Customer Reviews

Giles Goat Boy (The Anchor Literary Library)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First, let it be said that John Barth's work is hilarious and that Giles Goatboy is his best, in my opinion. Much of the humor is rooted in his insightful view of life, love, and the seeming futility of it all. Giles Goatboy offers up the microcosm of academia as the stage upon which the Greek tragedy of all our lives is played. The only real redeeming features in Barth's worldview are the laughs he rummages out of the ashes of nihilism, and his wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor. However, his works ultimately offer up a depressingly futile vision of life. His humor makes his perspective palatable, in fact, tasty, but I often find myself hoping that for his sake, Mr. Barth has more hope than his novels portray

It took me a couple of starts to get past the first twenty pages of this book, but the persistence was well repayed. Over the course of a few works (Sot-Weed, End of the Road, Letters) Barth was one of the great powers of modern literature. Goat-Boy finds him in peak form. The longevity of his computer/campus framework, and the wisdom of his "if it ain't broke" philosophy are subject to worthy discussion, but anybody who can get away with slapping a Lord Buckley styled hipster take on Oedepus Rex right in the middle just to show off his emense skill is beyond bold. Brazen in all the best ways.

This was my first exposure to Barth but based on this it certainly won't be my last. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, but what I can understand I find myself liking quite a bit. For those who have no idea about this book, it's basically the "quest" of Giles to reprogram the evil WESAC computer that is messing with the New Tammany College campus and even that brief blurb isn't enough to give this book ample justice. The plot is mostly straightforward, to me at least but the layers of satire that wrap around everything give the book greater depth, just when you think you've got it pegged as one thing, Barth gives a sly clue and it all shifts. Is it merely a big joke on the Cold War, or a comment on our culture in general. Or neither. The novel encompasses religion, sex, culture, war, just about everything you can think of and the humor is dark and bitter and at the same time hilariously funny, Giles is the perfect narrator and his observations are both hugely innocent and slyly subversive. The ultimate quest of stopping the computer becomes unimportant when you consider the events that it takes to get there and if there's any book with a more real yet wildly fantastic set of characters, I haven't read it, just when you think that he's treating them all as one big joke, a stray comment or an action reminds you that these are supposed to be real characters. As you can probably tell, this is a novel that you can't go in with any preconceptions, and if you do a lot of it will probably be lost on you. It's a massively dense read and took me almost two months (not because it was difficult, that weird time thing you see) but never once did I think of not finishing it. Definitely worth the time put into it and you can get the time, don't hesitate!

If I'd picked this book off the shelf having had no familiarity with its author, I have no idea how I would've felt about it. But I was already an enthusiastic fan of The Sot Weed Factor and some of Barth's earlier and later fiction when I read this one, and my knowledge of Barth's astounding narrative and comic capabilities made this book seem a little depressing. Now, I give it 5 stars with no qualms, mostly because of its originality and humor, but I still don't know exactly what to think about it. At the very least, it's something new (even 30 years later) and worth your time. For first-time readers of Barth, however, I strongly suggest The Sot Weed Factor. It isn't as self-indulgent or anti-novel as this one (not that those qualities are necessarily bad in the hands of Barth).

John Barth is as good a prose stylist as the US has produced, and this book shows it. In the first third or so of the book Barth makes the language cavort, caper, dance, sing. And it is very funny. But unfortunately the joke gets old fairly quickly. The allegory, amusing enough when its underlying conceits are introduced, gets stretched thinner and thinner, to the point where it finally gets agonizing. All through at least the second half of the book I was just waiting for it to end. On the whole, I found two of Barth's other novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, much more rewarding reading, although the prose doesn't quite scintillate the way it does in the early pages of this book. Give it a try, but if at some point you find it getting a bit grating and wonder if it might get better, lay it aside and get something else to read, because it will only get worse.

This theological, philosophical, sociological mélange of political (Cold War or "Quiet Riot") satire, of a sort, wordplay and quasi-Bildungsroman and whatever else it may or may not be, all coded into a cutesy academese, didn't do too much for me---except make me laugh, along with it, not at it.

I think one of the other reviewers was spot on in assessing Barth's version of Oedipus Rex, or, excuse, "Taliped Decanus", to be the summit of the book. As for the rest of it, I think the best way to read it comes from GGB (the character, not the book) on page 207, in my copy:

"It was not my habit to think in a directed manner, but rather to brood on whatever images came to mind as were unbid: not to manipulate and question them, but to attend like an interested spectator their links and twinings..."

And brood Barth does upon every philosophical, theological, sociological, political (no doubt I'm leaving something out here) link and twining in the universe or "University", but all in good fun with enough high jinks and drollery to keep one turning the pages.

Occasionally, Barth will even hit home with a moving passage like the following:

"`Anastasia...' The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair's rich smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices, strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pushing, squirting, bubbling, flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest, divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passedness, of love..." p.616

Read "blessedness" for the academese "passedness".


All things considered (or at least most of them), a jolly fun read, once one has mastered the academese argot. But, really, The Sot-Weed Factor is much more lively and fun and furthermore, not encumbered with quasi-satire and an entire argot to which one must accustom oneself. This book, by comparison, is just too...you know, the "P" word.

Giles Goat Boy is prefaced by 25 pages of introduction, including a disclaimer of sorts by "The Editors," who seek to warn readers that the book they're about to begin is decidedly bawdy, disturbing, irreverent, flabbergasting and probably without literary merit. Though lengthy, these introductions are great fun, and only serve to entice and encourage the already adventurous reader. This is particularly important because the first 100 pages of the book are actually fairly uneventful, a long slow pastoral unfolding of the early episodes in the Goat Boy's life and world. Without the introduction's promises of the mischievous burlesque to come, I might not have kept reading. And that would have been a mistake.

The narrative finds its stride when our would-be hero embarks on his inevitable journey, and what had in the early pages been a somewhat awkward and anachronistic style becomes a mythic mode for masterful storytelling. Giles Goat Boy is allegorical epic in which the "the University" serves as a microcosm of the universe, and where "Graduation" or "Commencement" represents some notion of enlightenment, liberation, earthly salvation. Though colored by lively historical satire and heroic farce, the book's themes are ultimately existential, even spiritual.

Each of the principal characters seeks to "Graduate," to discover modes of perception and behavior that will enable them to transcend their narcissistic limitations and become fully self-actualized. Their bungling, over-analyzed attempts to untangle repressions and overcome obsessions makes up much of this baffling, hilarious, ribald and psychologically complex tale. The book often reflects the preoccupations of the decade when it was written, and Barth's approach is mostly intellectual. All the while, the pages are littered with surprising insights, delightful mishaps and a certain uncommon wisdom.

At its heart, Giles Goat Boy is a zany and uniquely engaging adventure story, one that's playfully aware of it's own symbolism, subtexts and archetypes. In fact Barth seems incapable of leaving any aspect unexamined, and the narrative does get a bit carried away with itself sometimes. In a 2001 Bookworm Interview, Barth admitted that the book is longer than he wishes it was. His undertaking is so provocative and ambitious, however, that like the struggles of its multifaceted characters, the book is remarkable in both its successes and its failures. A Plus!

Let me state right now that this is not a review of the text but a review of the 'product' I received.

The copy I received in June 2011 is obviously a print on demand copy but there was no indication of this on Amazon's product details. The print quality of the cover is appalling, streaky and patchy, and the final trimming is off-centre. In additon, the type script is fuzzy and lacks sharpness and clarity - as an 'older' reader this is not just frustrating but spoils the pleasure of reading. Having worked in the print industry perhaps I'm too picky but it should be a requirement that Amazon specify if they are selling a print on demand copy.... suffice to say I would never buy one again! I will look for second hand copies as a preference in future.

Never thought I'd complain about a bookseller... soooo disappointed.

I suppose it is inevitable that, as the post-war boomers approach the big six-zero over the next decade, we will see a tidal flood of tender, soul-searching narratives. Boomers want to understand rather than simply experience life, and most have been frustrated by life's refusal to obey our expectations.

John Barth seems to have made such soul searching his life work, and I seem to have followed him book for book, life experience by life experience over the years. A clever "academic" writer (read: "he writes like a dream but his wit sometimes overwhelms the story"), Barth has addressed boomer experience and frailty .

Seeming to be five to ten years ahead of boomers, his books have ranged from the tragedy resulting from a terribly botched abortion (long before we openly spoke of this horror), through the visionary and usually misguided quest of the idealist (Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goatboy), the terrible pain of realizing one is an adult (the clever but exhausting Letters), to more leisurely and accessible mid-life reassessment as protagonists take "voyages" on the emotional seascape of middle age (Sabbatical, Tidewater Tales, Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Once upon a Time...).

Each five years or so, I eagerly await his newest offering, devour it, and then feel frustrated when his literary games seem to detract from his story.

But, then, each time I realize (as if for the first time), the essential nature of his writing. Like the age-old games from which his writings spring (the quest/redemption stories of the Iliad and Oddessy, the "doomed" prophet stories of the Old and New Testaments, the mistaken identity games of Shakespeare and thousands of authors since, and the metaphor of story as voyage and voyage as growth from Chaucer, 1001 Nights, etc), Barth plays his games to remind us that the act of story telling *is* the experience, it *is* the reason we read: the experience of hearing ghost stories around the camp fire remains with us long long after we have forgotten the actual story.

And then I remember that, as a reader, I have no more "right" to expect neatness and closure in a Barth story than I have the right to expect neatness and closure in my own life. Try as we might, our own work, our own story is always in progress. And like Barth's beloved Tidewater, the ebb and flow of our own story defies our attempt to capture to master it.

In the end, life and Barth's stories remain as delightfully cleansing as the tide itself.

KRH www.umeais.maine.edu/~hayward

A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

With his imposing fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966), John Barth stopped writing stories and started writing stories-about-stories and stories-inside-of-stories. The "meta-fictional" dimensions of the novel are apparent from its first page onward. A "Publisher's Note" informs its readers that Giles Goat-Boy is rumored to have been generated by WESCAC, a super-computer that-as one learns later in the text-has "commenced a life of its own" [86] and taken over a mythical Super-University. According to the logic of Giles Goat-Boy, the horizons of the University are the horizons of the universe, the "microcosm" stands for the "macrocosm" (a conceit derived from Joseph Campbell); it stands to reason, then, that WESCAC, having completely taken over the universal University, would have produced the very text that we are reading. This clever "meta-fictional" device displaces the individual voice of the author, of course, but also reflects the sources that make its writing possible. If the author wanted to write a work that refers ceaselessly to the conditions of its production, he succeeded. A sprawling epic about mythological heroism in an age of all-consuming computerization, Giles Goat-Boy resembles the infinitely self-referring spreadsheet of a constantly self-renovating and self-activating linguistic super-computer.

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.

Giles Goat Boy is a world of veils and yet these veils do not mask deeper verities. As authoritative as it might appear, GGB abdicates its own presumptions of authority. The "Publisher's Disclaimer" disclaims-or, at least, problematizes-all of the book's claims. According to the "Disclaimer," the alleged author, "J.B." renounced his authorship. He claimed that he is merely the editor of the manuscript in question, which was tailored by one "Giles Stoker" or "Stoker Giles." The latter claimed, in turn, that he is the editor of the manuscript, which was manufactured by the automatic computer, WESCAC. The computer also renounces the book's authorship. GGB's authorship, it would seem, is infinitely regressive. No one wants to admit having written the thing.

Barth's future meta-narratives (Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera, Letters) will become increasingly more involuted, vine-like, and entangling, increasingly more extravagant, bombastic, and bloated, and increasingly more irritating, self-fascinated, and densely imbricated. Some readers, overpowered by Barth's stale verbiage, will bow to his turgidity. Others will remember, wistfully and nostalgically, Barthes' real masterpiece, The End of the Road -- a sour and cruel novel, to be sure, but also an infinitely more powerful and engaging one than Giles Goat-Boy. Whereas The End of the Road comes about like the shock of a physical hammer-blow, reading Giles Goat-Boy is a bit like having one's mind EAT-en by an all-embracing cybernetic parasite.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

P.S. I gave this book a rather low rating because of its execrable, nearly unreadable prose style.