John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

I positively grinned at him, whereupon his voice at once turned guileful.

"How about Maxie? We could still spring him, if we work fast…" He raced his engine angrily. "Some Grand Tutorl You want her yourself!"

The students cheered. I motioned Stoker with my stick to get behind me; he was obliged in any case to do so, or leave his vehicle, as we'd arrived at the Library steps.

"Keep your hands off my wife!" he cried, heedless of bystanders — who seemed anyhow to assume that he was as usual playing a part. "If you even touch her without my say-so, I'll fix you both!"

But I went on up, and he didn't follow.

"You can say goodbye to Spielman!" he shouted at last. "You've condemned him to death!" He added something else, which the closing of the door cut off. Students clustered after me, some drinking from their steins, other heckling, a very few shouting threats of a fresh lynching, a roughly equal number defending me verbally against them, and most simply curious. All were halted, as was I, by armed cadets at the door of the Catalogue Room.

"No admittance," they declared. The students angrily reminded them that it was a public library in a presumably free college. "Open stacks! Open stacks!" they began to chant. The cadets, in beautiful unison, fixed their bayonets. Everyone waited to see what I would do. But the noise fetched out an elder library-scientist from the Catalogue Room, where in the erratic light one could see numbers of his colleagues poring over a tablesful of documents.

"Quiet!" he demanded. "We will have quiet in the Library!" To the students, who seemed to respect him, he explained that all of New Tammany had just been put under martial law by order of the Chancellor (who I therefore gathered must have come "back where he belonged") and would remain so until the general emergency passed and order was restored. He exhorted them to return to their dormitories in the meanwhile and do their homework, by candlelight if necessary, inasmuch as varsity political crises came and went, as indeed did colleges and curricula, but the research after Answers must unflaggingly persist. Follow his own example, he bade us, and that of his colleagues, who would continue to piece together as best they could the scattered fragments of the Founder's Scroll, though the very University rend itself into even smithiereens.

"My own coinage," he chuckled at this last. "Comparative diminutive after smiodar : a piece of flinder. The substantive een is spurious, it goes without saying…" As he spoke, a special lens attached to the side of his spectacles like a mineralogist's loup fell down into place and focused his attention on me: he asked excitedly whether I was not George Giles, the Goat-Boy and alleged Grand Tutor indirectly responsible for the shredding of the Founder's Scroll.

"Yes, sir," I said. "Sorry about that."

But he bore me no grudge; indeed he seemed almost grateful to me for having in a way occasioned his current research. He insisted that the door-guards admit me, unless they had specific orders to the contrary, as he and his colleagues needed to consult me on a matter of textual restoration. "Understand," he said to them and the students, "we're not necessarily intimating any support of Mr. Giles's claims or ambitions, which frankly don't interest us one way or the other. Even the Dean o' Flunks can quote the Scroll to his purpose, they say, and an accurate quotation is our only concern."

A few students laughed politely at the little joke; the guards clicked their rifle-bolts as one. But I was permitted to enter.

"A little humor there," the library-scientist told me modestly. "Shows them we're not all dry-as-dust." His associates looked up from a circular central table where the Scroll-case had formerly stood. Some had magnifiers in their hands, or Eierkopfian lenses, or scissors and paste. The manuscript-fragments, carefully laid out on the table-top, were surrounded by photographic equipment and bottles of chemicals; the floor round about was littered with longer, more modern scrolls: coded read-outs from WESCAC's automatic printers.

I was introduced around to philologists, archaeologists, historical anthropologists, comparative linguists, philosophers, chemists, and cyberneticists, the last on hand both to lend WESCAC's analytical assistance to the project and to apply their genius with codes and ciphers to the restoration of the priceless text. I nodded to each, explained to the group that I was merely passing through the Catalogue Room en route to the Belfry, and excused myself.

"Oh no." My escort, a model of donnish affability thitherto, spoke sharply and seized my arm. His colleagues too, whom one had thought to be gentle, preoccupied academicians, closed ranks between me and the exit, their expressions firm. I regarded them thoughtfully.

"Accuracy of text is all we care about," declared my warden. His voice was polite again; he even chuckled. "After the first shock of seeing the Scrolls destroyed, we realized you'd actually given us a unique opportunity. All the texts are corrupt, you know, even these — copies of copies of copies, full of errata and lacunae — - but we never could agree on a common reading, and of course the old Scrolls acquired a great spurious authority for sentimental reasons, even though they contradict each other and themselves." At an interdepartmental faculty luncheon that same day, therefore, a committee of experts from various relevant disciplines had been established to reconstruct, from the shards of the Founder's Scroll (actually several scrolls, overlapping, redundant, discrepant), the parent text, until then hypothetical, from which all known variants had descended and on which their authority was ultimately based.

"A radical project, to be sure," said the library-scientist, who was also chairman of the ad hoc committee. "But we like to think of ourselves as avant-garde classicists, so to speak. Little paradox there…" After a small digression then on the etymology of the word lacuna, and a more extravagant one on the word digression (which he justified with the chuckled preface that digression and extravagance were "etymological kissing cousins, you might say"), he came to the point. With WESCAC's aid and the committee's pooled learning, the groundwork for restoring the Scroll had proceeded very swiftly, and an "analogue model" of the proposed Urschrift had actually been roughed out on the computer. But before the work of assembling the Scroll-fragments after that pattern could really get under way, a fundamental issue had to be resolved. As much a question of personal philosophy as of historical philology, it involved whole complexes of argument, ideological as well as scholarly; but the Committee agreed that for convenience' sake it could be symbolized by a practical question about the translation of a single sentence — a mere two words in the original language of the Scrolls. The "etymons," as he called them, were the root terms for Pass and Fail, but inflected with prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and diacritical marks to such an extent, and so variously from fragment to fragment, that conflicting interpretations were possible; indeed, the history of certain such interpretations, in his opinion, could be said to figure the intellectual biography of studentdom, as had been amply demonstrated in a wealth of what he called Geistesgeschichten …

"Here's what it comes down to," one of his younger colleagues interrupted; "the existing texts of the sentence are grammatically discrepant, and where it's supposed to appear in the most reliable context we've got lacunae : the missing fragments are either in the CACAFILE somewhere or among the ones you ate this morning." He happened to brandish a pair of library-shears as he spoke, and I gripped my stick to parry any move to disembowel me. But all they wanted, even as his senior colleague had declared, was an opinion from me on the question whether to the best of my knowledge the crucial sentence ought to be translated Flunkèd who would Pass or Passèd are the Flunked. On that question, obviously, depended whole systems of others, perhaps even the overall sense of the Founder's Scroll.