forgotten to take into account—wo
uld preclude or assure the success of my little project for him. He was all enthusiasm for it now: vowed to cleave to Dr. Sear night and day and clasp to heart his every word. “I’ll tell him you sent me,” he said. “Better yet, you write me a note—like I’m your student, sort of.” The idea delighted him, as if he were indeed a child given special permission to leave the classroom; with little hope now of results I borrowed his ball-point pen and scribbled an explanation to Dr. Sear on the only available paper, the back of his spurious diploma. Seeing Bray’s inscription again, I could not resist amending it to read Passèd are the Kindergarteners—into First Grade.

  “You sure you don’t want some good old New Tammany know-how up there in the Clock-tower?” But though he cheerfully insisted he’d like nothing better than to “take ’er apart and see what makes ’er tick,” he was clearly impatient to be off, I declined the offer. He roared away then with a “Yi-hoo!” and spray of gravel, saluted a mailman whom he evidently took for some professor-general, and turned onto a path marked PEDESTRIANS ONLY, which however quickly cleared before his powerful machine.

  I showed my ID-card to an attendant in the marble lobby of Tower Hall and to another at a lift marked BELFRY, to which I was directed. This latter, like the horn-rimmed man at the orientation lecture, consulted a clipboard and discovered (to our mutual surprise) that thanks to WESCAC and Chancellor Rexford I was among these persons authorized to ascend into the clockworks—the list of names was not a large one.

  “Why can’t everyone go up there?” I asked him. He wrinkled his forehead, smiled cautiously, and instructed me to push the Up-button when I was ready; the elevator made no stops between lobby and Belfry. I shrugged and pressed. The ascent was long, or the lift slow; my ears clicked, clicked again, and then the automatic doors opened on a formidable scene. The Belfry was floored and walled in rough cement, grease-stained and inscribed with the names of visitors and curious messages; the sides were open to the air above a breast-high wall, and afforded a splendid prospect of Great Mall—on which, however, it was difficult to concentrate, for what seized eye, ear, and nose was the huge machinery of the clockworks that almost filled the place. It seemed essentially a mesh of gearwheels of every size, from bright brass ones small as saucers to greased black cast-iron monsters, apparently motionless, of which only the topmost arc thrust through the floor; their shafts turned or were turned by drums of steel cable that disappeared through roof and floor. Great bells hung about, the smallest as large as a feed-bucket; their clappers were mounted outside them and connected by rods to various parts of the machinery. Everything clacked, clicked, creaked, and whirred together; rocker-arms and escapements teetered, governors whirled, circuit-boxes cracked and thudded, the middle-sized gears turned leisurely and the smaller ones spun into a shining blur. The place smelled of oil and iron despite the cool air that breezed through at that height.

  “Halte dich dazu!” Dr. Eierkopf cried as the doors parted. I didn’t see him at once, perched on Croaker’s shoulders near a worktable to my left, but recognized the pipèd accent and could translate the tone of his command, if not its words. The spectacle anyhow held me for the second it took to see what I must beware of: the shaft of a great pendulum, fixed near the ceiling, swung noiselessly through a slot in the floor half a meter from the lift-sill; it rushed by even as Eierkopf spoke, hung weightily an instant, and rushed back.

  “So: der Ziegenbübe.” Eierkopf squinted through his eyeglasses; Croaker grinned and grunted. “Step here then. Look sharp.” As I made my way to them between the wall and the pendulum-slot, Dr. Eierkopf had Croaker place him on a high stool. The great Frumentian then bounced up and down, fetched up his shirt (he was dressed now in his usual garb, the gray cotton sweatsuit worn by varsity athletes, with NTC across chest and shoulders) and pointed happily to his belly, where I saw a livid pattern of fresh-looking scars below his navel.

  “He wants you to congratulate him on his Certification,” Dr. Eierkopf mocked. “You want evidence that Dr. Bray’s a faker? There you are.” Bray it seemed had left the Belfry not a quarter-hour past, having visited it to make an official inspection of the clockworks, and before proceeding to the Chancellor’s mansion had Certified both Croaker and Dr. Eierkopf.

  “Both of you?” I could not conceal my incredulity. Dr. Eierkopf agreed that Commencement Gate, whatever and wherever it might be, could not imaginably be wide enough to admit contraries: Entelechus’s Second and Third Logical Laws forbade the possibility. That he himself was a Candidate, if not indeed a Graduate, he needed no Grand Tutor to tell him: Scapulas’s motto Graduation is a state of mind had long hung on the walls of Observatory and Belfry; it was a conclusion he had reached, like Scapulas, by inexorable logic, and confirmed to his satisfaction on WESCAC. He had explained it politely to Bray out of deference to the administration in which he hoped to recoup his former high position, not out of any reverence for the man himself; and the self-styled Grand Tutor had had the good sense merely to write Q.E.D. under that motto, making it a certificate of Eierkopf’s Candidacy.

  “What else could he do?” Dr. Eierkopf smiled over his gums. “Even Scapulas was a brute compared to me.” Which made it the more absurd, he scoffed, that Bray should also Certify the shoulders, so to speak, on which the head perched. Scornfully he quoted Bray’s quotation from the Founder’s Scroll: “Consider the beasts of the woods, that never fail.” Whatever Enos Enoch might have meant by that advice, He surely wouldn’t have Certified an animal who couldn’t even read the Certification. But Bray, apparently determined to pass absolutely everyone, had first translated the Certificate of Candidacy into a Frumentian pictogram (a matriculation and procreation symbol, so he’d claimed) and then, somehow gaining Croaker’s confidence, had engraved it on the black man’s belly. Eierkopf himself was unfamiliar with the emblem; whether the bearer understood its significance was questionable, but he was most pathetically proud to display it in spite of the discomfort he no doubt suffered.

  I did not denounce these Certifications, but concurred with Dr. Eierkopf’s sentiments regarding the Certifier. Croaker’s incisions certainly did look tender; however, I could discern no subscription of any sort on Eierkopf’s Scapulist motto, which hung over a worktable littered with files, lenses, grindstones, calipers, micrometers, high-intensity lamps, and cartons of eggs.

  “I don’t see those initials you mentioned,” I said.

  His head lolled, apparently in amusement. “I can’t see them either! Except through this glass.” He pointed to a thick-ringed lens on the table and explained that Bray—whose ingenuity he did have to admire—had thought it appropriate to inscribe his Certification in letters of a sort and size that only an Eierkopfian Lens (a mated pair of lenses, actually, the one “synthetic,” or panoramical, the other “analytic,” or microscopical) could resolve and focus—and that inconsistently, so it seemed, for when he held the device for me I could see nothing.

  “Oh well,” Eierkopf said; “at least my Certification makes sense, even if not everybody sees it all the time. Croaker is seeing his, but nobody understands it!”

  I was about to reply that Croaker could at least feel his. But as Eierkopf made a gesture of contempt with the hand that held the lens, I thought I glimpsed the missing initials on its objective face. I pointed them out to him, a bit triumphantly it may be, as further evidence of Bray’s deceitfulness; but although Dr. Eierkopf himself could not see the reversed letters on the glass (owing to some feature of his spectacles), he was undisturbed by the disclosure.

  “The point’s the same,” he said. “Anyhow, I told you I don’t believe in Grand Tutors till I see once a miracle.” He was pleased, however, to clear up the somewhat puzzling detail of the image’s inconstancy, as he was convinced that for better or worse all phenomena were ultimately intelligible. Contrary to what one might suppose, he said, an image twice refracted in certain complementary ways was not always thereby restored to its original state, any more than a cat dissected and reassembled in the z
oology laboratories was the same cat afterwards: sometimes it came out doubly distorted (as it always was in theory); sometimes it seemed to vanish altogether, especially when the characteristics of his own extraordinary eyeglasses and the astigmatism they compensated for were added to the optical equation, or the light was wrong.

  “But,” he smiled, “take away my lenses, I’m blind as Dean Taliped.” However, I was not to infer that because all lenses distorted (“Your own included,” he said, perhaps unable to see that I wore none), nothing could be truly seen; all that was necessary was to compensate for optical error, and for this he relied, in his own work, on the lens in his hand, which he knew to be accurate.

  I asked him how he knew. His round eyes twinkled.

  “I like you, Goat-Boy! Croaker fixes you a lunch, you can eat it around behind the clockworks.” But my question, which I’d thought to be serious and difficult as well as perceptive, he disposed of lightly, perhaps facetiously. The lens affirmed his Graduatehood, did it not? And since he was in fact a Graduate, he affirmed the accuracy of the lens.

  “Wait a minute!” I protested. “Bray Certified your Candidacy, but you don’t believe in him.”

  He wagged a hairless little digit at me. “I won’t affirm Dr. Bray, but I can’t deny him, because it must be the same with Grand Tutors, if they really exist, as it is with Graduates: it takes one to know one, not so?”

  I readily agreed.

  “And a Grand Tutor would know Graduates from non-Graduates, ja? But not vice-versa. Well, just so with this lens: I know it’s correct because a Graduate like me can tell correct lenses from incorrect ones.” The case was analogous, he argued, to the interdependent relation between WESCAC and the Tower Hall Clock, which he had explained to me in the Observatory, and was reflected also in the problem of the clock’s accuracy, which, like all problems involving final standards and first principles, could be only academic.

  “You claim you’re the Grand Tutor yourself, and Bray’s not,” he said, “but you can’t prove it—without a miracle. You can only know it, just as I know I’m a Graduate.”