The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Barth · a novel in two volumes of three reels each, within a frame of disclaimers, a cover-letter and a closing Posttape · Doubleday, New York, 1966 · scored as published, frame included, on Barth’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Comic scripture: Menippean satire, allegory and the hero’s life of the comparatists built as one novel, within a frame of found documents
Mythos
The hero’s pattern stage by stage: the foundling raised among beasts, the summons and the tasks, the guide, the shadow, the descent into the belly of the monster, the sacred marriage, the return with a teaching and the foreseen fall; Oedipus built in
Phase
From George’s childhood in the goat barn, through the Assignment and three descents into WESCAC, to the Posttape of his age, which foresees his fall
Presentation
Fiction; the Revised New Syllabus in two volumes of three reels each, told by George in the first person, between disclaimers and a cover-letter signed “J.B.” and a closing Posttape, Postscript to the Posttape and Footnote to the Postscript
Register
From the goat-boy’s voice, earnest, bawdy and learned at once, and the office prose of the editors, to the mock-Sophoclean verse of Taliped Decanus and the cadence of a campus scripture
Scale
A cosmos as a university: two campuses, a college for each nation, a sacred history from the Founder on, and one hero’s life from a mysterious birth to a foreseen death
Governing Proposition
In the goat barn of the West Campus a boy raised among goats, who believes himself a goat, learns that he is a man, and comes to believe that he is the Grand Tutor, the redeemer the University awaits. He takes up an Assignment of impossible tasks, goes down three times into the belly of WESCAC, the computer that governs the campus and can destroy it, and brings out three teachings, the first two of which do harm. The wager of the novel is that a scripture can be written as a comic novel, its origin left undecidable by its own editors; that the hero’s ancient pattern can be built knowingly as a plot and mocked as it is built; and that a world divided into Passage and Failure, East and West, can neither live without the division nor survive taking it as final.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book does not begin with its hero. It begins with documents about itself: disclaimers from the editors, who cannot agree whether the book should be published at all, and a cover-letter signed “J.B.”, giving an account of how the tapes that make up the text came into his hands. Who composed them is left in doubt, and a computer may be among the candidates. Only after this does the scripture proper begin, the Revised New Syllabus, in two volumes of three reels each.
The frame is part of the work, and it is half of what the work says. A sacred text whose origin cannot be settled shows what a sacred text is: a thing handed down through editors, disputed at its source, and believed or refused on grounds that are never quite the text’s own. The office prose of the disclaimers, dry and anxious, is the first of the book’s many registers, and it makes authority the subject before the story has begun.
The title names the form. A syllabus is what a university teaches, and this one claims to be revised and new: a scripture written in the vocabulary of the campus, for a world in which learning has become religion and grading judgment. The joke is also the argument. What follows is a gospel, and a comic novel, and the book will not let the reader choose between them.
Movement II
“George is my name” are the first words of the scripture, and the claim is a goat-boy’s claim to his own story. He has grown up in the goat barn of the West Campus, among the goats, believing himself one of them. The opening pastoral has a lyric strangeness the book seldom finds again: a creature who must learn that he is human, and who will spend the rest of the scripture learning that the human is also the goat.
The world he learns is a university, and the university is the universe. The West Campus is governed from Tower Hall and its computer, WESCAC; the East Campus, Nikolay College, has its own computer, EASCAC. The two world wars were the Campus Riots, and the cold war between the campuses is the Quiet Riot. The Founder is God, Enos Enoch is Christ, and Moishe is Moses. Salvation is Passage, damnation is Failure, and the redeemer the campus awaits is the Grand Tutor.
George comes to believe that he is that redeemer. His guide is Max Spielman. His birth is surrounded by mystery, and like Oedipus he is a foundling who must seek his own parentage. He takes up the Assignment, a list of tasks that cannot be done, and goes out into the campus to prove himself. The hero’s life as the comparatists set it out is the plot from here to the end, built stage by stage, and the book knows it, which is both its daring and its distance.
Movement III
In the first volume a play is staged within the novel: Taliped Decanus, a verse travesty of Oedipus Rex. The greatest tragedy of the inherited canon is turned into farce, in mock-Sophoclean verse, and the farce is the book’s own admission of what it does to inherited myth. It builds the old pattern into its hero’s life and laughs at the pattern as it builds. George is a foundling seeking his own parents, and the play stages the most famous foundling of all.
He has a double. Harold Bray, the false Grand Tutor, mirrors George at every step. He is the hero’s shadow in the old pattern, and a rival claimant to the office: if one redeemer can be counterfeited, the reader is left to ask how the true one is to be known, a question the frame has already raised about the text itself.
Between the large events the campus is toured. George meets Stoker in the Power House, the Sears, Eierkopf, Peter Greene and Croaker, and each meeting restates the opposition of Passage and Failure in a new costume. There is a college for each nation, and the satire visits them. The comedy is wide, punning and bawdy, and it runs long: the joke of the campus vocabulary has made its effect long before it stops being told.
Movement IV
Three times George goes down into WESCAC, the computer that governs the West Campus and can kill a campus, and three times he comes out with a teaching. The descents are the book’s argument, spaced across its length and answered one by one. They approach dread and wonder, a hero passing into the belly of the machine as the hero of the old pattern passes into the belly of the monster.
The first teaching is strict distinction: Passage and Failure are absolute, and every act must be sorted into one or the other. It spreads cruelty. The second is its opposite: all distinctions are one, and Passage and Failure the same. It spreads licence. Both are failures of the redeemer, and the campus pays for them. The book’s finding is carried by the action: a world divided into opposites cannot live without the division, and is destroyed by taking it as final.
The third descent is the summit. Inside the computer George is joined with Anastasia, and an illumination follows: a knowledge beyond the opposition, which the book names as its goal and stages as its height. It comes near the mystic sublime the pattern promises, the sacred marriage in the belly of the monster. What the knowledge is, the book can name more readily than it can render, and that may be its point: the teaching that passes beyond words is the one that cannot be put into a syllabus.
Movement V
After the scripture comes the Posttape. In it the aged George foresees the institution his teaching will become, and foresees his own fall. The hunger for a redeemer has made the redeemer, and will now require his betrayal. The hero’s pattern runs to its end in decline and a foreseen death, and the book ends its gospel in disenchantment, not transport.
Then the frame closes on itself. A Postscript to the Posttape calls the Posttape spurious, and a Footnote to the Postscript follows. Whether the last words of the redeemer are his or a forgery cannot be settled, and the book does not settle it. The scripture ends as it began, in a dispute about its own authority, so that the reader leaves holding a sacred text whose last page is in doubt.
The questions stay open. Whether the third teaching is wisdom or a higher evasion; whether the book believes the myth it has built or only uses it; whether the campus that stands for the cosmos is a satire of its decade or a picture of every culture that has made knowledge its salvation. The book built the hero’s pattern as completely as any novel has, and took it apart in the same gesture, and it leaves both the building and the taking apart standing.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the spine is required. Without the goat barn there is no hero who has to learn to be human; without the Assignment there is no quest; without the three descents into WESCAC there is no argument, since the thesis is carried by the failure of the first two teachings and by the third. The frame is required too: the disputed authorship of a scripture is half of what the book says. The encounters of each middle reel, with Stoker in the Power House, the Sears, Eierkopf, Peter Greene and Croaker, each restate the opposition of Passage and Failure in a new costume, which a book about opposites can use. What the test finds is the tour: a college for each nation told past its point, and the campus joke repeated long after it has landed. Perhaps a fifth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and the action carries it. A mind or a civilisation that divides the world into Passage and Failure, East and West, cannot do without the division and is destroyed by taking it as final: the first descent teaches strict distinction and spreads cruelty, the second teaches that all distinctions are one and spreads licence, and only the third reaches a knowledge beyond the opposition. The hunger for a redeemer makes the redeemer and then requires his betrayal, and the Posttape carries it. The campus that stands for the cosmos shows a culture of knowledge that has made learning its religion and grading its judgment. Held below the bar: the finding is announced as paradox more than shown in persons, and part of it is a cold-war mood.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The register is comic, and the axis does not forgive that: the comedy caps elevation by design, and the book’s characteristic effect is the pun, the travesty and the bawdy set piece. There are heights. The opening pastoral, the boy among the goats who believes himself a goat, has a lyric strangeness. The descents into WESCAC approach dread and wonder, a hero passing into the machine that can kill a campus, and the third, the union with Anastasia inside the computer and the illumination that follows, is staged as the summit and comes near the mystic sublime the pattern promises. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: the heights are few in a very long book, Taliped Decanus turns the greatest tragedy of the canon into farce, and the Posttape ends in disenchantment, not transport.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Myth built, and built as completely as any novel has built it: the hero’s life as Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell set it out is the plot, stage by stage. A birth surrounded by mystery; a childhood among beasts; a summons and a list of impossible tasks; a guide, Max Spielman; a shadow, Harold Bray, the false Grand Tutor who mirrors George at every step; a descent into the belly of the monster; a sacred marriage; a return with a teaching; and, in the Posttape, the hero’s decline and foreseen death. Oedipus is built in as well as quoted, for George is a foundling seeking his own parentage. The structure bears the whole weight. It stops short of the bar because the particular does not stay particular: the figures exist to bear the pattern, and the parody that builds the myth holds it at arm’s length.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the Menippean satire and the comic encyclopedia of Rabelais, Swift and Sterne, Bunyan’s allegory, Joyce’s mythic method, and Barth’s own pastiche of the eighteenth-century novel in The Sot-Weed Factor. The turn goes further than that pastiche of a known form: a whole scripture written as a comic novel, a gospel of the cold war set in a university that stands for the cosmos, with the monomyth of the comparatists taken out of the study and made the conscious plot of a novel, and editors who cannot agree whether it should be published or who wrote it, a computer possibly among the candidates. The stake was real: a very long allegory, after a success. Held below the bar because the instruments were old ones turned, and Pynchon and Nabokov had made the frame of contested documents current a few years before.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The scripture form is the argument: a sacred text whose origin is undecidable shows what a sacred text is. The disclaimers, the cover-letter, and a Posttape that its own Postscript calls spurious, with a footnote on the Postscript, make authority itself the subject. The university as cosmos is a form that knows something: to put salvation in the vocabulary of examinations is to show a culture that has made learning its religion. The two volumes and the three descents enact the dialectic of the opposites. Held in the middle sevens because the episodic matter inside the frame is a container more than an instrument: most encounters could be reordered, shortened or exchanged without the book knowing less, and the one-to-one mapping of the allegory holds much of the content at the level of code rather than form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence first, and sixty years supply some. Robert Scholes made the book a centre of The Fabulators (1967), and it has kept a place in the criticism of American metafiction since, in studies of Barth and in Tony Tanner’s City of Words (1971). Its questions stay open: whether the third teaching is wisdom or a higher evasion; whether the Posttape is George’s or a forgery, as the Postscript suggests; whether the book believes its myth or only uses it. The frame rewards return. What holds the axis here is that much of the yield is decoding: once the campus vocabulary is translated, the allegory’s meanings are known and do not deepen. The criticism has thinned since the 1970s, as attention moved to Lost in the Funhouse and to Barth’s essays, and return to the book is now largely return to its period and its author.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The field is American fiction of the 1960s, and the intrinsic force is real. The book showed that the American novel could be a comic scripture, could build the monomyth knowingly as its plot, and could make its own authority the subject of its frame. With V., Catch-22 and Vonnegut it helped define what was soon called fabulation and then postmodern fiction. Held below the bar by its reach after the first years: the force of Barth’s example passed to later writers chiefly through Lost in the Funhouse and the essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), no line of campus allegories or computer gospels follows from this book, and the cinema that later made Campbell’s pattern its plot did not learn it here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Scholes’s The Fabulators, the year after publication, set the book among the founding texts of a critical category; reach that belongs to the author is not credited to the work.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty years, on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published, frame and all, and takes no charge. Fabric: none. Presence is where the charge falls. The book has stayed available, but its readership has narrowed since its first decade; it is read now mainly in the academy, and there less than Lost in the Funhouse, and it is rarely taught whole. Its surface is fixed to its moment in the way the axis penalises: the allegory of the Quiet Riot, the paired computers and the émigré scientists all ask the reader to decode the cold war. Narrowed presence and a topical surface together hold the axis at the foot of what sixty years of survival can show.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on Barth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of pastiche and of register, and it is wide: the goat-boy’s voice, earnest, bawdy and learned at once, telling a scripture in the first person; the office prose of the disclaimers; the mock-Sophoclean verse of Taliped Decanus; the cadence of a campus scripture; and a punning lexicon in which every term of theology and politics has a campus equivalent, kept consistent across the whole length. The construction is planned: the three descents are spaced and answered, and Bray shadows George step for step. Three charges hold it below the top: prolixity, sentences and scenes that run past their effect and a joke repeated after it lands; bawdry that is often laboured; and figures drawn as functions of the allegory, so that dialogue becomes an exchange of positions.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the goat barn of the opening and the inside of WESCAC at the climax, or the farce of Taliped Decanus and the disenchanted prophecy of the Posttape. One law governs them: the world is a university, knowledge is salvation, every distinction is required and none is final. The goat who must learn he is a man, and the man who must learn he is also a goat, obey the same physics as the two campuses that can live neither together nor apart. The campus vocabulary is held consistent from slapstick to theology, which is the law’s strongest proof. Charged on two counts: the one-to-one allegory slips, some figures standing now for a nation, now for a doctrine, now for a person, as the satire needs; and the bawdy farce sometimes works against the mystic claims of the climax rather than with them.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The attempt is cosmic, and much of it is achieved. History: the Campus Riots and the Quiet Riot stand for the world wars and the cold war, with a college for each nation. The sacred: the Founder, Enos Enoch and Moishe, and a new scripture in the making. Science and the state: WESCAC as the automated deterrent, the émigré scientists, Tower Hall and the Power House. Knowledge and the institution: the university as the order that contains the others. The natural order: the goat barn and the animal in the man. Sex and the body, in George’s education in both; the family, in his search for his parents. They are joined, not listed, by the one conceit. Held below the eights because the joining is a code more than an integration: consciousness is held mostly in George’s alone, and labour, class and the daily life of persons are thin.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, then The Swerve at 8.3. A text that survives whole, frame and all, after sixty years; the hero’s pattern built stage by stage as the plot, from the goat barn and the foundling’s search for his parents to the descent, the sacred marriage and the foreseen fall; and a whole scripture written as a comic novel, its authority made the subject of its own frame, on a real stake.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.0: a comic register that caps elevation by design, with heights in the opening pastoral and the descents into WESCAC and seldom elsewhere. Next above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.2, a yield much of which is decoding, with the criticism thinned since the 1970s; then The Inevitable at 7.3, a spine required from the goat barn to the Posttape, with perhaps a fifth of the book, the tours of the colleges and the campus joke repeated after it has landed, permitted rather than compelled.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 7.8, The Inner Law at 7.8, The Living Form at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 7.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.0, The Bottomless Well, 7.2, and The Inevitable, 7.3, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus, published by Doubleday, New York, in 1966: his fourth novel, after The Floating Opera (1956), The End of the Road (1958) and The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), and followed by Lost in the Funhouse (1968). It is scored as the novel as published in 1966, with its frame, which is part of the work: the publisher’s disclaimer, the cover-letter signed “J.B.”, the Revised New Syllabus in two volumes of three reels each, and the closing Posttape, Postscript to the Posttape and Footnote to the Postscript. Later reissues and anything added to them are not part of the work, and Barth’s later books are named only as evidence of where his reach ran, never credited to this one. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Barth’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening words of the Revised New Syllabus. The prose read sentence by sentence, the order of episodes within each reel and the texture of particular chapters are beyond this reading; where an axis turns on them it is argued from the episodes. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the first edition, its sales and its place on the bestseller lists, the particulars of George’s birth, the later reissues and their prefaces, and the names and roles of minor figures beyond those given, are not given. Citations are by volume and episode.