"Giles Goat-Boy (or The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles our Grand Tutor) is an allegorical satirical postmodern novel written by John Barth. It was first published in 1966, and deeply reflects the American campus culture of the time."
It goes on to say that "numerous mythological and Christian allegories" make the fate of the hero, George Giles, a farm animal, "seem almost predestined, regardless of his innocence." It's available in a paperback version that runs 748 pages and has a shipping weight of two pounds. [Below right: The perpetrator. You may click upon him.]
The book was first published in 1966. I found it in the Willard Straight Student Union Library while I was a graduate student in math at Cornell around 1974, when I was homeless but still a student. Around that time I had been getting ready for the 3 hour oral exam that was necessary to guarantee a masters degree and let me to get on with a doctoral candidacy, and to even think about selecting a thesis topic.The preparation for the oral exam was brutal. The deal was, your exam was scheduled at a time and place publicized throughout the math department, so all the professors could attend. Any professor interested in how you might do was welcome, including professors who were not on your doctoral committee. Even professors you'd never met or taken classes from were welcome to attend, and welcome to ask questions. The 3 hours of the exam was just a rough guideline.
You were told to prepare to answer any question in mathematics on any subject that any professor in the math department wanted to ask you. How do you?
You prepare by reading every damn book you can barely grasp in the math research library. You read day and night for months. You take thousands of notes. You realize that some jerk is going to ask you about his own research, so you try to dig up every pet paper of every self-centered jerk in the department, make some sense of it and at least learn enough to regurgitate some of the jargon to show that you tried.
Meanwhile, you want to be an educated literate human being. You like to read. You want to get away from it all, but you don't only want to escape to National Lampoon, you also want to gather up a little culture. Why not sit down in a nice plush easy chair in the the Willard Straight Student Union Library with a nice allegorical satirical postmodern novel and soak up some easy literary culture that way? Especially one that reflects American campus culture, so it should be familiar in spite of surreal elements.
[Above: How most Americans know Willard Straight Hall. Pulitzer Prize winning scene from the 1969 Black Student Takeover, before I arrived at Cornell. The windows of the library looking out on this entrance-way would be visible if the frame extended a few yards to our left.]
I made it to page 50 before my brain seized up. It wasn't that I wasn't up to the challenge of reading Giles Goat-Boy, in itself. It was Giles Goat-Boy plus 20,000 pages due Tuesday to be regurgitated in front of God knows how many or even which fish-faced math professor-torturers.
It was Giles Goat-Boy and surgery on compact non-simply-connected differentiable manifolds, Giles Goat-Boy and the use of spectral sequences to analyze the cohomology of Serre fibrations, Giles Goat-Boy and embeddings of this and immersions of that and oh god what if an analyst shows up because I have a reputation for being hot in analysis, and they want to know about p-adic analysis, because "everybody knows that topologists keen on analysis are out to apply p-adic analysis via localization and completion arguments but I have never cared about that because I have kept my interest in topology and my interest in analysis separate, why, WHY, had I never combined them? The exam IS TOMORROW!"
[Shown above: Someone else's random spectral sequence scratchings. Not to be confused with lovely colorful light spectra.]
I passed the exam on the first try, something that was rather unusual, but it took so much out of me it was a year before I could think of reading a postmodern novel again. When I felt ready, I realized that I would have to get back on the horse that threw me. I had to re-attempt Giles Goat-Boy. But after a year I had forgotten what I had already read. So I began again at page one.
And I made it to page 50, and my brain seized up. I couldn't absorb the story! Past page 50, I would need to reread page 1 and page 2 and page 15, over and over again. What was it about? I couldn't make sense of a postmodern novel anymore!
No other postmodern novel could be started until I could read this one. I bought my own copy. At first I retried it every few weeks. Then it became an annual ritual. Every year, around November, I would take my copy of Giles Goat-Boy out and make a brand new effort to read it, starting with page 1. Every year I made it to page 50, and then my brain seized up.
In 1983 I began seeing a psychotherapist for what I thought was an unrelated problem, having to do with lingering after-effects of childhood abuse I had survived. I saw her off and on for the next eight years, and in fact I still see her now once a month. But I separate out those first eight years for special mention, because they culminated in a breakthrough.
The breakthrough occurred in November 1991. One thing I realized was that the abuse had not been my fault. I think that was a big component of the breakthrough. But there were a lot of little incidental components. I realized for example that my stupid smoking habit was a means of subconsciously co-opting my parents' power. I realized that I could start over and re-negotiate my feelings for my parents in the light of my new understanding, and that I didn't have to have good memories of them.
And I realized that it wouldn't kill me to never have read Giles Goat-Boy. It was stupid of me to think that I had to. I gave my copy away.
Today I celebrate November 1991 continually with my personal slogan, which names my website: "Harnessing Stupidity Since 1991."
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