John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Nobody has to buy you!" Ira cackled after me. "You give yourself away for free! Like Anastasia!"

His taunt relieved me, giving as it did the lie to his talk of prices and commissions. I walked on. Students were beginning to throng Great Mall now, en route I presently learned to first-period classes, having eaten their breakfast.

"You got nothing from me!" Ira called again. "I got all you had to offer!" His voice was triumphant, but when I turned to him his old face was fiercely anxious.

"Then maybe you've helped me to pass," I said, "and yourself to flunk. Thanks."

The Living Sakhyan, I observed, smiled as ever from the foot of His elm. I might have upbraided Him for failing me once again (indeed, His condition, reputedly a kind of Commencement, seemed to me little different from Eierkopf's infantile paralysis. The one was unhelpful, the other helpless; for those in need of help it came to the same thing, and Eierkopf's at least was not wholly voluntary, though he affirmed it in his relationship with Croaker and his unconcern for the welfare of studentdom); but before I could speak I was hailed by several of the unshaven botherers who'd precipitated the whole encounter. Their attitude was friendly: though indigent, they were not ordinary beggars, I was to understand, but vagabond scholars — "Beists," in fact, who accepted tuition from Rexford's grant-in-aid program but contemned the whole academic establishment as mid-percentile and conformist, committed to the intercollegiate power struggle, hostile to art, sex, and the human spirit, and generally, in their vernacular, a drag. They inferred from my appearance that I was of their fraternity; were frankly envious, in fact, of my garment, stick, and bagful of tokens; and while their position, as I understood it, struck me as something wanting in consistency, they were clearly earnest, and I was grateful for their goodwill. However, there was no clarity between us. They knew who I was, but would not accept it that I had truly only one name, for example, and was literally half goat by training. "We dig those symbols," they assured me. And when I confessed that I couldn't make out their argot, they thanked me for reminding them that the Answer lay in wordless Being rather than in verbal formulas. Yet their own inclination was plainly towards the latter.

"How do you go about doing your Assignments?" I asked them. "Mine says Complete at once …" Some homely practical advice was what I sought, as one undergraduate to another; but they responded with disputation as passionate and abstruse as if I'd posed Dean Taliped's riddle.

"What is studentdom's Assignment, when all's said and done?" they demanded of one another; one asserted that there was none, as there was no Assignor; another, that each student was his own sole Tutor and Examiner; and so forth.

"Please," I said. "What I mean is, didn't WESCAC give you an Assignment? It gave me one."

"What He means is the analytical, conceptualizing consciousness," said one of my new classmates, as if speaking of someone not present.

"The flunk He does!" another objected. "He's putting us on, to remind us to be like Sakhyan."

"No, man!" insisted the first. "It's the Form-is-the-Void thing. Like the categories aren't real, but there they are, and we're in them even though there's really no us. "

A third intently scratched his crotch. "But does WESCAC symbolize Differentiated Reality or the Differentiating Principle?"

"Neither!" Number Two said contemptuously. "WESCAC symbolizes Symbolization. What He means — "

"Please," I said. At once they were respectfully silent. "The Assignment I'm talking about is a list of things I have to do to Pass…"

"See?" One said delightedly.

"I'm supposed to Fix the Clock, for example, and End the Boundary Dispute…"

"I'm with you!" Two muttered: "Space/Time thing!"

"And I'm supposed to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship, whatever all that means…"

"The Transcendence bit!" Three whispered.

But they could not decide whether I was exhorting them to attack their Assignment (whatever it happened to be) on its own terms, or the terms of the Assignment, or the very concepts of Assignor and Assignee. And did my aphorisms signify that the "Wheel of Passage and Failure" — their term — was to be affirmed, denied, ignored, or transcended? Specifically, for example, should they go to class and take respectful notes, go to class and quarrel with their professors, or cut class altogether? I left them contending beard to beard so heatedly that they took no notice of my departure. For though their debate was incomprehensible to me, and I despaired of getting usable advice from them, their illustration had suggested something to me for the first time: as young Enos Enoch had enrolled in the manual-training course taught by His mother's humble husband, so would I audit some ordinary professor, the first I came to, in hopes of learning something germane to my task. I would go to class! Great numbers of students were hurrying into a large hall not far distant, I joined them — rather, they made way for me, some mocking, others amused, most of them indifferent — in a vast low-ceilinged room divided into stalls by chest-high partitions. Each stall contained one chair and a console of sorts, far simpler-appearing than the ones in the Control Room and the Grateway. I saw no professor, humble or otherwise, but a number of young men in slope-shouldered worsteds and horn-rimmed spectacles were directing students into the stalls and explaining how to operate the consoles.

"Who's hazing you, frosh?" one asked me good-naturedly. I found the question meaningless, but identified myself with the aid of my new used card and asked whether I might sit in on the lecture, if there was to be one. The instructor leafed doubtfully through a roster of names on his clipboard, warning me that the class-rolls had just been read out on WESCAC's printers and might be incomplete, especially in the case of special or irregular students.

"George your first or last name?" His confidence was not bolstered by my reply; but as it happened there I was, under G: George. "I guess it's you," he said. "How the flunk can I tell? Not even a matric-number!" There was, however, a notation after my name to the effect that I was authorized by the Chancellor's Office to audit any courses offered in the College, though not for credit. The man addressed me more respectfully:

"Exchange-student, are you? Visiting this campus?"

I supposed he might put it thus, and he kindly showed me into a stall. The machines were teaching-machines, he explained, one of many varieties in the College, all wired to WESCAC's Central Instructional Facility. As a rule one addressed the device with one's "matric-number" and was then instructed individually, the subject-matter, pace, and method being determined by WESCAC's analysis of the student's record and current performance, as well as his academic objective. The machines in this particular hall, however, were designed for the orientation of new registrants; the morning's program consisted of a lecture recorded by the new Grand Tutor for that purpose. Doubtless noting some change of my expression, the instructor acknowledged rather sharply that attendance was voluntary: but he certainly thought it prudent for any new undergraduate to avail himself of the Grand Tutor's wisdom before commencing his regular course-work and assignments, especially as it was Dr. Bray's first formal lecture to the public. I had only to address the console (he did it for me, in fact, using the number on my ID-card, before I could decide to leave), don the earphones ready to hand, and press the Lecture -button to begin the recording. Should I desire elaboration of any particular point I was to press a button marked Hold, which stopped the lecture-tape, and another marked Gloss, which provided footnotes, as it were, to the text. Having explained this, he left the stall, a bit ruffled still at the idea that anyone could be uninterested in what after all was a historic event (he was himself a new instructor in the History Department), and went to give instruction to respectfuller students. But for all my disdain I pushed the Lecture-button, curious to hear what my rival conceived to be Grand Tutoring, and wondering too how he'd found time to put together a recorded lecture while partying at the Powerhouse and allegedly going into WESCAC's Belly. I hadn't managed yet even to visit Max in Main Detention! Through my headset came the clicking voice I knew — speaking, however, in a somewhat archaic style reminiscent of Enochist harangues: