Black Bible

GILES GOAT-BOY by John Barth. 710 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

John Barth, college English teacher and a leading comic of the theater of black humor, now makes with his academic robes like Mephistopheles--or perhaps Batman. Out tumbles a gothic fun-house fantasy of theology, sociology and sex, leaping across great tracts of human history. Fascism, Communism, recent wars, revolutions and the East-West split are played back in surrealist style. Practically every philosophy is put in the pillory. Barth contrives to blaspheme against, and maybe illuminate, both Judaism and Christianity, as well as the central tenet of 20th century humanism--that all life can be accounted for in terms of reason. In this prodigious, labyrinthine fiction, the reader is constantly baffled and bamboozled by trap doors and intellectual booby traps. Reading Giles Goat-Boy, and debating its meaning, will surely be one of the most bracing literary exercises of 1966 and beyond. It is a satire of major import.

The Revelation. Disgusted with the world, the author invents another one. He sets it on campus, a familiar locale to Barth, a 36-year-old State University of New York at Buffalo professor who is a favorite of intellectuals because of his earlier books, notably The Sot-Weed Factor. His world is New Tammany College; it is under the official aegis of the Founder (God), author of the Old Syllabus, and of his son, the Grand Tutor, whose system for passing the finals (death) is no longer valid, and who is known as the Shepherd Emeritus.

New Tammany has a West Campus as well as a rival East Campus, the latter occupied by the Nikolayans (Soviets), who are Founderless. Life on West Campus is regulated and dominated by a computer, WESCAC, which is challenged by its twin, EASCAC, the deity of East Campus. Campus life is affluent and almost totally permissive, but pocked by student riots (wars). Under the shadow of EAT-ray (nuclear destruction), the campus is haunted by death and doubt, trembles on the edge of a new revelation. Some students seek revelation through existentialism, sex or student-unionism (Communism).

Along comes a Messiah from the School of Animal Husbandry--a half-beast, half-boy called George Goat-Boy. The looping plot of Barth's intricate fable centers on George's struggle to be accepted as the new Grand Tutor.

The Answer Is Power. As with the Biblical Jesus, who is descended from both the Divine and the House of David, Goat-Boy is given both mystical origin through WESCAC and natural origin from a breed of Toggenburger goats on the campus animal farm. His mother, Virginia R. Hector, the chancellor's chaste daughter who works in the WESCAC programming room, falls into a trance before the machine and somehow is delivered of the goat-child. He is marked by a pair of horns. The goatherd, a disgraced Moishian (Jewish) professor, is cleared of suspicion.

In his pilgrimage through the metamorphic landscape, Goat-Boy re-enacts some of the known episodes of the life of Christ. He confounds philosophers, has disciples and enemies, is tempted by power and false worship. At one stage, he denies (or asserts) himself: "I'm no Enoch Enoch [God]. I've got as much Billygoat as Graduate [Christ]. And as much as the Dean o' Flunks [the devil] or anyone else." While Barth seems to be crudely baiting religion, he is actually enunciating his concern with the theological conception of the hypostatic nature of Christ--that Christ was both fully human and fully divine. Goat-Boy's Vergil on his pilgrimage is Stoker, a cynical beast of burden who may be in league with the devil and whose slogan is: "Never mind the question! The answer's Power."

Finally, Goat-Boy is arrested and turned over to a lynch mob. His last message is, "To Pass All, Fail All"--A twist on the Biblical text, "He who loses his life shall preserve it." On the gallows, rope around his neck, Goat-Boy gets a reprieve. Then he disappears. He is 33--Christ's age at death.

He leaves a final obfuscation in a codicil modeled on the apocryphal Book of Revelation. Goat-Boy ascends a hill beyond Founder's Rock and, in an exploit of mystical sex, with his male parts wreathed in mistletoe, splits the rock and sounds a new and enigmatic dispensation. In this veiled and quite possibly diabolic climax, Barth offers one glint of hope. Goat-Boy leaves behind his son Giles--whose mother was a coed who took too literally the injunction to "love her classmate as herself"--to carry on the Goat-Boy religion and bring the New Curriculum to every campus in the university.

Anything Can Be True. Barth's parable is something like Dante's, a pilgrimage within an invented cosmology. Here and there his prose matches the cool, deadly manner of Swift in dealing in an offhand way with the totally outrageous. He is as gamy as Swift; there are some campus orgies, and sex is kid's play to Goat-Boy. Like Swift, who satirized the casus belli between Britain and France as a dispute between Bigendians and Littlendians, Barth parodies today's split between the technologically similar but ideologically dissimilar East and West. Yet his prime concern is with myth and religion, with the divine and the animal in man.

Barth has produced a black Bible that proceeds not to revelation but to further mystification. At bottom, he seems to be saying that even the bestial can be beautiful if the beholder believes it to be so. He faults man's failure to distinguish pragmatically between truth and belief. And, as in his earlier writings, he bleakly seems to say that anything can be true if it is in the nature of the believer to believe it so.

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