John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

This remarkable computer, I was told (a gadget called WESCAC), not only pointed out in accordance with its program the hopeless disagreement of the texts; on its own hook, or by some prior instruction, it volunteered further that there was in its Storage "considerable original matter" read in fragmentarily by George Giles himself in the years of his flourishing: taped lecture-notes, recorded conferences with protégés, and the like. Moreover, the machine declared itself able and ready (with the aid of "analogue facilities" and a sophistication dismaying at least to a poor humanist like myself) to assemble, collate, and edit this material, interpolate all verifiable data from other sources such as the memoirs then in hand, recompose the whole into a coherent narrative from the Grand Tutor's point of view, and "read it out" in an elegant form on its automatic printers! The son, as disinclined to writing as the father but apparently commanding some authority in his college, agreed, and in the face of opposition from certain "Gilesians" as well as "anti-Gilesians," the computer made good its promise. After several false starts and program adjustments it produced a first-person chronicle of the life and teachings of the Grand Tutor, a text so faithful to the best evidence and polished in its execution that young Stoker needed only to "change a date or a place-name here and there," as he vowed, to call it finished.

The great test came, he told me, when he took the manuscript to one Peter Greene, an early student of Giles's, now past sixty and the strongest critic of the "WESCAC Project." A famous teacher in his own right by then, Greene met the youngster with a scowl and only after much persuasion agreed to listen to a dozen pages. Refusing even to sit, he paced the floor of his office with every prejudice in his expression (so Stoker declared) as the reading began. At the end of page one he stood still; halfway through the second he was weeping; by the third he was on his knees at the young man's feet, begging his pardon and declaring it was "the GILES's very voice" that sounded off the pages!

Thus was born The Revised New Syllabus, which like its narrator and its evangels was destined for arduous vicissitudes. Those Gilesians whose teaching it contradicted — some of them chairmen of their own departments by that time — charged that the work was spurious, concocted either by WESCAC or by the upstart Stoker Giles, perhaps both, if not by the "Dean o' Flunks" himself.* The most antipathetic went so far as to deny that my visitor was actually the Grand Tutor's son, calling him an opportunist and antigiles who made the best of an accidental resemblance; while the non-Gilesians, "naturally," maintained as they had from the first that the man called George was never "the true GILES" at all but a dangerous impostor, and that the R.N.S. , "authentic" or not, was anti-intellectual, immoral, subversive, and altogether unfit for undergraduate reading-lists.

* Quem vide infra.

My visitor sighed as he concluded this account, and toyed glumly with the shaft of his stick; then with a shrug his animation returned. "But it all worked to our advantage, you understand — all that censorship and prohibition, and beating us up and throwing us in jail. Even the imitations and pirated versions that everybody ran into print with helped us out — you must have wished for that sort of ruckus over your own books! We put up with it, just as Dad used to, and the New Curriculum gets established sooner or later despite all. Because you see, classmate, the one thing we have on our side is the only thing that matters in the long run: we're right . The others are wrong." His face was joyous. "It may take a hundred semesters, but we know the New Curriculum will win. The non-majors will flunk; the impostors and false tutors will be exposed. It's just a matter of time until that book on your desk there will be in every briefcase on every campus in the University. It must be so: there isn't any other hope for studentdom."

He consulted his walking-stick watch again and abruptly rose to leave. It occurred to me that I had lost track of the clock-chimes from Main Tower.

"I can't stay longer; I've got other colleges to visit — even other universities." He winked at me. "There are other universities, you know."

"Look here, now — " I shook my head vigorously to throw off my drowsiness and indicated the box of typescript. "What am I supposed to do with this? I don't have time — "

"Indeed you don't!" He laughed — and what a stance he struck with his mad cane! "It's late, late, late, that's certain! On the other hand, you have all the time there is, exactly." He poked at the manuscript with his stick. "Forget about yourself if you like. Just send this on to your publishers without reading it; they'll be grateful enough, and so will your students. Or throw it out, if you don't care what happens to them on the Finals. I have other copies for other campuses; this one is your affair entirely…"

He spoke without testiness, only a bit teasingly: now, however, it was my shoulder he touched the stick to, and his voice became full of a fiery solicitude. "But classmate, read it! We lecture to studentdom as a whole, and yet there isn't any studentdom, Daddy always said that — only students, that have to be Graduated one at a time. I want you to be Giles's professor to this campus, for their sakes; but more than that I want you to Commence yourself, for your own sake. Do read it!"

A moment longer the stick-tip rested there. Then he tapped me a little smart one with it and left, calling back from the hallway, "I'll keep in touch!"

But he never did. His typescript languished beside mine — the one unread, the other unwritten — even got mixed with it by a careless janitor. I took a breath, and the winter term was over; paused a moment to reflect, and found myself thirty-two. What gets better? Confronting a class I forgot what my opinion was about anything, and had to feign illness. Famous men died; the political situation deteriorated. No longer could I eat at bedtime as a young man does and still sleep soundly. Fewer social invitations; presently none. The polar ice-cap, scientists warned, is going to melt. The population problem admits of no solution. "Today's freshman is more serious about his studies than were his predecessors — but is he also perhaps less inclined to think for himself?" Yesterday one was twenty; tomorrow one dies of old age.

In unnaturally clear March twilight when the air is chill, one reflects upon passionate hearts now in their graves and wishes that the swiftly running hours were more intense. Young men and girls cut off while their blood flamed, sleeping in the fields now; old folks expiring with the curse; the passionately good, the passionately wicked — all in their tombs, soft-lichened, and the little flowers nodding. One yearns to make a voyage. Why is one not a hero?

I read The Revised New Syllabus . Do you likewise, gentlemen and ladies in whose hands this letter is!

A final word. I sought diligently to locate Mr. Stoker Giles, or Giles Stoker (the comma in his name on the title-page, and my imperfect memory of that fateful evening's details, make the order uncertain), with an eagerness you will presently appreciate. In vain: no such name is in our Student Directory, nor is a "New Tammany College" listed in the roll of accredited institutions of higher learning. At the same time I consulted one of our own computer-men on the matter of the R.N.S.'s authorship: his opinion was that no automatic facility he knew of was capable presently of more than rudimentary narrative composition and stylistics — but he added that there was no theoretical barrier even to our own machine's developing such a talent in time. It was simply a matter of more sophisticated circuitry and programming, such as the computer itself could doubtless work out; literature and composition, he observed, like every other subject, were being ably taught by the gadget in pilot projects all over our quarter of the campus, and it was his conviction that anything "computer-teachable" (his term) was "computer-learnable." Moreover, he could not vouch for what his military colleagues might be up to, not to mention their counterparts "on the other side"; the computer-race he counted no less important than the contest in weapons-development, and it had become as shrouded in secrecy. His impression was that our enemies were more concerned with raw calculation-power than with versatility and sophistication — there was no evidence of their using computers as we do to manage sausage-making, recommend marriages, bet on sporting-events, and compose music, for example — but no one could say for sure.