John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Calmly now he said, "You're like the man who gave my father a little lens once, that he claimed would show everything truly. Here it is…"

He flipped up a round concave lens near the head of his walking-stick and invited me to examine my manuscript through it. But the joke was, it was silvered on the back, and returned no image of my words at all, enlarged or reduced, only a magnified reflection of my eye. I felt myself blush, and blushed more to feel it.

He said, "You're going to fail. You've never been really and truly there, have you? And you've never finally owned to the fact of things. If I should suddenly pinch you now and you woke and saw that all of it was gone, that none of the things and people you'd known had been actually the case — you wouldn't be very much surprised."

Before I could reply he seized my arm and pinched the skin. I came out of the chair with a shout, batting at his hand, but could not shake him loose. "Wake up! Wake up!" he ordered, grinning at me. I found myself blinking and snorting out air. I did, I did with my whole heart yearn to shrug off the Dream and awake to an order of things — quite new and other! And it was not the first time.

He let go my arm and with his cane-hook retrieved my chair, which had got thrust away.

"It's beside the point that all the others are flunking too," he went on. "Don't you agree? The important thing is to pass ; you must pass. And you've got a long way to go! Don't think it's just a matter of turning a corner, to reach Commencement Gate: you've got to become as a kindergartener again, or a new-dropped kid. If that weren't so, my dad wouldn't have said it. But you know this yourself." Again he touched my arm, this time mildly, where the angry pinch-mark flamed, and affection beamed in his look. "What a pleasing thing it is that you don't bring up all the old arguments! But that's the artist in you (which is real enough, even if your work is wrong). You know a man can't reason a piece of music into being; and to argue the fact of Graduation is like arguing the beauty of a melody, or a line of verse. Splendid of you not to bother. I knew you were the man."

I still felt very much shaken; but I could not resist pointing out that in any case he made a good argument against further argument. He threw back his bronze head to laugh, and then with a serious smile declared: "I love you, classmate." My apprehension must have showed, for he added with a chuckle, "Oh, not in that way! There isn't time, for one thing: we both have too much to do. You've got to enroll yourself in the New Curriculum and get yourself Graduated; then you've got to establish Gilesianism here, so that the others can pass the Finals too. And this isn't the only college in the University, you know, or the only University, for that matter. My work is cut out for me!"

In the very head of his stick a silver watch was set, facing upwards, which he now consulted. Among my other emotions I was beginning to feel disappointment: what an anticlimax it would be if he revealed himself not only as a crank but as a tiresome one!

All I could think to say was: "Gilesianism."

"It's the only Way," he said pleasantly. "They call us crazy men and frauds and subversives — I don't mind that, or the things they do to us; we'd be fools not to have expected it. What breaks my heart is seeing them all fail, when The Revised New Syllabus could show them how to pass."

I sighed. "You're from the Education School. You've thought up some gimmick for your dissertation, and I'm supposed to read through it and make suggestions about the prose, since you took the trouble to buy my books."

"Please," he said gently. "The Syllabus doesn't need anything: I've already proofread the text that WESCAC read out and corrected the mistaken passages. It's you that needs the Syllabus ."

"You're from Business Administration," I ventured next, but I was too much upset still to relish the sarcasm. "All this rigmarole is somebody's notion of a way to sell textbooks."

Tranquilly he shut his eyes until I was done. Then, his good humor unimpaired, he said, "I enjoy raillery, classmate, but there just isn't time. Here's what you need to know: I'm not from this campus (you've guessed that already). My alma mater is New Tammany College — you couldn't have heard of it, it's in a different university entirely. And my father was George Giles." He paused. "The true GILES; classmate: the Grand Tutor of our Western Campus."

I leaned back in my swivel-chair. The hour was late. Outside, the weather roared. Nothing was getting done. Distraught to my marrow, I acknowledged him — " Was, you say." But I was almost incapable of attending what he said.

For the first and only time his expression turned sorrowful. "He's no longer with us. He has… gone away for a while."

Dreamily I said, "But he'll come back, of course."

He looked at me. "Of course."

"One day — when we need him again." How I should have liked to sleep.

His smile returned, albeit melancholily. "We need him now. Things are worse than they ever were in his day. But he's — on a sort of sabbatical leave, you might say. It's up to us to carry on."

He pressed upon me then his story, which I heard in my torpor and made this sense of only on later recollection: His father was or had been some sort of professor extraordinarius (of what subject I never learned) whose reputation rested on his success in preparing students to pass their final examinations. His pedagogical method had been unorthodox, and so like many radicals he had worked against vehement opposition, even actual persecutions: I gathered his tenure was revoked and he was dismissed from his position on a charge of moral turpitude while still in his early thirties — though it was not clear to me whether he had ever held official rank in his faculty. Neither was it plain what had happened to him afterwards: apparently he'd left the campus for a short time, returned clandestinely (don't ask me why) to confer with his protégés, and then disappeared for good. The tale was like so many others one has heard, I could almost have predicted certain features — such as that these same protégés had subsequently dedicated their lives to spreading their Mentor's word and institutionalizing his method as they understood it; that they too were roughly used as they transferred from college to college, but won proselytes by their zeal wherever they went. Neither was it surprising to learn that this Professor Giles, this "Grand Tutor" as his son called him, never committed his wisdom to the press: what academic department has not its Grand Old Man who packs the lecture-halls term after term but never publishes a word in his field? In fact, the one unusual particular of the whole story as I heard it this first time was the not-very-creditable one that the man had got a child, by a lady married to someone else; otherwise it was the standard painful history of reformers and innovators.

The problem for my visitor, then — the fruit of this illicit planting — was the common one faced by second-generation followers of any pioneer: to formulate the Master's teaching into some readily disseminable canon, a standard and authority for the fast-swelling ranks of its adherents. By the time Stoker Giles had reached young manhood his father's original pupils were already divided into factions; the son's first thought had been to compile as a source-book their reminiscences of the great man's life and tenure, but so many discrepancies, even contradictions, were made manifest in the collation, he abandoned that project. In its early stages, however, he had gone so far as to read the several texts into an automatic computer, as our fashionable classicists are fond of doing nowadays, to speed the work of comparing them — and here, gentle editors and publishers, your credulity like mine must flex its muscles for a considerable stretch.