John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

I was utterly dismayed: what in the barn had seemed a matter of simple courage — like walking into a dark room and turning on the light, or rescuing a kid from a pack of dogs — seemed here an impossibly complex and unlikely task. "How will I ever get all that done?" I cried. "And you talk as if you won't even be around to advise me!"

"I hope I may be, Georgie," he answered gloomily. Then his face brightened for a moment. "Who knows if it's possible or not? If things weren't impossible we wouldn't need Grand Tutors!" He pointed out that when a man found himself in great danger — pursued by a bull, say, or drawn under by a treacherous current — it not uncommonly happened that he discovered in himself extraordinary resources, thitherto unsuspected, with which to rescue himself. Such a resource to studentdom in general, it seemed to him, were those whom men called Grand Tutors: adrenalin for the imperiled student body. "If you get through the Grate you'll find your way without my help. All I can do is warn you in a general way, from studying how it went with ones like you in the past, and I don't know how useful that is. Look at yesterday."

He smiled somewhat sadly, to let me know he held no grudge, and we rejoined Croaker and Peter Greene. They in turn had been joined by a desiccate gentleman whom I recognized as Dr. Kennard Sear, and who it developed remembered Greene cordially as his patient of some years previously. The two seemed to be on good terms despite the great difference in their natures and the fact that their professional relationship had been unfruitful. Greene had bought an extra ticket for the Doctor and was clapping him on the shoulder as we approached.

"My dear George," Sear murmured amiably. "Good to see you again. Pity Hedwig isn't here; she was quite taken with you last night."

I shook the fine dry hand he offered me and then put by my apprehension at the morrow's prospect to join the general good-fellowship. Dr. Sear was delighted to see Max once more, having been among his admirers and supporters in the troubled past.

"Kennard Sear…" Max frowned. "Ja, sure, the young radiologist with the Cum Laude Project. I thought you were on Eierkopf's side."

"Gracious no!" Dr. Sear closed his eyes in a delicate expression of horror. "That is, I'm on everybody's side. ' Tout comprendre ,' all that sort of thing. Bloody bore, taking sides; not my line at all." He smiled very pleasantly. "But what's this they're saying about you and young George here, and all this Grand Tutor nonsense?" The man's manner was so urbane, his way of saying things so gracious, that Max chuckled at what surely would have affronted him from someone else. He assured Dr. Sear that while age and exile had doubtless taken their toll upon his faculties, on the subject of Founders and Commencements he was still the skeptic he'd been in the Senate. What was more, he declared, he was still as inclined as ever to act in accordance with his beliefs — unlike certain civilized and knowledgeable gentlemen who either had none or else disguised them wonderfully well.

"You're too severe," Dr. Sear protested mildly. We strolled towards the Amphitheater. "I grant you I can't go along with anybody's Answers I've heard of yet, but that's their fault, for always being half true. Founderism! AntiFounderism! Look at Greene here, with all his blather about Good Old NTC, and Let the Chips Fall Where They May. Don't you agree it's just simple-mindedness, this business of having principles?"

Greene whinnied merrily and jerked his head a number of times. "I swear, I can't keep up with you!" He gave the tickets to a uniformed attendant, to whom also he made known how interesting he found it that "these old-time thee- a ters," after which NTC's was patterned, had no balconies reserved for darkies, though even a country boy like himself knew that there'd been slavery in both Lykeion and Remus Colleges in their golden days. It all went to show, he maintained, what high-minded folks those old fellows were, who never regarded a man as inferior just because he wasn't as good as they were. He thumped the ticket-taker's chest congratulatorily as if he were himself not only an ancient Lykeionian but the designer of unbalconied amphitheaters, and the fellow acknowledged the tribute with a gracious grunt. Then we entered the great bowl of seats, already mostly filled, and were ushered down towards those reserved for us. I turned my attention from the cordial dispute between Max and Sear on the difference between simple, strong, and narrow minds to survey the dark stone stage and humming crowd. Though I knew the huge enrollment-figures of the College I had no appreciation yet of its size, and having met one acquaintance by sheerest chance already, I searched the audience in hopes of glimpsing Anastasia, or even Lady Creamhair — whom I was determined to seek out and make amends to for my bad manners, if she still lived in New Tammany. But there was no sign of them. Greene bought from a passing vendor five cartons of popcorn , pleasant stuff, whereof he and I took each a box and Croaker three, Max and Dr. Sear declining. The latter, enraptured by the carving on my stick (which he identified as a first-chop example of late-transitional mandibulary carving in the East Frumentian polycaryatidic tradition except for the shelah-na-gigs — - seldom to be found in the work of mandibulary artists by reason of strictures extended from taboos against certain kinds of oral heteroerotic foreplay — and the now completed intaglio vine, obviously an extraquadrangular influence since both viniculture and oenology were unknown in the East-Frumentian "colleges"), declared to Max with a sigh that after all he sometimes regarded the absolutely unselfconscious, like Croaker, to be the only real Graduates — "using the term figuratively, of course…"

"Pfui!" Max replied, and Sear conceded at once that he didn't really believe anything of the sort, though he certainly did admire spontaneity and animal innocence above all human qualities, despite his contempt for them.

"Who's nearer to being passed?" He included in a wan wave of the hand Croaker, Peter Greene, and myself. "Them or us?"

It seemed to me an improper question, presupposing as it did not only the evident similarity between the two professors but something significantly common to us eaters of popcorn. But I let it pass, both because Max himself promptly challenged it and because my eye was caught by a photograph of The Living Sakhyan and his retinue in a discarded newspaper near my feet.

"Innocence, bah," Max said.

"I agree, I agree!" Sear protested. "But it's sweet, all the same. Oh well, it's not, but it seems so to us ravaged post-Pre-Schoolists. I suppose we're the innocent ones, when we speak of great rascally simpletons like Greene there as being innocent."

Greene winked above a cheekful of popcorn. "Say what you want." I was impressed again by his strange combination of attitudes: I'm okay, his wink declared — but with as much supplication as conviction.

"Pfui on innocence," Max said.

"I couldn't agree more," Dr. Sear nodded. "I'll go even further: innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent."

Here Max parted philosophical company with the Doctor (who, I learned in time, had moved from the fields of radiology and general pathology into psychiatry, though like Max he was learned in a great many areas beyond his profession), for he regarded Commencement itself as an innocent illusion.

"Ignorant, I mean, not harmless," he added, much more in the vein of the Max who'd raised me than the fellow who'd met me at the fork in yesterday's road. I knew by heart his old indictments of any Answer which turned studentdom from realistic work upon the failings of life on campus; and though I was curious to know how he reconciled that point of view with his acknowledgment of my Grand-Tutoriality, I was more interested in scanning the front page of the Tower Hall Times. The photograph represented The Living Sakhyan seated on the grass beside a massive elm-trunk, perhaps on Great Mall, his associates round about, just as I'd last seen him on the beach in George's Gorge; his palms were pressed together, his eyes closed, and his lips turned slightly upwards at the corners, as if he were placidly amused by the crowd of photographers and curious passersby around him. The caption underneath read LIVING SAKHYAN MEDITATES ON MIDWAY and was followed by a brief account of how he had been rescued from the East-Campus Student-Unionists by his protégés, a flight he'd neither willed nor opposed; how he neither sought nor shunned publicity, but withdrew into meditative trances whenever he saw fit, regardless of time, place, or company. The rest of the page was given over to collegiate and inter-collegiate news: HIGHWAY DEATHS TO BREAK CARNIVAL RECORD, SAFETY COMMITTEE WARNS; REXFORD TO ANNOUNCE NEW EAT-TESTS TO UNIVERSITY COUNCIL; TENSION MOUNTS ALONG POWER LINE; THOUSANDS MASSACRED IN FRUMENTIAN INTRAMURAL RIOTS; FAMINE SPREADS IN T'ANG; FLOODWATERS RISE IN SIDDARTHA; NTC RAPE-RATE UP 4 POINTS. The weather promised to be fair for the last night of the Carnival as well as for tomorrow's registration and attendant ceremonies, and for that reason the Department of Meteorology urgently reminded everyone to refrain from looking directly at the sun during the annular eclipse predicted for shortly after dawn.