John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Acknowledge with me, then, the likelihood that The Revised New Syllabus is the work not of "WESCAC" but of an obscure, erratic wizard whose nom de plume, at least, is Stoker, Giles ; and, again with me, acknowledge further that this is not the only possibility — for as that splendid odd fellow observed, there are in literal truth "other universities than ours." To the individual student of the book's wisdom the question of its authorship is anyhow irrelevant, and it seems most improbable to me that any prior copyrights, for example, will be infringed by its publication. The text herewith submitted I declare to be identical to the one left in my hands on that momentous night (excepting only certain emendations and rearrangements which the Author's imperfect mastery of our idiom and his avowed respect for my artistic judgment encouraged me to make). My intentions are 1) to put aside any monies paid me as agent, against the Author's reappearance; 2) to resign my professorship forthwith, whatever hardship that may work upon my family, and set about the task of my own re-education, to the point even of "becoming as a kindergartener" if necessary; 3) in pursuance of this objective, to compile a more formal and systematic exposition of the Goat-Boy's teachings, as well as a full commentary on and concordance to The Revised New Syllabus — these latter for classroom use in my own "New Curriculum," still in the planning phase.

Which several projects, I hope and believe, together with the extraordinary Syllabus itself, will more than make good what losses you have sustained on my previous manuscripts and vindicate your unremitting, most touching faith in

This regenerate Seeker after Answers,

J.B.

THE

Revised New Syllabus

OF

George Giles

OUR GRAND TUTOR

Being, the Autobiographical and Hortatory Tapes

Read Out at New Tammany College to His Son

Giles (,) Stoker

By the West Campus Automatic Computer

And by Him Prepared for the Furtherment of the

Gilesian Curriculum

George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood has been chronicled in the Journal of Experimental Psychology . I am he that was called in those days Billy Bocksfuss — cruel misnomer. For had I indeed a cloven foot I'd not now hobble upon a stick or need ride pick-a-back to class in humid weather. Aye, it was just for want of a proper hoof that in my fourteenth year I was the kicked instead of the kicker; that I lay crippled on the reeking peat and saw my first love tupped by a brute Angora. Mercy on that buck who butted me from one world to another; whose fell horns turned my sweetheart's fancy, drove me from the pasture, and set me gimping down the road I travel yet. This bare brow, shame of my kidship, he crowned with the shame of men: I bade farewell to my hornless goat-hood and struck out, a horned human student, for Commencement Gate.

I was, in other words, the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy. Who misbegot me, and on whom, who knew, or in what corner of the University I drew first breath? It was my fate to call no man Daddy, no woman Mom. Herr Doktor Professor Spielman was my keeper: Maximilian Spielman, the great Mathematical Psycho-Proctologist and former Minority Leader in the College Senate; the same splendid Max who gave his name to the Law of Cyclology, and in his prime led his department's fight for some sort of examination to supplement the Orals. Alas, his crusading ardor burned many a finger; so far from being awarded an emeritus professorship to comfort his old age, he was drummed off the quad a year before retirement on a trumped-up charge of intellectual turpitude — though his only crime, he avowed to the end, was to suggest in a public lecture that his science alone could plumb the bottom of man's nature. Disgraced and penniless, he was obliged to take whatever employment he could find to keep body and soul together; and thus it came about that he spent his last years as Senior Goatherd on the New Tammany College Farms. Ignominy — yet who can say Max didn't make the most of it? His masterwork, The Riddle of the Sphincters, twenty years in the writing and done but for the index, he fed to the goats a chapter at a time: I myself, so he told me years later over Mont d'Or cheese and bock beer, had lunched on the Second Appendix, a poem-in-numbers meant to demonstrate mathematically his belief in the fundamental rectitude of student nature. Embittered, but too great-hearted for despair, he removed himself entirely from society and devoted all his genius to the herd. Year-round he lived among us: made his home in a stall through the winter and pastured with us when the weather warmed. Call it if you will the occupational affliction of the field-researcher, he soon came to feel for the objects of his study more love than he had ever felt for his peers in the Senate. He became a vegetarian, grew a little beard, exchanged cap and gown for a wrapper of mohair, and lamented only that his years would not let him go on all fours. Though he never deigned to publish again in his life, his researches were at no time more bold and meticulous than during the first few years of this period. The goats, after all (to quote an entry from his diaries) "do not conceal in shame that aspect of their beauty I crave to fathom; serenely aware, after their fashion, that a perfect whole is the sum of perfect parts, they fly their flags high…" His one enemy among the bucks was an old brown Toggenburger called Freddie, tyrant of the herd, who, when he spied Max bent over to inspect any doe, would butt him, taking him for a rival. Max in turn was thus driven head-first against the subject of his examination, who thinking herself assaulted seldom felt again the same trust in her keeper. Such subversion of rapport between subject and investigator could not be permitted; just as vexing was the coincidence that the Chairman of New Tammany's Speech Department, whose filibuster in the Senate had blocked passage of the Qualifying Anals bill and contributed to Spielman's downfall, was named Fred. Max saw in this a sign, and took his vengeance. He dared not approach the Toggenburg openly, and so one October night when the bucks were bleating their lust as usual (none more loudly than treacherous Freddie), he arranged for a spry young nan to find her way into his enemy's stall: some moments later, Max crept up behind with a patent docker. Zut , the old rogue was clipped in mid-service, no joy in his windfall then! And all his fierceness withered; he grew fat and docile, never said a word when his keeper dehorned him a few weeks later. Of his trophies Max made the earlier into an amulet, of which more anon, the latter into a kind of shophars wherewith thenceforward he summoned the flock — and his studies proceeded without further trouble. Indeed, whether because they understood "after their fashion" that Freddie was undone and were grateful to his undoer, or because in goatdom the horn and testicle, irrespective of their bearer, command obeisance, the bucks gave place to Max ever after, and the does they capered to his tootle. The months that followed were perhaps his blissfullest: he founded the sciences of analogical proctoscopy and psycho-symbolistic cosmography, developed the Rectimetric Index for "distinguishing, arithmetically and forever, the sheep from the goats," and explored the faint initial insights of what was to become Spielman's Law, his last and farthest-reaching contribution to man's understanding of the University. That capstone on the temple of his genius, climax of his epic quest for Answers: how commonplace it sounds already, very nearly banal; and yet what dash, what vaulting insight! In three words Max Spielman synthesized all the fields which thitherto he'd browsed in brilliantly one by one — showed the "sphincter's riddle" and the mystery of the University to be the same. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny — what is it but to say that proctoscopy repeats hagiography? That our Founder on Founder's Hill and the rawest freshman on his first mons veneris are father and son? That my day, my year, my life, and the history of West Campus are wheels within wheels? "Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny" — I cannot hear those words but in the gentle Moishian accents of my keeper. Well he knew, old Max, the fate of grand hypotheses, but hard experience had brought him unfairly to mistrust his colleagues' wisdom, and his isolation kept him from final appreciation of WESCAC. For fifty years, he said, his theory, of Cyclic Correspondence would be anathema on West Campus: not twenty had gone by before it was dogmatized by the Chancellor, taped by the Chief Programmer, and devoured by WESCAC.