John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"That much more piquant, you mean."

"Very good, George! Really, you amaze me."

But I was too desirous of Anastasia's esteem (not to mention Dr. Sear's final welfare) to be content with bland compliments. What I wanted, I told him, was not that he should be amazed, but that he should Pass, and prerequisite to that end was his real conviction, not merely that he was not passèd (despite Bray's Certification, which I sensed Sear had no final faith in), but that he was failed.

"Wait now," he protested more firmly; "you forget what Gynander — "

I interrupted: "Gynander was a proph-prof, sir. Excuse me, but that makes all the difference on campus. Gynander didn't do things just out of curiosity; he didn't especially even want to see everything he saw. But he did things; he had… a power. He wasn't just a spectator."

Dr. Sear allowed I had a point, and this time his expression of surprise at what he called my "native discernment" was more sincere, and less composed.

"But see here, George," he said, making a little grimace; "there's one factor in Hedwig's condition, and my attitude, that you're leaving out of account — naturally enough, since I've told no one about it except my wife." He contemplated the ash of his cigar. "The fact is, I won't be on campus much longer…"

Though he touched the little bandage on his brow as he spoke, I mistook his meaning until Anastasia, with a small compassionate exclamation, put by her tray and hurried to his chair-arm. Pressing his distinguished head at once to her chest, she declared she'd known there was more to "that sore place" than he'd let on. Her tears ran freely into his silver hair; I could almost envy him the squamous-cell carcinoma that provoked such sympathy. It had begun, he told us quietly, as a small growth upon the bridge of his nose, which had commenced to fester, as he'd thought, from daily contact with the frames of his eyeglasses. He himself had subsequently diagnosed it as malignant and arranged for its removal, but the surgeon-friend who excised it had discovered preliminary invasions of both orbits as well as of the paranasal sinuses.

"You've noticed," he said, almost with embarrassment, "that my breath is often foul. The cause of that, happily, also prevents my being able to smell it myself — or anything else." He attempted to turn this circumstance into a wry example of Tragic Compensation; but Anastasia, who knew the import of his words as I did not, weepingly implored him to cease making light of it, to have the cancer dealt with at once, before his eyesight and very life should go the way of his sense of smell.

"Nonsense, my dear." He patted her arm. "I have a twenty percent chance of living another decade if I let them cut my nose off; maybe thirty percent if they take the eyes out too. No thank you!" He had, he said, devoted his life to the admiration of beauty and the enlargement of his experience and understanding; he saw no reason literally to deface himself for the sake of a few horrid extra semesters. Moreover, though there was he supposed no end to art and knowledge, he could not but feel surfeited with both. He regarded his life as having been pleasant and rich in variety; for that very reason he was lately bored with it; nothing had for him any longer the delight of genuine novelty, and he confessed to looking forward to his dying with the temperate enthusiasm of a connoisseur, as the one experience he'd yet to try. To his mind, the only choice was aesthetic: whether to take his own life forthwith or let the cancer make a blind purulent madman of him before it killed him, a year or two hence. The latter course appealed to him, as the more passive and exquisite; he had always rather let experience write upon him than play the role of author. On the other hand he loathed monstrosity and unawareness, particularly in combination; even before the carcinoma reached his brain he would be stupefied with suffering or narcotized against it, and of what value was an experience one didn't experience?

"Oh well," he concluded — actually yawning, as if this subject too had begun to bore him; "naturally all this has been a trial for Heddy; she never was much of a philosopher."

Anastasia kissed him all about the face, but especially upon the fatal bandage; nor would Sear's tuts and pats assuage her concern.

"If I could help you somehow!" she grieved, and I knew with a sting that had the doctor been a man of normal appetites she'd gratefully close his sorrow in her honey limbs. I too was touched with pity and begged his pardon for my earlier criticisms, though I couldn't help feeling that the fact of his disease, however grave in itself, had no bearing on our argument. It pleased and chastened me that Dr. Sear acknowledged as much himself a moment later, when Anastasia had gone to the washroom to compose herself.

"I'm aware," he said, "that my attitude toward dying is quite as perverse as my other attitudes. Contemptibly effete, if you like. And so I'm properly contemptuous of it — which is more effete yet, and so on."

I asked him to excuse my tactlessness, as I'd had little experience of human attitudes towards dying (the goats, it goes without saying, have no opinions on the subject); no doubt it was presumptuous of me to advise him at all, and particularly in these circumstances…

"No no no," he insisted, more cheerfully. "You're quite right; the cancer's beside the point; you must help me teach Hedwig that. So, you have a prescription for me, do you? A tip for the Finals?"

I saw he was ironical, but set forth anyhow a notion that had occurred to me when I considered his Certification in the light of the others I'd challenged. It came to this: that so long as he relished his self-loathing and found his failings piquant, he was by no means being "nothing ignorant"; on the contrary, his failure to see the vital difference between Gynander and himself — between the mantic and the connoisseur — argued to me that he was after all naïve.

"Naïve!" He very nearly tapped his cigar into his coffee-cup. "Naïve!" He could say no more. I blushed, but insisted on the term. What fundamentaller innocence was there, I asked him, than the inability to distinguish passage from failure? Hadn't he himself alluded, in the Amphitheater, to those verses in the Old Syllabus condemning fallen studentdom to "knowledge of truth and falsehood" — which was to say, awareness of their failure? Yet he still believed — naïvely, in my opinion — not only that total awareness of failure was somehow tantamount to passage, but that experience was synonymous with depravity. In short, he confused innocence and experience, self-knowledge and self-delusion, passage and failure.

"I see," Dr. Sear said coolly. "And how do you suggest I correct this lamentable ingenuousness?"

What I suggested, stubbornly, was that he learn to loathe his self-loathing in fact, and not just in the voluptuous way, by taking true measure of his perversion…

"Ah," he said, brightening up at once. I hastened to add that what I had in mind was no elaboration of his usual amusements; depravity à quatre was not perverser than depravity à trois, I argued, any more than voyeurism by fluoroscope was naughtier than Eierkopf's night-glass watches. No, the consummate perversion for a man of his temper, as I saw it, lay on the opposite hand: let him eschew the piquant and exotic, if he would taste the full flunkèdness of his life; let him pursue instead the humblest and most commonplace of satisfactions…

"What do you mean, exactly?" he demanded. "Eat my beef well-done? Drink beer from a can with dinner? Watch Telerama-shows all evening?" Even as he told over these suggestions I saw his fine nostrils begin to quiver, and was the more persuaded of my good judgment. I shook my head.