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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

CLASSICS IN THEORY

General Editors
BROOKE A. HOLMES
MIRIAM LEONARD TIM WHITMARSH
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

CLASSICS IN THEORY

Classics in Theory explores the new directions for classical scholarship

opened up by critical theory. Inherently interdisciplinary, the series
creates a forum for the exchange of ideas between classics, anthro-
pology, modern literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and
other related fields. Invigorating and agenda-setting volumes analyse
the cross-fertilizations between theory and classical scholarship and set
out a vision for future work on the productive intersections between
the ancient world and contemporary thought.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

Narratology

Genevieve Liveley

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Genevieve Liveley 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

For Tulip
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

■ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge permission from Jim Phelan to reproduce a

short extract from his 2007 essay ‘Rhetoric/Ethics’, published in David
Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 203–16.
I am also grateful to the University of Bristol’s Institute for Advanced
Studies for funding a period of research leave in 2013/14 which allowed a
substantial portion of the book to be completed. Thanks too to Bristol’s
Faculty of Arts Research Fund and its School of Humanities for sup-
porting a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Ohio’s Project Narra-
tive Institute in the summer of 2015. This book owes much to the
insights of the ‘Ohio School’—to Jim Phelan, Angus Fletcher, Sean
O’Sullivan, and the participants of the 2015 Project Narrative Summer
School, especially Rae Muhlstock and Greta Matzner-Gore. I am also
indebted to Leon Golden for discussing his landmark translation of the
Poetics with me and to Tim Whitmarsh for his generous readings of the
draft manuscript. Thank you.
My grateful thanks are also owed to a number of my colleagues at
Bristol: Ruth Coates for advice on translating various Russian texts;
Lyndsay Coo for steering me away from too many misreadings of the
Greek; Emma Hammond and Natalie Swain for also appreciating the
Russian formalists (and much more besides); and Rob Crowe for his
gimlet eye.
Finally, my thanks to Alex Wardrop, and to Lynette and Alex Hibbert
for being so delightful. And, above all, to Richard and Tulip Huxtable—
for everything.
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

■ CONTENTS

1. Introduction 1
2. Ancient narrative theory before Aristotle—Plato 11
2.1 Arche 11
2.2 Plato’s Ion 13
2.3 Plato’s Republic 15
2.4 Teleute 21
3. Aristotle 25
3.1 Arche 25
3.2 Aristotle and Plato 27
3.3 Muthos 34
3.4 Katholou and idion 41
3.5 Ethos 44
3.6 Dianoia 46
3.7 Diegetic mimesis 48
3.8 Teleute 54
4. Ancient narrative theory after Aristotle—Horace 63
4.1 Arche 63
4.2 Horace’s ‘Letter to the Pisones’ or Ars poetica 64
4.3 Teleute 72
5. Ancient narrative theory in practice 75
5.1 Arche 75
5.2 Ancient narratological terms and concepts in the
Homeric scholia 77
5.3 Modern narratological terms and concepts in the
Homeric scholia 83
5.4 Ancient commentaries 89
5.5 Ancient narratological terms and concepts in the Servius
commentaries 92
5.6 Modern narratological terms and concepts in the Servius
commentaries 96
5.7 Teleute 106
6. Russian formalism 109
6.1 Arche 109
6.2 Victor Shklovsky 112
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x CONTENTS

6.3 Mikhail Petrovsky 119

6.4 Boris Tomashevsky 122
6.5 Vladimir Propp 127
6.6 Epeisodion (On translation) 130
6.7 Teleute 134
7. Neo-Aristotelianism 135
7.1 Arche 135
7.2 Ronald Crane 140
7.3 Wayne Booth 146
7.4 David Richter, Peter Rabinowitz, and James Phelan 151
7.5 Teleute 157
8. Prestructuralism 159
8.1 Arche 159
8.2 Henry James 159
8.3 Percy Lubbock 165
8.4 E. M. Forster 167
8.5 Norman Friedman 171
8.6 Franz Stanzel 175
8.7 Teleute 177
9. Structuralism 179
9.1 Arche 179
9.2 Roland Barthes 182
9.3 Tzvetan Todorov 186
9.4 Gérard Genette 189
9.4.1 Diegesis as mimesis (Plato and Aristotle) 190
9.4.2 Diegesis as histoire (Benveniste) 193
9.4.3 Diegesis as narrative pure and simple (Todorov) 195
9.4.4 Diegesis as diégèse (Metz and Souriau) 198
9.4.5 Diegesis as diégésis (Plato and Aristotle revisited) 201
9.5 Mieke Bal 203
9.6 Epeisodion (On translation) 210
9.7 Teleute 213
10. Poststructuralism 215
10.1 Arche 215
10.2 Seymour Chatman 217
10.3 Susan Lanser 223
10.4 Peter Brooks 228
10.5 Teleute 231
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Contents xi

11. Postclassicism 235

11.1 Arche 235
11.2 Monika Fludernik 236
11.3 David Herman 242
11.4 Jan Alber and Brian Richardson 246
11.5 Teleute 251

GLOSSARY 253
BIBLIOGRAPHY 257
INDEX 281
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

1 Introduction

The story goes: In the beginning there was Aristotle who theorized
“plot”, then there came the novelists who theorized their own plots,
then after some false starts (Propp, Benjamin, Bakhtin) narrative
theory really took off with narratology (the structuralist-led “science
of narrative”). However, like the dinosaurs, narratologists died out
and were replaced by more mobile, covert forms of narrative theory
within a “post-structuralist” diaspora. Narrative theory lives on,
embedded in the work and tropes of post-structuralism.
Martin McQuillan, ‘Aporias of writing: Narrative and
subjectivity’ (2000: xi)

In the beginning there was Aristotle . . . That’s how one version of the
story goes, anyway.1 Other tales and other tellers remind us that before
there was Aristotle there was Plato. And after Aristotle there came
Horace (and ‘Longinus’, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Quintilian,
and Demetrius). Later, while the Anglo-American novelists were busy
plotting, the revolutionary Russian formalists were busy separating
fabula from syuzhet, discourse time from story time, and ‘free’ from
‘bound’ motifs, in their endeavours to develop a formalist ‘science’ of
literary poetics. What’s more, before there were French structuralists
there were Chicago neo-Aristotelians, also inviting us to see narratol-
ogy as a ‘science’ and pointing to ‘grammatical structure’ as the key to
understanding the formal mechanics and dynamics of story as dis-
course, as a purposive communication act.2 And while the meteor
strike of poststructuralism may have wiped out most of the heavier
beasts of structuralism, the adaptive neo-Aristotelians have not merely
survived but thrived in the ensuing narratological ‘rhetorocene’ era.

1
As Mezei 1996: 2 trenchantly observes: ‘The his/story of narratology, like any story,
rather depends on who the narrator is.’ Herman 1999 locates the origins of narratology with
the ‘classical’ structuralist project of the 1960s and documents the evolution of narrative
theory only back thus far. Fludernik 2005a (following Fehn, Hoesterey, and Tatat 1992)
acknowledges a prestructuralist ‘archaic’ period of narratology that begins with Henry
James, Percy Lubbock, and E. M. Forster.
2
Crane 1953: 168–9: ‘Before we can understand a poem as an artistic structure we must
understand it as a grammatical structure.’
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2 NARRATOLOGY

Their interdisciplinary Aristotelian DNA has also helped them to live

happily alongside newer postclassical narratological species.3
In their 2002 mapping of the evolution of these various new narratol-
ogies, Ansgar and Vera Nünning drew up a shortlist of topics warranting
further future investigation, including among them an appeal for more
research into the history of narratology.4 So far, that call has been
answered with new studies into the Russian formalists, the Prague
school, and the German tradition of Erzähltheorie.5 This book aims to
extend the history of narratology beyond these early twentieth-century
precursors to ‘classical’ structuralist narratology by going back further
still—into the ancient world and to the earliest ‘classical’ origins of
narrative theory.
The reception history that it tells offers some remarkable plot twists.
We unmask Plato as an unreliable narrator and theorist, noting the
absence of anything like a ‘Platonic’ theory of narrative in his Ion and
Republic. We uncover Aristotle not only distinguishing between plot and
story, but anticipating the Russian formalists’ interest in story motifs,
Barthes’s interest in narrative nuclei, and Chatman’s in story kernels. We
also get a rare glimpse of Aristotle himself putting narrative theory into
practice in the role of storyteller in his fragmentary work On Poets. In
Horace’s Ars Poetica we find a rhetorically conceived poetics and a
sophisticated reader-response-based narratology evincing a keen interest
in audience affect and cognition. And amongst the ancient scholia critics
and commentators we come across untimely appreciation for such
modern narratological concepts as variant, deviant, and embedded focal-
ization, and for sundry forms of anachrony (including ‘repeating’ and
‘completing’ analepsis). These ancient theorists and critics turn out to
have a specialist narratological lexicon as rich (and as vexing) as any-
thing dreamt up by their modern counterparts too.
Those modern counterparts have no less fascinating stories of their
own to tell regarding the ancient world of narrative theory. In many of
these stories, Plato and Aristotle are characterized—mythologized
even—as figures of ancient authority and atemporal wisdom. Their
intuitions as narratologists avant la lettre provide credibility and philo-
sophical integrity to the new ‘science’ of narratology—not only in its

3
For a survey of the latest neo-narratologies see the range of entries in Hühn et al. 2014.
Cf. also Fludernik 2005a, Prince 1995, Nünning and Nünning 2002, and Onega and Landa
1996: 12–35.
4
Nünning 2003: 239–75. Cf. Nünning and Nünning 2002.
5
On the Russian formalists see Schmid 2009a; on the Prague school see Schmid 2009b;
on the German narratological tradition see Cornils and Schernus 2003, and Fludernik and
Margolin 2004.
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INTRODUCTION 3

formalist and structuralist first phases but in some of the latest

‘postclassical’ neo-narratologies too.6 In the storytelling mode that char-
acterizes most narratological discourse (ancient and modern) Plato and
Aristotle are figured in various aetiologies as pioneers, as patrons, as
ancestors, as donors—sometimes of nothing more than a magical name
with which to conjure. They are accordingly cast in traditional plots in
which the maturity of any new narratological hero is proved by leaving
these father figures dead at a convenient crossroads. As Russian formalist
and literary historian Yury Tynyanov, reflecting on the place of formal-
ism within the literary-critical tradition, suggested in 1921:7
When one speaks of “literary tradition” or “succession” . . . usually one implies a
certain kind of direct line uniting the younger and older representatives of a
known literary branch. Yet the matter is much more complicated. There is no
continuing line; there is rather a departure, a pushing away from the known
point—a struggle . . . Any literary succession is first of all a struggle, a destruction
of old values and a reconstruction of old elements.
We are familiar with the Bloomian notion that poets are supposed to
fight against their literary predecessors in an Oedipal struggle to make
their own mark, but Tynyanov reminds us that literary critics and
theorists may do the same.8 Indeed, Tynyanov himself is here struggling
to make space for his own ideas by pushing against those of fellow
formalist Viktor Shklovsky—especially Shklovsky’s theory of ‘defamiliar-
ization’ (ostranenie), the process by which poets (and theorists and
critics) are supposed to innovate within and against the constraints of
literary tradition. Actually, Tynyanov and Shklovsky have very similar
views on this and on poetics more broadly; they clearly descend from the
same lineage and belong to the same formalist family. But Tynyanov
seeks to ‘push away’ from this familiarity, not least of all by over-
emphasizing his own innovation and difference—even if that departure
from tradition itself leads to a kind of return through ‘a reconstruction of
old elements’.
In the reception history of narratological poetics these familial and
Oedipal patterns tend to recur, with Plato and Aristotle all too frequently
embraced and then subsequently pushed away and pushed against—even
though the attempted ‘destruction of old values’ may end up facilitating
their reconstruction. As David Richter puts it: ‘Like the novel, literary

6
Cf. Ryan 1999.
7
Tynyanov 1921 quoted in Eichenbaum 1965: 134.
8
See Bloom 1973 and on Bloomian models in the classical reception tradition see
especially Martindale 1993.
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4 NARRATOLOGY

criticism is an institutional form, whose continuities may be sought in a

tradition of common assumptions and problems, and whose evolutionary
change is the history of experimental innovations seeking new forms of
inquiry and new modes of explanation.’9
Framing these local familial plots of cross-generational inheritance
and innovation, larger narratological aetiologies and genealogies have
tended to place Plato and/or Aristotle at the base of a great (partheno-
genic) family tree. Higher up, significant boughs are seen to branch off in
various directions (Russian formalism, neo-Aristotelianism, structuralism),
each with their own bifurcating offshoots (Prague formalism, rhetorical-
narratological poetics, poststructuralism). In these genealogically con-
ceived narratives, less emphasis is placed upon conflict or resistance and
more upon continuity or resemblance.10 David Herman offers us one
such genealogy, emphasizing the fact that the structuralists were rather
less ‘revolutionary’ than their 1966 manifesto proclaimed, and that their
project represented less of a hostile bifurcation than a sympathetic
convergence of pre-existing critical theories and traditions.11 Indeed,
the (Foucauldian) genealogical metaphor that Herman uses in his
account of the structuralist reception of ideas first mooted by German
morphologists, Russian formalists, New Critics, and neo-Aristotelians is
explicitly (re)configured in this narrative as part of a plot:12
to uncover forgotten interconnections; reestablish obscured or unacknowledged
lines of descent; expose relationships between institutions, belief-systems, dis-
courses, or modes of analysis that might otherwise be taken to be wholly distinct
and unrelated . . . to situate recent theories of narrative in a complex lineage, a
network of historical and conceptual affiliations, and thereby underscore how
those theories constitute less a singular continuous tradition of research than a
cluster of developments marked by family resemblances.
As such genealogical models suggest, these plots are readily incorporated
into an even larger ‘grand narrative’—structured along the lines of a

9
Richter 1982: 48.
10
By a common focus, for example, upon literary discourse qua discourse, as speech act,
enunciation, rhetorical communication, or variants thereon. Cf. Onega and Landa 1996: 26,
who see the Russian formalists, New Critics, the Chicago school, and the structuralists as
akin in forwarding ‘theories of enunciation’.
11
Herman 2005: 20.
12
Herman 2005: 20–1. Cf. Herman 2005: 31 citing Hill 1998: 1: ‘History, according to
genealogists, is not teleological . . . They cannot identify a goal of a historical process, and
then go on to show how it gradually emerged from its embryonic beginnings. Rather, they
chart the processes that, by contingent confluence, produce a contemporary result. Hence
the metaphor: no individual is the goal of a family history. Rather, a family is a vast fabric of
relationships, and any one individual represents only one among many confluences of past
lines of descent.’
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INTRODUCTION 5

(phylogenetic) evolutionary tree—which sees the history of a ‘species’ of

literary theory and criticism like narratology in terms of its quasi-
Darwinian evolution.13
It is precisely according to the pattern of this grandest of narratives
that we find the transformation of ‘narratology’ into ‘narrative theory’
plotted in Martin McQuillan’s version of narratology’s history in this
chapter’s epigraph. In keeping with Darwin’s own careful attention to
evolutionary culs-de-sac and aporiae, McQuillan even includes some of
the ‘false starts’ that emerge in this appropriately ateleological story of
the ‘origin of the species’ before describing how the literary-critical
equivalent of natural selection processes brought about the extinction
of the structuralist dinosaurs, remnants of their DNA surviving in more
adaptable poststructuralist species.14
Although both Herman and McQuillan carefully avoid plotting these
histories of narratology as teleological, their respective genealogical and
evolutionary patterning necessarily imposes a narrative sequence upon
them. They choose different beginnings, but move through similar
middles towards identical ends: both stories covertly privilege the devel-
opments of the latest postclassical or poststructuralist phase of narrative
theory with its rich interdisciplinary plurality and narratologies. And
they are not alone. Monica Fludernik, eschewing an explicitly genea-
logical or evolutionary plot structure for her 2005 history of narratology,
bases it instead upon an analogously organic model of human biology.
One of her classically troped plots for this history narrates ‘The rise and
fall of narratology’ from its structuralist birth in the 1960s, through its
maturation in the 1980s, followed by its terminal decline and death in the
1990s; a second plot describes ‘The rise and rise of narrative theory’ from
its structuralist ‘adolescence’ through its ongoing growth and maturity in
a poststructuralist phase, and its flourishing ‘diversification of narrative
theories’ in the twenty-first century.15 Whether genealogical, evolution-
ary, or both, teleological narrative structures imposing organically con-
ceived beginnings, middles, and ends upon these narratological histories
are hard to avoid, it seems.

13
For an alternative mapping of narratology’s genealogy see Darby 2001, who empha-
sizes difference and schism rather than continuity and evolution, positing a fundamental
split between the Germanic tradition of Erzähltheorie and the broad American-French
structuralist/poststructuralist tradition. On the cognitively delimiting narrative dynamics of
such Darwinian models see Abbott 2003.
14
McQuillan 2000: xi. De Jong 2014: 11 also uses this DNA metaphor. Cf. Morson 1999:
292–3, for whom Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species stresses the messiness, historicity, and time-
liness (not timelessness) of things . . . [and] imagines a world of constant small adjustments
accumulating without plan, of adaptations tripping over earlier adaptations.’
15
Fludernik 2005a: 36–7.
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6 NARRATOLOGY

Yet literary histories, like other stories, are not neatly structured with
the clearly defined beginnings, middles, and ends that Aristotle pre-
scribed for plots in his Poetics. Indeed, the monstrous literary chimera
that Horace describes in his Ars poetica might offer a better model to
illustrate the shape of narratology’s strange history, in its fusion of
incongruous yet congruous parts joining together to make up a whole.
Thus, the story this book sets out to tell about narratology recognizes the
impossibility of turning a reception history of narrative poetics spanning
more than two thousand years into a perfect plot. It attempts instead to
tell a good story.
Narratology and its theorists, ancient and modern, have at least
equipped us well to recognize and describe the operations and phenom-
ena associated with such a telling.16 Just as any storytelling involves
making choices, selecting some characters and events at the expense
of others, offering detailed descriptions and analyses of some features
and elliptically passing over others, lingering over some moments and
speeding through the rest, so the reception history offered here pre-
sents a particular focalized and emplotted narrative. Its emphasis is
upon the destruction of old values and the reconstruction of old
elements. The German morphologists, the Prague Circle, the Tel Aviv
school, and key figures such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jonathan Culler, Käte
Hamburger, and Paul Ricoeur receive less attention than they deserve.
Nor does this reception history tell the full story of narratology and
genre, or of narratology and historiography—both rich and complex
narratives in their own right.
And just as any narrative involves, in Jim Phelan’s useful formulation,
‘somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some pur-
poses that something happened’, the story I tell here has a particular
‘somebody’ in mind as its intended audience.17 In fact, I have two
somebodies: classicists and narratologists.18

16
Some narratologists engage playfully with this idea: Herman, in the introduction to
his own genealogical ‘overview’, first selects key moments or chapters in the history
of narratology on which to ‘focus’ and then ‘zoom[s] out to reveal the broader contexts’
(2005: 20). De Jong 2014 offers a ‘birds-eye view of the history of narratology’ (3–6).
17
Phelan 2015: 146.
18
Because of this double focus, Greek and Latin has been kept to a minimum but ancient
terms are used contextually throughout, while narratological terminology is similarly
glossed and variants explained. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Readings and translations of Plato’s Republic are based on Slings 2003; Plato’s Ion and
Phaedrus on Burnet 1903; Aristotle’s Poetics on Halliwell 1999; Aristotle’s On Poets on
Janko 2011; Aristotle’s Homeric Problems on Rose 1886; Horace’s Ars poetica on Rudd
1989; the Greek scholia on Erbse 1969–88 and van Thiel 2000; Servius on Thilo and Hagen
2011. On narratology’s notorious terminological complexity see Toolan 1988: 9–11.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/1/2019, SPi

INTRODUCTION 7

In the last thirty years the tools and terms of narratology have been
taken up eagerly by classicists and have inspired many productive read-
ings of a broad range of texts, from epic to elegy, ancient historiography
to the ancient novel.19 Massimo Fusillo’s Genettean readings have revo-
lutionized the study of the ancient novel. Irene de Jong has used Bal’s
narratological methodology to demonstrate how complex subjectivities
and embedded focalization characterize Homeric narrative. John Wink-
ler has put Barthes to expert use in his narratological readings of
Apuleius. Stephen Wheeler has used Genette’s theory of ‘narrative levels’
to expose new dimensions to the embedded tales-within-tales of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. The fruitful merging of narratology with psychoanalyt-
ically informed theories of reading and reader response (inspired by
Peter Brooks’s influential work) has opened up further avenues leading
to new narratological approaches to textual analysis—particularly in
Latin literature: David Quint’s landmark study, Epic and Empire, and
Duncan Kennedy’s characteristically nuanced readings of Latin love
elegy have both used Brooks’s model to release fresh insights into Latin
poetry.20 Although, as Mieke Bal appropriately warns, narratology is not
‘some kind of machine into which one inserts a text at one end and
expects an adequate description to roll out at the other’, classicists have
been relatively quick to test the potential of this new system of textual
analysis, welcoming not only its taxonomies and technical vocabularies
but the interpretative insights it can help to yield.21
For a much longer period of time narratologists have looked to the
classics for equivalent insights. Successive waves in the modern history
of narratology have seen each new generation of narratologists devel-
oping their own stories about how narratives and narrativity works,
based upon the basic plots and precepts established in antiquity by
Plato and Aristotle.22

19
Cf. Fowler 2001: 68: ‘Narratology . . . is an approach which has been taken up and
adapted even by classicists relatively hostile to theory: terms like “prolepsis”, “intradiegetic”,
and “focalization” are now as familiar to classical scholars as such non-jargon terms as
“syllepsis”, “propemptikon”, or “prosopopoia”.’
20
See de Jong 2014 for an extremely useful overview (with bibliographies) of narrato-
logically informed close readings of ancient Greek epic, historiography, and drama. On the
ancient novel see Fusillo 1985, Winkler 1985, and Whitmarsh 2011; on the narrativity of
Greek hymns see Faulkner and Hodkinson 2015. On Roman epic see especially Wheeler
1999 and 2000, Fowler 2000, Barchiesi 2001 and 1994, Rosati 2002, and Nikolopoulos 2004;
on didactic see Gale 2004; on Roman historiography see Pausch 2011, Pelling 2009, Hardie
2009, and the essays collected in Liotsakis and Farrington 2016; on elegy see Liveley and
Salzman-Mitchell 2008; and on lyric see Lowrie 1997.
21
Bal 1997: 3–4.
22
To avoid the unnecessarily complex spectrum of terminologies suggested by some in
this field, I use the terms narratology and narrative theory as broadly interchangeable—and
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This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: Friends and Enemies

Author: Fritz Leiber

Illustrator: Robert Engle

Release date: June 22, 2022 [eBook #68374]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDS

AND ENEMIES ***
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
 By FRITZ LEIBER

Illustrated by ENGLE

In a world blasted by super-bombs

and run by super-thugs, Art vs.
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[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity, April 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The sun hadn't quite risen, but now that the five men were out from
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young and with a curly mop, looked all feeling.
The fat man barring their way back to town mopped his head. The
two young men flanking him with shotgun and squirtgun hadn't
started to sweat yet.
The fat man stuffed the big handkerchief back in his pocket, wiped his
hands on his shirt, rested his wrists lightly on the pistols holstered
either side his stomach, looked at the two unarmed men, indicated
the hot road with a nod, and said, "There's your way, professors. Get
going."
The thin man looked at the hand-smears on the fat man's shirt. "But
you haven't even explained to me," he protested softly, "why I'm being
turned out of Ozona College."
"Look here, Mr. Ellenby, I've tried to make it easy for you," the fat man
said. "I'm doing it before the town wakes up. Would you rather be
chased by a mob?"
"But why—?"
"Because we found out you weren't just a math teacher, Mr. Ellenby."
The fat man's voice went hard. "You'd been a physicist once. Nuclear
physicist."
The young man with the shotgun spat. Ellenby watched the spittle
curl in the dust like a little brown worm. He shifted his gaze to a dead
eucalyptus leaf. "I'd like to talk to the college board of regents," he
said tonelessly.
"I'm the board of regents," the fat man told him. "Didn't you even
know that?"
At this point the other unarmed man spoke up loudly. "But that doesn't
explain my case. I've devoted my whole life to warning people against
physicists and other scientists. How they'd smash us with their
bombs. How they were destroying our minds with 3D and telefax and
handies. How they were blaspheming against Nature, killing all
imagination, crushing all beauty out of life!"
"I'd shut my mouth if I were you, Madson," the fat man said critically,
"or at least lower my voice. When I mentioned a mob, I wasn't fooling.
I saw them burn Cal Tech. In fact, I got a bit excited and helped."
The young man with the shotgun grinned.
"Cal Tech," Ellenby murmured, his eyes growing distant. "Cal Tech
burns and Ozona stands."
"Ozona stands for the decencies of life," the fat man grated, "not
alphabet bombs and pituitary gas. Its purpose is to save a town, not
help kill a world."
"But why should I be driven out?" Madson persisted. "I'm just a poet
singing the beauties of the simple life unmarred by science."
"Not simple enough for Ozona!" the fat man snorted. "We happen to
know, Mr. Poet Madson, that you've written some stories about free
love. We don't want anyone telling Ozona girls it's all right to be
careless."
"But those were just ideas, ideas in a story," Madson protested. "I
wasn't advocating—"
"No difference," the fat man cut him short. "Talk to a woman about
ideas and pretty soon she gets some." His voice became almost
kindly. "Look here, if you wanted a woman without getting hitched to
her, why didn't you go to shantytown?"
Madson squared his shoulders. "You've missed the whole point. I'd
never do such a thing. I never have."
"Then you shouldn't have boasted," the fat man said. "And you
shouldn't have fooled around with Councilman Classen's daughter."
At the name, Ellenby came out of his trance and looked sharply at
Madson, who said indignantly, "I wasn't fooling around with Vera-
Ellen, whatever her crazy father says. She came to my office because
she has poetic ability and I wanted to encourage it."
"Yeah, so she'd encourage you," the fat man finished. "That girl's wild
enough already, which I suppose is what you mean by poetic ability.
And in this town, her father's word counts." He hitched up his belt.
"And now, professors, it's time you started."
Madson and Ellenby looked at each other doubtfully. The young man
with the squirtgun raised its acid-etched muzzle. The fat man looked
hard at Madson and Ellenby. "I think I hear alarm clocks going off," he
said quietly.
They watched the two men trudge a hundred yards, watched Ellenby
shift the rolled-up towel under his elbow to the other side, watched
Madson pause to thumb tobacco into a pipe and glance carelessly
back, then shove the pipe in his pocket and go on hurriedly.
"Couple of pretty harmless coots, if you ask me," the young man with
the shotgun observed.
"Sure," the fat man agreed, "but we got to remember peoples'
feelings and keep Ozona straight. We don't like mobs or fear or girls
gone wild."
The young man with the shotgun grinned. "That Vera-Ellen," he
murmured, shaking his head.
"You better keep your mind off her too," the fat man said sourly.
"She's wild enough without anybody to encourage her poetic ability or
anything else. It's a good thing we gave those two their walking
papers."
"They'll probably walk right into the arms of the Harvey gang," the
young man with the squirtgun remarked, "especially if they try to
short-cut."
"Pretty small pickings for Harvey, those two," the young man with the
shotgun countered. "Which won't please him at all."
The fat man shrugged. "Their own fault. If only they'd had sense
enough to keep their mouths shut. Early in life."
"They don't seem to realize it's 1993," said the young man with the
shotgun.
The fat man nodded. "Come on," he said, turning back toward the
town and the coolness. "We've done our duty."
The young man with the squirtgun took a last look. "There they go, Art
and Science," he observed with satisfaction. "Those two subjects
always did make my head ache."

On the hot road Madson began to stride briskly. His nostrils flared.
"Smell the morning air," he commanded. "It's good, good!"
Ellenby, matching his stride with longer if older legs, looked at him
with mild wonder.
"Smell the hot sour grass," Madson continued. "It's things like this
man was meant for, not machines and formulas. Look at the dew.
Have you seen the dew in years? Look at it on that spiderweb!"
The physicist paused obediently to observe the softly twinkling
strands. "Perfect catenaries," he murmured.
"What?"
"A kind of curve," Ellenby explained. "The locus of the focus of a
parabola rolling on a straight line."
"Locus-focus hocus-pocus!" Madson snorted. "Reducing the wonders
of Nature to chalk marks. It's disgusting."
Suddenly each tiny drop of dew turned blood-red. Ellenby turned his
back on the spiderweb, whipped a crooked little brass tube from an
inside pocket and squinted through it.
"What's that?" Madson asked.
"Spectroscope," Ellenby explained. "Early morning spectra of the sun
are fascinating."
Madson huffed. "There you go. Analyzing. Tearing beauty apart. It's a
disease." He paused. "Say, won't you hurt your eyes?"
Turning back, Ellenby shook his head. "I keep a smoked glass on it,"
he said. "I'm always hoping that some day I'll get a glimpse of an
atomic bomb explosion."
"You mean to say you've missed all the dozens they dropped on this
country? That's too bad."
"The ball of fire's quite fleeting. The opportunities haven't been as
good as you think."
"But you're a physicist, aren't you? Don't you people have all sorts of
lovely photographs to gloat over in your laboratories?"
"Atomic bomb spectra were never declassified," Ellenby told him
wistfully. "At least not in my part of the project. I've never seen one."
"Well, you'll probably get your chance," Madson told him harshly. "If
you've been reading your dirty telefax, you'll know the Hot Truce is
coming to a boil. And the Angeles area will be a prime target." Ellenby
nodded mutely.
They trudged on. The sun began to beat on their backs like an open
fire. Ellenby turned up his collar. He watched his companion
thoughtfully. Finally he said, "So you're the Madson who wrote those
Enemies of Science stories about a world ruled by poets. It never
occurred to me back at Ozona. And that non-fiction book about us—
what was it called?"
"Murderers of Imagination," Madson growled. "And it would have
been a good thing if you'd listened to my warnings instead of going on
building machines and dissecting Nature and destroying all the lovely
myths that make life worthwhile."
"Are you sure that Nature is so lovely and kind?" Ellenby ventured.
Madson did not deign to answer.
They passed a crossroad leading, the battered sign said, one way to
Palmdale, the other to San Bernardino. They were perhaps a
hundred yards beyond it when Ellenby let go a little chuckle. "I have a
confession to make. When I was very young I wrote an article about
how children shouldn't be taught the Santa Claus myth or any similar
fictions."
Madson laughed sardonically. "A perfect member of your dry-souled
tribe! Worrying about Santa Claus, when all the while something very
different was about to come flying down from over the North Pole and
land on our housetops."
"We did try to warn people about the intercontinental missiles,"
Ellenby reminded him.
"Yes, without any success. The last two reindeer—Donner and
Blitzen!"
Ellenby nodded glumly, but he couldn't keep a smile off his face for
long. "I wrote another article too—it was never published—about how
poetry is completely pointless, how rhymes inevitably distort
meanings, and so on."
Madson whirled on him with a peal of laughter. "So you even thought
you were big enough to wreck poetry!" He jerked a limp, thinnish
volume from his coat pocket. "You thought you could destroy this!"
Ellenby's expression changed. He reached for the book, but Madson
held it away from him. Ellenby said, "That's Keats, isn't it?"
"How would you know?"
Ellenby hesitated. "Oh, I got to like some of his poetry, quite a while
after I wrote the article." He paused again and looked squarely at
Madson. "Also, Vera-Ellen was reading me some pieces out of that
volume. I guess you'd loaned it to her."
"Vera-Ellen?" Madson's jaw dropped.
Ellenby nodded. "She had trouble with her geometry. Some
conferences were necessary." He smiled. "We physicists aren't such
a dry-souled tribe, you know."
Madson looked outraged. "Why, you're old enough to be her father!"
"Or her husband," Ellenby replied coolly. "Young women are often
attracted to father images. But all that can't make any difference to us
now."
"You're right," Madson said shortly. He shoved the poetry volume
back in his pocket, flirted the sweat out of his eyes, and looked
around with impatience. "Say, you're going to New Angeles, aren't
you?" he asked, and when Ellenby nodded uncertainly, said, "Then
let's cut across the fields. This road is taking us out of our way." And
without waiting for a reply he jumped across the little ditch to the left
of the road and into the yellowing wheat field. Ellenby watched him
for a moment, then hitched his rolled towel further up under his arm
and followed.

It was stifling in the field. The wheat seemed to paralyze any stray
breezes. Their boots hissed against the dry stems. Far off they heard
a lazy drumming. After a while they came to a wide, brimful irrigation
ditch. They could see that some hundreds of feet ahead it was
crossed by a little bridge. They followed the ditch.
Ellenby felt strangely giddy, as if he were looking at everything
through a microscope. That may have been due to the tremendous
size of the wheat, its spikes almost as big as corncobs, the spikelets
bigger than kernels—rich orange stuff taut with flour. But then they
came to a section marred by larger and larger splotches of a powdery
purple blight.
The lazy drumming became louder. Ellenby was the first to see the
low-swinging helicopter with its thick, trailing plume of greenish mist.
He knocked Madson on the shoulder and both men started to run.
Purple dust puffed. Once Ellenby stumbled and Madson stopped to
jerk him to his feet. Still they would have escaped except that the
copter swerved toward them. A moment later they were enveloped in
sweet oily fumes.
Madson heard jeering laughter, glimpsed a grotesquely long-nosed
face peering down from above. Then, through the cloud, Ellenby
squeaked, "Don't breathe!" and Madson felt himself dragged roughly
into the ditch. The water closed over him with a splash.
Puffing and blowing, he came to his feet—the water hardly reached
his waist—to find himself being dragged by Ellenby toward the bridge.
It was all he could do to keep his footing on the muddy bottom. By the
time he got breath enough to voice his indignation, Ellenby was
saying, "That's far enough. The stuff's settling away from us. Now
strip and scrub yourself."
Ellenby unrolled the towel he'd held tightly clutched to his side all the
while, and produced a bar of soap. In response to Madson's question
he explained, "That fungicide was probably TTTR or some other
relative of the nerve-gas family. They are absorbed through the skin."
Seconds later Madson was scouring his head and chest. He
hesitated at his trousers, muttering, "They'll probably have me for
indecent exposure. Claim I was trying to start a nudist colony as well
as a free-love cult." But Ellenby's warning had been a chilly one.
Ellenby soaped Madson's back and he in turn soaped the older man's
ridgy one.
"I suppose that's why he had an elephant's nose," Madson mused.
"What?"
"Man in the copter," Madson explained. "Wearing a respirator."
Ellenby nodded and made them move nearer the bridge for a change
of water.
They started to scrub their clothes, rinse and wring them, and lay
them on the bank to dry. They watched the copter buzzing along in
the distance, but it didn't seem inclined to come near again. Madson
felt impelled to say, "You know, it's your chemist friends who have
introduced that viciousness into the common man's spirit, giving him
horrible poisons to use against Nature. Otherwise he wouldn't have
tried to douse us with that stuff."
"He just acted like an ordinary farmer to me," Ellenby replied,
scrubbing vigorously.
"Think we're safe?" Madson asked.
Ellenby shrugged. "We'll discover," he said briefly.

Madson shivered, but the rhythmic job was soothing. After a bit he
began to feel almost playful. Lathering his shirt, he got some fine
large bubbles, held them so he could see their colors flow in the
sunlight.
"Tiny perfect worlds of every hue," he murmured. "Violet, blue, green,
yellow, orange, red."
"And dead black," Ellenby added.
"You would say something like that!" Madson grunted. "What did you
think I was talking about?"
"Bubbles."
"Maybe some of your friends' poisons have black bubbles," Madson
said bitingly. "But I was talking about these."
"So was I. Give me your pipe."
The authority in Ellenby's voice made Madson look around startledly.
"Give me your pipe," Ellenby repeated firmly, holding out his hand.
Madson fished it out of the pocket of the trousers he was about to
wash and handed it over. Ellenby knocked out the soggy tobacco,
swished it in the water a few times, and began to soap the inside of
the bowl.
Madson started to object, but, "You'd be washing it anyway," Ellenby
assured him. "Now look here, Madson, I'm going to blow a bubble
and I want you to watch, I want you to observe Nature for all you're
worth. If poets and physicists have one thing in common it's that
they're both supposed to be able to observe. Accurately."
He took a breath. "Now see, I'm going to hold the pipe mouth down
and let the bubble hang from it, but with one side of the bowl tipped
up a bit, so that the strain on the bubble's skin will be greatest on that
side."
He blew a big bubble, held the pipe with one hand and pointed with a
finger of the other. "There's the place to watch now. There!" The
bubble burst.
"What was that?" Madson asked in a new voice. "It really was black
for an instant, dull like soot."
"A bubble bursts because its skin gets thinner and thinner," Ellenby
said. "When it gets thin enough it shows colors, as interference
eliminates different wavelengths. With yellow eliminated it shows
violet, and so on. But finally, just for a moment at the place where it's
going to break, the skin becomes only one molecule thick. Such a
mono-molecular layer absorbs all light, hence shows as dead black."
"Everything's got a black lining, eh?"
"Black can be beautiful. Here, I'll do it again."
Madson put his hand on Ellenby's shoulder to steady himself. They
were standing hip-deep in water, their bodies still flecked with suds.
Their heads were inches from the new bubble. As it burst a voice
floated down to them.
"Is this the Ozona Faculty Kindergarten?"
They whirled around, simultaneously crouching in the water.
"Vera-Ellen, what are you doing here?" Madson demanded.
"Watching the kiddies play," the girl on the bridge replied, running a
hand through her touseled violet hair. She looked down at her slacks
and jacket. "Wish I'd brought my swim suit, though I gather it wouldn't
be expected."
"Vera-Ellen!" Madson said apprehensively.
"It doesn't look very inviting down there, though," she mused. "Guess
I'll wait for Aqua Heaven at New Angeles."
"You're going to New Angeles?" Ellenby put in. It is not easy to be
conversationally brilliant while squatting chest deep in muddy water,
acutely conscious of the absence of clothes.
Vera-Ellen nodded lazily, leaning on the railing. "Going to get me a
city job. With its reduced faculty Ozona holds no more intellectual
interest for me. Did you know math's going to be made part of the
Home Eck department, Mr. Ellenby?"
"But how did you know that we—"
"Daughter of the man who got you run out of town ought to know
what the old bully's up to. And if you're worrying that they'll come after
me and find us together, I'll just head along by myself."
Madson and Ellenby both protested, though it is even harder to
protest effectively than to be conversationally brilliant while squatting
naked in coffee-colored water.
Vera-Ellen said, "All right, so quit playing and let's get on. You have to
tell me all about New Angeles and the kind of jobs we'll get."
"But—?"
"Modest, eh? I'm afraid Pa wouldn't count it in your favor. But all
right." She turned her back and sauntered to the other side of the
bridge.

Madson and Ellenby cautiously climbed out of the ditch, brushed the
water from their skins, and wormed into their soggy clothes.
"We've got to persuade her to go back," Madson whispered.
"Vera-Ellen?" Ellenby replied and raised his eyebrows.
Madson groaned softly.
"Cheer up," Ellenby said. And he seemed in a cheerful humor himself
when they climbed to the bridge. "Vera-Ellen," he said, "we've been
having an argument as to whether man ruined Nature or Nature
ruined man to start with."
"Is this a class, Mr. Ellenby?"
"Of sorts," he told her. Behind him Madson snorted, flipping his Keats
to dry the pages. They started off together.
"Well," said Vera-Ellen, "I like Nature and I like ... human beings. And
I don't feel ruined at all. Where's the argument?"
"What about the bombs?" Madson demanded automatically. "By man
our physicist here means Technology. Whereas I mean—"
"Oh, the bombs," she said with a shrug. "What sort of job do you think
I should get in New Angeles?"
"Well ..." Madson began.
"Say, I'm getting hungry," she raced on, turning to Ellenby.
"So am I," he agreed.
They looked at the road ahead. A jagged hill now hid all but the tips of
the spires of New Angeles. On the top of the hill was a tremendous
house with sagging roofs of cracked tiles, stucco walls dark with rain
stains and green with moss yet also showing cracks, and windows of
age-blued glass, some splintered, flashing in the sun, which tempted
Ellenby to whip out his spectroscope.
Curving down from the house came a weedy and balding expanse
that had obviously once been a well-tended lawn. A few stalwart
patches of thick grass held out tenaciously.
Pale-trunked eucalyptus trees towered behind the house and to either
side of the road where it curved over the hill.
In a hollow at the foot of the one-time lawn, just where it met the road,
something gleamed. As Madson, Ellenby and Vera-Ellen tramped
forward, they saw it was an old automobile, one of the jet antiques
that were the rage around 1970—in fact, a Lunar '69. Coming closer
Ellenby realized that it had custom-built features, such as jet brakes
and collision springs.
A man with an odd cap was poking a probe into the air intake, while
in the back seat a woman was sitting, shadowed by a hat four feet
across. At the sound of their footsteps the man whirled to his feet,
quickly enough though unsteadily. He stared at them, wagging the
probe. Just at that moment something that looked like an animated
orange furpiece leaped from the tonneau.
"George!" the woman cried. "Widgie's got away."
The small flattish creature came on in undulating bounds. It was past
the man in the cap before he could turn. It headed for Ellenby, then
changed direction. Madson made an impulsive dive for it, but it
widened itself still more and sailed over him straight into Vera-Ellen's
arms.
They walked toward the car. Widgie wriggled, Vera-Ellen stroked his
ears. He seemed to be a flying fox of some sort. The man eyed them
hostilely, raising the probe. Madson stared puzzledly at the cap. Out
of his older knowledge Ellenby whispered an explanation:
"Chauffeur."
The woman stood in the back seat, swaying slightly. She was wearing
a white swim suit and dark teleglasses under her hat. At first she
seemed a somewhat ravaged thirty. Then they began to see the rest
of the wrinkles.

She received Widgie from Vera-Ellen, shook him out and tucked him
under her arm, where he hung limply, moving his tiny red eyes.
"Come in with me, my dear," she told Vera-Ellen. "George, put down
that crazy pole. Pay no attention to George—he can't recognize
gentlefolk when he sees them, especially when he's drunk.
Gentlemen," she continued, waving graciously to Madson and
Ellenby, "you have the thanks of Rickie Vickson." As she pronounced
the name she surveyed them sharply. Her gaze settled on Ellenby.
"You know me, don't you?"
"Certainly," he answered instantly. "You were my first—my favorite
straight 3D star."
"Are you in 3D?" Vera-Ellen asked, a sudden gleam in her eyes.
"Was, my dear," Rickie said grandly. She ogled Ellenby through the
fish-eye glasses. "Ah, straight 3D," she sighed. "Simple video-audio
in depth—there was a great art-form." She began to sway again and
they caught the reek of alcohol. "You know, gentlemen, it was
handies that ruined my career. I had the looks and the voice, but I
lacked the touch. Something in me shrank from the whole idea—be
still, Widgie—and the girls with itchy fingers took over. But I'm talking
too much about myself. It's hot and you wonderful gentlemen must be
thirsty. Here, have a—"
The chauffeur glared at her as she reached fumblingly down into the
tonneau. She caught the look and quailed slightly.
"—sandwich," she finished, coming up with a shiny can.
Madson accepted it from her, clicking the catch. The top popped four
feet in the air, followed lazily by the uppermost sandwich which he
caught deftly. He handed the can to Ellenby, who served himself and
handed it up to Vera-Ellen. Soon all three of them were munching.
"Miss Vickson," Vera-Ellen asked between mouthfuls, "do you think I
could get a job in broadcast entertainment?"
Rickie looked at her sideways, leaning away to focus. "Not with that
ghastly atomglow hair," she said. "Violet is old hat this year—it's
either black, blonde or bald. But give me your hand, my dear."
"Going to tell my fortune?"
"After a fashion." She held up Vera-Ellen's hand, squeezing and
prodding it thoughtfully, as if she were testing the carcass of an
alleged spring chicken. Then she nodded. "You'll do. Good strong
hand, that's all that's needed, so you can really crunch the knuckles
of the bohunks. They love it rough. Of course the technicians could
step up the power when they broadcast your hand-squeeze, but the
addicts don't feel it's the same thing." She looked sourly at her own
delicate claws. "Yes, my dear, you'll have a chance in handies if you
don't mind cuddling with two million dirty-minded bohunks every night
and if Rickie Vickson's still got any entree at the studios." She made a
face and dipped again into the tonneau, apparently to gulp
something, for the chauffeur's glare was intensified.
"You're from New Angeles?" Madson asked politely when Rickie
came up beaming.
"Old Angeles," she corrected. "My home's in a contaminated area.
After 3D lighting I've never been afraid of hard radiations. But this