John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

It was true, all true; I knew it at once despite my inexperience of the campus and the accidental fact that we in the goat-barns had been spared the intellectual degeneration of those pig-men. I peeped over the partition: some of my classmates slept, some furiously took notes, some picked their noses, some played cards, but none save myself seemed distressed by what I assumed we all were hearing.

"Alas," went on the firm sad voice in my ears, "the Finals are comprehensive; the Examiners care not a fig for your Sub-Department of Rot Research; one wonders whether they know of its existence! Our Schools and Divisions — - what are they but seams in the seamless? Our categories change with the weather; not so our fates. In vain our less myopic faculty preaches general education: they have not only the mass of their colleagues to contend with, but the very nature of great institutions. Bravely today one devises something 'interdisciplinary': perhaps a pilot survey of Postlapsarian Herpetology and Pomegranate Culture. 'Dilettantism!' cry the pomologists; the natural-historians, 'Thin soup!' By tomorrow there is a Division of General Education, with a separate Department of P.H.P.C., and in time an additional Department of P.H.P.C. Education to train instructors for the first. There's no end to it."

How was it, I wondered, an impostor dared speak so heretically against the Administration — all administrations? His next assertion — "Now mind, I mean no disrespect for the colleges, certainly not for old New Tammany, which I love as only an adopted child can love its mother" — - enabled me to revive for some moments the contempt for him I wanted to feel. "A wart on Miss University," he said warmly, "were nonetheless a wart; and if I will not call it a beauty-mark, neither would 1 turn her out of bed on its account." It was all a pose, then, that subversive compassion: a stance he took in order to abandon it, as a lover feigns displeasure to gain a kiss! But Bray went on then to speak of institutionalized education in terms so affecting, hypocritical or not, that it was much not to weep outright:

"We teachers forget our business; the University does not. There is a spirit in our old West-Campus halls, a wisdom in the stones as it were, that no amount of pedantry or folly quite dispels. I hear the pledges singing in their cups truths deeper than they know:

The Gate is strait,

And Great Mall is not all…

Strait is the Gate;

Great Mall, not all.

"For those with eyes to see, New Tammany abounds with voiceless admonitions to humility. Not for nothing are 'Staff' and 'Faculty' equally privileged, so that groundskeepers and dormitory-cooks are affluent as new professors; not for nothing does custom decree that our trustees be unlettered folk, and that our chancellor be selected not from the intelligentsia but by ballot, from the lower percentiles: tinkers and tillers and keepers of shops. For the same reason one observes among the faculty not graybeard scholars only, their cowls ablazon with exotic marks of honor, but men of the people: former business-majors, public-relations clerks, gentle carpenters and husbandmen. It is fit that our libraries be more modest than our cow-barns, our cow-barns than our skating-rinks, our skating-rinks than our stadiums. Was not Enos Enoch, the Founder's Boy, by nature an outdoor type, a do-it-Himselfer who chose as His original Tutees the first dozen people He met; who never took degree or published monograph or stood behind lectern, but gathered about Him whoever would listen, in the buckwheat valleys or the wild rhododendron of the slope, and taught them by simple fictions and maxims proof against time, which now are graved in the limestone friezes of our halls?

Not the cut of your coat, but the cut of your jib.

Milo did not pass in class,

Nor did he fail in jail…"

Blinking back tears (and recognizing neither of the alleged Maxims as my former keeper's) I Held and Glossed. A crisp male voice, refreshingly passionless, explained that the allusion in the latter epigram was to an early diplomate of Lykeion College from whom Milo Park, New Tammany's largest stadium, took its name:

"Book One of The Acts of the Chancellors," the glosser proceeded, "tells us that Milo matriculated in a provincial Lykeionian Ag-school during the so-called 'Golden Chancellory' of Xanthippides, with the modest aim of studying dairy husbandry; but though he covered himself and the Lykeionian Complex with glory for his athletic prowess, and became the inspiration of a dozen sculptors, he repeatedly failed to qualify for Candidacy, for the reason that a certain heifer named Sophie, assigned to his care, refused to eat the experimental feed-mixtures he prepared for it. Certain of failure, Milo turned on the animal one evening in a rage, dispatched it with a single sock, and carried it on his shoulders across most of Lykeion from the old Doric Stock-Barns to the Chancellor's Palace, where he left it high in a young red oak. For this outrage he was fetched to detention by the campus patrol, who however were unable to remove the dead beast from its perch. Seeing it next morning, the Chancellor asked how a heifer had contrived to climb his oak, and, told of Milo's offense, so far from exhibiting anger, he smiled and remarked: 'There is one way to raise a cow.' He then convoked the entire Department of Animal Husbandry and inquired whether the ablest among them had ever got a heifer up a tree, or knew how to coax one down. When none replied, he ordered Milo released from Detention Hall, dismissed the charges against him, and passed him without further examination — - the power of Summary Bond and Loosement being still vested in the Chancellory in that place and term. This gloss was prepared by your Department of Agricultural History. May we remind you that — -"

Impatiently I jabbed at the Hold -button, not to have to hear another advertisement. Owing to some characteristic of the machinery the gloss Held, but the lecture did not recommence; therefore I depressed Gloss again, and learned of a new dimension in the program: instead of the interrupted advertisement I heard a third voice, energetic and intense, apparently glossing the gloss:

"The Milo incident, and thus the later Enochist epigram, has been variously explained. Philocaster the Younger (in his Commentary on the Actae Cancellorum, Volume Two, pages four thirty-eight ff.) formulates the classical interpretation: 'Excellence is non-departmental' — - that is, greatness is what counts, irrespective of its particular nature. Opposed is the influential little treatise by Yussuf Khadrun, De Vacae in Arbores, which holds that ends, rather than means, are the Examiners' primary concern: that the excellence for which Milo was rewarded lay not in his athletic record but in his radical (and in the final sense practical) solution of an apparently flunking predicament. To the objection that treeing the cow was not a solution of anything until the Chancellor made it so by rewarding it, later Khadrunians have asserted that Milo's victory was not over the problem on its own terms, but over the terms of the problem — - that is to say, over the directive 'Raise this heifer' in its conventional interpretation. As Fanshaw and Smart ask (in The Higher Pragmatism): 'What did the Examiners care about experimental pasturage or the physical well-being of Sophie the heifer? In one sense everything, in another nothing. Milo's bold gesture made his failure the Department's failure. As one of Sakhyan's "footnotes" reminds us, too eager pursuit of solutions may blind us to the Answers, which are at least in some cases to be discovered by strange means indeed, and in strange places.' End of quote…"