Giles Goat Boy by John Barth Read Free Book Online

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.
    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