Giles Goat Boy by John Barth Read Free Book Online Page B

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 neccessary; 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.
    *
Quem vide infra
.

R.N.S
.
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

Volume One
First Reel

1
.
    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 goathood and struck out, a hornèd 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, hewas 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