John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

All I said was, "Oh?"

"My name is Stoker Giles," the young man announced. His head still was propped on the singular stick, and he continued to regard me with an uncalled-for look of delight. Perhaps I was intended to recognize the name, but my hold on such things was never firm. Especially of late, though I lectured with animation, indeed almost fervidly, I had sensed myself losing command of memory and attention. Information escaped me; I could not recall my telephone number, and missed my way on the most familiar campus paths. My family waited only for the day I should come home to some stranger's house; their teasing had given way to concern, concern to impatience, and impatience to a silent rancor, which though I perceived it I could not seem to engage.

I asked him whether he was a graduate student.

"Well, at least I'm a Graduate." His apparent amusement now positively irritated me, the more as it was not my place to draw his business out of him but his to state it. And then he mildly added, "I wonder if you are."

I think no one may accuse me of hauteur or superciliousness. In truth I reproach myself for being if anything over-timid, acquiescing too easily, suffering presumption to the point of unmanliness, and provoking contempt in my eagerness not to displease. But the man was impudent! I supposed he was referring to the doctoral degree; very well, I'd abandoned my efforts in that line years since, when I eloped with the muse. Moreover, I'd never pretended I had the memory and temper for scholarship, or even the intelligence: time and again I've followed some truly profound one to my limits and been obliged then to stand and watch, chin-high in the shallows, while he forged on past my depth. I was properly humble — and properly indifferent. To make is not the same as to think; there are more roads than one to the bottom of things.

"You'd better take that box and get out," I said. "I've got work to do."

"Yes," he said. "Yes indeed you do!" As though at last we understood each other! Then he spoke my name in the gentlest tone (he had, I should say, a curious accent that I couldn't place, but which sounded not native), and indicating my work-in-progress added, "But you know this isn't it. There's much to be done; you mustn't waste any more time." In the face of my anger his voice became businesslike and brisk, though still cheerful. "Nor must I," he declared. "Please listen now; I've read your books and understand them perfectly, and I've come a long way to see you. May I ask what you're calling this one?"

I was taken aback by a number of things. Not simply his presumption — I rather admired that, it recalled an assurance I once had myself and could wish for again; indeed he was so like a certain old memory of myself, and yet so foreign, even wild, I was put in mind of three dozen old stories wherein the hero meets his own reflection or is negotiated with by a personage from nether realms. Yet there was little of the Evil One about this chap, however much of the faun; it wouldn't have surprised me to see he had cloven hooves, but the reed-pipe, rather than the pitchfork, would be his instrument. I found myself so caught up in such reflections as these, and contrariwise arrested by the tiresomeness of succumbing to an image the fellow obviously strove to affect, that annoyance and perspective got lost in my confusion. I couldn't think how he should be dealt with; the situation was slipping my hold, disengaging from me as much else had lately seemed to do. For example, I'd forgotten my pills again, which I'd come to need regularly not to fall asleep over my work: that accounted for my present somnolence, no doubt. I told him that the book was to be called The Seeker — or perhaps The Amateur, I could not decide…

"Certainly." The pleasure with which he stroked his beard was plainly not at the excellence of my titles. "A seeker; an amateur: one who is a lover, so to speak, but not a knower; passionate naïf — am I right?"

Well, he was. Do you know, the great mistake we make in these encounters comes not at their end but here, at the very outset. The moment our mysterious caller comes to the door, or we recognize we've made a wrong turn somewhere and are in alien realms — then is when we should take instant, vigorous action: protest at once against the queerness of it, shut the door, close eyes and ears, and not for one second admit him. Another step down his road and there'll be no returning — let us stop where we are! Alas: Curiosity whispers to Better Judgment, "It's too late anyway," and we always go on.

"He's about thirty," my visitor supposed.

"Thirty-three, I guess."

"Thirty-three and four months? And I'm sure he has some affliction — something physical, that he was probably born with — is he a cripple?"

I hadn't thought of making my man a cripple, though it was true that he seldom left his quarters (in the top of a certain tower), preferring the company of his books and amateur scientific apparatus to that of his fellow men. "He's just nearsighted, is all," I said, "but he does have a port-wine birthmark on his temple — "

"Cancerous!" the stranger cried. "You'll make it turn out to be cancerous! Oh, that's very good. But shouldn't he have some sort of astigmatism instead of myopia?"

Ah, it was so right, so righter that the seeker's vision be twisted instead of merely blurred — and to make the birthmark incipiently cancerous, what a stroke that would be! For the first time in half a year I grew truly interested in my book. Putting reticence by, I outlined the plot to this remarkable visitor of mine, who displayed a keener grasp of my concerns than any critic or reviewer I'd read — keener, I smiled to suppose, than myself, who in recent months had come nearly to forgetting what was my vision of things.

"It's about love, as you say; but a very special kind. People talk about two sorts of love, you know, the kind that tries to escape the self and the kind that affirms the self. But it seems to me there's a third kind of love, that doesn't seek either union or communion with its object, but merely admires it from a position of utter detachment — what I call the Innocent Imagination." My hero, I explained, was to be a Cosmic Amateur; a man enchanted with history, geography, nature, the people around him — everything that is the case — because he saw its arbitrariness but couldn't understand or accept its finality. He would deal with reality like a book, a novel that he didn't write and wasn't a character in, but only an appreciative reader of; naturally he would assume that there were other novels, better ones and worse… But in truth, of course, he wasn't finally a spectator at all; he couldn't stay "out of it"; and the fiascos of his involvements with men and women — in particular the revelation of his single mortal fate — these things would make him at the end, if not an authentic person, at least an expert amateur, so to speak, who might aspire to a kind of honorary membership in the human fraternity.

"I think there's some heroism in that, don't you?" I was, in truth, never more enthusiastic about my story. It was a great conception after all, and little inspirations came as I spoke: the seeker must be not only astigmatic but addicted to lenses, telescopic and microscopic; the tower he lived in I would convert to a sort of huge camera obscura into which images of life outside were projected, ten times more luminous and interesting than the real thing — perfect, perfect! And my amateur of life would welcome and treasure his cancer, his admission-ticket to brotherhood…

But even as my enthusiasm grew, Stoker Giles shook his head.

"It's wrong, classmate." He even laid a hand on my arm — I can only say lovingly. And for all I saw pretty well he was playing to the hilt his role of clairvoyant, the touch moved me. And the laughing candor in those eyes, that exalted-imp's face (doubtless practiced in a mirror) — the wretch had a way with him! My quick disappointment gave way to lassitude, a sweet fatigue. It was wrong, of course; all I'd ever done was wrong. I had no hold on things. My every purchase on reality — as artist, teacher, lover, citizen, husband, friend — all were bizarre and wrong, a procession of hoaxes perhaps impressive for a time but ultimately ruinous. He couldn't know how deep his words went, almost to the wellsprings! Without for a moment accepting him as prophet (I knew all moods are retroactive, so that what he said would apply to anyone ripe for discontentment), I let myself acknowledge the mantic aspects of the situation. Throughout the rest of our interview, you must understand, there was this ambivalence: on the one hand I never lost sight of the likelihood that here was just another odd arts-student, even a lunatic, whose pronouncements were as generally pertinent as weighing-machine fortunes; on the other I was quite aware that it is the prophet who validates the prophecy, and not vice-versa — his authenticity lies not in what he says but in his manner and bearing, his every gesture, the whole embodiment of his personality. And in this salient respect (which I dwell upon because of its relevance to the manuscript he left me) Mr. Stoker Giles was effective indeed.