by John Barth
“Well, hum,” Mother said, going to the console. “Founder’s Scroll, is it? Is that the title?”
“Yes’m. Founders Scroll.”
Still flustered by my kiss, she fiddled with her hairpins and the switches of the CACAFILE. “… o-l-l,” she murmured, pressing buttons. “Who did you say the author was, dear?”
I hesitated. “The Founder.”
She did not: “… n-d-e-r. No first name?”
“Just one name, Mother.”
The CACAFILE seemed to purr at her touch. “Please step into the next room,” she said, still in her office voice. “The volume or volumes you called for will be delivered to the Circulation Desk in approximately one minute.”
As soon as I took her arm the manner vanished; she minced and colored like a shy schoolgirl. The CACAFILE-console gave a little snarl, then lapsed into its previous torpid blink.
“Let’s go to the Circulation Desk, Mother.”
“Oh. Well.”
But at the empty Scroll-case we were arrested by a double commotion: from the Circulation Desk, next door to the Catalogue Room, feminine squeals as alarmed as merry; from behind us, at the door we’d first entered through, an angry male voice: “There you are, flunk you!”
A half-dozen scholars in the spokes of the card-file raised their heads.
“Hello, Daddy,” Mother said placidly.
It was indeed Reginald Hector, but much changed: the fringe of hair around his bald pate was grown shoulder-long; his body, that had been sleek, was brown and wiry, and wrapped in fleece of Angora; his feet were sandaled, and under his right arm (apparently hurt, for he clasped it with his left) was a goat-herd’s crook! This last he tried to raise with his better arm as he approached, and my surprise gave way to apprehension. I put the case between us.
“P.-G.!” A young dark-spectacled woman rushed in from the Circulation Room with a double handful of long white shreds. Behind her, from the desk-chute, more of the same blew forth, like paper streamers from a fan. “Thank the Founder you’re here, P.-G.! Look at this!”
I recognized her as Professor-General Hector’s receptionist, now out of uniform and evidently employed by the Library, perhaps in Mother’s former capacity. She showed no surprise at her previous employer’s costume, whether because she’d seen it before or because of her present agitation. The “P.-G.” paused and scowled, crook high. Mother clucked her tongue, nowise discomposed. The young woman held out the tangled skein and wailed: “It’s the Founder’s Scroll!”
The ex-Chancellor clutched his ailing arm. “The Dunce you say!”
“A-plus,” Mother affirmed.
“The CACAFILE’s gone crazy!” the young woman cried. “All these months the Scroll’s been lost in it somewhere, and now it’s spitting it out in ribbons!”
There was consternation among the scholars: one snatched a handful of the shreds, examined them, and groaned; others raced to the Cataloguing Office to pound on its locked door, and yet others to the Circulation Desk, where they clenched and hopped in vain to see the wisdom of the ages shredding forth.
“You!” my grandfather roared, thrusting a fistful of tatters under my nose. I closed my eyes, nodded, and took a mouthful of the ruins.
“What’s he doing?” the receptionist shrieked.
Mother smiled benignly and said, as if interrogated by a library-clerk: “Just browsing, thanks.” At the same time a dim memory of our readings in the hemlock must have stirred in her, for she took it upon herself to feed me more of the Scroll. Though I’d had no lunch to speak of and was quite famished, the old vellum was bitter on my tongue, like dung dried in the sun of desert centuries—quite apart from the anguish I flavored it with, compounded of doubt and desolation. For either my insight of a few moments earlier was false, in which case I was as much in the dark as ever, or else it was true, in which case I was failing by my own terms. What was the use of restoring those shreds to the Scroll-case? I was not blind to the possibility that failing all, on my own terms as well as WESCAC’s, might be the deeper sense of my answer; that is to say, that the failure truly equal to passage might be the failure to understand truly that Failure is Passage. Even as I chewed, that proposition flickered through my head as on a dim translux but did not console me. No, I was as snarled and wrecked as the Founder’s Scroll: never mind P.-G. Hector’s crook (now belaboring my shoulders) and the alarums of bystanders; never mind that the lights began to flicker again, as they had upon my spring-term disaster, bespeaking another crisis at the Power Lines; never mind that the College was in anarchy, that lunatics and flunkees ranged the quads—all I could think of, strangely enough, was My Ladyship. I envisioned her beneath—no, atop—Peter Greene, or Maurice Stoker, or Eblis Eierkopf, or Lucky Rexford, in some lubricious exhibition on the Living-Room dais. No, no, after all it was none of them; or having serviced them to exhaustion, now she stood, slack-mouthed with love; expelled their mingled seed with a tricky jerk, and stretched forth her arms to her fated, fateful lover, who rose up glitter-eyed upon the dais and enfolded her body in his hard black cloak. And I was no longer jealous, no, I was relieved; joyous, even, for her sake, when I heard the muffled cry of her delight and knew she was infused for good and all with the germ of Passage. I wanted to die.
“You can’t eat that!” a scholar shouted, clawing at the strips that hung like pasta from my jaws.
“He can shove it!” my grandfather snapped. “Independence, he calls it!” He grabbed at his wrapper. “Where’s my aides?” he demanded of his former receptionist. “Get this flunkèd hair-shirt off me!”
“Weren’t they with you at the barns, sir?” she said.
“Oh, the Dunce, I forgot I sent ’em out there.” Suddenly defensive, he glared at me and asked how the flunk a man could mix a batch of goat-dip by himself and keep his eye on a young buck like Triple-T at the same time. At mention of that name tears sprang to my eyes; I swallowed a great cud of Scroll; the rest fell to the floor and was scrabbled up by scholars. For a moment my despair gave place to a sweeter if no less painful emotion.
“Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom? Have you been with the herd, Grandpa?”
“Don’t Grandpa me, Dunce flunk you! If that buck hadn’t banged up my arm—”
He would crook me a harder one despite his infirmity; I lowered my head to take the blow and die like Redfearn’s Tom, grandsire of the buck he spoke of. There were cries from receptionist and bystanders, quite a number of whom had been attracted by the disturbance.
“Stop.” It was a voice I knew that pierced the clamor, and my heart: hard, clickèd, like a thumbnailed flea, a hoof-cracked tick. Asafoetida, the very smell of my impotent vision some moments before, was faint now in the literal air. Like Bray’s voice, it came from the Circulation Desk, whither all eyes turned. He stood upon the desktop, as if flushed forth by the CACAFILE: a taller, leaner-jawed Bray than the last I’d seen, less hirsute, more commanding, stronger of voice and odor. His skin shone as if varnished, and even as I had dreamed, he now affected over his white tunic a stiff black cloak, as of hard-shined gabardine. Everyone fell silent. My grandfather humphed, but lowered the crook. Mother made a baleful sound and whipped a knitting-needle from her bag, undoing all her purlings in one stroke; but she permitted me to disarm her. I patted her hand.
“Thank you, George.” Bray stepped from the desk and came hubwards.
“Look at this, sir!” an old scholar cried, wetting with his tears a handful of vellum tatters. “It’s destroyed!”
Everyone spoke at once then: it was my fault more than the CACAFILE’s, they said, whose original breakdown I’d also caused with my spring-term program; rather, it was Lucky Rexford’s fault, for they assumed that my freedom, and Mother’s, was owing to the flunkèd general amnesty. The ex-Chancellor’s former receptionist was especially vociferous: she had mistrusted me the minute she’d first set eyes on me, she declared to Bray (forgetting, I presume, that I’d been at that time disguised as him), and her suspicions had been borne out
catastrophically: not only had I, in addition to my more famous crimes, driven my mother mad, ruined the CACAFILE, and caused the Founder’s Scroll to be first lost and then destroyed; I was also responsible for the undoing of New Tammany’s most beloved alma-matriot, chancellor emeritus, and professor-general (retired). Not content to destroy the Philophilosophical Fund and thus move the College another step closer to Student-Unionism (of which Founderless ideology she had no doubt I was an agent), I had by some sinister means arranged for the transfer of its former director, the greatest of p.-g.’s and most considerate of employers, out of Great Mall and all posts of honor, to the managership of a bunch of stinking goats—probably in reprisal for the well-deserved punishment of the “pink pedagogue” and traitor Max Spielman.
“There, there,” the P.-G. muttered, blushing gratefully and patting with his good hand first her corseted, indignant rump and then, catching himself up, her back, in a classmately way.
“A-plus,” my mother said, impressed I think by the righteously wrathful tone of the woman’s accusations, and glaring at Bray as if they were directed at him. The bystanders murmured; cameras clicked, and their wielders cursed the flash-bulb shortage—for which too my denouncer called me to blame. Only the scholars paid us no heed; possessing themselves of what shards and tatters had been fetched into the Catalogue Room, they withdrew to the Circulation Desk to salvage the rest, curiosity supplanting their dismay. Bray himself heard the charges patiently, without expression, as nothing new, and I indifferently, bristling only at her insult to the herd. Then he raised his hand to silence her and the assemblage.
“Professor-General Hector’s retirement to the goat-barns was his own decision,” he said. “He wished to be ‘beholden to no man,’ I believe he told me. Isn’t that true, sir?”
Gruffly my grandfather admitted it was—not to be obliged, I suppose, for advice either, even bad advice. It was a poor professor-general, he declared, who didn’t know when he was licked, and he would not deny that his objectives—utter independence and complete self-reliance—which thitherto he’d thought of as synonymous, had turned out to be contradictory. Managing the herd without the help of his aides, he’d found himself dependent absolutely on himself—a dependence so oppressively time-consuming, he’d had no opportunity to “be himself” at all. Isolated from classmates and staff, absorbed from morning till night with the tending of goats, the preparation of his food, the maintenance of the barns, even the manufacture and repair of his clothing, he’d scarcely had time to roll himself a cigarette, much less assert his independence and enjoy his individualism.
“And that was when I had two hands,” he said.
“You poor thing, sir!” the receptionist exclaimed, touching the injured arm. “Let me tie it up for you.”
But he refused permission, declaring he’d bind the wound himself, as he’d done more than once in time of riot, as soon as he located his goldbricking aides—on whom obviously it was folly to depend; he pitied the goats, now he remembered he’d dispatched his aides to tend them in his stead. But no: Dunce flunk those stinking brutes!
“Then you weren’t beholden to the Goat-Boy for that idea,” Bray asked again. “Is that correct?”
“I make my own decisions,” the ex-Chancellor grumbled. “I don’t pass the buck. I’m my own man. An officer’s responsible for the mistakes of his subordinates.”
Touched by his sense of honor, however confused it was, I apologized for the counsel he now denied I’d given him, and agreed that it had been mistaken, though for other reasons than his.
“Every man for himself,” he snapped.
“Hear hear!” his loyal former receptionist applauded, taking his good arm and flashing her glasses at me defiantly, as if I’d been put in my place. I turned to Bray and explained, with a mixture of new respect and old resentment, the fault I’d found with his Certification of Reginald Hector: reading the citation “No class shall pass” to mean that his famous self-reliance was my grandfather’s key to Commencement Gate, I had bid him cast off his lifelong unacknowledged dependency upon his brother, the Old Man of the Mall, and singled-handed herd the goats. But I saw now, not merely that he was more dependent than ever, only upon himself instead of upon Ira and the aides, but also that my counsel was self-contradictory: I’d held Passage (Reginald’s at least) to depend on independence, whereas to be consistent with itself it ought to be independent of independence.
“Balls!” said Grandfather.
“May we quote you, sir?” inquired a reporter, but retreated before the former receptionist, who had commandeered her former employer’s crook and brandished it menacingly.
Bray may have smiled. “I believe Mr. Ira Hector intends to restore the original endowment of the P.P.F. He’s doubling it, in fact …” This announcement caused much stir among the bystanders and the reporters who had found their way to the scene, or perhaps arrived in Bray’s company. “Do you suggest,” he asked me politely, “that Chancellor Hector apply to his brother for reappointment to the directorship?”
“I don’t take favors from any man,” snapped the P.-G.; but the proposal was clearly not unwelcome to him, for he added with a growl: “Besides, Ira’s gone kerflooey, from what I hear; he’d probably turn me down. Not that I’d go begging, mind!”
I assured him that if Bray’s report about the P.P.F. was true, then Ira had repudiated my former advice, as I’d latterly advised him to, and could be depended upon to reinstate him.
“I wouldn’t take his word for it, sir,” the receptionist said.
“I think you can depend on your grandson this time,” Bray interposed with a level click. I could not but be comforted by his support, not alone for the sake of my grandfather, whom I’d long since forgiven his attempted nepocide and wished only well, but also because, as Bray’s subsequent speech indicated, he had apparently more confidence in me than I’d had for the last quarter-hour in myself.
“Grandson my foot,” the P.-G. said. “No bearded Beist is any grandson of mine. If he is, I disown him.”
“A-plus,” Mother said in her unhappy ignorance.
Bray raised both arms, spreading his cloak impressively, and addressed the company. “Now hear this,” he demanded; “George Giles, alias the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy, alias Billy Bocksfuss, was released from Main Detention early this morning at my request. I believe he is the true, authentic GILES.” A great commotion greeted this pronouncement: reporters dashed for telephones; Grandfather and his former receptionist frowned and gasped, respectively; Mother wept and kissed the hem of Bray’s cloak. I remained suspicious, but my heart stirred.
“However,” Bray continued, “he may or may not be a Grand Tutor.” The reporters halted in their tracks; everyone seemed reassured, even myself, by the possibility that I might yet be false. “Now hear this, classmates and Tutees: you did right to lynch him last spring, but I did right also to stop the lynching, and grant him now a probationary pardon. This is his opportunity to redeem his former failings, complete his Assignment correctly, and thus verify the Answer he claims to have discovered. Very soon he and I will go as before into WESCAC’s Belly, but unmasked this time, and we shall see who emerges unEATen. Perhaps we both shall; perhaps neither. Or perhaps George Giles is the true Grand Tutor, and Yours Truly is false …”
He waved down a chorus of No’s; clearly his popularity was undiminished outside the small circle of my acquaintances. Mother remained kneeling before him as if he were still praising me. The former receptionist bitterly, but not disrespectfully, objected that my second day on Great Mall, from all reports, was proving at least as disastrous as the first. Look what I’d done to the Founder’s Scroll …
“His Assignment was to re-place it,” Bray said calmly. “But what is the origin of the Founder’s Scroll? Not the Founder, Who surely inspired it, but the minds and hearts of His protégés—which is to say, of studentdom! If a Grand Tutor eats His words, is He not feeding Himself Himself?”
The woman was quieted, if not
satisfied. Grandfather scowled at me uncertainly. I myself attended Bray’s apology with interest, for though I could not remember that it was he who’d ordered the EAT-whistle sounded and stopped the lynching, and though I was aware of his ulterior motive in freeing me, and though I had no intention of submitting to WESCAC’s examination as before, his defense of my sixth Assignment-task was ingenious and straightforwardly offered. Moreover, the phrase “eating my words” suggested yet another interpretation, whether meant by him or not: what else had my day’s work consisted of?
“Consider too,” Bray enjoined them, “that the Scroll was torn to pieces by the CACAFILE in its efforts to file it at once in many different categories, as I believe George Giles instructed it to do last spring. But he now denies the reality of all such categories; of all categories. According to his present teaching, the distinction between one book and another, and between books and non-books, is illusory, inasmuch as the Founder is One, and the Founder is All! Possibly his destruction and partial consumption of the Founder’s Scroll is meant to demonstrate that teaching. Possibly not.”
I was much impressed with this analysis, and with Bray’s surprising grasp of my position, derived as it must have been from sketchy reports and observations of my long day’s labor. The others appeared less convinced, but respectful of Bray’s magnanimity and explicatory prowess. I regarded him closely for signs of guile, and found none.
“Understand,” he concluded, “I don’t say that this is the case, or that George Giles’s teaching is my teaching …” There were murmurs of agreement. “But is it for students to correct and discipline their masters? And until we have gone through the Belly unmasked, who dares say which is the student and which the master?” His expression seemed to grow sad, and his next words much moved me: the fact was, he declared, studentdom inevitably did judge its Tutors, and being less than Tutors, inevitably judged wrong, for which reason it was written in the Founder’s Scroll: A proph-prof is never cum laude in his own quad. That this was so was the failing of studentdom; yet there was no help for it; it was the nature of the student condition that one was obliged to honor one’s Tutors as true or condemn them as false, and yet such a judgment could not be made truly except by a true Grand Tutor. Had he said that studentdom necessarily judged wrong? The truth was, they might honor the true and condemn the false as easily as the reverse, but in either case they judged ignorantly. Yet did he say “as easily”? Nay, not as easily, for the false more often pleased than the true; wherefore it followed that the true Grand Tutor was almost invariably condemned as false, and the false celebrated as true—but not always.
