John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Mornings and afternoons were devoted to my tuition. Indeed the entire day was, and in a sense the night, as shall be shown; not a minute but Max turned to pedagogical account. We rose as always just before daybreak with the herd, and for exercise I forked down hay or did push-ups in the peat. At the same time, while memory was still fresh, I would recount my nightsworth of dreams — of which there were a great many compared to the old days — and we would discuss them with reference both to general human nature and to the character of my particular mind, which was revealed to be a guileful, impious rascal. One night in my twenty-second year, for example, I dreamt of a terrible misfortune: at the sound of the shophar old Freddie stormed into the barn (that troublesome Toggenburger of days gone by, whom I had known only after his castration); he butted Max square in the chest and caused him to fall upon the patent docker, so injuring himself that he could never rise again. Then, fleeced oddly in angora, the brute set out to mount Mary V. Appenzeller, restored to ripe matronage by the dream. In vain her attempt to flee over the pasture fence; in vain my best efforts to defend her with a stick; the brute climbed her unmercifully, and I woke in terror at her short sharp cries. For all the villain Freddie had died eight years since and been gelded long before that, I hurried to embrace my sleeping keeper and assure myself he was not harmed.

Imagine my disgust next morning when, having heard my tearful report of this dream, Max said calmly as I forked: "What that means, you were actually wishing what I did to that Freddie was done once to me. Then I couldn't take Mary to my stall like you used to see me do. That's all that part means, Georgie." Worse, he declared the Freddie of my dream to be no other buck than myself, who had indeed once felled my keeper with a blow to the chest, where no ordinary goat could reach. As for my apparent defense of Mary, it was but the reaction of my new human conscience to my former goatishness — which latter still secretly envied Redfearn's Tom the circle of does (including Mary) that lustily had crowded round him on the day of his death. It was sufficient to observe that my crook-work in the dream was a vain defense, which in fact had been a deadly successful attack: my final wish, as revealed by this and other details, was that Max be castrated and rendered helpless and my human scruples forcibly put aside, so that bucklike I could mount the doe who'd mothered me!

"That's an awful thing to say!" I protested. "It's not so at all!"

"Then something worse is," Max said. He hastened to add that there was nothing unusual or necessarily wrong about such a wish, nor did the fact of it imply that I hated my keeper and approved of what amounted to incest; the wish might not even be a current one — but its authenticity was as beyond doubt as my disapproval of it. To my question, Why couldn't the dream just as well mean something admirable, such as that I fervently wished no injury to befall my keeper, and would lay down my life for my dam's sake if only she could be restored to us? Max replied, "Every man's part goat and part Grand Tutor; it's the goat-part does the dreaming, and never mind how he carries on at night, just so we keep him penned up in the daytime! If you didn't kill me in your dream, someday you might do it for real."

Clear-seeing keeper in your tomb: forgive me that I disputed your grave wisdom. When I had been most nearly a goat in truth, I argued, I had used to dream straightforwardly, as it seemed to me, of eating willow-peel, butting my rivals, and humping all the nannies in the barn; from these fancied mating-feasts my "mother" was no more excluded (nor on the other hand singled out) than she would have been in fact had I come to proper buckhood during her lifetime, for among the liberal goats one sort of love never precludes another. I no longer dreamed overtly of such pleasures; why could it not be merely that my tastes had changed since the confirmation of my humanness? So far as I could see, I had no more desire for any doe, not even for Hedda of the Speckled Teats, who once had roused me to a deadly human passion. Further, I was mystified by the feeling of terror that I had awakened with: it seemed the effect equally of both actions in the dream, the smiting and the ravishment, yet upon waking it was only Max I'd feared for, not Mary, even in those instants before I realized she was past harming. Which was altogether fit, for that whole latter business made no sense! A buck didn't "attack" a doe, anymore than a male undergraduate "seduced" a prostitute: he simply availed himself of her. And where attack is meaningless, defense is also; had a rutty buck ever truly got loose in the barn I'd have been quite as anxious on Max's behalf as I was in the dream, but any concern in the other matter would have been for the proper order of our breeding-schedules, not for so preposterous a notion as a milch-goat's honor! No, I insisted (rapping my points out firmly with the butt of my hay-fork on the floor), the dream must have some other meaning, and an innocent one, perforce. I had no wish to mate with Mary V. Appenzeller; for one thing, she was dead; anyhow she was not my real mother; even if she were, there would be no evil from goatdom's point of view in mounting her, unless it lay in singling her out exclusively. It came to this, that I was not wicked: I was good. Undeniably I had struck my keeper once, and had slain my best friend — but those were tragic mistakes, one might almost say accidents; it was unkind even to recall them, proceeding as they had not from a flunkèd heart but merely from suffering ignorance, the same that had assaulted Lady Creamhair in the hemlocks…

"Yes?" Max asked politely. "You remember something else in the dream, Georgie?"

"No. And I won't tell you any more dreams if you're going to turn them into something ugly." The fact was, I suspected Max had guessed more of that particular fiasco than I cared for him to know. Several times I'd seen his face grow thoughtful as I wound my silver watch: no doubt he thought I'd stolen it from Lady Creamhair (which was more nastily human, the concept or the suspicion?) and in his teasing spiteful way had concocted this cynical dream-theory for the purpose of trapping me into some confession.

I drove my tines deep into the hay. The way Max watched annoyed me further: meekly, warily, yet stubbornly, as if expecting violence — as if inviting it. I pitched more than was necessary into the crib.

"Flunk this psychology of yours!" I cried. "Can't anything I do be just innocent?"

The retort caught me with my fork poised — at shoulder-height! — to drive again into the hay. I leaned upon it instead (for though I'd learned to stand and even work erect without assistance, I was never to walk far unsupported), and, blushing briskly, made some apology. I was to report in mornings to come more heinous dreams (indeed, once I'd got the hang of interpretation I saw there was no wickedness my night-self didn't revel in, the grievouser the better, so that where several explications seemed plausible I chose without an eyeblink the flunkingest, as most in character, until Max pointed out to my distress that " a priori concession of the worst," as he called it, may be as vain a self-deception as its opposite) but none more troubling; in the red light of my blush I saw, not the dream's full significance yet, but at least the guile and guilt of my bad temper. Blushes and apologies, apologies and blushes — in the monkish book of my tutelage they illuminate every chapter-head and — foot!

Max, of course, only shrugged. "So what's the maxim for this morning? What it says in the Founder's Scroll: Self-knowledge is always bad news ."

Our text determined by this or other means, we would discuss over breakfast its manifestations in literature and history, its moral and psychological import, or its relevance to earlier lessons. Such a one as the foregoing, for example, could well have introduced me to the "tragic view of the University," to the Departments of Philosophy and Drama in ancient Lykeion College, to the Enochist doctrine that thoughts are as accountable as deeds on one's final Transcript, even to the provinces of medicine or mathematics — for my tutor was nothing if not resourceful, and synthesis, it goes without saying, was his particular genius.