Word: goats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...GILES GOAT-BOY, by John Barth. A brilliant gothic fun-house fantasy of theology, sociology and sex in which a goat (or is it a boy?) appears as the Messiah of a new religion...
...remembers the "days when the District Officer was like the Supreme Deity and the Interpreter the principal minor god who carried prayers and sacrifices to Him." The pay and cringe benefits were enough to support Odili, 34 other children and five wives in high style, with a goat killed every week, and lashings of palm wine to wash down the yams. But times change. The white man has gone, and Odili must emerge with his emergent nation and attach himself to black power in the person of a cynical grafter named Chief Nanga. So begins a comedy of Freedom...
...leaves a final obfuscation in a codicil 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...
...pilgrimage within an invented cosmology. Here and there his prose matches the cool, deadly manner of Swift in dealing in an offhand way with the totally outrageous. He is as gamy as Swift; there are some campus orgies, and sex is kid's play to Goat-Boy. Like Swift, who satirized the casus belli between Britain and France as a dispute between Bigendians and Littlendians, Barth parodies today's split between the technologically similar but ideologically dissimilar East and West. Yet his prime concern is with myth and religion, with the divine and the animal...
...greatest beauty aid of all-soap -was an invention of the barbarian Gauls, who made it from goat's tallow and beech ashes. Though the Greeks and Romans praised cleanliness, neither used soap. As late as 1853, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone condemned soap as "most injurious both to the comfort and health of the people." Fortunately, some prejudices come out in the wash...