Giles Goat Boy (69 page)

“In consequence, you will discover in the terms ahead numerous hypotheses about the nature of Examination, which can be sorted into two general categories: one holds that while the Questions are different for each Candidate, the Answer is the same for all; the other, that while the Question never varies, the Answers do. Whether, in either case, the variation is from term to term or Candidate to Candidate; whether it’s a difference in formulation only, or actual substance; whether it’s radical or infinitesimal; whether the matter or the manner of the Candidate’s response is of more significance, the general tenor or the precise phrasing—these and a thousand like considerations are much debated among your professors, many of whom, one sadly concludes, are more interested in academic questions of this sort than in the ultimate ones which in principle they should prepare you to confront. You undergraduates are to be pardoned
(
but alas, not necessarily Passed
)
for being in the main more realistic, if sometimes pitifully wrong-headed. Snatching at straws, you will badger your professors with down-to-campus queries: ‘Will we be asked this on the Finals?’ ‘Does attendance count?’ ‘How much credit is given for class participation, for extracurricular activity, for washing blackboards and beating erasers, for a neat appearance and respectful demeanor, for improvement over bad beginnings?’ Not a few of you are persuaded that independent thinking is the
sine qua non,
even when naive or erroneous; others that verbatim responses from your lecture-notes are what most pleases. Some, of a cynic or obsequious temper, will openly flatter your instructor’s vanity, hang on his words as on a Grand Tutor’s, turn the discussion to his private specialty, slap your knees at his donnish wit, and rush to his lectern at the hour’s end. ‘What
other
courses do you teach, sir?’ ‘Is your book out yet in paperback?’ You co-eds, particularly, are often inclined to hope that a bright smile may make up for a dull intelligence, a firm bosom for a flabby argument, a clear peep for a cloudy insight. And
(
more’s the justice
)
not one of these gambits but has succeeded—in some cases and to some extent! Given two young ladies of equal merit and unequal beauty, who has not seen the fairer prosper? Who has not observed how renegade genius goes a-begging, is actually punished, while the sycophant’s every doltishness is pardoned? A term’s hard labor in the stacks, an hour’s dalliance in Teacher’s sidecar—they come to the same. Who opens her placket may close her books; she lifts her standing with her skirts; the
A
goes on her Transcript that should be branded in her palm …
”

Ah, I was moved, so immediately likely seemed this review of the student condition—flunkèd, flunkèd! And, black as surely had to be the heart of any false Grand Tutor, the art of Bray’s imposture watered my eyes.

“Yet all this is vanity,”
he said, and his voice despite its click was heavy with compassion. “
The Examiners care nothing for transcripts, only for Answers. Campus legend is peopled with model students who never passed and mavericks who did; of those tightly fleshed and loosely moraled queans, some go dressed in white gown and mortarboard to be diploma’d out of hand, others are led shrieking down the Nether Mall to be thrust beyond the pale forever. No theses so contrary that history won’t feed both, and a chosen few of you with both eyes open may soon induce that our whole collegiate establishment—our schools, departments, and courses of study, our professorial rank and tenure, our administrative apparatus, our seminars, turkeypens, elms, and
alma maters,
even our WESCAC—is but one more or less hopeful means. The most organized, surely, and hallowed by custom, but a mere alternative for all that. And the very advantages of organization are not without their own perniciousness: faced with a Department of Moral Science and one of Swine Research, each with budget, offices, and journals, one comes inevitably to believe in the real separateness of those subjects—as if one could fathom hogs without knowing metaphysics, or set up as a practicing ontologist in ignorance of Porcinity! Worse, within the same department one finds the Duroc-Jersey men at odds with the Poland-Chinas; the Deontological Intuitionalists and the Axiological Realists go to separate cocktail parties. Yet one must choose curriculum and major, ally oneself with this circle or that, dissertate upon
The Navigation of Sinking Vessels, Coastwise and Celestial, or Foundation Planting for Crooken Campaniles …”

It was true, all true; I knew it at once despite my inexperience of the campus and the accidental fact that we in the goat-barns had been spared the intellectual degeneration of those pig-men. I peeped over the partition: some of my classmates slept, some furiously took notes, some picked their noses, some played cards, but none save myself seemed distressed by what I assumed we all were hearing.

“Alas,”
went on the firm sad voice in my ears,
“the Finals are comprehensive; the Examiners care not a fig for your Sub-Department of Rot Research; one wonders whether they know of its existence! Our Schools and Divisions—what are they but seams in the seamless? Our categories change with the weather; not so our fates. In vain our less myopic faculty preaches general education: they have not only the mass of their colleagues to contend with, but the very nature of great institutions. Bravely
today one devises something ‘interdisciplinary’: perhaps a pilot survey of Postlapsarian Herpetology and Pomegranate Culture. ‘Dilettantism!’ cry the pomologists; the natural-historians, ‘Thin soup!’ By tomorrow there is a Division of General Education, with a separate Department of P.H.P.C., and in time an additional Department of P.H.P.C. Education to train instructors for the first. There’s no end to it
.”

How was it, I wondered, an impostor dared speak so heretically against the Administration—all administrations? His next assertion—”
Now mind, I mean no disrespect for the colleges, certainly not for old New Tammany, which I love as only an adopted child can love its mother
”—enabled me to revive for some moments the contempt for him I wanted to feel.
“A wart on Miss University,”
he said warmly,
“were nonetheless a wart; and if I will not call it a beauty-mark, neither would I turn her out of bed on its account
.” It was all a pose, then, that subversive compassion: a stance he took in order to abandon it, as a lover feigns displeasure to gain a kiss! But Bray went on then to speak of institutionalized education in terms so affecting, hypocritical or not, that it was much not to weep outright:

“
We teachers forget our business; the University does not. There is a spirit in our old West-Campus halls, a wisdom in the stones as it were, that no amount of pedantry or folly quite dispels. I hear the pledges singing in their cups truths deeper than they know:

“For those with eyes to see, New Tammany abounds with voiceless admonitions to humility. Not for nothing are ‘Staff’ and ‘Faculty’ equally privileged, so that groundskeepers and dormitory-cooks are affluent as new professors; not for nothing does custom decree that our trustees be unlettered folk, and that our chancellor be selected not from the intelligentsia but by ballot, from the lower percentiles: tinkers and tillers and keepers of shops. For the same reason one observes among the faculty not graybeard scholars only, their cowls ablazon with exotic marks of honor, but men of the people: former business-majors, public-relations clerks, gentle carpenters and husbandmen. It is fit that our libraries be more modest than our cow-barns, our cow-barns than our skating-rinks, our skating-rinks than our stadiums. Was not Enos Enoch, the Founder’s Boy,
by nature an outdoor type, a do-it-Himselfer who chose as His original Tutees the first dozen people He met; who never took degree or published monograph or stood behind lectern, but gathered about Him whoever would listen, in the buckwheat valleys or the wild rhododendron of the slope, and taught them by simple fictions and maxims proof against time, which now are graved in the limestone friezes of our halls?

Blinking back tears (and recognizing neither of the alleged Maxims as my former keeper’s) I Held and Glossed. A crisp male voice, refreshingly passionless, explained that the allusion in the latter epigram was to an early diplomate of Lykeion College from whom Milo Park, New Tammany’s largest stadium, took its name:

“
Book One of
The Acts of the Chancellors,” the glosser proceeded, “
tells us that Milo matriculated in a provincial Lykeionian Ag-school during the so-called ‘Golden Chancellory’ of Xanthippides, with the modest aim of studying dairy husbandry; but though he covered himself and the Lykeionian Complex with glory for his athletic prowess, and became the inspiration of a dozen sculptors, he repeatedly failed to qualify for Candidacy, for the reason that a certain heifer named Sophie, assigned to his care, refused to eat the experimental feed-mixtures he prepared for it. Certain of failure, Milo turned on the animal one evening in a rage, dispatched it with a single sock, and carried it on his shoulders across most of Lykeion from the old Doric Stock-Barns to the Chancellor’s Palace, where he left it high in a young red oak. For this outrage he was fetched to detention by the campus patrol, who however were unable to remove the dead beast from its perch. Seeing it next morning, the Chancellor asked how a heifer had contrived to climb his oak, and, told of Milo’s offense, so far from exhibiting anger, he smiled and remarked: ‘There is one way to raise a cow.’ He then convoked the entire Department of Animal Husbandry and inquired whether the ablest among them had ever got a heifer up a tree, or knew how to coax one down. When none replied, he ordered Milo released from Detention Hall, dismissed the charges against him, and passed him without further examination—the power of Summary Bond and Loosement being still vested in the Chancellory in that place and term. This gloss was prepared by your Department of Agricultural History. May we remind you that—
”

Impatiently I jabbed at the Hold-button, not to have to hear another advertisement. Owing to some characteristic of the machinery the gloss Held, but the lecture did not recommence; therefore I depressed
Gloss
again, and learned of a new dimension in the program: instead of the interrupted advertisement I heard a third voice, energetic and intense, apparently glossing the gloss:

“
The Milo incident, and thus the later Enochist epigram, has been variously explained. Philocaster the Younger
(
in his
Commentary on the
Actae Cancellorum, Volume Two, pages four thirty-eight ff
.)
formulates the classical interpretation: ‘Excellence is non-departmental’—that is, greatness is what counts, irrespective of its particular nature. Opposed is the influential little treatise by Yussuf Khadrun
, De Vacae in Arbores,
which holds that ends, rather than means, are the Examiners’ primary concern: that the excellence for which Milo was rewarded lay not in his athletic record but in his radical
(
and in the final sense practical
)
solution of an apparently flunking predicament To the objection that treeing the cow was not a solution of anything until the Chancellor made it so by rewarding it, later Khadrunians have asserted that Milo’s victory was not over the problem on its own terms, but over the terms of the problem—that is to say, over the directive ‘Raise this heifer’ in its conventional interpretation. As Fanshaw and Smart ask
(
in
The Higher Pragmatism):
‘What did the Examiners care about experimental pasturage or the physical well-being of Sophie the heifer? In one sense everything, in another nothing. Milo’s bold gesture made his failure the Department’s failure. As one of Sakhyan’s “footnotes” reminds us, too eager pursuit of solutions may blind us to the Answers, which are at least in some cases to be discovered by strange means indeed, and in strange places.’ End of quote …
”

I listened amazed. Though the quotation was ended, the gloss-upon-the-gloss evidently was not:

“
Hugo Krafft takes a similar stand in his brilliant and exhaustive
(
if sometimes oppressive
) West-Campus Cattle-Barns from Pre-History to the Thirty-Seventh Remusian Chancellory,
and, like other semantically oriented interpreters, makes much of Xanthippides’s fondness for word-play as a pedagogical device. The Neo-Philocastrians, to be sure, like the Scapulists they derive from, have never sympathized with pragmatism, higher or lower, and are inclined to be skeptical of the close textual analysis made popular by Krafft’s followers; in general they still maintain that virtuosity, rather than net achievement, is the key to Commencement Gate—whether the performance wherein it is manifest be in itself ‘admirable’ or not. Thus Bongiovanni cites the examples of Carpo the Fool, an early freshman who knocked himself senseless in a fall from the parallel
bars and was for some terms thereafter the butt of campus humor, and Gaffer McKeon, ‘The Perfect Cheat,’ who confessed to never having given an uncribbed answer during his brilliant undergraduate career. Both men passed
.

“
But the West-Campus Philocastrians identify virtuosity with particular excellencies, while their East-Campus counterparts
(
if so various a group may be thought of collectively
)
tend to speak of it with a capital
V,
as something distinguishable from virtuoso performances. Thus the old East-Campus table-grace quoted by Dharhalal Panda: