John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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…