by John Barth
With a loud oath he wrenched open the throttle; our acceleration pressed me into the seat. Moreover he sounded the siren, and the crowd on Tower Hall Plaza looked around in grave alarm as we raced up. Above the great clockfaces the Belfry was floodlit by mobile searchlight-units of the NTCROTC and the various Telerama departments. Agitated pigeons flew in and out. I saw Stoker’s face grow grim.
“Go around to the back,” I said. “I’m going up through the Library.”
“The flunk you are!” he exploded, and jammed on the brakes. “I’m not going anywhere!”
I considered a moment, shrugged, and climbed out of the sidecar.
“Neither are you!” he insisted. But I obviously was.
3.
Just then the crowd sighed; looking up with them I saw a white-tunicked, black-cloaked figure waving from the Belfry. Beside him, all in white, was a smaller, whom partially he caped.
“Did you see it, Jo Anne?” one co-ed demanded of another. “He walked right up the wall, with her on His shoulder!”
“Nonsense,” a young man sneered. “He was up there all along. I saw the whole thing.”
“So did I!” said the girl on his arm indignantly. “And you’re both wrong: He flew down, from higher up.” And this opinion she defended stoutly against the most cynical objections: maybe it was a publicity stunt, or a Telerama trick; she neither knew or cared; but that Bray had by one means or another flown into the Belfry with his girlfriend she was as absolutely certain as was her beau that he’d done nothing of the sort and the first girl that he’d scaled the tower barehanded and -footed. Strongly I gimped through, sticking and butting my way in some circumstances, politely begging leave to pass in others. Once, recognizing a knot of my erstwhile lynchers, I slipped into my Bray-mask till I was by them; in another instance I declared I was on official Chancellory business; in yet another, that I was George Giles, Goat-Boy and true Grand Tutor, en route to rescue My distressèd Ladyship.
“From what?” Stoker demanded, puttering behind me on the motorcycle. “Who said she wants rescuing?”
A few male students chuckled. Others whispered to their female companions. I gimped on, around to the Library-entrance, followed by a small but growing throng. The figures in the Belfry disappeared.
“Flunk it all, listen here!” Stoker yelled, throttling up beside me. “Do you think she’d be up there if I hadn’t ordered her to go? I arranged it!”
I smiled.
“Call me a cuckold!” Stoker challenged. “You can bet I have my reasons!” His tone grew more fretful as we came near the Library door. “But that doesn’t give you permission, Goat-Boy! You’re staying right here!”
I positively grinned at him, whereupon his voice at once turned guileful.
“How about Maxie? We could still spring him, if we work fast …” He raced his engine angrily. “Some Grand Tutor! You want her yourself!”
The students cheered. I motioned Stoker with my stick to get behind me; he was obliged in any case to do so, or leave his vehicle, as we’d arrived at the Library steps.
“Keep your hands off my wife!” he cried, heedless of bystanders—who seemed anyhow to assume that he was as usual playing a part. “If you even touch her without my say-so, I’ll fix you both!”
But I went on up, and he didn’t follow.
“You can say goodbye to Spielman!” he shouted at last. “You’ve condemned him to death!” He added something else, which the closing of the door cut off. Students clustered after me, some drinking from their steins, others heckling, a very few shouting threats of a fresh lynching, a roughly equal number defending me verbally against them, and most simply curious. All were halted, as was I, by armed cadets at the door of the Catalogue Room.
“No admittance,” they declared. The students angrily reminded them that it was a public library in a presumably free college. “Open stacks! Open stacks!” they began to chant. The cadets, in beautiful unison, fixed their bayonets. Everyone waited to see what I would do. But the noise fetched out an elder library-scientist from the Catalogue Room, where in the erratic light one could see numbers of his colleagues poring over a tableful of documents.
“Quiet!” he demanded. “We will have quiet in the Library!” To the students, who seemed to respect him, he explained that all of New Tammany had just been put under martial law by order of the Chancellor (who I therefore gathered must have come “back where he belonged”) and would remain so until the general emergency passed and order was restored. He exhorted them to return to their dormitories in the meanwhile and do their homework, by candlelight if necessary, inasmuch as varsity political crises came and went, as indeed did colleges and curricula, but the research after Answers must unflaggingly persist. Follow his own example, he bade us, and that of his colleagues, who would continue to piece together as best they could the scattered fragments of the Founder’s Scroll, though the very University rend itself into even smithier eens.
“My own coinage,” he chuckled at this last. “Comparative diminutive after smiodar: a piece or flinder. The substantive een is spurious, it goes without saying …” As he spoke, a special lens attached to the side of his spectacles like a mineralogist’s loup fell down into place and focused his attention on me: he asked excitedly whether I was not George Giles, the Goat-Boy and allegèd Grand Tutor indirectly responsible for the shredding of the Founder’s Scroll.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
But he bore me no grudge; indeed he seemed almost grateful to me for having in a way occasioned his current research. He insisted that the door-guards admit me, unless they had specific orders to the contrary, as he and his colleagues needed to consult me on a matter of textual restoration. “Understand,” he said to them and the students, “we’re not necessarily intimating any support of Mr. Giles’s claims or ambitions, which frankly don’t interest us one way or the other. Even the Dean o’ Flunks can quote the Scroll to his purpose, they say, and an accurate quotation is our only concern.”
A few students laughed politely at the little joke; the guards clicked their rifle-bolts as one. But I was permitted to enter.
“A little humor there,” the library-scientist told me modestly. “Shows them we’re not all dry-as-dust.” His associates looked up from a circular central table where the Scroll-case had formerly stood. Some had magnifiers in their hands, or Eierkopfian lenses, or scissors and paste. The manuscript-fragments, carefully laid out on the table-top, were surrounded by photographic equipment and bottles of chemicals; the floor round about was littered with longer, more modern scrolls: coded read-outs from WESCAC’s automatic printers. I was introduced around to philologists, archaeologists, historical anthropologists, comparative linguists, philosophers, chemists, and cybernetecists, the last on hand both to lend WESCAC’s analytical assistance to the project and to apply their genius with codes and ciphers to the restoration of the priceless text. I nodded to each, explained to the group that I was merely passing through the Catalogue Room en route to the Belfry, and excused myself.
“Oh no.” My escort, a model of donnish affability thitherto, spoke sharply and seized my arm. His colleagues too, whom one had thought to be gentle, preoccupied academicians, closed ranks between me and the exit, their expressions firm. I regarded them thoughtfully.
“Accuracy of text is all we care about,” declared my warden. His voice was polite again; he even chuckled. “After the first shock of seeing the Scrolls destroyed, we realized you’d actually given us a unique opportunity. All the texts are corrupt, you know, even these—copies of copies of copies, full of errata and lacunae—but we never could agree on a common reading, and of course the old Scrolls acquired a great spurious authority for sentimental reasons, even though they contradict each other and themselves.” At an interdepartmental faculty luncheon that same day, therefore, a committee of experts from various relevant disciplines had been established to reconstruct, from the shards of the Founder’s Scroll (actually several scrolls,
overlapping, redundant, discrepant), the parent text, until then hypothetical, from which all known variants had descended and on which their authority was ultimately based.
“A radical project, to be sure,” said the library-scientist, who was also chairman of the ad hoc committee. “But we like to think of ourselves as avant-garde classicists, so to speak. Little paradox there …” After a small digression then on the etymology of the word lacuna, and a more extravagant one on the word digression (which he justified with the chuckled preface that digression and extravagance were “etymological kissing cousins, you might say”), he came to the point. With WESCAC’s aid and the committee’s pooled learning, the groundwork for restoring the Scroll had proceeded very swiftly, and an “analogue model” of the proposed Urschrift had actually been roughed out on the computer. But before the work of assembling the Scroll-fragments after that pattern could really get under way, a fundamental issue had to be resolved. As much a question of personal philosophy as of historical philology, it involved whole complexes of argument, ideological as well as scholarly; but the Committee agreed that for convenience’ sake it could be symbolized by a practical question about the translation of a single sentence—a mere two words in the original language of the Scrolls. The “etymons,” as he called them, were the root terms for Pass and Fail, but inflected with prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and diacritical marks to such an extent, and so variously from fragment to fragment, that conflicting interpretations were possible; indeed, the history of certain such interpretations, in his opinion, could be said to figure the intellectual biography of studentdom, as had been amply demonstrated in a wealth of what he called Geistesgeschichten …
“Here’s what it comes down to,” one of his younger colleagues interrupted; “the existing texts of the sentence are grammatically discrepant, and where it’s supposed to appear in the most reliable context we’ve got lacunae: the missing fragments are either in the CACAFILE somewhere or among the ones you ate this morning.” He happened to brandish a pair of library-shears as he spoke, and I gripped my stick to parry any move to disembowel me. But all they wanted, even as his senior colleague had declared, was an opinion from me on the question whether to the best of my knowledge the crucial sentence ought to be translated Flunkèd who would Pass or Passèd are the Flunked. On that question, obviously, depended whole systems of others, perhaps even the overall sense of the Founder’s Scroll.
“Mind you, we agree on what each version means,” the young man said briskly. “What we call the A reading means that one ought to desire to fail, since the desire to pass is vain and vanity’s flunkèd—not to mention the famous tradition that Passage is to be found only in the knowledge of Failure, et cetera et cetera.”
The older man adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. “Well, now …”
“The B reading,” his protégé continued quickly, “is a way of saying that while to desire passage is to fail, to desire failure on that account is also to fail, since it equals desiring to pass. But despite the fact that Passage and Failure aren’t different, they’re not the same either; and for that reason if one wants to pass one should desire neither Failure nor Passage—yet one shouldn’t desire neither because one wants to pass, obviously …”
“Obviously,” several of his colleagues agreed, and even his mentor nodded with a slight cock of the head, as if to say that while details of the young man’s gloss were not unexceptionable, as a rough-and-ready formulation it would do.
“But we can’t agree whether A or B is correct,” he concluded, “and so we’re collecting expert opinions, weighting them appropriately, and programming WESCAC to arbitrate the whole question.” He winked and chuckled. “You may be interested to know that your colleague Dr. Bray has already obliged us with his judgment—though you understand I’m not at liberty to confide it, or what his weighting is on our little scale.”
They waited for me to speak. “Gentlemen,” I said, “your problem is most interesting in itself. What’s more it’s of the first practical importance, clearly. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”
But they blocked my way.
“A or B?” the young scholar demanded. “If you can’t remember what you ate, boy, tell us what you think, and we’ll let you go.” His superior tut-tutted at this show of coerciveness, but my inquisitor frankly declared that accuracy and thoroughness in scholarly matters were his only values in this flunkèd University, and that as a truly revolutionary researcher he would not hesitate to resort to terrorism if necessary to gain his ends. He didn’t give a flunk, he said, whether A or B was “true” in the philosophical sense—all such mystical formulations, in fact, he regarded as superstitious mumbo-jumbo: their authors knaves, their Tutees fools—but upon their like was constructed the whole mad edifice of campus history, for a clear understanding whereof it was absolutely essential to have accurate texts, “believe” them or not.
“Do you have an opinion?” he asked me wryly.
I smiled, as I had done through the whole episode. “Yes.”
“Then let’s have it.” He clacked the shears grimly. “We’ll let WESCAC decide what it’s worth.”
Reluctant for some reason to use the library-scientist’s term, I asked, “Where is this famous ‘pit’?”
The young man smiled and carefully indicated with the point of his shears a ragged hole near the center of the assembled shards. I opened a lens on my stick-end and leaned close over.
“Why magnify it if you don’t know the script?” he asked unpleasantly. “That just makes a big riddle out of a little one.”
But I was not inspecting the lacuna, nor was my lens a magnifier, but Dr. Sear’s mirror, with the aid of which I observed that the Committee had forsaken the aisle to gather close about.
“What’s your answer?” one of them demanded.
I huffed a great puff, sending vellum flinders in all directions, and with a sweep of my stick scattered fragments, chemicals, note-cards, shears, and scholars. Before they could recover themselves enough to decide whether stopping me or re-retrieving the smithered eens was of immediater importance, I had dashed into the Circulation Room and was gimping it headlong for the lobby. Halfway down a flickering corridor it occurred to me that if two riot-troopers were guarding the Catalogue Room, whole platoons must be on duty in the main lobby, especially at the lifts that serviced Belfry and Belly. Somewhere overhead the clock once again struck the three-quarter-hour; unless it was in error, there was no time to waste debating with a phalanx of bayonets. I retraced my steps to the Circulation Room (no one seemed to be pursuing me) and having noticed from a corner of my eye a few moments earlier its single occupant—a longhaired pallid girl, uncosmeticked and -washed, reading behind a desk marked INFORMATION—I took a long hazard.
“Excuse me, miss: is there any way up besides the lift?”
Next door the scholars fussed and clamored, scrambling after fragments on all fours like awkward kids, but the Circulation Room was still. The pimpled maid, thin and udderless as Mrs. Rexford but infinitely less prepossessing, looked over her spectacles from the large novel she was involved in and said with careful clarity—as if that question, from a fleecèd goat-boy at just that moment, were exactly what she’d expected—“Yes. A stairway goes up to the Clockworks from this floor. You may enter it through the little door behind me.”
All the while she marked with her finger her place in the book, to which she returned at once upon delivering her line. Mild, undistinguished creature, never seen before or since, whose homely face I forgot in two seconds; whose name, if she bore one, I never knew; whose history and fate, if any she had, must be lacunae till the end of terms in my life’s story—Passage be yours, for that in your moment of my time you did enounce, clearly as from a written text, your modest information! Simple answer to a simple question, but lacking which this tale were truncate as the Scroll, an endless fragment!
“-less fragment,” I thought I heard her murmur as I stooped through the little door she’
d pointed out. I paused and frowned; but though her lips moved on, as did her finger across the page, her words were drowned now by the bells of Tower Clock.
4.
In jerky leaps I sticked upstairs, around and around the shaft in which the mighty pendulum swung. Four flights there were, which I ascended as the bells phrased out their tune, and then a vertical ladder from the topmost landing up to a square trap-door in the Belfry floor. This ladder had ten rungs, I happen to know, for as I hiked myself up to each, the bells tolled an hour and over my head Anastasia screeched—a little higher each time, the three of us. Upon the eighth, bane of Dr. Eierkopf’s head, my own was through the trap-door, and in the reflected glare of plaza searchlights I saw My Ladyship a-humpèd upon the floor. On hands and knees she was, face slack, shift high; standing behind her, black cape spread and face a-glint, Harold Bray—quite older-visaged than thitherto, also hairier. Though his tup was hid (the pair were facing me) it must needs have been brutish long and sore applied: he was not mounted, only standing with bent knees aft of her ‘scutcheon, and his cassock was raised in front no higher than his shin-tops; moreover he did not thrust like any buck but only stood connected, opening and closing his eyes and cape; yet on each peal (high-re and -mi were the two I witnessed) Anastasia shrieked as if impaled, and on fa—which last stroke fetched me through the trap-door altogether—she collapsed upon the bird-limed floor, among broken eggshells and pigeon-straw. I was obliged to leap over her, the way being strait between Eierkopf’s work-tables and the busy gears of the clock; my stick-stroke, consequently, fell short of Bray’s head and but thwacked his cape, raising a silky dust that made me sneeze. He sprang behind the pendulum-shaft into the lift, and so escaped—but I had meant anyhow only to drive him off My Ladyship just then. To her, sitting up now fuckèd in the strew, I turned.
