John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"The trouble is," Max smiled, "there haven't been any Candidates since ancient terms, and things being how they are, the Enochists wouldn't dare say any more who's a Graduate and who isn't — even in the old days they never decided on that until after the student passed away. So the Turnstile's never been turned — it's probably rusted shut — and Scrapegoat Grate's been locked since it was built."

My fancy was caught by that latter name, and I squinted into the shadows with new interest. Max explained that the word had nothing to do with scapegoat, more the pity, but alluded to three characteristically anticaprine remarks of Enos Enoch's: that He was come to separate the sheep from the goats; that the Way to Graduation was too narrow for even a goat to walk, but a broad mall for His flock; and that it were easier for a goat to scrape through an iron fence-grating than for a merely learned man to enter Commencement Gate. The present practice in West-Campus colleges was for the strongest and nimblest young men from each quadrangle — generally the winners of athletic competitions held in conjunction with the Carnival — to fling themselves against the Turnstile, bleating in what they took to be goatly fashion, while the new registrants and spectators cheered them on and a figure dressed to represent the Dean o' Flunks endeavored to block their way. When all the athletes had failed they were garlanded with lilies by Miss University and by her symbolically driven from the scene, to the Dean o' Flunks' delight; then the great Right and Left Gates were thrown open, as if they were Scrapeboat Grate, and while the Dean o' Flunks gnashed his teeth in mock frustration, the hosts of actual new registrants were admitted into the Gatehouse just inside Mall Wall, and the business of scheduling courses for the term was begun. Few who participated in these festivities were aware of their original significance, any more than they recognized Carnival as coming from the Remusian "farewell to flesh" that preceded any period of fasting or mourning; Trial-by-Turnstile was no more than an amusing sport at the end of a week's carouse, and it was cause enough to rejoice for most students if they were able to turn out at all so early on that Friday morning, after partying all through Randy-Thursday night.

Of late, however, the tensions of the Quiet Riot, alarming rises in the student delinquency and divorce rates, and such exacerbating problems as overcrowded classrooms and the "drop-outs" from EAT-wave testing (which was held to poison the intellectual atmosphere and produce each term a certain number of defective minds) — these anxieties had lent a new significance to the ancient rites, at least in the eyes of the Enochist Fraternity, who held that only a return to the teachings of the New Syllabus could save the University from self-destruction, and studentdom from final Failure. Many non-Enochists, though they found that particular Answer unacceptable, agreed on the seriousness of the problem, and remembering the Spielman Proviso in WESCAC's Menu-program, called for a new Grand Tutor to change the AIM and give to contemporary West-Campus culture a fresh direction, a Revised New Syllabus, as Enos Enoch had done in His term.

"That's what that Greene meant a while ago," Max said, "when he said the woods is full of Grand Tutors this time of year. Spring Term is when your old wandering researchers and dons-errant used to appear on campus, or do their big projects." Furthermore, he declared, it was my selection, as though by chance, of this particular time of year to set out for Great Mall that had finally persuaded him of the possibility that there might be something to my claim to Grand-Tutorhood.

"Ah, Max!" I broke in at this point. "Even yet you can't believe me, can you?" My distress was so purely for his sake and not my own (there were tears of concern in my eyes) that he was moved to embrace me.

"Dear Billy!"

"George," I corrected.

"Suppose you were!" he muttered intensely, much as Peter Greene had done, and repeated the sentiment so familiar to me by now, and irritating: that it was beyond belief that so uncanny a chain of happenstance could be mere coincidence, and yet … By which was meant, I neither talked nor behaved Grand-Tutorially, in his estimation, and so the "chain of happenstance" must be coincidental after all, etc. "But if it's not you it's not anybody else around," he added, as though with clenched teeth, "not in my lifetime; and hard as it is to believe in Grand Tutors and all that daydreaming, I think of Stoker, and I think of Eblis Eierkopf, and I know we're going to EAT each other up if somebody don't stop us!"

He then confessed, excusing his bluntness on the grounds of short time and antiflattery, that he didn't for a minute subscribe to the hope that any "campus-passing spook" could change the student mind in general — indeed, he was still old-fashioned enough to find such a prospect as depressing as it was unlikely. Nor, he had to admit in all affection, did he regard me as a mental giant: excuse him, he had known prodigious intelligences in his day, in both scientifical and philosophical departments, and they were different from me, no offense intended. Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement — a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with his comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself — and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture — followed demonstrably — in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion — the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law — ontogeny repeats cosmogeny — and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence…

"Look how we been acting," he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; "the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity." Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ("…ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang…") which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naïve general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like — all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power — as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred — and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.