Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus was published by Doubleday in 1966, and it polarized readers more completely than any American novel of its decade. The conceit is total: the universe is a university, the Cold War is a rivalry between East and West Campus, God is the Grand Tutor, the atom bomb is WESCAC (a computer), and the protagonist — George Giles, raised among goats on the experimental farm — may be the new Grand Tutor destined to “pass all, fail all.”
Barth sustains this allegory for 700 pages, and the result is either brilliant or maddening depending on the reader’s tolerance for extended metaphor. The novel’s admirers see it as a profound meditation on heroism, knowledge, and the nature of truth, rendered with inexhaustible comic invention. Its detractors see it as a clever premise extended far beyond its capacity to generate meaning — an academic joke that takes itself too seriously.
What is undeniable is the novel’s ambition: Barth attempts nothing less than a complete mythology for the modern world, using the university (the institution of knowledge, the place where truth is sought and credentialed) as the vehicle for exploring every major question of the 1960s — Cold War politics, sexual liberation, the crisis of authority, the nature of heroism, and the possibility of transcendence in a secular age.
Collecting Giles Goat-Boy
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1966): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $10–$30