Word: barth
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...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...
...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(God), author of the Old Syllabus, and of his son, the Grand Tutor, whose system for passing the finals (death) is no longer valid, and who is known as the Shepherd Emeritus...
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...
...enemies, is tempted by power and false worship. At one stage, he denies (or asserts) himself: "I'm no Enoch Enoch [God]. I've got as much Billygoat as Graduate [Christ]. And as much as the Dean o' Flunks [the devil] or anyone else." While Barth seems to be crudely baiting religion, he is actually enunciating his concern with the theological conception of the hypostatic nature of Christ-that Christ was both fully human and fully divine. Goat-Boy's Vergil on his pilgrimage is Stoker, a cynical beast of burden who may be in league...
...modeled on the apocryphal Book of Revelation. Goat-Boy ascends a hill beyond Founder's Rock and, in an exploit of mystical sex, with his male parts wreathed in mistletoe, splits the rock and sounds a new and enigmatic dispensation. In this veiled and quite possibly diabolic climax, Barth offers one glint of hope. Goat-Boy leaves behind his son Giles-whose mother was a coed who took too literally the injunction to "love her classmate as herself"-to carry on the Goat-Boy religion and bring the New Curriculum to every campus in the university...