John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"I respect your position on the social aspects of the Commencement question," Dr. Sear was saying to Max, "but not on the phenomenon of personal Graduation. One good medical therapist might be worth a hundred professors of Enochism, as you say; but a real Grand Tutor's worth all the medical therapists that ever were."

Max shook his head.

"You believe in Graduation and Grand Tutors, then, sir?" I asked him — rather surprised, but much gratified.

"Of course I do," he smiled. "If you mean do I believe they exist, of course I do. But I mean something rather special by the terms, that has nothing to do with Founders and Dean o' Flunks. Even Dr. Spielman agrees that there really are heroes, and that they serve a useful purpose. Why else would he enlist you in this quaint project of his?"

Max objected that to his mind heroes were one thing — even Grand Tutors, whom he regarded merely as a particular variety of heroes — and Graduation was another. "What I believe, certain men are born with a natural talent for the hero-work; they're no more miraculous than great violinists. It's a neutral thing: some people are red-haired, some are hump-backed, some are heroes." And what everyone went through for himself, he went on, more or less profoundly depending on one's character, Grand Tutors went through on the level of the whole student body: "Every college needs a man now and then to go to the bottom of things and turn us around a corner. That's what George must do with the WESCAC if he can." As for Graduation, if Sear meant by the term simply the emotional and intellectual maturity that normally followed the ordeals of adolescence, whether in an individual student or an entire college, then Max was quite ready to affirm its reality; indeed, cyclological theory was founded on such correspondences as that between the celestial and psychic day, the seasons of the year, the stages of ordinary human life, the growth and decline of individual colleges, the evolution and history of studentdom as a whole, the ultimate fate of the University, and what had we. The rhythm of all these was repeated literally and emblematically in the life of the hero, whose function, Max took it, was the important but prosaic one of helping a college grow up or get out of a particular bind: more than that he denied. And if there was a difference between Grand Tutors and other sorts of heroes, it was that men like Maios, Enos Enoch, and the original Sakhyan taught students how to behave more decently toward one another, while heroes like Anchisides and Laertides actually preserved their classmates from immediate harm, whether by slaying certain monsters or by resettling groups of student refugees threatened with extinction. Me he conceived to be, not destined to save studentdom from being EATen but very possibly designed for that task, as who should call a man uniquely designed to play championship tennis, without implying either a designer or that he will ever take racket in hand. If I chose to regard myself as a Grand Tutor, that was my affair; Max would not split hairs. But if I or Sear or anyone maintained that there was something to herohood or Commencement beyond this unglamorous definition — something magical or transcendental — then we must excuse him, he had no patience with such notions.

"We quite excuse you!" Dr. Sear insisted cordially, "Don't we, George?"

I confessed I wasn't sure I grasped Max's point, and that I considered it anyhow my business less to understand than to perform my task, which was immediately to get through Scrapegoat Grate and then to do what I'd come to the campus for: to pass all or fail all. They both seemed pleased with this reply, and fortunately didn't ask for an explanation of that dark imperative from my PAT-card, which I could not then clearly have given them. The Amphitheater was quite filled now, and the floodlights dimmed. People hushed and coughed. Dr. Sear lowered his dry voice to remind Max that not much if any of Sakhyan's Tutoring, for example, had to do with interpersonal relations or the general welfare of studentdom, except indirectly, and that while Anchisides and Moishe had unquestionably led their followers to a new and greater campus, Laertides was the sole survivor of an expedition that benefited no one (even the giant he blinded had scarcely been a public menace, remote as he was from inhabited quadrangles), and among the more primitive heroes of ancient lore it was rather the rule than the exception that their exploits profited no one save themselves. But surely, he protested, Max knew this better than he, and no doubt had in mind a distinction between practical and emblematic heroes, the former being those who in fact or fiction rendered some extraordinary service to studentdom, the latter those whose careers were merely epical representations of the ordinary dramatical metaphor, if he would.

"What do you think Graduation and Grand Tutorhood are?" I asked again, in a whisper. "They must be real things, or I couldn't want them so much."

He smiled at my reasoning. "I imagine you would, in any case. The desire to be a Graduate is normal enough in young people, although in adults it's a neurosis, often as not. And the itch to be a Grand Tutor — that's always neurotic, wouldn't you say?"

"Neurotic means not right in the head," Max explained, tapping his temple and watching me with interest.

"Well, how about the person who actually is the Grand Tutor?" I demanded.

Peter Greene clapped me on the knee. "Attaboy, George! Don't take nothing off him!" He had been reading the pages of sporting-news and comic drawings in the newspaper, and joined our conversation now only because the lights had gone too dim to read by.

"Why," Sear asserted good-humoredly, "he's necessarily somewhat mad, my dear boy. Enos Enoch, Anchisides — all those hero and Grand-Tutor chaps. Charmingly mad, I grant you. Magnificently mad, if you like. But mad."

I was the more put out by this remark in view of my infant circumstances and G. Herrold's state after rescuing me from the tapelift. But fifteen folk in white cotton wrappers, high boots, and masks had filed onto the stage below, and since I scarcely knew how to reply in any case, I turned to them my troubled attention. They carried leafy branches in their hands and sat now here and there upon three long steps in the forepart of the stage.

"Please don't be offended," Sear whispered. "Who wouldn't choose to be mad like Enos Enoch instead of sane like Dr. Spielman and me? Besides, there's another kind of hero that we didn't mention: the tragic kind." I was not consoled. To Max he added, "They never got their due in the Cum Laude Project, either, when Eierkopf had us all working on that flunkèd GILES. But if you ask me, the only sane heroes are the tragic heroes." He nodded his elegant thin head towards the stage, where now a man taller than the others, with a greatly pained expression on his mask, had stepped forth from a central door in the background to approach the seated gathering.

"There's the best example of all," Dr. Sear whispered to me; "that's Taliped Decanus."

Taliped's my name: the famous Dean

of Cadmus College. You're the ad hoc team

(department-heads and vice-administrators)

whom I named last year as evaluators

of our academic posture. Maybe you knew

these things already. Notice I've come to you

in person: that's because I itch to find

out what, if anything, is on your mind,

and why you're camping on the Deanery stoop.

You, there: you're head of the Speech and Forensics Group

and closest to retirement; speak without fear

or rhetoric: What on Campus brings you here?