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(God), author of the Old Syllabus, and of his son, the Grand Tutor, whose system for passing the finals (death) is no longer valid, and who is known as the Shepherd Emeritus.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.