Giles Goat Boy -

John Barth

Anchor

1987

748 páginas

1d 0h 56m

ISBN-10: 0385240864

Giles Goat-Boy is many things. It is a Bildungsroman that charts the gradual socialization of an individual subject. Raised by goats, messianic savage George Giles strives to become the new "Grand Tutor" of the University and reprogram WESCAC. In fact, it is George who is reprogrammed. Following the classical form of the Bildungsroman, the novel ends with the disappearance of the hero's identity insofar as he is absorbed into the computer's complex machinery. Deep within Axis Mundi, the belly of the computer, George submits to WESCAC his student identification card. In doing so, he loses his name and remerges as "The Founder." Like Wilhelm Meister, George's character is stamped by an external authority that grants him his socially reconstituted selfhood and, thereby, his validity.

Giles Goat-Boy is also a complex theological and political allegory. The University is a stage upon which various world-historical conflicts are dramatized and enacted. "The Quiet Riot" allegorizes the Cold War. The Campus Riots are the world wars. The Bonifascists represent the National Socialists; the Moishians represent the Jews. The West Campus represents the West; the East Campus represents the East in general and the Soviet Union in particular. WESCAC is the atomic bomb. "New Tammany College" represents America. Getting "flunked" is equivalent to damnation; passing is equivalent to salvation. The "Dean O'Flunks" refers to Satan; the "Old Founder" refers to Jehovah. Each of the oppositions mentioned above is dialectically synthesized at the novel's close.

Most importantly, however, Giles Goat-Boy is an extraordinarily elaborate practical joke. As with most postmodernist works, the reader doesn't quite know whether to take any of its meanings seriously, but suspects that one shouldn't. Allegory, for instance, is merely one of GGB's many language games. Perhaps one should take "J.B." at his word when he says-or is alleged to have said-that "language is the matter of his books, as much as anything else, and for that reason ought to be `splendrously musicked out'" [xvi]. Nonetheless, one of its reputed authors maintains that the book should not be dismissed as `a work of fiction': "Excepting a few `necessary basic artifices'" Stoker maintains, GGB is "neither fable nor fictionalized history, but literal truth" [xi]. This is also doubtful. "Literal truth" may not refer to a truth on the other side of language, but rather, a linguistic elaboration or fabrication of truth. "Literal truth," in this context, would be a truth that is composed of letters.