Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  3.

  My plan for dealing with the Boundary Dispute was necessarily tentative, more a principle than a program; but its wisdom seemed to me confirmed by my luncheon-briefing in the history of the problem. Leaving Tower Hall I had crossed Great Mall to the Chancellor’s Mansion (“Lucky’s Light House,” wags had dubbed it, because of Mr. Rexford’s installation of floodlights all about the grounds and his custom of leaving the interior-lights burning all night in virtually every room), where, on the strength of my special Candidacy, I was admitted—not directly to Lucius Rexford, as I had hoped, but to the office of one of his advisors, a gentleman whose skin was the rich fawn color of Redfearn’s Tom’s coat, and whose knowledgeable, crisp analysis belied my assumption that all Frumentians were either brutes like Croaker or gentle servitors like G. Herrold. His dress was impeccable, his mind and tongue were quick, and though he could not affect the Rexfordian forelock, his accent was closer to the Chancellor’s than to Peter Greene’s, for example. An elegant meal was sent in, of which I ate the salad- and vegetable-courses while it was explained to me that the Chancellor was about to depart for a Summit Symposium at the University Council that afternoon, where he was expected to censure the Nikolayans for breaking the “Provisional Fast” agreement and provoking fresh incidents at the Power Line.

  “Originally that boundary was defined jointly by EASCAC and WESCAC,” the advisor said; “our only experiment so far in cooperative computation. The principal sightings were made just after Campus Riot Two from the Tower Clock fulcrum on our end and a similar reference-point in the Nikolayan Control Room in Founder’s Hill, and the main power-cables for East and West Campuses were laid side by side along most of the boundary.” For many terms, he said, students and staff from the westernmost East-Campus colleges had “transferred” freely in large numbers, without authorization, across the line to West Campus. More recently, however, EASCAC had read out that any further unauthorized transferees would be EATen at the line—and only the sick or feebleminded were ever authorized. WESCAC’s reply had been a threat to EAT Nikolay College automatically the instant any Nikolayan EAT-wave crossed the west side of the Power Line, and EASCAC had read out an identical counter-threat. There the dangerous situation stood: a few determined East-Campusers still managed to slip across; a few more were EATen in the attempt by “short-order” waves designed to fade out just a hairsbreadth from NTC’s line. A few border-guards on each side—those intrepid fellows who walked the great cables like armed acrobats—had fallen to their deaths in the no-man’s land between East and West or been shot from their perches by unidentified snipers. Any such incident, both sides feared, might touch off Campus Riot III, the end of the University. Yet it was contended in New Tammany that the Nikolayans were covertly advancing their line towards NTC’s to exploit an ambiguous clause in the original read-out (“The Boundary shall be midway between the East and West Power Lines”); the Western position was that this clause was intended to locate the cables with reference to the Boundary, not vice-versa, and they demanded a resurvey from Tower Hall and Founder’s Hill. But the Nikolayans refused to admit outside surveyors, even from “neutral” colleges, to enter their Control Room, calling the proposal a mere pretext for cribbing secrets, and argued besides (though not officially) that it was the Power Lines that determined the location of the Boundary. Thus the dispute, which had been being debated continuously in the University Council for at least six terms, and had come to involve the equally thorny question of “fasting” (the popular term for abstention from EAT-tests): on the one side, pacifists like Max advocated unilateral fasting; on the other, “preventive rioters” like Eblis Eierkopf taunted, “He who fasts first fasts last,” and counseled, “He who fasts last, lasts.” In between was every shade of military- and political-science opinion: Chancellor Rexford’s own, as affirmed in the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, was that the debate must continue, however meager its yield or exasperating the harassments, inasmuch as the hope of effective compromise, though slim, was in his judgment the only hope of studentdom.

  “I expect we’ll test as long as they do,” my host concluded; “but we won’t break off the Summit Symposium or leave the U.C., even if it’s proved that they’re moving their cable.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” I ventured.

  “Pity.” He patted his lips on a linen napkin. “The Political Science Department, after years of study, seems rather to approve of it.”

  “What I want to suggest to Mr. Rexford is a different principle entirely,” I said. “I thought of it a few minutes ago.”

  “Ah. Care for a cigar?”

  “No, thank you, sir. You see, I was discussing a different matter this morning with Dr. Eierkopf, and before that I’d been talking with Mr. Maurice Stoker …”

  His eyes turned up from the end of his cigar. “I see. Eierkopf and Stoker.”

  I would have bade him please not to misunderstand me, that my strategy for the Quiet Riot was not derived from those gentlemen, though my conversation with them had inspired it. But as he repeated their names his eyes flashed over my shoulder and he jumped smiling to his feet, jamming the fresh cigar into an ashtray. I glanced doorwards and had presence enough of mind to rise quickly also as the Chancellor himself strode in, unannounced. His forelocked entourage pressed just outside, some with concerned expressions, others grinning like Rexford himself, whose visit to the office was apparently not expected.

  “Did I hear someone say a naughty word?” He shook hands with me, waved off his assistant’s apology in my behalf, and congratulated me on my penetration of Scrapegoat Grate; I thanked him in turn for his prompt action in clearing my entry into various College buildings.

  “It’s not Maurice Stoker’s idea I wanted to tell you about,” I said; “it’s my own. My second Assignment-task is to end the Boundary Dispute, and I thought—”

  “Look here,” he interrupted, obviously enjoying his associates’ discomfiture; “want to ride along with us to the Symposium? You can tell me your plan on the way, and we’ll wrap up the whole Quiet Riot by dinnertime.”

  Though I knew the prediction for a tease, the invitation seemed sincere, and I accepted it eagerly. With the train of guards and assistants I gimped after him through elegant corridors, pleased to be photographed in his presence, though I knew that the mightiest deans and chancellors were as pallid candleflames beside the radiance of Truth, which from the sun of Grand-Tutorhood warmed and lit the University. On another impulse he turned onto a verandah, where, from a respectful distance, we saw a handsome young woman turn her cheek to him for kissing; she was sitting with a group of similarly comely young men and women, all of whom except herself rose at his approach; he chatted for some moments, more with them than with her, and then led us to a row of white motorcycles with large closed sidecars, along the curb. I found myself honored with a seat in the first of these, along with the Chancellor; the remainder of the party paired off in the others.

  “I told Mrs. Rexford I hoped you could help us with the East-Campus Transfer problem,” he joked as we started off. The sidecars were elegantly appointed, and virtually soundproof. “Since you made it through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate, maybe you can find a way for people to slip through the Power Line.” He asked me then how I was faring, and I recounted briefly my morning’s travels and my concern at Harold Bray’s promiscuous Certifications. He tisked sympathetic disapproval of Max’s attitude. If only Max would leave all pleading to the lawyers, he said, there would be no trouble getting an acquittal, or at worst a suspended sentence; Siegfried New Tammany relations would not be threatened, and Max would be free to punish himself in any way he saw fit. The problem was especially vexing at the present time, Rexford added, when NTC was counting on the support of its former adversary in a number of controversial programs which would be handicapped, even spoiled, by any general resurgence of anti-Siegfrieder sentiment in West Campus. At my mention of Maurice Stoker I felt him bristle and knew I was being
undiplomatic, but as it bore upon my plan for the Boundary Dispute I explained my conviction that Stoker claimed kinship with him in order that none might believe the claim; thus that the flunkèd libel had a passèd effect, if not a passèd motive: the polar distinguishing of Passage and Failure, which never for an instant must be confused.

  Mr. Rexford was cordially skeptical. “Earlier this morning you wanted me to admit he was my brother.”

  “If I did I shouldn’t have,” I apologized. “I think you should be as opposite to him as you can be. You should deny him once and for all, publicly. By name.”

  “Oh well …” He waved cheerfully from the sidecar to throngs of well-wishers along the seedy campus streets through which we happened to be passing. Many were garishly dressed women—prostitute ladies, in fact, as I presently learned, or “campus-followers,” who throve in the rougher quadrangles of the College. They all waved back, as did their pimps and the other toughs of the quad. “That would be going a little far, if you mean refuse to do business with him at all.”

  “Then you won’t like my plan for ending the Boundary Dispute, I’m sure,” I said; “my notion about opposites is that they ought to be kept as distinct and far apart as possible.”

  The Chancellor assured me that he quite agreed. We were passing now through an equally squalid quadrangle: the paths and steps were littered with drunks; youths loitered in mean-looking knots; posters advertised erotic films; a man punched a woman in the mouth with such force that she almost dropped the baby she was nursing. This last scene particularly arrested Mr. Rexford, who turned to watch the pair over his shoulder when we had passed, and tisked his tongue when the lady’s assailant kissed her contusions.

  “It seems to me,” I went on, “that making clear distinctions must be the first step to Graduation: not confusing one thing with another, especially the passèd with the flunked.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Mr. Rexford smiled. “That’s why I think of WESCAC as our colleague instead of our enemy: the only cure for knowledge is more knowledge.” However, he added (speaking as though in a rehearsed interview, but growing clearly interested in the subject as he talked), there were two distinctions in particular which he felt must be insisted on when speaking of the importance of Distinctions in general. One was the difference between scientific and human affairs: in the former, though all might be precise in theory, seldom was anything in fact, and in consequence—as Dr. Eierkopf’s frustrations illustrated—real nature could only approximate the orderliness of theoretical nature, and often contradicted it. In the areas of studentdom’s morals and government, on the other hand, all theories soon led to impossible contradictions—hence the typical despair of advanced students in those fields—but in practical fact much could be achieved. East and West Campuses, he reminded me before I could remind him, were ideologically irreconcilable—thus the conservative insistence that negotiation between them must be fruitless—yet the record showed, to his satisfaction at least, that constant negotiation backed by flexible strength and firm leadership had brought New Tammany and Nikolay Colleges closer together in fact, if not in theory. “Remember what I said this morning about the two sides of the arch,” he said; “their opposition supports the whole building. Look how influential the small colleges are getting in the U.C. because we and the Nikolayans are deadlocked. It’s a constructive state of affairs.”

  The second distinction he’d also mentioned in his speech of the morning: the difference between questioning means and questioning ends; between the criticism of operations and the challenging of first principles. The University, he insisted again, made what sense it made only when one accepted certain first principles without question. “You remember the old story about the Chancellor’s New Gown, that the tailors claimed was invisible to cuckolds? Well, I say the truth of it is that he was robed until that kindergartener said he wasn’t. The people laughed at him then and punished the tailors for fraud, because the alternative was to admit that they were all cuckolds, every one, including the Chancellor himself.” I noticed that he blushed at this point. “As for the child: if he was too young to be cuckolded, he was too young to understand a robe invisible to cuckolds. That doesn’t make him right. There are plenty of things on campus that can’t be seen until you’ve learned to see them, and some of the most important disappear when you look at them directly, or too closely. It doesn’t follow that they aren’t there.” He reaffirmed his criticism of the author of Taliped Decanus: “The fact is, Taliped was a good father and husband and a good dean until he let his basic research go too far: the playwright cheats by pretending that a flunking situation can exist without anyone’s knowing it, and then choosing one that everybody in the theater knows about except the characters in the play! So the idea of Taliped’s not finding out is as horrifying to us as his discovery.” He blushed again. “But look at you; look at me; look at all of us—we’re getting along, aren’t we? Was Cadmus College any better off at the end of the play? Why didn’t Taliped leave well enough alone? People ought to mind their own business, and get their work done, and not ask basic questions like whether anything’s worth doing!”

  This last was said with such surprising heat, even bitterness, that the Chancellor noticed my dismay and apologized. “I get as carried away as Maurice Stoker sometimes,” he confessed with a little laugh. “It’s a great temptation to say ‘Flunk all this responsibility and reasonableness.’ It would be awfully easy to go home and get drunk, and beat your wife like that fellow back there instead of living reasonably with her; or say any mad thing you feel like saying instead of weighing all the consequences.”

  He admitted then that his unwonted vociferousness was due to his certainty that I’d challenge the ground of his recent Certification by “the Grand Tutor,” which now he showed me. Passèd are the riot-quellers, it read: if order is better than disorder, Lucius Rexford is a Candidate for Graduation.

  “My assumption is that order is better than disorder,” he said. “I don’t question that for a second, and frankly I don’t care to hear it questioned.”

  I assured him that I had no quarrel with the proposition; on the contrary, I was ready to affirm (as I would not have been on the previous day) that order and disorder were like Passage and Failure, not to be confused either in fact or in value. I kept to myself certain reservations about his comment on the Taliped play (had he forgotten that Cadmus College was rotting and dying from the poison of the Dean’s secret flunkage? And that Gynander, the Cadmusian equivalent of a Grand Tutor, had not been ignorant of the awful answer?) and commended sincerely both his distinction between theory and practice in science and in politics and his general position vis-à-vis first principles, which I rather shared: would I not otherwise have despaired long since of my undemonstrable Grand-Tutorhood? Of all humans I had met on campus, I told him, there was none whose Candidacy it would more delight me to affirm than his …

  “But,” he grinned sadly. I had indeed a but or two, not unrelated to my program for ending the Boundary Dispute, but before I could think of a respectful way to voice them the Chancellor said, “They tell me you’ve seen a bit of Mr. and Mrs. Stoker recently.” I acknowledged I had, remembering suddenly and with interest an insinuation of Stoker’s: that Lucius Rexford was among those to whom Anastasia had granted—more accurately, not denied—her favors. The image of Mrs. Rexford’s coolness on the verandah recurred to me. “Excuse the personal question,” the Chancellor went on: “we’ve all heard how he abuses his wife; even beats her. Did you get the impression that she loves him?”

  I considered for a moment—not so much the yes or no demanded by the question, but how I might turn my response to more pertinent account.

  “Do you think it’s ever right for a man to strike his wife, sir?”

  “What?” He frowned sharply. “Well, no. No, of course not.” Whether or not he saw the difference between his question and mine, he answered at once, blushing vigorously, and added before I could think how to ask i
t: “Or be unfaithful to her, either. It’s indefensible—especially if his wife is loyal and affectionate.”

  “And Stoker’s not your brother, is he, sir? You agree that his way of life is flunkèd, don’t you?”

  Because I saw his eyes begin to flash dangerfully, I hastened to modulate to a less personal and particular application of my general point, the same I’d endeavored to make to Max, Peter Greene, Dr. Eierkopf, and Croaker—even, half-wittingly, to Anastasia, and perversely to Ira Hector and Stoker himself: that apart from the question of whether the grounds of their Certifications were valid or the Certifier was authorized, I was not convinced that themselves quite measured up to those several standards after all. Just as I’d found on the one hand Stoker’s Dean-o’-Flunkhood and Ira Hector’s selfishness equivocal, and likewise on the other Anastasia’s vulnerable magnanimity, Max’s scapegoatery, Greene’s innocence, Eierkopf’s asceticism, and Croaker’s appetitiveness, so I suspected that Lucius Rexford was not so entirely free of Stokerishness, so to speak, as we both might wish: I dared guess he had lost his temper with Mrs. Rexford on occasion, perhaps even had struck her—surely not more than once or twice—as well as sampled at least upon one occasion the extracurricular pleasure of Anastasia. Obversely, his condemnation of extremism and disorder, as manifest in Stoker, had never been more than mild; it was his partisans and associates who shouted down the gossip of their fraternity.

  Not to speak of these things directly, I praised instead his speech of the morning and the philosopher Entelechus on whom he’d drawn, and with whose thought I had a passing acquaintance, thanks to Max. Then I made bold to suggest that the principle of moderation and compromise lost its meaning if it too was compromised and moderated. Entelechus himself, I happened to recall, had warned against “means in the extremes”—by which he meant that one was not to lie, cheat, steal, rape, or murder even discreetly, but to eschew those vices altogether. Just so (I spoke in as objectively illustrative a tone as I could manage) with adultery, wife-beating, drunkenness, and violence of all sorts: the question was not when, with whom, how much, or how often, but whether at all in any case; and the answer was No.