John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Anastasia's character, in fact, was one of two chief subjects of debate among my friends in Main Detention; it always came up when Peter Greene and Leonid were within talking distance of each other.

"Keep-her-legs-together-wise," Greene would declare to him, "I used to think she was a durn nice girl, same as you do now. I'd of swore she was the GILES her own self if you'd of stepped up and asked me! Didn't I sock you one in the Living Room for saying she weren't no virgin? But it's no use her putting on airs now, by golly: I've seen what I've saw!"

"And done what you did," Max would remind him.

Leonid then would shout "Irrelevanceness!" or "Dumbnicity!" and, seizing his new friend by the hair (if they were in a common cell) or shaking a cordial fist, would harangue him on his blindness to the real nature of Anastasia's virtues.

"Is the GILES!" he would declare of her. "Excuse, George: you know what! Virgins bah! All this chastehood, all this niceship — what's the word it is, Dr. Spielman, sir?"

"Schmata," Max would offer, who had grown fond of Moishian terms since his detention. "Dreck."

"I love!" Leonid then would roar, with reference equally to the words, his idol Max who supplied them, his grumbling and perhaps pinioned cellmate (who had given up exercise and vitamin-pills), and My Ladyship. "Never mind goodity! Pfui! Pfui!"

What he meant I can more easily paraphrase than reproduce in his idiom: to believe in Grand Tutors and Founders was against his curriculum, but he would not dismiss as did everyone else the notion that the GILES could possibly be female or that Anastasia, despite her sexual history, might be it. On the contrary, it was just that aspect of her biography and former nature that Commenced her in Leonid's eye; he loved her as blindly (it seemed to me) as earlier had Peter Greene, but for just contrary reasons: as a quintessential rapee, an absolutely unselfish martyr to studentdom's lust — his own included, for he'd once knelt before her in a corner of the Powerhouse, confessed an overmastering desire, and not been denied its satisfaction. He would none of my suggestion that her very docility perhaps aroused the lust that made her its victim. "Nyet!" he would shout, slamming one fist into the other and plunging as always about the cell. So far from learning the flunkèdness of her innocence, he would school me in the passèdness of her guilt.

"Lustily I spit on!" he cried. "Chastiness same like!" Celibate co-eds, in his view, were a kind of misers, Ira Hectors of the flesh, and rapists a kind of burglars or book-pirates: flunkèd men whose flunkèdness was made possible by the corresponding flunkèdness of private property. Neither would Graduate if he were Grand Tutor; none save the generous should pass. "But nyet!" he would then avow further. Had he called her a mere rapee? Insufficienthood! There was no merit in being robbed; that mischance befell miser and philanthropist alike. Anastasia, he maintained, was like a man who not only gives alms to the poor and greedy but bestows his whole wealth among them, share and share alike, lest they be led to steal it: "A Reginald Hector of sexness!"

I smiled at this analogy, ironically more telling than he knew, but declined to argue the point or disabuse him of his esteem for the former chancellor. It was between him and Greene that the argument raged, as it had since their first encounter at Stoker's Randy-Thursday party; only now, thanks to Greene's disillusionment, it was flunkèd versus passèd promiscuity rather than the latter versus passèd maidenhood. Otherwise they were the cordialest companions — except when Greene's bitter hallucinations and Leonid's epileptoid fits made one or the other unapproachable.

"No durn good," was Greene's new refrain, whether he was speaking of Anastasia, "Miss Sally Ann," New Tammany College, or himself. "No gosh durn good! What I mean, Truth-Beauty-and-Goodnesswise, y'know?" Though convinced that Anastasia had got what she deserved from him ("Flunking hussy, leading me on she hadn't never been touched, and all the time selling it faster'n O.B.G.'s daughter!"), he did not excuse himself of the felony. He was flunked, he saw plainly now; had always been flunked, in every wise. He had despoiled the forests and destroyed their aboriginal inhabitants, vaunted his uncouthness, ridden roughshod with his vulgar wealth; he had been no husband to his wife (who however he was sure now had betrayed him many times over), no father to his children (wastrels and delinquents though they were). Let them Shaft him; he deserved no less a penalty, even from a college he saw now to be corrupt from Belfry to Basement. Or, if the whore he'd alleyed and her pimp the false Grand Tutor chose to hush the thing up, let them acquit him: once free he'd divorce his wife, resign from his enterprises, quit the Junior Enochist League and all it stood for, perhaps even defect to the East Campus — or blow his brains out, he was not sure which. In earnest of these resolves he had already abandoned razor and soap: his chin bushed orange; his scent approached the late Redfearn's Tom's.

It turned out that he was neither convicted nor acquitted. In the morning of the day at hand — the first of Max's trial — the case against him was dismissed, and he left Main Detention.

"She wouldn't testify!" Stoker exclaimed to me, referring to his wife. I was only slightly less baffled than he. My Ladyship had decided to press no charges — so the prosecuting barrister had announced, plainly chagrined — because "mature reflection" had led her to believe that she'd doubtless invited and provoked Mr. Greene's assault, and doubtless been gratified by it in some flunkèd wise. As her statement was read, Anastasia regarded me coolly across the court-room, where I sat with other prospective witnesses in the Spielman case.

"Generostness!" Leonid wept later, when he heard the news. "GILES-hoodhood!"

At the counsel-table Greene muttered: "I knew she weren't no better'n she should be, drive-a-man-to-drinkwise. They're all of a feather."

But Stoker, like myself, could accept neither of these interpretations.

"It's what you've said about her all along," I reminded him; and he agreed, but pointed out with a troubled sigh the same irony that puzzled me: her admission was — perhaps for the first time! — not true at all.

"Flunk if I know what's come over everybody," Stoker said. "Maybe you are the Grand Tutor." I observed him narrowly: there was in his tone and expression no trace of his usual tease — nor did he lately, as of old, prompt one's least-passèd aspects to the fore. For example, his remark did not tickle my vanity or ambition, as formerly it would have, but rather shamed me, and I answered calmly: "I don't know any more whether Bray's the Grand Tutor or not; there's something extraordinary about him. But I know I'm not. I'm a total failure."

My warden smiled. "Maybe Failure is Passage."

The cell that Peter Greene had vacated I found occupied now by Croaker, fetched there from the Infirmary while I'd been in court.

"He's diplomatically immune," Stoker said. "We're just boarding him till they fetch him back home."

My black friend did not look well. Max and Leonid held his head as best they could while he vomited through the bars. He too was charged with rape, Stoker explained to us, and though he could not be prosecuted he had been declared non gratis in New Tammany College and was being held against his recall at the request of his Frumentian alma mater. Following my advice, it seemed, he had mutinied against Dr. Eierkopf: eaten every egg in the Tower Hall Belfry, fresh and otherwise, then jammed home the Infinite Divisor into the escapement of the clockworks and abandoned his master between Tick and Tock. Putting by all restraint, he had deflowered two co-eds, one male freshman, a trustee's maiden aunt, a blue-ribbon gilt, and a cast-bronze allegorical statue in heroic scale of Truth Unveiled. In addition he had consumed indiscriminately raw chipmunks, aspen catkins, toadstools, dog-stools, and the looseleaf lecture-notes of his third victim, an economics major. The campus patrol had overtaken him at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel; yet they doubted they'd ever have subdued him, unless fatally, had not a remarkable occurrence quite nonplussed him.