| Giles Goat-Boy | |
|---|---|
1st edition |
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| Author(s) | John Barth |
| Original title | Giles Goat-Boy or The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles our Grand Tutor |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | 1966 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 710 pp |
| ISBN | 0-385-24086-4 |
| OCLC Number | 15489838 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 19 |
| LC Classification | PS3552.A75 G5 1987 |
Giles Goat-Boy (or The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles our Grand Tutor) is a 1966 novel by the American writer John Barth. It is a satire and allegory of the American campus culture of the time. In 2001, Barth told Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm that while he wrote the novel thinking the name 'Giles' was pronounced with "a hard 'G'... I liked the alliteration with 'Goat'", his editor naturally reminded him of the correct pronunciation: the title is to be pronounced with a soft 'G', "whether we like it or not."[1]
Contents |
George Giles is a boy raised as a farm animal who rises in life to Grand Tutor (spiritual leader[2]) of the New Tammany College (the United States[3]). He strives for herohood. The novel abounds in mythological and Christian allegories, as well as in allusions to the Cold War, 1960s academia, and religion.
The role of the Grand Tutor (in German Grosslehrer) is that of a spiritual leader, and the novel mentions them with altered names than their actual mythological equivalents: Enos Enoch (Jesus Christ), Moisè (Moses), the original Sakhyan (Buddha), Maios (Socrates).[2] Enos Enoch in Ebraic means "The man who walked with God" or "humanity when it walked with God."[2] Similar renaming take place for heores of epic poems: Laertide (Odysseus), Anchisidis (Aeneas).[2] The subtitle The Revised New Syllabus means, in the renamings of the novel, a parodic rewriting of the Gospels of Jesus Christ (the New Testament).[2] Among the parodic variations, a computer replaces the Holy Spirit, and an artificial insemination the Immaculate Conception.[2] Christian reviewer Guido Sommavilla found these aspects of the parody irritating, blasphemous and grotesque.[2]
Very presciently, a hypertext encyclopedia also figures in the novel, years before the invention of hypertext and three decades before the Web became part of society at large. The character, Max Spielman is a parody of Ernst Haeckel, whose insight "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is rephrased as "ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny" and "proctoscopy repeats hagiography".[4] The "riddle of the universe" is rephrased as "the riddle of the sphincters".[5]