John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"And all the doors are open, Georgie," he concluded. "You can't go through every one at the same time, but they don't ever close unless you close them yourself. I'm still finding out things about the violin." He set about to discourse then upon the acoustical properties of a fiddle-box lacquer he had made from the whites of grouse-eggs, but I would not hear him out.

"Max — "

"You keep interrupting." He seemed less annoyed than uneasy; indeed it appeared to me that he spoke to prevent me from speaking.

"I do know what I want to major in," I pressed on. "It's not anything you've ever studied."

" Wunderbar ! Now, well — " He cocked his head and pretended to search his memory. "That leaves open-channel hydraulics, school lunch management, coalmine ventilation… and the history of baseball. Unless they've changed the New Tammany Catalogue since I was fired. Which is it?"

"I'm going to be a hero."

Max's little gaiety vanished. Thrusting out his lips he turned away and plucked a straw of buckwheat.

"What's this hero? What kind of hero?"

I wasn't sure what he meant. Quietly, but with a kind of fierceness and still averting his eyes, Max explained that a lifeguard at the college pools, for example, was called a hero if he risked his life to save his fellow students, whereas a professor-general of military science might be similarly labeled for risking his life to destroy them. Which sort of hero-work did I plan to take up?

I admitted that I had no particular project in mind. "A hero doesn't have to know ahead of time what he'll do, does he? All he knows is who he is — "

"You don't know that much yet," Max grumbled.

"I don't mean my name!" His strange ungentleness vexed me. "I mean he might know he's a hero before he can prove it to anybody else. Then when he finds out the thing that needs doing, that nobody but the biggest hero can do, he goes there and does it. Like the old dons-errant and wandering scholars — they didn't know what adventures they'd have when they started out, but they knew it was adventures they were starting out for, isn't that right? Well, that's how I feel."

Max shook his head. "You're wrong, George."

"I'm not!"

"Na, please — " Gentle again, Max held up his hand. "What I mean, you're wrong I haven't studied herohood. I know more about herohood than anybody." This remark my keeper made in the tone of a plain statement of fact — he never boasted. "I'm not a hero myself and wouldn't want to be. But I sure do know what the hero-work is."

"Well, I am one," I declared. "That's why I'm tired of studying everything: I want to get started on doing whatever has to be done. I'll find out what it is."

Max continued to shake his head, as if my words pained him. "I don't believe in that kind of thing, Georgie." There were, he said, two classes of heroes worthy of the name: one consisted of people who in pursuit of their normal business find themselves thrust into a situation calling for the risk of their welfare to insure that of others, and respond courageously; G. Herrold was of this sort, an entirely ordinary man who just once had done an extraordinarily selfless deed. The other class consisted of those men and women the fruit of whose endeavors is some hard-won victory over the sufferings of studentdom in general: discoverers of vaccines, for example, and authors of humane legislation. These latter, in Max's view, were not more or less admirable than the former sort; the courage of the one was physical, of the other moral; the result in both instances was rescue from suffering, and in neither did the agent regard himself (before the fact, at least) as heroic. But the heroic professional — the riot-front doctor or the varsity pacifist — was nowise to be confused with what Max feared I had in mind: the professional hero. "It's the misery that should make the hero: the problem comes first, and true heroism is a kind of side-effect. Moishe didn't lead his people to the Promised Quad because he was a hero: he happens to be a hero because he did it. But this other kind, like the Dean Arthur Cycle, they decide they're heroes first and then go looking for trouble to prove it; often as not they end up causing trouble themselves." How many luckless sophomores had perished, he asked me, in order that Anchisides might gratify his ambition to found Remus College, and Remus College to dominate West Campus? To what worthy end did the son of Amphitryon steal the horses of Diomedes and set them to murder that animal-husbander, who had done him no injury at all? "It's perfectly plain when you read those stories that the hero's not there for the sake of the dragon, but the other way around. I got no use for heroes like that."

"But there always are plenty of dragons, aren't there, Max? If a man knows he's a hero, can't he always find himself a dragon?"

Max agreed that he could indeed, and ruthlessly would — even if the dragon were minding its own business. For the sane man, he insisted, there were no dragons on the campus, only problems, which wanted no slaying but solving. If he was suspicious of adventuring heroes, it was because like that gentlest of dons, Quijote, they were wont at the very least to damage useful windmills in the name of dragomachy. "Heroes, bah," he said.

I was then moved to argue (not entirely out of the captiousness I have confessed to) that aside from the matter of dragons, it was true by Max's own assertion that different men were called to different work, and that studentdom stood presently in the gravest peril of its history; could not a man then feel called to this greatest hero-work imaginable, the rescue of all studentdom?

"Well, and what from?" my keeper demanded. "From EATing each other up, I suppose."

"Yes!" For all their sarcasm, his words led me to an inspiration. "That place you told me about in WESCAC's machinery — what did you call it? — where it decides who the enemy is and when to EAT…"

"The AIM," Max said glumly: "Automatic Implementation Mechanism. It sets the College's objectives and carries them out."

My excitement grew. "Suppose a man found out how to get inside of WESCAC and EASCAC and change their AIMs so they couldn't ever hurt anybody! Wouldn't that be fit work for a hero?"

"This is enough," Max declared very firmly. "Any man that steps inside the Belly-room, he gets EATen on the spot."

"Anybody, Max?"

My friend's face grew most stern. "I was in the Senate when they passed the bill, Georgie," he reminded me, "and I was with the Chief Programmer when he read it in. Nobody changes WESCAC's AIM."

My heart beat fast indeed. "Nobody but a Grand Tutor, you told me once. Isn't that what you got them to put in?"

"Now look here, my boy!" Max was moved to take me by the arm; his tone was impatient and severe, but a great agitation trembled through him. "You're too old for this foolishness, verstehst? In the first place I don't like Grand Tutors, if there ever really were any — "

I interrupted: "If Enos Enoch was alive he could change WESCAC's AIM, couldn't he? And he could Commence the whole student body."

"Pfui on Commencement!" Max snapped. "Never mind Commencement! Your friend Enos Enoch cured a couple dozen sick students and brought one dead one back to life; how many millions do you think he's been the death of? Anyhow you're not Enos Enoch: you're a plain boy like any other boy, and be glad if you can learn to be a man — that's hero-work enough!"

But I insisted: "I'm not a boy. I'm a goat-boy."

"Anyhow, you're not a Grand Tutor."

"Then I'm a freak, Max: those are my choices."

Max shook his head vigorously, almost in my face. "They aren't choices, Georgie; they're the same thing. Now you get this Grand Tutor business out of your head. I can't watch over you when you matriculate; you're on your own then. But the man that sticks his head into WESCAC's Belly — ach, he comes out like G. Herrold."