Narratology and the history of science

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Narratology and the History of Science William Clark * The difference between an historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse-indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history. . . The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.’ Part I

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. It is the age of wisdom; it is the age of foolishness. We have everything before us; we have nothing before us. For those who have eyes to see, ears to listen, and a nose to smell (the most original of senses) the winds are blowing fair and strong but in no particular direction. That may be disconcerting for one wishing to organize an armada to conquer somebody else’s point of view. For the wayward and pointless, however, conditions could hardly be better. It is of such that I avail myself. This essay is about the narrative structure of Charles Gillispie’s The Edge of Objectivity (Gillespie, 1960), Steven Shapin’s and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985), Martin Rudwick’s The Great Devonian Controversy (Rudwick, 1985), and Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions (Haraway, 1989). I intend to read these works in the spirit of a literary critic, whom I’ll pretend does something other than an historical or philosophical critic. This essay is not a review of those four books, and you need not have read them in order to read on. My goal is to help further establish literary criticism as an aspect of science studies, and also to subvert ‘whig history’ as a historiographic concept. *Institut fiir Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Humboldtallee 11, Universitlt Germany. Received 14 February 1994; in revisedform 18 August 1994. ‘Aristotle (1932), 35 [translation revised]=145lb. in notes. ‘Ibid’. and ‘id’. in the text refer to sources to sources above in the notes. Pergamon

Giittingen,

37073 Giittingen,

Sources will be cited below either in the text or above in the text; ‘ibid’. and ‘id’. in notes refer

Stud. H.&t. Phil. Sci., Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 1-71, 1995 Copyright 0 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0039-3681/95 $9.50+00.00

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During my first week in graduate school, Robert Westman drew a picture something like this:

Philosophy

Sociology

This triangle or trinity, then with a slight scent of the scandalous, seems now an orthodoxy. A new journal, Perspectives on Science, has even canonized it as a subtitle. Way back when, for Westman just returned from Cambridge and for us then in this tale of two cities, science studies trinitarianism meant apostasy to ‘HPS’ orthodoxy and acknowledgement of Edinburgh sociology of science. In the meantime, though it might have seemed all the world was Edinburgh (‘Edinburgh’ as science studies utopia being really nowhere), the winds have shifted and forces gathered to inveigh against the sociology of science, so that even once secure treaties, as that between externalists and internalists, no longer restrain some philosophers or historians of science.2 I have nothing against the sociology of science, and neither pray for a neo-HPS orthodoxy, nor intend to preach the orthodox trinity, nor myself desire to supplant one of its parts with some new member. Instead of disputing of its proper parts, we should rather, as Westman now doubtless does, see science studies as a new, labile form of power-knowledge, neither reduced to nor defined by departments, such as history, philosophy, sociology, or others. Like gender studies, science studies should be seen as an autonomous formation, and one which is not an aggregate of disciplinary formations, but sooner subversive of them. Thus, it is not so much a matter of integrating other diciplines, such as anthropology or literary criticism, into a pantheon of science studies; it is, rather, more a matter of allowing science studies to articulate itself as discursive formation across or above disciplines. In short, one might take the collected works of Michel Foucault as exemplar and say: Whatever else they may be, they are science studies. Here then I intend to mobilize literary criticism as an aspect of science studies to illuminate histories of science as forms of writing or narrating. There is already a big and growing corpus on the literary and rhetorical dimension of science as writing. There seems as yet, however, not much attention paid to histories of science as narratives themselves, and so my proposal to consider the forms of the above four histories of science.3 ‘See, for example, Kuhn (1992). On the externalism--internalism matter anew, see Shapin (1992). ‘Reviews of other canonical histories of science have been written recently, for example, by Daston (1991). and Westman (1994). The 1990 preface to Gillisuie (1960) itself. in a sort of short list of n&ew&thies since 1966, cites Shapin a&i Schaffer (198$, ahd R;dwick (1985); Haraway (1989) was doubtless too new and too far from the field of The Edge of Objecfivityto be mentioned there. Some recent works in the ‘literary turn’ are Lepenies (1985); Hallyn (1987); Gross (1990); Dear (1991); Locke (1992); Rheinberger (1992).

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One of the things I hope this narratological analysis does is to discredit ‘whig history’ as an historiographic concept, and one which, like the externalism-internalism treaty, seems to make little sense now. Like many others in the 1980s I struggled to reconcile rather romantic views of science with those of the new professionalism in the history of science. Clever professionals wanted to do justice to the science without writing whig history. How to do this was the hard thing. Clifford Geertz, reviewing Haraway’s Primate Visions, and Ian Hacking, reviewing Shapin’s and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, have accused them of being whig histories.4 Now consternation turns to elucidation. If one may not aspire to write like those works, then who wants to be a clever professional historian of science? The solution lies in rejecting the concept ‘whig history’. Like the supposed consensus on extemalism-intemalism, that on whig history seems not to have been well formulated. Short of seeing all history of science as whig history, I don’t think consensus exists about the application of the concept; the texts have been chosen for this essay with that in mind. If anything, The Edge of Objectivity is an exemplar of whig history. Leviathan and the Air-Pump and Primate Visions have been accused of being whig histories. Finally, The Great Devonian Controversy seems an exemplar of a non-whig history and about which, to my knowledge, none has deemed to think otherwise. A narratological analysis of these four texts will, I hope, provide a better appreciation than ‘whig history’. Indeed, part of this essay’s aim is to displace an historiographic discourse drawn from political history, with terms like ‘revolution’ and ‘whig history’, by one drawn from literary criticism or poetics. This will make the history of science perhaps more philosophical, ci la Aristotle.5 Post-war poetics or literary criticism is a field where the winds change directions with some rapidity, so that it is easy to become wayward and pointless in one’s work. Given that, I shall seek bearings on narratology from familiar ground: Aristotle’s The Poetics (Aristotle, 1932) as understood and extended largely through the work of Northrop Frye, whose historical application came first by Hayden White. The orientation is thus Aristotelian and structuralist. In analyzing the four chief texts here as narratives, I’ll take four genres as essential, and argue that each of our four texts embodies one, even though the authors may not have consciously so planned. ‘Precisely because the historian is not (or claims not to be) telling the story “for its own sake” [thus is not a mere storyteller], he is inclined to emplot his stories in the most conventional forms-as fairy tale or detective story on the one hand, as Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire on the other. . . Historians in general, ‘See Geertz (1990), 22; and Hacking (1991), 238. ‘Cf. Ricoeur (1983-85), esp. Vol. 1, L’intrigue et le r&it hisforique. I do not aspire here to write a history of ‘whig history’; on whig history, see Butterfield (1931), and Hall (1983).

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however critical they are of their sources, tend to be naive storytellers’.6 The latter four narrative genres were isolated by Aristotle: ‘When tragedy and comedy came to light, poets were drawn by their natural bent towards one or the other. Some became writers of comedies instead of lampoons, the others produced tragedies instead of epics. . .‘7 As genres then, we have epic and lampoon as primary, after which tragedy and comedy later emerged. I’ll speak of satire instead of lampoon, as Aristotle himself uses these interchangeably. Epic will occur here as part of the larger genre of romance, whose other great part is folktale. By ‘romance’ we mustn’t understand its later sense via Romanticism, which made it into ‘sentimental’ romance, a particular generic modification of the Modern Era.8 Here we shall take ‘romance’ in its original sense as a genre whose two chief parts are epic and folktale, the latter under Romanticism becoming sentimentalized as the fairytale. Tragedy and comedy present fewer problems. So used in this essay, will be the four generic narratives-(naive) romance, tragedy, comedy, satire-stemming from Aristotle and coming most proximately by way of White from Frye’s work.9 Use of Frye’s generic archetypes or stereotypes of narrative is simply strategic and pragmatic. Following White, I think that Frye’s work offers a good point of departure for narratological analyses of historical works, though by no means the final word. Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (Frye, 1957) has a nearly canonical status, at least in AngloAmerican literary criticism, which is only to say that it is known by most, but doubtless has had as many if not more detractors than supporters. Its impact within literary criticism nearly matches the contemporaneous impact in philosophy and/or history of science of another product of America structuralism: Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientzjic Revolutions. I’ll postpone most further comment on genre until the close of this essay, where general matters will be broached. Until then, Frye will be more or less my Philosopher or The Critic, for whom I serve as commentator.10 In this essay, I shall read The Edge of Objectivity as an (epic) romance, Leviathan and the Air-Pump as a tragedy, The Great Devonian Controversy as a comedy, and Primate Visions as a satire. What all that means in detail will be 6White (1973) 8, no. 6. ‘Aristotle (1932). 17 = 1449a. ‘Cf. Schiller (1795). ‘Frye (1957) ‘Third Essay’; White (1973) 29; id. (1978) 70. ‘OThough Frye plays my Aristotle or The Critic, such an extension of his work from purely literary into historical texts might not meet with his approval. See Frye (1957) 86; id. (1963), 53-55; on this point in general, see Ricoeur (1983-85) I, 286301, where he endorses White’s extension of Frye’s work into ‘non-fictional’ texts. There was already a large secondary literature on Frye and, with his recent death, a small Frye revival has begun. A most recent work on Frye is Hart (1994) which contains an analysis of Anatom_v of Criticism and a full bibliography. On structuralism and Frye, see besides White, for example, Scholes (1974) esp. Chap. 4. On genre in general, and Frye in particular, see Dubrow (1982). esp. 98-103; Hernandi (1972), esp. 131-51; Hempfer (1973) esp. X-80, here with a rather dismissive reading of Frye; and Genette et al. (1986). On particular genres, see Beer (1970); Booth (1974); Cooper (1922); Frye (1976); Highet (1962); P. Merchant (1971); W. M. Merchant (1972); Muecke (1966); id. (1970); Pollard (1970); Propp (1927).

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the substance of the essay. Let me acknowledge that an asymmetry obtains in the chronology of this list: the first work appeared in 1960, while the other three all in the 1980s. It would be, moreover, a cheap trick to try to avail myself of the 1990 edition of The Edge of Objectivity as ameliorating the asymmetry. To achieve gender and temporal parity, I sorely wished to use a feminist or women’s history of science from the 1980s as example of romance instead of The Edge of Objectivity, and as counterpart to Primate Visions as satire. It was not for want of candidates that I resisted this. As an excuse let me simply say that, in short, I was afraid. It hasn’t escaped my notice either that some may take umbrage at the treatment given to Gillispie’s work below. My possible maltreatment of The Edge of Objectivity has perhaps some of its roots in psychobiography, not a proper subject of this essay. A reader’s response of being offended might, however, be a proper subject. Since The Edge of Objectivity is an icon of Cold-War history of science, an analysis of its narrative structure is bound to run risks, given current tastes. And, since romantic emplotment seems in such ill-repute now (a topic to which we must return), my depiction of The Edge of Objectivity as a romance, and of the epic sort, will itself give grounds for offense. In any case, after having forsaken fearful symmetry, chronology seemed less imposing. Moreover, as I wish to argue that what is called ‘whig history’ has been till lately largely a form of romantic emplotment (which I’ll further explain in the course of the essay), I wanted to have the most perfected exemplar of whig history as the embodiment of romance, whence preference for The Edge of Objectivity. One of my central theses will be this: the enjoinment not to write whig history of science has largely meant proscription of using romantic emplotment, with the other three genres forming the diffusion space for subsequent narratives. I shall argue that the center of narrative in recent history of science has shifted from romantic to comic emplotment, so that The Great Devonian Controversy is an exemplar of normal ‘non-whig’ history of science. Leviathan and the Air-Pump and Primate Visions, both accused of being whiggish, will embody in this essay extreme solutions-tragedy and satire-to the problem of narrative order or genre in relation to historical practice. I am not claiming that our chief authors, with the posssible exception of Haraway, set out to cast their works in one of the four genres. Generic history or storytelling emerges often at a level not unlike the one Foucault sought in Les mots et les chases: somewhere between the worlds of the externalists and internalists. Since an historian, unlike a fiction writer, does not usually make a conscious decision to emplot a narrative in this or that genre, the generic aspect of the historian’s work permeates and guides the work beyond the historian’s conscious control. Usually ingrained in youth, genres function as complex cultural codes by which participants in a particular culture learn how to follow

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plots. The key concept here is ‘follow-ability’.” While some generic markers facilitating followabilty of a narrative are obvious (such as ‘Once upon a time’ for fairytales in English, and ‘Es war einmal eine Zeit’ in German), other generic markers are not so obvious, and so their isolation constitutes part of the office of the literary critic. Learning how to follow, thus how to write a story or plot, is different from learning how to follow an argument. Historians as academics do argue a lot, but they also tell lots of stories too. When not using generic patterns deeply ingrained in European storytelling, histories usually intermingle aspects of several genres, which either produces very interesting work, and maybe even a new genre, or produces very boring or bad stories you cannot follow or do not wish to. I shall also leave to last the great question about whether a text that argues and describes, but never narrates, can claim to be a ‘history’ of anything. Let us simply say for now that, in so far as they narrate, histories of science more likely than not end up somewhere along a spectrum from lovely to loathsome mixtures of the four genres. I have chosen the four chief texts for this essay because, as I’ll argue, they are perfected embodiments of one of each of the above four genres. Let me now schematize the genres as follows: Tragedy Romance

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L

L

Comedy

Satire

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This is to some extent drawn from White. The schema is read as an Hegelian dialectic. One begins on the left with romance, which splits into tragedy and comedy, which reunite in satire. This is meant as a logical or tropic or spatial progress since, as seen, I take romance and satire as chronologically coeval and prior to tragedy and comedy. Following Aristotle, the middle genres, tragedy and comedy as drama, are the emergent ones historically, articulating a clearing between romance and satire, in which drama grew (and, as we’ll see, historia too). As a dialectic, the final term, satire, refigures the initial term, romance, in terms of the divergent middle terms, tragedy and comedy; or, as we’ll see, satire is romance inverted or stood on its head, by which tragedy and comedy, with history, emerged.12 “Cf. Ricoeur (1983-85) I, 265-76. ‘*On the origins of this schema, cf. White (1973); id. (1978), 70, 128; cf. also Genette (1979), 98-100. The schema is meant to recapitulate a like schema of the four ‘master tropes’ in Clark (1992) 186. White (1973), Chap. 2, deals with Hegel on history and poetics in the same vein, Hegel’s view being not so distant from Frye’s, In his Aestherik, Hegel traces, with other stops along the way, a path from epic to drama, as tragedy and comedy, but neither ends with satire nor the novel. Satire comes earlier and, as culmination; would not-suit Hegel’s own agenda; the novel is ignored altogether, perhaps as a modern critic might ignore film. See Hegel (1971), XIV, 120-26; XV, 325414, 474-574. Hamburger (1957) moves from epic to drama to film.

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The structure of the essay falls into six parts: voice, scene, agents, plot, end, and audience. These six aspects or moments of narrative have some ties to Aristotle’s six elements of tragedy, though I’ve freely replaced some of his with others of mine.13 The Edge of Objectivity, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, The Great Devonian Controversy, and Primate Visions will now be analyzed, respectively, as (epic) romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire in terms of the above six aspects of narrative, each one forming a part of the essay. I’ll try as much as possible to explicate the sense of the six parts by analysis of the four chief texts; nonetheless, I’ll be compelled in some cases to begin sections with introductory expositions on the categories. In our persona as literary critic reading history, we’ll bracket out a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. There is a difference between history and literature, fact and fiction, but it concerns the historical and philosophical critic, not the literary. Reading our four chief texts as narratives, attention goes, not to their veracity, but to how certain literary effects are achieved and maintained.

Voice

I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll, when we were alone together, ‘Now Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!’ . . . The above paragraph begins Chapter 3 of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. It was necessary to leave off quotation marks in order to achieve the effect of that paragraph in its context. The first two chapters of Bleak House are narrated in the abstract third and then first person plural. Since in our culture the narrative voice has been traditionally gendered as masculine, and since ‘Charles’ stands on the book’s cover as the name of the juridical author, the above paragraph disorients the reader: a narrative persona or poetic voice in the text suddenly unveils itself as feminine. Dickens’ sophistication as narrator illuminates the space between a work’s juridical author and the text’s poetic voice. These two entities inhabit disjoint universes. The juridical author, if extant, stands behind the ‘work’ and, for instance, forgets things and grows older by dint of the human condition; the poetic voice abides within the ‘text’ and, for instance, may or may not forget or age at all. There thus obtains only a metaphorical relationship between these two entities: ‘the “I” who writes the text is never, in itself, anything but an “I” of paper’.‘4 Conflation of the text’s voice with the book’s author is one of the central rhetorical devices by which ‘non-fictional’ ‘3Aristotle (1932), 22-25 14Barthes (1984). 77.

= 1449bl4SOa;

cf. Frye (1957), 52-53

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writing imposes itself. As literary critic reading history, we must resist this imposition.‘5 In the late 1960s some critics declared the author useless or dead. ‘The dictum of Derrida, ‘there is nothing outside the text’, included the author.16 The next year appeared the famous essay by Barthes on the death of the author. Some remarked on the coincidence that criticism declared the ‘author’ dead just about the time when the implicit maleness and whiteness of the ‘author’ first came into question. That remark is correct; but, at the time, Derrida, Barthes and others were trying to overcome the Master-Servant (Herr-Knecht) relation translated into the writing-reading relation: ‘the birth of the reader must be paid for with the death of the Author’.” Resurrection of the author, as well as figuring out a non-metaphorical relation between juridical author and poetic voice, pertains to philosophical and historical critique. And let us hope a resurrected author be free of Herr-schaft: neither Father of the work, nor Lord over the reader. My project is, however, conception of the text’s poetic persona. While the author is best seen as a substance, the poetic persona will be taken as more predicative, so called ‘voice’. That will also bring out the tie to rhetoric. Under this aspect falls part of Aristotle’s category of ‘diction’. The text’s voice has grammatical form as active, middle or passive, along with number, singular or plural, as well as person and gender. Voice does not hide behind, but rather lies in the text. It gives the text tone and part of its style. I am not concerned with the juridical authors Charles Gillispie, Donna Haraway, Martin Rudwick, Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, about most of whom I know very little. This essay is rather concerned with the poetic voice cast by them in specific texts. Designate Gillispie’s The Edge of Objectivity as EO, Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump as LAP, Rudwick’s The Great Devonian Controversy as GDC, and Haraway’s Primate Visions as PV. I shall refer to EO’s voice, to LAP’s, and so on; by ellipsis, I shall have EO and the rest speaking, though in citing pages I’ll refer to authors by name. Remarks here must be a bit assertive for, as you’ll see, voice cannot be made out without the other aspects. Evidencing the following assertions would, moreover, require many and long citations from our four chief texts. Save for its ‘Bibliographic Essay’ and a rhetorical ‘we’ on occasion, EO speaks in the active, third person singular. It calls itself ‘the historian of science’ or ‘the historian’ (e.g. Gillispie, 1960, 8,43,45, 197) and at times as masculine: ‘THE HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE approaches nineteenth-century physics in a gingerly spirit. He has before him a great story, perhaps the greatest in his subject’ (ibid., 352). LAP, GDC and PV speak in active voices, first person “Cf. Ricoeur (1983-85). III, 230; Grossman (1978), 3637; 7-16; &holes and Kellogg ( 1966), Chap. 7; Booth (1961). “‘Derrida (1967), 227; cj: also 14748. “Barthes (1984), 69.

Ray (1990), esp. 15-17; Prince (1982),

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plural or singular, though neither LAP nor GDC genders itself vocally. The poetic nature of LAP’s ‘we’ is especially clear, as it is never of two minds, while its two authors doubtless were. PV thematizes gender, but its ‘I’ is opaque, speaking as ironic voice, whose tie to its author remains as insecure as Dickens’ feminine persona above. Save LAP, the texts proclaim themselves as narrative. EO says ‘its purpose is to set out in narrative form’ the history of classical science and announces the text as a ‘tale’ (ibid., 8, 521). GDC lists its ‘dramatis personae’ as a cast and says, ‘It is high time for a genuine revivial of narrative to be set in train’ (Rudwick, 1985, xxix-xxxiii, 11). PV places its ‘account of primatology within SF-the narratives of speculative fiction and scientific fact . . .’ (Haraway, 1989, 15). Turn now to generic differences. ‘In the period of romance, the poet, like the corresponding hero, has become a human being . . . His function now is primarily to remember [not to reveal by oracles]. Memory, said the Greek myth . . ., is the mother of the Muses’ (Frye, 1957, 5657). Romantic voice is memory. It is the story-teller. Not only the mother of Muses, it is history itself. Romantic voice is nostalgic, of times past and golden. Its dreamy voice, least displaced from myth, promises to speak of the noble, and of origins and ends. Romantic voice is enticing and threatening or, as Kant defined it, sublime. ‘Men of other traditions can and do appropriate our science and technology, but not our history or values. And what will the day hold when China wields the bomb? And Egypt? Will Aurora light a rosy-fingered dawn out of the East? Or will Nemesis?’ (Gillispie, 1960, 9). Tragedy modulates the historical in juridical tones. Tragic voice ‘is preeminently a courtier, a counsellor, a preacher, a public orator or a master of decorum . . .’ whose element is the courtroom, the theater (Frye, 1957, 58). Tragedy seeks detachment by calling attention to neither its voice nor its story as such. Tragedy’s juridical rhetoric, placing power in the context of law, is sophistical, in the original sense. Tragic voice speaks as advocate of a just society, so ‘requires the noblest diction’ (ibid., 210). The noblest things of which romance promises to speak resonate into the noblest tones. In tragedy, moreover, the mythic first moved to the ironic, as ‘objective’ spirit. Without the tragic voice, all narratives ‘might be plausibly explained as expressions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment [as in romance and comedy] or of repugnance [as in satire]: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience’ (ibid., 206). LAP’s voice is forensic, sophistic, rhetorical, theatric, and so suitable for the tragic. Though humor often accompanies comic voice, that is not its essence. Pleasure is. Comic voice promises the happy ending. All’s well that ends well. If romance is the historical, and tragedy the juridical, comic voice embodies the social. GDC fashions its voice in the modernist comic grain as finite and perspectival, while not unreliable or deceitful (Rudwick, 1985, 13). Apropos of comic emplotment, GDC says, ‘with luck, most readers of this book will not

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know who were the goodies and who the baddies . . . nor will they know in advance how the plot was to end. I shall not tell them’ (ibid., 14). GDC wants to keep you guessing, since teasing is essential to the erotic undercurrent of comedy. Unlike satire, comedy’s humor is often from displaced eros, since the techniques to tease occasion laughter, sometimes itself nervous. With comic voice as a social force, art for art’s sake appears in writing. Not sophistic, it is epicurian. All our poetic voices are moralists; but, the satiric speaks most politically. ‘Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack’ (Frye, 1957, 224). Satire does not usually speak in the noblest tones. An essential method lies in using language to shock, and that may entail ‘brutally direct phrases, taboo expressions, nauseating imagery . . .‘; satire speaks with ‘coarseness, an improvisatory tone, humor, mimicry, echoes of the speaking voice, abusive gibbing . . . [and] combination of jest and earnest is a permanent mark of satiric writing’.lS Satiric voice seeks detachment like the tragic, but achieves it by contrary means: it often calls attention to its story and its voice as such. ‘Complemented by a ready suspicion for the flaw in apparent natural truths, laughter is an indispensible tool in deconstructions of the bio-politics of being female. Suspicion and irony are basic to feminist reinscriptions of nature’s text’ (Haraway, 1989,280; cf. 15, 161, 197). Satire may drift into purely ironic modes of literalness and coolness, describing the absurd and grotesque on its own, unsanitized terms: ‘Their practice and mine have been literal, dead literal’ (ibid., %).I9 Reading EO, LAP, GDC and PV as romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire, we should find each voice appropriate. The tones of the texts do not seem to me inappropriate as generic voices but, as said, this section must be more assertative than those to come. This section on voice serves the functions of, first, indicating where the Aristotelian category of diction, thus where rhetoric, ties into the analysis and, secondly, helping separate this criticism from philosophical or historical in the normal sense, as the fiction/non-fiction divide vanishes.

Scene Narrative needs scene as much as plot. Effacement of scene is a device by which some writing, such as philosophy, dispels narrativity. The scene fell out of philosophy between the Platonic dialogue and the Aristotelian treatise. Seen as mostly comedies by Aristotle himself, Plato’s dialogues take place sometime somewhere, and the more so the earlier written, until ‘in the Republic the rest of “Highet (1962), 20, 233. 190n irony, see esp. Booth (1974), esp. Chaps

3 and 6.

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the company, including Thasymachus, follow Socrates inside Socrates’s head, so to speak’ (Frye, 1957, 182) where philosophy has remained since. This enabled a sort of Platonism for historical writing about ideas, since the scene in narrative is a material condition of the plot, part of the tale’s material cause in Aristotelian terms. Aristotle stands as the original historian of ideas, his treatises omitting the scene or material conditions of ideas, so permitting a sort of idealism in historical writing. One sees the obverse in philosophies or histories tending to materialism: not only do they give a scene or context, they privilege it above agents and plots .20 So some historical writing seeks to dispel narrativity by focusing on the scene alone. The geographical-statistical focus of the French Annales School, for instance, is meant to frustrate narrativity. Suppressing or privileging scene, as historical idealism versus materialism, or as internalism versus externalism, are two devices for writing a philosophical or sociological history of science. But I shall read our four chief texts as narratives. The scene is first where we live. That is the world. In romance the world is commonly cleanly divided into distinct but adjoining realms. In European romance, the earth is abutted by an overworld and an underworld. The underworld serves as habitat for sinister agents and plots. The overworld, the realm of sky or pure spirit, stands most distant from the underworld. Outside the underworld but joining it lies earth, the realm of minerals, plants and animals. That is nature. Human beings inhabit this realm, the earth, but do not feel at home, since they long for the sky. Motivation for distinction between nature and culture inheres in romance in the moment of scene. Sky or overworld is the realm whither science aspires, making astronomy the loftiest science for romance. Images for the realm between heaven and hell, where nature and culture mix, are the park and garden, and later the tower and temple. Descent to the underworld may be by caves, dungeons, forest or field.21 Like other genres, satire has no sort of scene of necessity, though as parody of romance it may recur to beloved scenes of romance, especially to animal worlds, far off lands, or outer space .22 PV does that. It is an extended parody of romantic motifs in primatology. As constructed by the ‘West’, the scene of primatology lies between the underworld embodied by ‘deepest, darkest Africa’, and the overworld as outer space. Eden in the jungle is the dreamscape where primatology moves toward the sky. So ‘Apes in Eden, Apes in Space’ is the title of Chapter 7. PV sets ‘western’ scenes against the ‘non-western’, the ‘wild’, the ‘field’, that is, the Other, chiefly as Africa. PV sets itself in these, while putting them into question as constructs. The ‘West’ versus the ‘wild’, as well as the great romantic scenes of nature and culture, set the stage, which is undermined in every act. For western scenes, PV takes you to a museum in New “More than Marx, Hobbes remains best example of this in philosophy: cf. Burke (1945) “On the above, see Frye (1976), Chap. 4 and 5; id. (1957), 119, 141-55, 203-06. ‘*See Highet (1962), 159-62.

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York City as the ‘Garden of Eden’. There is Harlow’s laboratory as a ‘dream structure’, recreating not the jungle or wild, but an underworld prison of torture, with ‘evil mothers’ and ‘rape racks’.*3 Such a scene approaches the ne plus ultra in satire, ‘the point of demonic epiphany, the dark tower and prison of endless pain . . .’ (Frye, 1957, 238-39). Besides museums, labs, parks and conferences, universities set backgrounds, usually offstage. Plenty of photographs exhibit scenes. The ‘realism’ induced by such photographs, privileged tokens for the real in our culture, is undercut by postcards, cartoons, cinema, ads and poems, surrealistic in effect. This is PV’s destabilization of the ‘field’, narrative or wild.24 Romance’s scenes resemble irreal or dream worlds (cf. ibid., 186; id., 1976, 53, 104-05). A fuzzy border lies between the elements of narrative, so that scenic aspects may become agents. The scene-agent equation forms a staple of romance, especially as it tends to the mythic. Trees may walk and talk, or even whole forests move with sinister intent. ‘The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: . . . enchanted weapons, [and] talking animals . . . violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established’ (id., 1957, 33). Recent works of Latour, especially his notions of microbes with ‘interests’ and the ‘parliament of things’, put the scene-agent equation to perhaps mythic effect.25 Institutional history also plays with the same equation: are institutions agents or scenes? They are both, and the weighting of the equation can produce an idealism or a materialism. Historical romance tends to submerge more obvious generic marks, and it may even dissolve scenic elements in favor of an idealism of agency or pure history of ideas. EO gives an example for the nice line between scene and agent. It speaks as ‘An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas’, as its subtitle says, though garden variety scenes do emerge. Close to its opening, EO announces the scene as the West or western civilization (Gillispie, 1960, 8-9), but that quickly reduces to a few nations: Greece, Italy, France, Britain and Germany. These lands, though at times scenes, tend to become agents. This is a way to write internalist history. The trope of Volksgeist or national types makes scenes into collective agents, and pushes EO’s institutional histories toward idealism. For the myth of origins, Greece serves as ‘Greeks’, of whom four bear the folk: Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes. The progeny of Pythagoras “Haraway (1989), 238; on the above ibid., 5, 10-13, 136-39, 14649, 156, 263368 z4ibid., II, 117P20, 155, 161, 191, 212, 288, 381, 383. “Cf. Latour (1984), passim, esp. 6366; id. (1991) esp. 19498. In review of the first piece, see Schaffer (1991), esp. 182, 192. Schaffer casts his analysis of Latour’s work in a theologicophilosophical idiom, though his formulations lend themselves to seeing Latour’s motifs as neo-romantic or mythic. Rendering things or animals into agents is a device of (naive) romance or of ironic satire moving to the mythic. Cf. Beer (1983) 21, ‘Lyell, and later Darwin, demonstrated in their major narratives of geological and natural history that it was possible to have a plot without man ,‘, Beer seeing this in the light of the mythic remnant in such.

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and Plato will bring forth a mysticism, going ‘into the underworld of science’ (ibid., 15). The progeny of Archimedes, though long in intellectual exile, are associated with sky and heaven, sun and light. This is Galileo. ‘The Latin genius speaks out in Galileo’, imbued with the ‘clear light of Italian classicism’, his ‘Platonism bleached bare, sterilized of its mystical nonsense in the Tuscan sun’ (ibid., 40). Synecdoche of scene, the sun made ‘Italian’, figures Galileo’s heroic birth as son of the overworld, and here with resonances of the Messiah (cf. ibid., 16). The Italian or solar rebirth of modern science is twinned in the scene-agent of France and England, as heaven and earth in EO. France as ‘mind’ is spirit, while England as ‘character’ is earth (ibid., 205, 408-10). Descartes is the spiritual father of the folk, France becoming his mind (ibid., 159, 358,493-94). England or English character is associated with earth and soil, embodied in laboratories, whereas French mind ‘rose above the battle of the laboratory, and looked down in diminishing vigor upon Anglo-Saxon handiness, of the earth earthy’ (ibid., 494). EO’s underworld is inhabited by ‘Slavs’ and ‘Teutons’. Copernicus was ‘loath like many a Pole and German before and since to return from Italy’, and who after ‘ten years in the sun, and in the open intellectual climate of Italy’ went back home. ‘He never left Poland again’, and here ‘would peer through the mists and pore over Ptolemy’ (ibid., 20-22). ‘Gothic excrescences of the North’ (ibid., 39) inhabit the misty and dark world bequeathed by Pythagoras and Plato. Though EO alludes to the primal scenes of European romance, these abide inobtrusively enough in the text to escape a casual reader’s notice. As said, EO reads mostly as historical idealism or history of ideas, which effaces its scene or translates it into agency, though scenes of modem science do appear here and there. Note that instruments will be taken now as a scenic aspect. A seamless web so runs from the laboratory to its instruments, as scene or material conditions of action. Instruments appear now and again in EO, but usually as rendered mathematically ideal. Money as instrument, moreover, rarely sullies EO’s pages. Non-monetary instruments appear on scene, and agents get from scene to scene, but without needing money most of the time. Money does emerge in a passage on Lavoisier. A career in science ‘required money, of course, and Lavoisier was not rich. But he secured a place in the corporation of financiers which farmed the taxes, devoted a portion of each day to acquiring wealth, and acquired, too, his patron’s fourteen-year-old daughter as his wife. She was an heiress. She was intelligent. She knew English. She became interested in chemistry, and served as amanuensis in the laboratory’ (ibid., 215). This passage is remarkable for its lapse into ‘realism’ and for its linked figures. Money summons up the woman, showing how feminine figures may become simply scenic, equatable with money in narrative. The strange nature of money and women in romance is correlative with that of society. Not only does the course of nature bend for the hero, the weight of society tends to fall away too. In

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romances the ‘chief characters live in a kind of atomized society: there is only the most shadowy sense of a community, and their kings and princesses are individuals given the maximum of leisure, privacy and freedom of action . . . The same disintegrated society appears in the cells of hermits, . . . [and] the knights errant who wander far from courts and castles’ (Frye, 1976, 172). As historical romance, EO gives its heroes privacy, leisure and autonomy. Even the normal ‘scientist wants of his subject an intellectual adventure which can only remain private’ (Gillispie, 1960, 75). Scene of science is the private, Socratic mind of the vita contemplativa. 26 The best figure fusing an enchanted instrument and a romantic scene lies elliptically in the title of Chapter 4, ‘Newton with his Prism and Silent Face’, its poetic origin unspoken in the text: I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone (Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. III, 59-63).

Tragedy resides in the narrative clearing between romance and satire. Tragedy leaves the irreal, dream world of romance, and locates its agents and plot in a place and time, and almost obsessively so, achieving a sort of hyperrealism. Aristotle saw tragedy as tending to fall within one revolution of the sun.27 This is further intensified in, say, Racine’s plays that take place in one place: so the temple of Jerusalem as the whole scene of Athalie. Neither the single day nor single place is necessary for tragedy; more essential is metonymic focus. In tragedy space and time tend to collapse to a point and moment: the rupture from dreaming to waking, darkness to light, blindness to insight, the warfare of all against all to civil peace and commonwealth. This brings out the heavy weight of space and time in tragic action (Frye, 1957, 213-14). Tragedy gives gravity, not only to space and time, but also to nature and culture, identifying them in difference. In tragedy an over- and underworld may be scenes; but, in ‘full tragedy the main characters are emancipated from the dream [world], an emancipation which is at the same time a restriction, because the order of nature is present. . .’ (ibid., 206-07). Nature and culture come to presence at once in tragedy as ‘law’. Tragedy emerged above all genres as the drama, theater as public stage. Even if cast as castle or court, temple or laboratory, the scene of tragedy is public space as law and its instruments. Opposed to romance, tragedy conceives the instrument as autonomous but disenchanted object. The deus ex machina compromises not only tragic plot, but also its scene.28 Tragedy as public theater of the natural-social, unified in 26Cf. Shapin (1991). 27Aristotle (1932), 21 = 1449b. “On the first, see ibid., 57 = 1454a-b

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difference, is of instrument and spectacle, of law and light. So tragedy may fixate on seeing clearly, on the dazzling gaze, and by metonymy focus a center of sight. ‘The high mimetic period [bearing tragedy] brings in a society more strongly established around the court and capital city, and a centripetal perspective replaces the centrifugal one of romance . . . The central episodic theme of the high mimetic is the theme of cynosure or centripetal gaze, which . . . seems to have something about it of the court gazing upon the sovereign, the court-room gazing upon the orator . . .’ (ibid., 58). In panoptic extremes, tragedy’s ‘chief symbols, besides the prison and madhouse, are the instruments of a torturing death. . . and for the crucified Prometheus the humiliation of exposure, the horror of being watched, is a greater misery than the pain’ (ibid., 223). LAP’s scene is England from the 1660s to early 1670s (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, 7). Yet except for Boyle working fifteen years in one line, and save the map of air-pump distribution (ibid., 192, 228), space and time reduce essentially to juxtaposition of the mind and the theater at the Baroque’s closing. Scenes, in particular the laboratory as theater of public spectacle or law, and the access of agents to it, form a major portion of the plot. The laboratory is a new theater or court of law for science, a natural-social space, physical in itself and abstract by virtual witnessing. Against philosophical space (or Socratic mind), the laboratory promises a new covenant. ‘Inside this boundary, Sprat claimed, the exact equivalent of a civil war could be staged, as in a theatre, with no harmful result’ (ibid., 306; cf. 3940, 55-60). The primary scene outside the laboratory is one of virtual witnessing embedded in a literary technology. So Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist was ‘a piece of theatre’ for the experimental life (ibid., 74; also 25, 60-72). This laboratory life casts itself in interiors. It renovates ‘the house of natural philosophy’, its laboratory a new temple (ibid., 21, 319). Transit is from the interior of the private philosophical mind to the interior of the experimental theater or public house. Only a few of LAP’s many illustrations open to exterior scenes, and here the natural lies embodied in the domesticated interior. Save the map and cover, only Figures 2, 17 (a detail of 2) and 22 indicate a world outside. And even these exhibit exterior nature at a marginal or vanishing point, from the central gaze of Baroque interiors. This provides focus on a single, central place in LAP. Latour and Hacking have remarked that the air-pump is the hero of LAP’s story.29 Witty remarks should not be mistaken for criticism or commentary. LAP isolates its elements, above all along the scene-agent axis. The Royal Society serves essentially as agent or chorus, as the air-pump as scene or instrument. Only in romance and satire, and only as both meet at the extremes 29See Latour

(1991), 28; and Hacking

(1991), 235

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of myth and irony, does the scene-agent equation bear objects as subjects. No parliament of things regales the laboratory, and no Zeus ex machina enlivens the air-pump. Pneumatics is machine-made and Boyle’s pump required the labor of ‘ “two strong men for divers hours” to evacuate it’ (ibid., 26). Experimental life looks from earth toward an empty heaven. The gods have retreated and no overworldly spirit infuses the laboratory. In Figures 2, 4, 22, heavenly spirits appear but do not dissolve the order of nature. LAP’s illustrations figure neither the irrealism of romance, nor the realism of comedy. The hyperrealism of modern science in its iconography rather pervades LAP. The air-pump in schematic sections dominates as scene. From Figure 1 onward, the laboratory as anatomical theater of instruments appears as scene, neither romantic nor surrealistic nor even ‘realistic’. Through a hyperrealism in scenic effect, LAP isolates the philosophic mind, solipsified in Hobbes, a true tragedy for the moderns. Comedy fashions its scene as ‘realism’. Like Frye (1957, 140), my distaste for this word is reflected in the quotation marks, which I shall mostly omit, though meaning them. Realism here is not that of the philosophers, but rather of the literary critic, and is more appropriate to historical writing: a certain mimetic style, which in its most recent incarnation comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being of the same flesh as the novel.30 Part of the realism of comedy lies in its disenchantment of the world’s scenes. Whereas romance, satire and tragedy may have images of or journeys to over- or underworld, comedy generally remains in the ‘real’ world. If over- and underworld exist, it is as faint figures. Comedy rules the earth and embraces nature and culture. No forboding tie to an underworld, nature is but an instrument of social action. Culture too is no awesome tie to an overworld, but rather mere social action. Both nature and culture are usually translatable into comedy’s main instrument, money.31 In GDC the earth forms the scene as nature and culture. An underworld as scene has become the dead matter of geology. GDC’s agents fight over the scene’s aspects, especially over naming strata and scientific ownership of them (Rudwick, 1985, 127,28&87,298,343-52). ‘Murchison had duly taken the hint to keep off Sedgwick’s territory’, but poaches on De la Beche’s, who as a government man is against personal intellectual ownership of strata by individual scientists (ibid., 128; also 143, 185). The Greywacke stratum serves as initial scene in which the agents contest over parts. Devonshire provides the locale instigating the main plot, even though most action takes place elsewhere. Two major agents have strata as scene of intellectual action: Sedgwick’s ‘“See Watt (1957), Chap. 1. “Reversing the gender equations of naive romance, one of the more sustained ironies of Jane Austen’s novels is the constant equation of men, especially as potential grooms, with an income. On comedy. cf. also Hegel (1971), XV, 527.

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Cambrian and Murchison’s Silurian and Devonian. The plot revolves around which agent can defend and expand its scene, at others’ cost. So Murchison’s Silurian grows at the expense of Sedgwick’s Cambrian. De la Beche begins with Devonshire as his intellectual property, but clings to the Greywacke as general scene, which is however slowly dissolved by Murchison’s. Two aspects binding nature and culture, coal and money, underlie much of the plot, and money appears as instrument facilitating or constraining mobility of agents to scenes (ibid., 67, 80-81, 90, 99, 102203, 130, 203, 377, 443). These are not final causes but rather scenic aspects. GDC oscilates between the poles of nature and culture, as ‘field’ and ‘society’. The field has us often outdoors, in the fresh air and country-side, moving in a realistically described nature. There are seasons, some better and some not for fieldwork. There is proper clothing for geologizing, and there is the hammer, the tool of the geologist (ibid., 3741). Key illustrations show interiors. The first is of the Geological Society and centers on the table, the symbol of European community. The second shows the British Association. Finally, a third shows De la Beche in his lodgings at Cornwall, awaiting the end of a storm (ibid., 19, 3 1, 182). Other scenic motifs contrast provinces with cities, and Britain versus the contintent. Most happens in Britain, but this does not have the resonances of folk as in romance. Here it is realistic: action must take place some time some where. The superscenes of nature and culture find reflection in two literary ones. .4s image of nature, there is the map, and as image of society, letter writing (ihid., 3437,454). As analogues of money, maps and letters hold privileged places in comedy’s real or ‘geo-political’ space and time. Let me begin summing up this section on scene with realism. In history and literature, ‘realism’ emerged as a development in the context of representational works or, in Aristotle’s terms, of mimetic writing, that is, writing that seeks to represent scenes, agents, acts, and ends as they are or could be. For the Aristotelian tradition, mimesis occurs in the central realm of our schema of genres above. Though some epic romance is mimetic, it is the central realm, tragedy and comedy, where mimesis or proper representation comes to be in writing. Mimetic epic and tragedy have been called ‘high’ mimetic, while comedy and later realistic genres, such as the novel, have been called ‘low’. Use of the root ‘-realism’ for comedy brings out its primary position in Europe since the Enlightenment, above all in history and the novel, moving mostly in the low mimetic. Taking comedy as the center, and associating it with realism, the three remaining genres have received designations above. By the canons of the central mimetic realm or ‘realism’, both romance and satire may deploy scenic aspects that are not realistic. To distinguish romance from satire, I have used ‘irreal’ for romance, and ‘surreal’ for satire, though the latter may not match surrealism in art; to distinguish tragedy, I have used ‘hyperrealism’. But all this is again only

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in view of realism’s modern generic centrality, with scene as the material cause or conditions of narrative.32 Agents

The agents are the efficient causes of action in narrative. From Aristotle onward, literary criticism has seen agents in terms of social class. This comes from taking genre seriously. ‘Ever since Aristotle criticism has tended to think of literature as essentially mimetic, and as divided between a “high” form of epic and tragedy dealing with ruling-class figures, and a “low” form confined to comedy and satire and more concerned with characters like ourselves’ (Frye, 1957,65).33 Comedy and satire may be about a pack of nobodies, but epic and tragedy are usually of somebodies. This loses hold at the extremes. As satire drifts to irony, great effect can come of gracing a lofty figure, like Socrates, with a literal lampoon. Romance is the basis of narrative, and divided into its two traditional forms, folktale and epic, spans the social order. In folktale, the characters become but figures of social class, while heroes may range from peasants to princes. Peasants may rise to royalty in a folktale, though they may as often simply get rich, like Hansel and Gretel. Based on myth or folktale but usually a product of professional poets or historians, epic romance tends to displace its heroes and most agents into the upper classes, an aristocracy of birth or merit. An historian of science, as professional, can assume the more refined terms of epic romance, our chief interest. Untrained as they are, modern scientists in writing history may tend to write folktale. So let us glance first at folktale, to which we shall recur, as a possible genre for the proper picture of the modern scientific mentality. In analysis of Russian folktale, intended as having general application, Propp isolated some canonical personae: a villain, a victim, a false hero, a hero, a dispatcher of the hero, a helper of and/or a donor to the hero, and a princess or other feminine figure usually with her father. ‘The princess and her father cannot be explicitly delineated from each other according to functions’.x4 The fused persona of the daughter-father, though the most interesting, points to others, so that Propp’s personae may be further collapsed. Consider ‘Hansel und Gretel’.35 Here the list of agent types falls to or below four. We have only Hansel, Gretel, their father, stepmother and the wicked witch. The stepmother “‘The passage of the Modern Era shows displacement at the popular level from comedy and realistic genes through ironic to non-mimetic, neo-mythic sorts of romance, evidenced by the growth of science fiction, ‘a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth’ (Frye, 1957, 49; cf. also ibid., 46, 13640). Realism is problematized in (post)-modernism and in anti-representational movements in general. “Cf. Aristotle (1932) 9 9 , 15, 17, 19, 57, 113 = 1448a49a, 1454b, 146lb62a; on agents less schematically, see Scholes and Kellogg (1966), Chap. 5. Carlyle (1841), Lect. V, is a sendup of the ‘Man of Letters’ as hero. j4Propp (1927), 79-80, and cf. Chaps 3 and 6 in general. 351n Grimm and Grimm (1949), 1 l&25.

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and the wicked witch are the same persona, one displacing another in the tale and the killing of the latter tied to death of the former. Hansel and Gretel are joint heroes for, despite Hansel’s leading role at first, Gretel reveals herself a grim heroine by tricking the witch into the oven and killing her. The father is the reluctant dispatcher. No helper-donor exists, unless we demote Gretel or have the leads alternate as hero(ine)-helper, and both also victims. No princess exists, though we may see the relevant feminine figure displaced-by the scene-agent equation-into the scene, here in the witch’s house as money or boxes with pearls and precious stones (‘Kasten mit Perlen und Edelsteinen’) which Hansel and Gretel bring to their father with whom, stepmother having somehow died in the meantime, they live happily ever after.36 Consider now Bronowski’s 1968 review of Watson’s The Double Helix, a useful work for bringing archetypes to light. Bronowski termed Watson’s story ‘a classic fable about the charmed seventh sons, the antiheroes of folklore who stumble from one comic mishap to the next until . . . they guess the magic riddle correctly. Though the traditional parts of Rosalind Franklin as the witch and Linus Pauling as the rival suitor (for example) have been toned down, they are still mythological postures. . . .‘x7 Like Hansel and Gretel, Watson and Crick are joint heroes. Pauling plays a false hero, and Franklin the villain. Wilkinson is, as we’ll see, an ‘outsider’: someone siding with the villain. Perutz, Donohue and others are donor-helpers. As the dispatcher father, Delbrtick seems well cast. For the princess or feminine figure, one might ponder the many photographs in The Double Helix for help. We shall return to folktale now and again, as it may offer the best mimesis of the untutored scientist’s thinking. In his analysis of agents, to encompass all genres from folk romance to ironic satire, Frye takes four comic personae as archetypal and looks for analogues elsewhere.38 Frye’s schema for agents is much simpler than Propp’s, and I shall orient the discussion below by using Frye’s schema. As dialectical structure, Frye’s first two personae figure pro- and antagonists, while variations on his third and fourth set mood. The third agent type ranges from the helper to the chorus-character: they side with the protagonist. The fourth agent type is difficult, and ultimately undermines this schema; nonetheless, I shall typify a fourth achetype as the ‘outsider’, in all its shades, explained here as we go through the analysis. Though I shall use this schema of personae for orientation on generic type casting in history, it is 36Freud (1905) 7677, in analyzing Dora’s dreams, comes upon the same set of metonymies as above in the witch’s house: ‘Die Dose-box, puxis-ist wie das Taschchen, wie das Schmuckklstchen wieder nur eine Vertreterin der Venusmuschel, des weiblichen Genitales!’ “‘In Stent (1980), 201; for other comparisons of The Double Helix to folktale, see Gross (1990) 5465, esp. 59; Locke (1992), 12630, gives a rhetorical analysis. s8Frye schematizes agents from Tractatus Coisliniansus, a work related in origin to Aristotle’s Poetics, which Frye supplements by Ethics: IV. vii. l-12 = 1127a-28b. Translation of Tractatus Coisliniansus is in Cooper (1922) 22426; on it and agents, see ibid., 1615, 117-23, 262-65. On agent in general, see Frye (1957), 33-34, 171-77, 195-98, 206-07, 211, 216-19, 223-39.

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apparent that caricatures may result. I take refuge in paucity of space, and solace in the notion of historical ‘caricature’ itself. Elements of folktale appear in EO, and the tale of Newton, true to tradition, is a folktale. EO remains, however, the work of a professional historian, and so reads more as epic romance. We have noted that EO-like historical epic romances such as the Iliad, the Book of Joshua, and The Song of Roland--casts agents as folks. Greeks and Italians inaugurate the story, which is mostly about the French, English (British) and Germans. Also as noted, folks by the agent-scene equation work an historical idealism. Agents act not so much under the material conditions of a scene, as sooner through the spiritual genius of a folk, such as a Cartesian mind. Opposition in epic is between pro- and antagonists as heroes and villains. ‘The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, and old age, and the hero with dawn order, fertility, vigor, and youth’ (Frye, 1957, 187-88; c$ 151, 195-96; id., 1976, 53). In EO the French and English, like Hansel and Gretel, are joint heroes, while Germans are false heroes or villains, the wicked witch. ‘In the realm of intellectual habit, national styles do certainly persist’. Behold ‘the French and English minds in science: the one systematic, rigorous, theoretical, and formal; the other ingenious, inventive, concrete, and physical; the one too elegant to dare the brusquer innovations, the other too deficient in taste to feel the force of elegance’ (Gillispie, 1960,408,409-10). The French are mind, clear and distinct. EO’s French heroes-Descartes, Pascal, Lavoisier, Carnot, Fresnel+zmbody proper folk virtues: they are theoretical, systematic, mathematical, formal and, in sum, Cartesian.j9 Others present a problem. Diderot has math-anxiety and talks like Goethe and the Romantics (ibid., 184-92). Lamarck is even worse in ‘romantic resistance to physical science’, and his ‘attack upon Lavoisier was of a piece with Goethe’s Farbenlehre’ (ibid., 271, 27677). For association with Germans, Lamarck is an outsider, introduced old, an almost ghost, rhetorically dead, at apparition (ibid., 268-69). Not so Cuvier, though ‘never altogether really French’. Schooling in Stuttgart brought him contact with Naturphilosophie, which encouraged him ‘without taking possession of his scientific soul’ (ibid., 277, 278). Less mind, the English are more earthy. EO’s English heroes-Boyle, Priestly, Dalton, Darwin, Joule, Young, Faraday-are, in their thinking, concrete, physical, ingenious, inventive and experimental.40 Bacon presents a big problem on account of his character, or lack of it, and his vulgar philosophy, so that he is a near outsider (ibid., 74-82, 108-09, 246). Maxwell is also not formulaic, as his ‘ingenuity’ was ‘at once rational and handy’, a Scot fusing the French and English (ibid., 460). Finally the ‘daemonic quality’ of Newton’s genius, giant shouldered, ‘united knowledge of heaven and earth’ (ibid., 117, 305). “Gillispie (1960), 83-85, 89, 93-94, 101, 209-10, 357-58, 409-10, 421-22, 493-94 4olbid., 103, 205-09, 218, 250-53, 3o4-05, 371-72, 408-10, 412-21. 437-38, 494.

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‘Romance usually presents us with a hierarchial social order, and in what we have called kidnapped romance: this order is rationalized’ (Frye, 1976, 177). The hero of epic romance is almost always noble; in sentimental romance, the hero ends up of the gentry, even if first appearing low in social origin (ibid., 161). In ‘kidnapped romance’ like EO, the no longer noble heroes are fashioned as a neo-aristocracy whose hegemony, no longer by birth, needs be rationalized, say, by merit. Bacon gives a key. Sir Francis ‘made himself the Aristotle of the philosophical bourgeoisie’, his method one ‘for the middle-brow mind . . _ In Baconian science the bird-watcher comes into his own while genius, even theorizing in far places, is suspect’. Science is ‘far more abstract, elegant, and intellectually aristocratic than Bacon foresaw’ (Gillispie, 1960, 74, 77, 82). EO’s heroes are intellectual aristocrats, who as seen want private adventures. A romantic hero is a singular individual, whose society is shadowy, or serves as antagonist. The source of the hero’s action lies in him as charisma or genius, and outside him, though this outside is not social, but rather like ‘luck’ in Scandinavian sagas.4’ In EO’s hierarchy, the mathematical physicist is first, with a ‘transforming touch’ and youth. ‘Athletes of the intellect, theoretical physicists build careers upon innovations of their youth’ (ibid., 7, 119). Others are measured against physicists, and need less exalted genius (ibid., 13, 54, 329). Big heroes master and order specific realms. ‘Every science has its orderer in the structure of history, one who first framed objective concepts widely enough to reorient its posture: Galileo for kinematics, Newton for physics, Darwin for biology. That high place Laviosier claimed for himself in chemistry. And rightly . . .’ (ibid., 202-03; cf. 338). Beside orderers, there is Descartes as a ‘founder’, and Bacon as a ‘prophet’ (ibid., 74, 83). There are helper-donor sorts, since their science was not first rank, as with Vesalius, or since their genius was not, such as Gassendi (ibid., 57, 99). Those between big heroes and helper-donors remain a motley crew. Lesser heroes or major helper-donors would be Boyle, Priestly, Cuvier, Carnot, Fresnel, and so on. Alongside the Galahads, Percevals and Bors in a quest are Lancelots. EO has tainted heroes as outsiders in Diderot and Lamarck. Newton is a case, and his tale merits space not here available. In this quest, he is the Galahad, paragon of chastity and modesty (ibid., 139, 150). Older than Newton and less a mathematician, Hooke plays the false hero. ‘Halley was more sophisticated. He was an attractive and sympathetic young man’ (ibid., 137) a good helper-donor. As in many romances of science, a dispatcher-daughter-father-figure may be displaced. ‘It is . . . German taste which relishes bewilderment and builds upon it’ (ibid., 494). Teutons and Slavs play villains. Analysis of scene showed them tied to polar motifs, a ‘Gothic’ underworld of the north. Against the ‘determinate 4’Cf. Frye (1957), 62; id. (1976), 67, 13940,

172

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toughness’ of others, the Gothic north gave way to ‘the romantic sentimentality of Slavic and Teutonic culture’ (ibid., 53; cf. 20-22, 39). In romance, the ‘antagonists of the quest are often sinister figures, giants, ogres, witches and magicians, that clearly have a parental origin . . .‘, often as the terrible step-mother (Frye, 1957, 193, 196). Save Einstein, Kepler is the first German in EO, and the only one whom the narrative graces with a family, other Germans appearing as disembodied spirits, that is, like ghosts (which is not untypical of agents in intellectual history, an academic genre of the ghost-story). The only German given a family, Kepler had a ‘horrible old mother, . . indicted as a witch, perhaps with some reason’; Kepler ‘casts his own spell over all who study him’ (Gillispie, 1960, 29, 38). Thereafter EO personifies Germany as Goethe as Faust. If France-Anglo quest for objectivity is misguided, then ‘the world is the way Goethe will want it to be, . . . where Faust will take his shortcut to knowledge, and power, not through science, but through magic’ (ibid., 107, cf. 192-201, 263). If not as villains, Germans are cast as rustics or buffoons, so Guericke and Nageli, or are made honorary Franks or Saxons, so Weismann (ibid., 100-01, 326, 328-39). Save Einstein, and noting that Clausius appears as mere mind, Helmholtz is the sole member of the Teutons made a hero in the quest (ibid., 382). Having real villains, EO proves itself a perfected romance. Most academic whig history makes due with the mere false hero or imposter (the alazon), more typical of comedy. Without Teutons and Slavs as villains, the antagonists would be Bacon, Lamarck and Diderot, outsiders to the two heroic national types in quest of objectivity. Though it has villains, EO remains coy in the matter of fathers and daughters. The Quest of the Holy Grail has a reluctant dispatcher-father-figure in King Arthur, who said about the quest, ‘Ah, Gwain, this vow of yours is a mortal blow to me, for you have deprived me of the best and truest companions a man could find. I speak of the fellowship of the Round Table . . . I have raised them up , . ., and indeed love them still like sons or brothers . . .‘.42 During the quest, women form chief villains or tricksters, while the grail (a chalice) as telos of the quest may be a displaced feminine figure. As in science, the feminine in romance is fraught with ambivalence. Sex as virginity and chastity, male and female, is central in romance (Frye, 1976,73-93, 152-53, 121). An object of chaste male quest in romance is often a princess or a feminine figure: the outsider as bride. ‘This bride-figure [of romance] is ambiguous: her psychological connection with the mother in an Oedipus fantasy is more insistent than in comedy’. So the bride may be displaced into a father-figure, treasure, the holy grail, or some other precious object in romance (id., 1957, 193, 194).43 Few women appear in EO, and the few get linked to material goods. We have noted the case of Mme. Lavoisier. Emilie du Chatelet gives Voltaire a “‘Matarasso (1969), 45. %iee also Propp (1927). 79-80.

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chateau and lab, and Emma Wedgewood is attached to a dad with cash (Gillispie, 1960, 158, 30647). Feminine figures, if extant in EO, find themselves otherwise displaced. Diderot’s ‘was no feminine dislike of precision’, by which one may suspect Goethe’s was (ibid., 192). The metonymy rendering Germany to Goethe, coupled with their ‘romantic sentimentality’, perhaps gives an answer, as women tended to be figured as sentimental in the Modern Era. If Germans do not embody the feminine, it must be, as it is so often in science, nature (cf. ibid., 13). Epic romance is of the sublime: of desire and death, eras and than&ox In the quest of femininity above, I was consequently following the genius of romance. One must, however, know the limits of one’s generic genius. The genius of tragedy presents an instance where gender analyses can become forced. As the Freudian says, ‘Some times, even in psychoanalysis, a banana is just a banana’, I’ll say, ‘Some times, even in History of Science, an air-pump is just an air-pump’. While epic romance is of eras and thanatos, comedy and tragedy divide these, the first having desire as its basic motif and the second death. Sex or eros is often absent from tragedy and, if present, is just as often bad, and even linked to death. Displacement in tragedy serves thus not to veil desire but rather death. Like epic, tragedy centers on elite somebodies by birth or merit. Tragedy in the ‘high mimetic’ mode has a somebody of ‘a properly heroic size’ who falls, this imposing figure having blocked out a greater world (Frye, 1957, 37, 215). We’ve seen in analysis of scene that tragedy may contain aspects hearkening through the romantic to the mythic, which symbolizes the world left behind by the rupture in history which is the tragedy. These mythic links may symbolize the monstrous nature of a fallen hero. Tragic works recurring to the Hebraic tradition come upon the leviathan, ‘who is described as an enemy of the Messiah, and whom the Messiah is destined to kill in the “day of our Lord”. The leviathan is the source of social sterility . . .’ (ibid., 189). An imposing or monstrous anti-hero against an avenger constitutes a common tragic motif. The difference between romance and tragedy, however, is that the tragic anti-hero is not a villain, so ‘the center of tragedy is in the [anti]-hero’s isolation, not in a villain’s betrayal . . .’ (ibid., 208, also 38, 207709, 219). Moving to low mimetic tragedy, pathos displaces epic sublimity. ‘The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence the central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the isolated mind . . . The most popular types of alazon [or anti-hero in pathetic tragedy] are the miles gloriosus and the learned crank or obsessed philosopher’ (ibid., 39). To wit Hobbes. LAP hovers between the high and low mimetic. Symbolizing a leviathan, Hobbes is a monster and must be cast out from the city that the true temple, the laboratory, be consecrated. Yet Hobbes figures pathos, and the tale never deprives him of humanity (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, 136). Despite that, the

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text places Hobbes pretty much alone. Save the cover, LAP has twenty-one figures for Boyle, laboratories or air-pumps. Against these stands one figure for Hobbes (and one neutral woman: Athena in Figure 4). Hobbes looks old in his lone figure, especially when put with the more youthful looking Boyle. Hobbes is cast outside Boyle’s new society, the experimental community (ibid., 72, 253%54), and Hobbes says of the Fellows of Gresham ‘ “All of them are my enemies” ’ (ibid., 112). Boding a new philosophical persona, Boyle plays literally the canonical tragic protagonist cast in Frye’s schema: the ‘eiron’, the self-deprecator, as avenger. Against a philosophus gloriosus, Boyle is set like Newton in EO as ‘modest and humble’, here by the Royal Society (ibid., 139). In terms of social class, we remain in the high mimetic. Hobbes is tutor and friend of royalty, but is himself a non-aristocrat by blood. A tragic anti-hero is often in the ‘ambiguous position of a tyrannos whose rule depends on his own abilities, rather than a purely hereditary or de jure monarch . . .’ (Frye, 1957, 217). So Hobbes well seems a tyrannt to Sprat (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, 137-38). It is Mr Boyle who is the aristocrat by blood, scion of the Earls of Cork, and it is he who makes covenant with the new society of machines. Boyle triumphs neither by noble genius nor luck; his triumph is rather instrumental and social. Boyle thus offers at once restoration and innovation. Youthful and aristocratic, Boyle provides a proper vessel for a re-newed order, ultimately embodied in law. Philosophus gloriosus, as tyrannos, as leviathan, pathetic old Hobbes figures a mythic past. In tragedy the chorus ‘usually represents the society from which the [anti]-hero is gradually isolated’ (Frye, 1957, 218). Akin to helpers in romance appear in tragedy a chorus and others who side with the avenger as eiron or self-deprecator. Boyle’s pact is with the Royal Society and new experimental community, who as tragic chorus bear the correct moral judgment. Most figures fall into this chorus, even the Jesuit Linus (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, 163). Huygens figures the international dimension of the new society, as well as the central mediator. He is the only one who dines with Hobbes in the tragedy (ibid., 252). Spinoza and More play outsiders, refusing to join the society promised by the avenger (ibid., 222-24, 253-54). With a dash of pathos, LAP casts its agents with high mimetic decorum befitting a baroque tragedy. ‘If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us . . . This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and realistic fiction [including the novel] . . . On this level the difficulty in retaining the word “hero” . . . occasionally strikes an author’, since the comic figure is bound by social context. The comic ‘hero himself is seldom a very interesting person: in conformity with low mimetic decorum, he is ordinary in his virtues, but socially attractive’; indeed ‘the main character interest in comedy is often focussed on the defeated characters’ (Frye, 1957, 34, 44, 170). Giving losing sides in a scientific controversy just or equal attention is a good way to plot a

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comedy. One way to do this would be to cast two leads as equally likeable or unlikeable, so that the reader cannot tell till the end who is the imposter or losing suitor, who in comedy usually replaces the villain as antagonist. Comedy has a social focus, and often involves generational conflict or the relation of the leads to society (ibid., 54, 16364, 171, 207). If one lead is a famous figure, and so more at home in the high mimetic mode of epic and tragedy, then for comedy one must, so to speak, bring this figure down into the low mimetic, perhaps by putting it in generational or social conflict or context, or by making a point of its human frailties. The hero must be made ‘one of us’, one whose triumph is sooner by social fortune than by romantic genius or tragic fate. Befitting low mimetic decorum, GDC’s heroes are more like its audience than not. They do see themselves as ‘gentlemen’, but good gentlemen don’t have blue blood so much as good manners and cash flow, something to which most of us doubtless at least aspire. Besides. we’re all ‘ladies and gentlemen’ now. We’ve also already heard that GDC will not tell us in advance ‘who were the goodies and who the baddies’ (Rudwick, 1985, 13-14). Figures more likely known to its audience in advance-Lyell, Sedgwick, Darwin-do not play the leads. The two leads, De la Beche and Murchison, are not revolutionary heroes, but rather two normal guys who make a rival-suitor comedy. De la Beche and Murchison play the leads, and the question amounts to: who is the ‘alazon’ or imposter, and who the ‘eiron’ or self-deprecator? Since GDC is not farcical, the alazon or antagonist cannot really be an imposter; he’ll just be the losing suitor. Both Murchison and De la Beche have virtues and vices, and either would make a worthy winner. Murchison failed as a soldier and also as a country gentleman. Retiring from the army, he married a young heiress, Charlotte, intelligent and willing to let him use the family money for science. He writes her nice letters and helps with the ‘ “airy palace” ’ they later acquire (ibid., 67, 303-04, 308, 316, 321, 44041). Despite that, he often acts like a jerk and, I must say, I did not care for him. (In comedy as low mimetic, the audience must be able to identify with one of the leads.) Murchison pits himself as the private gentleman against De la Beche as the government man (ibid., 194, 269). Four years younger than Murchison, De la Beche was ‘a wealthy young man about town’ by inheritance and soon also married. But he seems more the pleb by his hammer and clothes, as well as his sometimes impecunious existence (ibid., 70, 104-05, 182, 441). Analysis of the chorus character in LAP versus GDC would reveal much about the fine differences between tragic and comic emplotment of character. To extend a quotation from above: ‘In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from which the [anti]-hero is gradually isolated . . .’ (Frye, 1957,218). In tragedy the chorus is sooner a moral or juridical body, while in comedy it is more a social or political one. A tragic chorus may become a revolutionary body, vanguard of a ruptured social order, which sides with the avenger, demanding death or

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expulsion for the tragic alazon or antagonist. A comic chorus serves usually as mediator in conserving a reformed but normal social order, which sides with one suitor, generationally or otherwise, and may be a new sort of society, but usually allows a place for the alazon. LAP extends its chorus, the Royal Society, by a globalizing ‘experimental community’; GDC achieves the like by societies: Cambridge Philosophical Society, BAAS, Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Arzte, SociCtC geologique de France, and so on. Though centered on the British, LAP and GDC do not embody folk narratives of the epic sort. Extension of the chorus character in both indicates global community while, apropos to tragedy and comedy, action remains spatio-temporally well indexed. The main chorus in GDC is the Geological Society of London. Comic chorus characters are those who side with the winning suitor (Frye, 1957, 434, 175-76, 218), the ‘straight-men’ for the comic hero (here departing from Frye). Since GDC is a rival-suitor comedy, and the rivals sue for neither the other’s wife nor other women, it must be the most and best straightmen, or straightest men, whom they sue and court. The eros of EO, as we’ll see later, is mostly male homosocial desire. From the chorus step figures whom the leading men court as their straightmen. William Smith is ‘father figure for geology’, so by implication for the Geological Society, though his status as non-gentleman makes him a near outsider (Rudwick, 1985, 63-64, 316), the society seeming progeny of mtsalliance. Note too that though declared father, he has no portrait in the ‘Dramatis Personae’ (ibid., xxix-xxxiii) nor elsewhere. Suitors and straightmen are set up on pages 63 to 69. Portraits of Murchison and De la Beche hang out together here, and so too those of Greenough and Sedgwick, who are older brother or uncle types, and whom Murchison and De la Beche sue and court. The broad male chorus-Buckland, Darwin, Lye& and so on-lends EO its realistic feel. It gives consolation to the critic that GDC’s candidates, after Smith, for candidates for the outsider turn out to be so in the original sense: rustics and provincials, Williams and Weaver (ibid., 133-34, 220-24, 315-16, 332-33, 369, 413). Their role here is to reject the winning suitor’s hand. The canonical outsider of comedy as provincial, even rustic or buffoon (Frye, 1957, 172-76) indicates the chorus’s metropolitan nature. Whereas the chorus of tragedy embodies sooner the law as abstract socio-physical entity, the chorus of comedy instances more the city as political entity, so the hegemony of a bourgeois order and view. On the subject of satire and irony, Frye is least useful. This may be due to lack of interest or ability; but, it’s also due to the subject’s difficulty. I’ve been following Frye by using a schema of four personae (protagonist or eiron, antagonist or alazon, helperdonor or chorus, outsider or rustic), taken from the study of comedy, but used for orientation in generic or type casting for all narrative. When he turns to analysis of satire-irony, Frye (1957, 223-39) abandons this schema. In another place he says that in satire the characters

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‘tend to be caricatures’ (ibid., 206). That must be put in this light: ‘Some readers will complain that Dickens has relapsed into “mere” caricature (as though caricature were easy) . . .’ (ibid., 134). How to take this? The poles of mythfolktale and satire-irony are alike, since their agents do not seem realistic, but rather fairy-like in the former and caricatures in the latter. As seen, this judgment comes from the perspective of the central generic modes, the high and low mimetic. For Frye to the contrary, ‘high’ and ‘low’ show their origin in social classes. Aristotle presumes as most that the duty of literatureand history-is mimesis, truthful representation, of high life or low lives. Professionalized history of science, having begun in the high mode of mimetic epic, has broadened its scope to include low mimetic or realistic decorum, which is to say that the original orientation on intellectual history has been broadened to include institutional and social history of science. In so far as these last two sorts of history do not efface agents into scenic aspects, they are most at home with low or comic figures. So-called externalist history of science seems most captive by the genre of ‘realism’. .If satire or irony in historical writing produce seeming caricatures, that is only from the mimetic or ‘realist’ perspective, which takes its views, largely those of the great middle classes, as definitive of reality and humanity. PV abandons mimesis and ‘realism’. That hasn’t to do with method, such as source-critique or citation convention, whose norms PV doesn’t violate. Like Les mots et les chases, PV rather rejects canons of mimetic or realistic historical writing. Being non-representational by normal canons, it may appear to some as archaic or even silly, like modern art, which like PV is ‘non-taxidermical’ in its figurations. ‘Taxidermy became the art most suited to the epistemological and aesthetic stance of realism. The power of this stance is in its magical effects: what is so painfully constructed appears effortlessly, spontaneously found, discovered, simply there if one will only look. Realism does not appear to be a point of view. . .’ (Haraway, 1989, 38). But it is. Whether or not PV’s characters are caricatures is a question whose resolution would entail we first agree that historical writing must be mimetic, and then that we decide what this means: classically high or low mimetic, modern novelistic-historical realism, or what? A figure may only be labelled a ‘caricature’ once a canon has been set, explicitly or not, about what counts as realistic or natural representation Even should we concede that mimesis or realism lies at the center of modern historical practice, and that historians are taxidermists whose characters must be like stuffed dummies, PV’s figures seem anyway ironic antitheses of caricature. The figures drawn there are usually literal, dead literal, and that brings out the stylized, often sanitized nature of low mimetic types. Returning to Frye, note that, though satire takes from high mimetic its ironic mode, it adopts its figures from low mimetic, bringing them lower. Note too that, given Frye’s four personae, ‘irony’ descends from cognates of ‘eiron’, the

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self-deprecator. ‘The figure of the low-norm eiron is irony’s substitute for the hero, and when he [or she] is removed from satire we can see more clearly that one of the central themes of the mythos [of satire] is the disappearance of the heroic’ (Frye, 1957, 228). In comedy the protagonist or eiron becomes ‘one of us’, whereas in satire the eiron tends to withdraw from the play altogether, to become poetic voice as irony incarnate. Poetic voice does not cast itself as hero; rather, heroes vanish, with poetic voice left as self-deprecator to fill the heroic void, but only able to speak about the grotesque or absurd world, in which it is also caught up (cf. ibid., 34, 172-75, 22631). With the eiron made poetic voice, principal characters are left as analogues of the chorus, the outsider, and the antagonist as imposter. PV’s satire comes in reversing normal roles. Male chorus characters here have no proper protagonist to side with in order to resolve plot, so chorus types move off stagecenter. In Parts 1 and 2 the figures at stagecenter are typed as philosophus gloriosus, alazon or imposter, who offer a potential chorus an absurd or even wicked social order, usually a strange view of the ‘Family’, or of ‘Man and Woman’, passed off as science. Satire is achieved in part by outsiders-women, cartoon characters, monkeys and apes (the latter two as scenic aspects become agents)-more sympathetic than the male leads. Some outsiders at the outset of PV move to stagecenter by Part 3. But fundamental misreading of PV arises from reading these outsiders-become-insiders as a new sort of eiron or hero. If PV had a hierarchy of absurdity, Harry Harlow’s gang would be on top. ‘A doctoral research scientist, Margaret Harlow became a midwife in the reflective birth of her husband as father to himself-as-mother, a scientific hero . . . No wonder the style of the Harlow lab reads as burlesque parody’ (Haraway, 1989, 233). With Margaret as misguided helperdonor, Harry is sadistic father of the ‘cloth mother’, a surrogate mother for monkeys. Chorus characters are played by institutions, such as CBS television and the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Iatter giving Harry a lot of money for his gang’s sadistic plans. By the scene-agent equation, a baby rhesus monkeythe outsider as victim-seems the only decent one in Harlow’s tale (ibid., 239). Carl Akeley, as a Bungalow Bill, has a case for second place in the hierarchy. Carl tracks elephants and big gorillas, and has two wives, Delia then Mary. The last is a good helper, while Delia as outsider writes unromantic truths about Carl, a pure alazon (ibid., 50). Delia too tells tall tales, but becomes the outsider of romance itself: a figure whose role is to indicate the dream world the rest of the cast inhabits (cf. Frye, 1957, 197). An option of satire is mock romance and, after introductory chapters, it is with such in Carl’s saga that PV opens its plot. Opening with Carl the Taxidermist, the plot stands under the sign of the alazon whose tricky ex-wife pricks a romance of science (Haraway, 1989,4&52). After Harry and Carl, PV has no clear pecking order amongst alazonians. Taking the first two parts as a whole, one could see main figures as alazonian chorus

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characters, each not a true alazon or imposter, but just one of an absurd tribe. Yerkes seems sympathetic enough with his chimps, but ‘the tone of this father of primatology’, resounding from his lab ‘wrote the male-dominant economics of power and sex into the food chute exchanges. Here is the origin narrative of prostitution in the market and cooperation in marriage’. A psychologist as outsider, Herschberger, takes the part of one of Yerkes’ female chimps to argue against him (ibid., Chap. 4, esp. 6&61, 80), again making a scenic aspect into an agent. Washburn, among founding fathers most sympathetic, also falls from his pedestal. He helped lay ‘the material matrix . . . for the masculine scientific birth of Man the Hunter’, satirized by a Farside cartoon (ibid., 210-12). Francis Bacon, as prophet-outsider, gave the key to EO, while Jane Goodall, as bride-outsider, gives the same to PV. Taking PV’s first two parts as a whole, the chapter on Goodall occupies the center. This is the pivotal chapter and shows why PV is neither whig history nor romance. Leave the band on the cover aside (cf. ibid., 133-35). Three other pictures show what PV is about. Two in Chapter 7 depict Goodall with outsiders in Akeley’s world (ibid., 167, 173). With Goodall outsiders move to stagecenter. The third picture lies in the next chapter (ibid., 222). PV’s images were selected with apparent care, and deserve like attention. This image bears marks of a professional photographer. This image is nearly the archetypal western, middle class, wedding photo. The exact center, if you measure it, is the line joining the shoulders of Goodall and Hamburg, figuratively wedded. Were it not for Masakazu on the left, one could read the guests as his and hers: all other non-males, non westerners are on Goodall’s bridal side. ‘The reversal of the positions of King Kong and the blonde virgin in the 1980s card [Figure 7.8, by Nancy Carlson for Hallmark] cannot simply reverse the semiotic values of the tragic 1933 film and its classic myths of race, gender, and knowledge; it turns them into farce, the risk run even by white scientific women in public. This is the risk run by National Geographic’s Jane Goodall’ (ibid., 162). Not a ‘no one’, Goodall could not read this book and escape unscathed. With the two others of Leakey’s trio in her bridal party, Fossey and Galdikas, Goodall is denied a place in Part 3. These three lie in Part 2 as victim-outsiders, made pawns of cameramen and the master narrator: National Geographic (ibid., 150, 158). Goodall as bride-victim-outsider shows the risks run amongst alazonians. PV’s Part 3 has chapters on four female primatologists, bookended by a prologue and reprise. I shall save all these for the next section, as aspects of plot become essential here. As reiteration, suffice it to say that PV does not cast these four women as a new sort of eiron or hero; rather, they are ironized. I need now to sum up this section on agents. Though taken from analysis of comedy, the schema of four personae used here, if having mimetic resonances, has them in relation to literary archetypes or stereotypes or personae, not to historical persons. This section on agents is an exercise, not

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in historical, but rather in archetypal or stereotypal or generic critique. Thus also not intended as caricatures, the four personae--eiron or self-deprecator, aluzon or imposter, helper or chorus, outsider or rustic-have been used above for orientation on generic or type casting in historical writing on science. In analysis of scene above, though beginning with romance’s polarization of the world between an over- and underworld, I gave pride of place to comic scene taken as ‘realism’, and made the other three generic scenes into modulations as irreal, hyperreal and surreal. Here in analysis of agents, I have likewise, now following Frye, given pride of place to comic agents, as low mimetic or realistic, in so far as the four termed agent-schema used here was derived from comedy, then applied with modification to the other genres. As with scene, then, implicit in this section on agents has been the thesis that the movement in history of science from internalism to externalism, or from intellectual to institutional and social history, moved stereotyping or generic casting from high to low mimetic modes or realism, in so far as agency does not become scenic. So we see the centrality of low or comic figures in much professional writing about science today. Moreover, unlike EO, stereotypical whig history, as imperfected romance, seems not to cast real villains. The typical antagonist of professional whig history is rather more the canonically comic aluzon, the imposter or false hero. The turn from romance to comedy in our history of science has meant then, more particularly, that the epic hero of whig history has fallen to the low mimetic or realistic decorum of the canonically comic eiron, the self-deprecator, who is ‘one of us’ and so not really a hero at all. Thus we also see now the centrality of the chorus character or straightmen, as scientific society or institution or ‘social context’, which may make agency scenic or even attempt to de-narrativize history altogether.

Part II Recapitulation Using an Aristotelian structuralism as understood mostly through the work of Northrop Frye, in the first part of this essay I began a narratological study of Charles Gillispie’s The Edge of Objectivity as epic romance, Steven Shapin’s and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump as high mimetic tragedy, Martin Rudwick’s The Great Devonian Controversy as realistic comedy, and Donna Haraway’s Primate Vi.sions as ironic satire. In the first part, the essay analyzed each of these four works in terms of three aspects of narrative: voice, scene, agents. This part completes the analysis in terms of the remaining three aspects: plot, end, audience. The essay will end with a sort of concluding unscientific postscript.

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Plot

Aristotle deserves praise for many things, especially for this: ‘The plot (mtithos) then is the first principle (arc/G) and as it were the soul (psych;) of tragedy’.& The Philosopher errs, however, in not extending this to all genres. As scene and agents are material and efficient causes, myrhos or plot is the formal cause of narrative and so its soul or first principle. Like formal causes, souls and first principles, plot is a most obscure thing. Some of the most difficult parts of narratology concern making sense of plot. In view of that, I’ll postpone general remarks about it till the close of the essay, and plunge right into the analysis. Of romances, we are interested mostly in epic, which is a story ‘made up of many plots (poltimuthon)‘. Epic has less unity than tragedy, so ‘any one epic makes several tragedies. The result is that, if the epic poet takes a single plot (mfithon)‘, either bad or no epic arises. 45Good epic weaves many little plots into a big one, while bad epic dissolves its plot into fragments. A mythos or plot in general must be a whole, like an living thing, and its unity is even more perfect than that of a hero’s life. Thus Homer did not put all stories he knew about Odysseus into his epic.46 EO is also episodic and good, for it has a master plot: ‘to set out in narrative form the structure in the history of classical science . . . [to be found] in the route which the advancing edge of objectivity has in fact taken through the study of nature from one science to another’ (Gillispie, 1960, 521). Each episode contributes to a mimesis of the ‘classical’, whose age in science is from Galileo to Einstein. The master plot lies in the advancing edge of objectivity, whose direction was marked out by physics. EO speaks as no positivist, so no logic of reduction will link the episodes. Advance of objectivity comes not in other sciences being reduced to physics; they must rather ‘follow’ it (ibid., 13). EO’ s scientists, as said above, are looking for adventures, which is the essential element of romantic plot, while metaphor is romance’s central trope.47 Adventures come by advancing the ‘route’ of the ‘edge’ of objectivity. Those are the key metaphors linking the episodes of the epic. The edge is ‘cruel’ and is cutting: ‘Physics has been at the cutting edge of science since Galileo . . .’ (ibid., 44, 54). Physics cuts a path, so essential for a quest romance. ‘Newton had to supplant Descartes in order to set physics on the road mapped out by Galileo’. Cutting paths is cast in military metaphors of opening ‘breaches’ and advancing ‘fronts’. The work of Harvey was ‘the first, if partial, breach opened by the scientific revolution’ in life sciences. With Newton ‘the advancing front of objectivity moved through optics’. Darwin ‘opened the breach through which biology could follow physics into objectivity’. Young’s interest in waves was a ‘breach, which was to widen and bring the properties of aether’ into *Aristotle (1932), 27 = 1450a. 45Ibid., 71 [first translation revised], 115 = 1456a, 1462b. 461bid., 31-33, 37-38, 67, 95 = 1450b51b, 1455b, 1459b. 47Cf. Frye (1957). 186; White (1973), 29; id. (1978), 70-75.

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science. Rather than follow Fresnel, EO will ‘specify the breaches he exploited in the theoretical attack’. EO has focused on those who have ‘borne the battle, and not without sympathy for its casualties’.48 Following physics, each science becomes ordered, mathematical, metrical, impersonal; sciences win objectivity as a ‘mood’ and a ‘posture’.49 ‘The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream’ (Frye, 1957, 186). Heroes in epic romance have an aristocratic charisma, which in northern European stories is, besides genius, ‘luck’, and this luck and genius characterize the hero apart from a social order other than family or tribe: society is shadowy and atomized; moreover, ‘the frustrations, ambiguities, and embarrassments of ordinary life are made little of’ (ibid., 151; id., 1976,67, 172). Romantic heroes, in short, do not work. They rather battle adversaries and blaze trails. They hunt and quest for precious objects or formulas. They solve riddles and puzzles. Life is a game, a ritual. ‘[I]n romance, essentially the whole human action depicted in the plot is ritualized action’ (ibid., 56). A world where lift’s work is ritual gives the mythos or generic plot of romance its figure. By ‘ritual’ more is meant than a contrast of sacred play with profane work. Action in romance involves festivities, sport, games, trials, tests, and so on. As children know, games and other ritualized acts can entail much application. In folktale, reflecting peasant consciousness, the ritual may be like work, but then is usually that of a nightmare. In the tale ‘Rumpelstilzchen’, the miller’s daughter must weave for the king roomfulls of straw into gold on three nights in ever larger rooms lest she lose her life. The task is done for her by a mysterious ‘Mannchen’ who therefore demands her first born, she becoming queen by his execution of the task. The equation of work and play, and above all the absence of economic rationality or realism in romance, emerges in the means by which the queen may redeem her child. The Miinnchen will forsake the baby, his payment for three nightmare’s work, if she can guess his name. In her analysis of the Grimm’s tales, Bottigheimer noted that ‘work’ bears no relation to results, by canons of realism.50 Riddle- or puzzle-solving, in particular, seem out of all proportion to effort invested in and consequences of solution. Riddles and puzzles are primal elements of European romance and with oracles and spells inhabit the realm of enchanted knowledge. In folktale, a series of hard tasks is a common motif, and riddle- or puzzle-solving a typical task for a hero who, however, if a real one, does not work.51 Some and maybe lots of scientists seem to think this way. I cited above Bronowski on The Double Helix, where the plot turned on guessing ‘the magic riddle correctly’. Many scientists’ conception of their ‘work’ seems to reduce to 4XGillispie (1960), 73. 85, 133, 338, 413, 423, 521. ““Ihic~.. 4143, 58, 63, 73, 81, 10607, 141, 156, 197-201, 261. ‘“Bottigheimer (1987), esp. Chap. 12; ‘Rumpelstilzchen’ is in Grimm “On the above, cf. Frye (1957), 81. 280, 300; Propp (1927). 60.

and Grimm

(1949), 314-I 7.

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ritual-games, tests, trials, riddle- and puzzle-solving-which as sacred activity, though involving application, along with a little luck and some genius, is not at all like profane work. Good sociology of science, such as by Knorr-Cetina and Latour and Woolgar, does not reduce science to puzzle-solving and other ritualized actions, but rather integrates it with means of production and work.52 Yet many scientists seem to take no joy in this depiction their life. If the office of historians of science, as opposed to that of sociologists, is a mimesis of scientists’ self-consciousness, then romance must be history’s proper genre for science. Though many apply themselves, there is little work done in EO, which reverberates in the absence of money. In epic romance, since no one really ever works, money takes on a paradoxical form: things either cost a fortune or are free, so are in any case price-less. ‘No one in a romance, Don Quixote protests, ever asks who pays for the hero’s accommodation’ (Frye, 1957,223). Historians casting a romance for science will find the mention of money in prices out of place: in good science things like ideas should be priceless. The money-work motif or its absence is, moreover, a way in which scene and plot correlate in narrative. The absence of work is related to the neo-aristocracy fashioned for EO’s agents. The non-monastic, aristocratic tradition of liberal arts and the contemplative life has long been antithetical to manual arts and labors. Pascal’s brother-in-law carries a barometer to the top of Puy-de-Dome; about the air-pump, one feels the spring of’ the air when one ‘pumps a tire by hand’; and Fresnel makes due at first with ‘homemade apparatus’ (Gillispie, 1960, 102, 105, 423). Otherwise little sense of a material basis or the work of science emerges in EO. Profane work is contrasted with science, where one loses oneself and with which one is in love (cf. ibid., 437). Newton’s nervous collapse, Mayer’s mental breakdown, and prostration by Faraday and Darwin get noted (ibid., 139, 375, 450-51) but illness like vacation is part of work’s obverse. Opening EO’s Chapter 4 elliptically, the citation from Wordsworth is key to the plot too: Newton is ‘for ever voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’. The radical of the romantic mythos is adventure, here as the solitary Socratic mind in quest. Let’s consider briefly the chapters as episodes. The first chapter sets out the epic, pitting Galileo against Kepler. After this, most chapters don’t set heroes against villains. Chapters center on French or British figures, with one at stagecenter, or with a few as rivals. Newton and Darwin merit the only chapters centered on one figure. The chapter on Lavoisier bookends him with Priestly and Dalton. Lamarck and Cuvier, one sort of descending into the Teutonic underworld and one ascending from it, form a good chapter. Young and “See Knorr-Cetina (1991); and, Latour and Woolgar (1979). Given the analysis below, one might say, however, that sociology simply deploys many aspects of the rhetoric of realism, such as ‘work’.

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Fresnel begin the best chapter on folk rivalry, while that on Descartes and Boyle works less well. EO’s least successful chapters, narratologically, are ‘Art, Life, and Experiment’ and ‘Science and the Enlightenment’, and it is in these where no hero of the first rank, other than Bacon, can be found; moreover, it is here where one has the feeling that desire to hll in the story or chronicle from Galileo to Einstein gets in the way of the plot, that is, the quest for the classical in the advancing edge of objectivity. In the last named chapter, however, we do meet Goethe, the central aluzon. EO’s antepenultimate and penultimate chapters point to the quest’s end. The antepenultimate chapter is on energetics. It begins with Carnot and Joule, but moves to three Germans who steal the stage, beckoning to the end of the classical. The penultimate chapter on fields opens with the Young-Fresnel rivalry, consummated in the ‘marriage’ of Faraday to Maxwell, whose daemon promises to save classical science from the ‘Schwiirmerei of energetics’, by blocking ‘the escape from mechanics into energetics’ (ibid., 487). ‘The hunt is normally a image of the masculine erotic . . . The consummation of the hunt is the death of the animal’ (Frye, 1976, 104, 105). This is one way in which eras and thanatos join in romance. In the quest of objectivity or the ‘classical’, EO’s mythos or master plot hurtle toward the death of the hunted object in the antepenultimate chapter where Germans upstage the two heroic folks. The quest is redeemed in the penultimate chapter, centered on a Frenchman and three Britishmen. ‘The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest . . .’ (id., 1957, 187). EO emplots a complete romance and, as epic on the grandest scale, plots its own unraveling. Time in epic romance is often circular, curved back upon itself. ‘mhe quest romance takes on a spiral form, a open circle’, and in some romances the ‘past becomes the mirror of the future’, constituting ‘a present where past and future are gathered’ (id., 1976, 174, 177, 179). That gives historical romance part of its so-called whiggishness. EO’s last chapter is about Einstein, who appeared in its first chapter, ‘Full Circle’. In romance’s curved space-time, EO gathers past, present and future. At the birth of classical science with Galileo, Archimedes’s lost son, also appeared Einstein, who heralds its death at inception. Luck may rule but destiny ends EO. Facing ‘the vast impersonality of nature . . ., the loneliness of a Greek tragedy . . .’ (Gillispie, 1960, 520) Einstein consummates the quest of the classical in death. We have noticed the proximity at a distance of myth-romance and satire-irony. On plot it will be the same. Epic romance, per Aristotle, must be ‘polymythic’, composed of several plots which need be woven into a single even if loose fabric. Good epic thus needs a master plot to keep it from falling to fragments. ‘As structure, the central principle of ironic [and satiric] myth is best approached as a parody of romance’ (Frye, 1957, 223). For a satiric-ironic plot, episodes may be formed for which a master

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plot may be satirized or ironized: falling to fragments may become the master plot of a satire. ‘The romantic hation which revolves around the beauty of perfect form . . . is also a logical target for satire. The word satire is said to come from safura, or hash, and a kind of parody of form seems to run all through its tradition . . . This technique of disintegration brings us well into the third phase of satire . . .’ (ibid., 233-34). I have not followed Frye in his analyses of genre by phases, and shall not do so now, as his symmetry is at times too fearful, even for me. PV is, however, about disintegration of plots. Here it follows the fundamental trope of satire, which is irony. ‘This plot is, of course, like all history of science, a fictional reconstruction of the twinned productions of science and politics’ (Haraway, 1989, 197). When it says ‘history of science’, PV may mean its contents, but no doubt also itself. As ironic satire, PV speaks in two registers: about its story and about its own story-telling or emplotment. Disintegration of story fills both levels, and is tied to disintegration of the social as basic theme. The little plots of popular knowledge, such as told by National Geographic on television, and the Master Narratives in society, such as the ‘Progress of (Western) Science’, PV links: ‘Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice . . . So in part, Primate Visions reads the primate text as science fiction . . .’ (ibid., 4, 5). Given a role for narrative, d la Lyotard, in forming the social bond, the disintegration of plots correlates with disintegration of the social in PV. One sees again the proximity at a distance of romance and satire. Romance suppresses recognition of the social, disintegrating society in favor of a round table of sort of noble, somewhat lucky and perhaps ingenious heroes who hunt and quest but do no work, while satire, as romance’s inverted world, may make fragmentation of the social a master plot. PV is polymythic and, abiding in life-sciences, picks up chronologically where EO ended. PV’s first two parts have nine chapters. Part 1 is set before World War II, which means in PV the state of things by the turn of the century; Part 2 begins after World War II. The first chapters of Parts 1 and 2 serve as points of departure for primatology. Of seven remaining chapters in Parts 1 and 2, five center on white western males: Akeley, Yerkes, Carpenter and S. A. Altmann, Washburn, and Harlow. The last chapter of Part 2 is a transition to Part 3, and focuses on primatology and politics in Japan, India and Africa. The remaining chapter of Parts 1 and 2 is ‘Apes in Eden, Apes in Space’, which is devoted in good part to Goodall. Fragmentation of white, western, male science of nature, culture and self is the master plot of Parts 1 and 2. Part 3, along with a sort of prologue and epilogue, concerns four post-war female primatologists: J. Altmann, Fedigan, Zihhnan, Hrdy. ‘The radical of satire, as Lucian established long ago, is a descent narrative, where we enter a lower world which reveals the sources of human absurdity and

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folly’ (Frye, 1976, 120). With such a descent narrative, PV begins its plot with Dr. Akeley, the alazon whom we met above as Big Game Hunter and Taxidermist. The descent takes us to a mythical world called ‘Africa’, constructed mostly by white, western males. This ‘Africa’ is the underworld of romance, a nature without culture, but where western heroes can unveil the origins of ‘Man’ or their self. Akeley’s quest takes shape as the hunt, moving ‘Man the Hunter’ to stagecenter of PV’s first two parts (cf. Haraway, 1989,28). Engaged in an erotic ritual entailing death for the animal, Man the Hunter returns from the African underworld with his catch to the New World’s Central Park, a ‘Garden of Eden’, with the American Museum of Natural History. Akeley’s taxidermic science dedicates itself to ‘the prevention of decadence, of biological decay’ (ibid., 34). Akeley has fears, eugenic and otherwise, about the decay of society. His taxidermy and ‘African Hall’ are eugenic story-telling practices for conserving male culture of self, with Man the Hunter as social bond (cf. ibid., 26-27,4142,46, 54-55, 58). Akeley’s dream, African Hall, and its simulacra open a descent narrative from which Parts 1 and 2 ascend, from blindess to insight. ‘The willed blindness of the white lover of nature remained characteristic of the scientists who went to the Garden to study primates, to study origins, until cracks began to show in this consciousness around 1970’ (ibid., 54).

The remaining four chapters centered on males, in Parts 1 and 2, deal with modulations of African Hall, as fields, parks, and labs. Each tells an absurd or grotesque tale of community and humanity, of nature and culture, seen by these scientists. The tale of Yerkes follows Akeley’s. ‘Yerkes loved chimpanzees . . . This love was intrinsically bound up with power: the colonizing logic of paternalistic domination . . . pervaded every level of Yerkes’s science . . . This domination stood as the foundation of rational cooperative society, of adult love’ (ibid., 63). The Carpenter-Altmann tale shows emergence of life science as ‘a cybernetic technological functionalism’, ultimately ‘a science of control’, as the prehistory of sociobiology, whose roots and tropes are military (ibid., 84,98, 110-l 1). Amongst males, Washburn receives most sympathetic treatment, while Harlow, as seen, embodies the demonic epiphany of the satire, after which the white-male master plot dissolves in the final chapter of Part 2. Washburn’s tale completes the transit from Akeley, for Washburn’s ‘hunting hypothesis’ makes Akeley’s persona into the first ‘Man’ (cf. ibid., 187). Washburn’s and his colleagues’ science, while rid of the grotesque in Akeley’s, ends up absurd by constructing humanity and ‘The First Family’ on the basis of a western, middle-class view of the family, ruled by Man the Hunter, a male with weapons. ‘This is the key mythic element of evolutionary scientific humanism. In this framework, culture means first of all tools’ (ibid., 208, cf. 192-93, 196, 201, 207, 211-17). We move from Akeley as Dr. Frankenstein to Prometheus. Washburn’s project of UNESCO Man dissolved by the 1970s in part thanks to

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the rise of sociobiology, where ‘universal man looked more like yuppies of both sexes’, who maximize fitness strategies and cost benefit analyses. From the Washburn camp, ‘Woman the Gatherer’, conceived by Zihlman and Tanner, contested the Promethean status of Man the Hunter. Woman the Gatherer is a legitimate critique of Washburn’s universal Man, but is herself no less science-fiction (ibid., 229; also 127-28, 215-17, 228-29). With Harlow’s tale we pass back through the looking-glass, where Harlow reincarnates Akeley as Dr. Frankenstein. Western primatology ends up with Harlow’s gang, in all nuances, a sadistic joke (ibid., 242-43). ‘Irony is consistent both with complete realism of content and with the suppression of attitude on the part of the author. Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque . . .’ (Frye, 1957, 224). One can say further that satiric modes are appropriate for political targets, or for things open to change. Ironic modes may also involve fantasy, but the subject is sooner metaphysical or anthropological than political, that is, of things absurd but not open to change. 53 Gulliver’s Travels helps here, as its first three parts are satiric, while the fourth part is sooner ironic. In Parts 1 to 2, Gulliver winds up in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and in Part 3 from Laputa to Japan. In the first three of these lands he meets hominoid beings who satirize European politics, science, and culture; but, Part 4 cannot be read in a satiric mode. Part 4’s horse society of Houyhnhnms does not satirize a human utopia as dystopia in the manner of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Nor is this an animal fable. The Houyhnhnms are simply a society of intelligent non-humans, here horses, whom it would make little sense to satirize. The Houyhnhnms, who educate males and females equally, embody a supposed sub-human species achieving a socio-cultural order superior to the human. That is the first irony. The second irony is that this horse society rests on exploitation of hominoid Yahoos, whom Houyhnhnms even consider exterminating. Houyhnhnms, moreover, practice eugenics by breeding a ‘colored’ race of horses as their servants.54 Sooner anthropologico-metaphysical than political, the irony here is that society seems perforce, even as utopia, to entail domination and prejudice. The reader may contest Swift’s vision of the absurdity of the social. The point is, however, to see how in the genre of satire a narrative may suddenly shift into rather more ironic modes. PV is satiric in most of Parts 1 to 2, switches toward the ironic in the last chapter of Part 2, and continues in an ironic mode in Part 3, becoming mythic-ironic in the ultimate chapter. This shift from satiric to ironic modes must underlie the thick-headed description of PV as whiggish: one reader senses the lack of satiric modes in the book’s last third, but misses the irony, so reads a romance of non-westerners and females. As targets of most of Parts 1 and 2, “See Mutxke (1966), and Highet (1962). 54See Swift (1726), 276, 31621, 330.

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we have white, western males, aided and abetted by some females, who together construct a racist and masculinist vision of society, humans and other primates. They constitute appropriate subjects for satire since their errors are political, so remediable. The shift to irony signals that the remaining problems may not be amenable to solution in the same way: letting outsiders in brings no utopia. Like the Houyhnhms, we may just invert the Master-Servant relation. ‘Perhaps the chief lesson of Japanese primates for feminist theories of science is that living in the “East’‘-no matter whether that place is found . . . in the right half of the brain, in the Sacred Hills of Dakota, in mothering before or beyond patriarchy, or on Koshima Island in a matrilineal Macaca fuscata colony-is no solution for living in the “West” ’ (Haraway, 1989, 258). So the last chapter of Part 2, ‘The Biopolitics of a Multicultural Field’, helps point the way into Part 3, ‘The Politics of Being Female’, where neither an ‘East’ nor an amazonian utopia replaces the alazonian. The chapter opening Part 3, ‘Women’s Place is in the Jungle’, tells you that irony fills Part 3 (cf. ibid., 279980). Reconstruction of primatology came from women, but here femininity is not re-romanticized as charisma; it is politicized and historicized and further problematized. In the ironic mode, Part 3 concerns Jeanne Altmann, Linda Fedigan, Adrienne Zihhnan, and Sarah Hrdy, ending in a final chapter returning to the theme of science-fiction. The women here do not form a new round table. They rather ‘destabilize a story field’, as does PV, by restructuring the field of stories, where ‘new dominations are possible, but so might be something else’ (ibid., 303; cf. 350). Destabilization is the first irony, since the narrative techniques of the women end up problematizing narrative techniques in their science, so too then its methods of social bonding. The second irony lies in PV’s voice, distancing itself from three of the four women. Altmann works as feminist but, unlike PV, insists this doesn’t entail putting politics into science (ibid., 309-10). Zihlman’s Woman the Gatherer may be an irony of Man the Hunter, but is ‘in the universalizing humanist lineage of western origin stories, which have been so much a part of colonial discourse’ (ibid., 347). And Hrdy ‘counts herself an unrepentant sociobiologist’, like a good yuppie. Hrdy and sociobiologists ‘have perhaps lacked a sense of irony about their own narrative resources’ (ibid., 350, 366; also 229, 353, 358-59). ‘One story is not as good as another’ and it is Fedigan’s which PV shows as best. But Fedigan’s tale is recounted neither as origin nor as telos nor as romance in a matriline of tales on founding mothers (cf. ibid., 326). ‘ “I well remember my dismay when, having put many hours of effort into learning to identify the individual female monkeys of a large group, my ability was dismissed as being inherent in my sex, by a respected and senior male colleague”,’ says Fedigan (in ibid., 316). PV’s women work. ‘Delia’s readers discover Carl frequently sick in his tent . . . while the courageous wife hunts not

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only for food for the entire camp, but also for scientific specimens . . .’ (ibid., 50). Hunting here hasn’t the romantic resonance of the male erotic, is not sacred play. Carl engages in the ritualized behavior of a male scientist, protracted illness and all, while Delia’s profane labor feeds the camp and does his job. Altmann’ s experience as a woman in science, ‘dual career mothering’, lead her to the metaphor of the budget in analyzing mothering amongst primates (ibid., 3 13-14). The primates here will not have their lives cast into ritual by a scientist unable to see hers so. ‘Man the Hunter’ appears as the final scientific fantasy, the romance and ritual of scientific self-consciousness displaced into its own objects. Woman the Gatherer transposes ritual to work. PV is no romance of women in science. That is why Goodall is no heroine. Goodall, with Fossey and Galdikas, collaborate in their romanticization by National Geographic and others. But PV is itself in the end of two minds about work and play, its final irony. For in moving from the rituals of Man the Hunter to the work of Woman the Gatherer, we would trade romance for ‘realism’. Woman the Gatherer is albeit female but still science-fiction from the field. ‘ “She laughed bitterly” ‘. Though in contrary ways, romance and satire tend to involve disintegration of the social, which in satire may go so far as disintegration of plot. Tragedy and comedy are about social integration, likewise in contrary ways. Fate hangs over tragic plot, as fortune over comic. These condition the time orders in each, and help explain why LAP’s tragic emplotment may cause it to be read as whig history, while GDC’s comic emplotment seems to redeem it of this charge. One of the central theses of my essay is that the enjoimnent not to write whig history has pushed emplotment in histories of science from romance toward comedy, for ‘. . . in striking contrast to tragedy, there can hardly be such a thing as inevitable comedy . . .’ (Frye, 1957, 170). In comedy we know the ending will be happy, but aren’t sure how, especially when the to-be-defeated figures get equal treatment, so it isn’t clear which is eiron and which alazon. Comedy thus postpones as long as possible the precise features of the happy ending. As opposed to this teasing deception, bound to comedy’s erotic nature, ‘tragedy seldom conceals anything essential from audience or reader’ (id., 1976,66). One knows usually who the tragic figure is and, given the genre, what his or her end must be (id., 1957, 211). Tragic plot is ‘suspense’, as agents’ roles and end are clear but suspended in the space of the tale; comic plot is ‘mystery’, since agents’ roles and end are unclearly wrapped in the time of the tale. The primary motif of tragedy is a mimesis of sacrifice, as a body is offered, literally or not, for the sake of social integration. The primary motif of comedy is a mimesis of festivity, especially of marriage, as bodies unite, literally or not, for the sake of social integration. ‘Shakespearean comedy may marry off eight or ten people of approximately equal dramatic interest, just as high mimetic tragedy may kill the same number. . .’ (ibid., 44). Bound with metonymy,

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necessity, fate and death, tragedy has scenic ties with mechanical instruments; bound to synecdoche, accidents, fortune and eros, comedy shows scenic attachment to organic forms (cf. ibid., 60) .55 The dramas have oppositely inclined social ends: there is ‘a “comic” tendency to integrate the hero with his society’ versus ‘a “tragic” tendency to isolate him’ (ibid., 54). Tragedy’s metonymic focus may displace death into law, as judicial sentence, an anti-hero’s doom; comedy’s synecdochic view may make desire into money, as social exchange, a hero’s pact. Comedy is thus of the social, while tragedy more the legal (cf. ibid., 4344, 163-69, 208-12; id., 1976, 149, 171). But tragedy and comedy both deploy the rhetoric of the courtroom. This is clear for tragedy, as was seen under ‘voice’; and, the ‘resemblance of the rhetoric of comedy to the rhetoric of jurisprudence has been recognized from the earliest times’ (id., 1957, 166). Tragedy and comedy both concern social integration by case, trial, suit and court. Tragedy is of legal space as public, the suit as spectacle, the temple as place of sacrifice or doom. Comedy is of social space as private, the court as domestic festival, the temple as place of marriage or contract. Tragedy may contain reversals and the like; but, this must not be confused with the complicated plots full of suprises more typical of comedy (cf. ibid., 170; id., 1976, 68). As one moves into realism, centered in comedy but able to color other genres, and especially in the novel, the plot may get full of details, of which the Modern Era made a fetish. Drifting from comic to romantic emplotment, the novels of Jules Verne, for instance, are full of details-the weight of the Nautilus, its longitude and latitude at various times, and so on-which effect a nuance of realism or science-fiction. Barthes argued that this penchant for plotting gratuitous detail embodies part of the ‘effet du reel’, the rhetoric of realism, and is a principal technique to make the (hi)story seem unplotted: gratuitous detail is the secret shibboleth of realism in history and the novel. The same fetish for detail arises in the detective novel, ‘in the sharpening of attention to details that makes the dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living leap into mysterious and fateful significance’ (Frye, 1957, 46). The detective novel, like science-fiction, has comic emplotment drifting to romantic, returning to the male erotic of the hunt. The historian as ‘detective’ indicates a romantic nuance in low mimetic. Plot becomes realistic by emphasizing, not erotic rituals like the hunt, but rather manual work. Gardens and parks give way to ‘the painful labor of the man with the hoe’ (Frye, 1957, 155) or the physicist with the air-pump, or the geologist with the field-hammer.56 55Cf. White (1973) 29, and id. (1978), 70, 128. s6Realism is too big a topic for adequate analysis in this essay. On realism generally, including in the novel, see Barthes (1984) 179987; Frye (1976) Chap. 2; Auerbach (1946), passim; Booth (1961) 23-64; Watt (1957), 9-34, 101, 153, 155, 193; de Certeau (1975) 5456, 112. On the ‘new realism’, Robbe-Grillet (1961) 13536, 140. On gratuitous detail in science cf. Myers (1988) 23449. On historians as detectives cf. Ginzburg (1989) 96125.

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Racine’s At/z&e is a model for LAP’s plot. Athalie takes place wholly in the Jerusalem temple. The opening character in Act 1, Scene 1, proclaims Athalie has brought Baa1 (a leviathan) to Israel and defiled the temple. Her theologically monstrous act notwithstanding, Athalie claims justification from heaven, and achieves political security for Israel. 57 She is therefore not a romantic but rather a tragic alazon. Like many tragic figures, she is plagued by ghosts as bad dreams (this being one of the great resonances of the mythic-romantic world in tragedy), and these move her toward the pathetic. The high priest seeks to restore Mosaic law by forming a new covenant with the Levites. Resolution comes in rallying the Levites to cast Athalie from the temple, led to her death by the sacred avenger, as announced by the high priest. Jerusalem freed from the monster, Levites become guardians of the temple. Other than this, not much else happens in the story, whose plot is largely psychological defeat of the leviathan and formation of a chorus restoring the Mosaic law and temple. LAP’s dedication page sports two quotations. One says, What a blessing to mankind, in himself and in his writings, was the ingenious, humble, and pious Mr. Boyle; what a common pest to society was the fallacious, proud, and impious Hobbes! Accordingly we find the former bad adieu to this world with the utmost serenity, honour, and hope; while the other went out of it in the dark, with an odium on his name, as well as with terrible apprehensions of an unknown future (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, iv). This sets the tale as a tragedy

from the outset. It casts Hobbes and Boyle into

two archetypal tragic roles. Hobbes is Athalie, and Leviathan the Baa1 he introduces to Albion’s shores. Boyle is the high priest, around whom the society that emerges from the tragic action, the Royal Society as Levites, collects in the laboratory as new temple. Like Athalie, the action in LAP ties political, theological and metaphysical themes together, here with science too. In LAP, the philosopher’s mind, as the ‘overworld’ from Plato to Hobbes, falls onto the experimental stage as new global theater of science. Boyle sees his party as ‘ “priests of nature” ‘, whose ‘doctrines could be traced back to Moses’ (ibid., 319). Hobbes must be cast out from their new temple. His exclusion from the Royal Society is no small matter of simply being a ‘club bore’, which would lead to comic emplotment; the exclusion of pathetic Hobbes is central (ibid., 131-39). Instead of a comedy of Boyle wooing the Royal Society, LAP’s excluded Hobbes, who turns out to have been right after all, is what makes this a tragedy about an isolated philosopher against the superior society that Boyle bodes. A metonymy of place grounds Boyle’s new practice. The experimental philosophy is founded in groups whose primary index is spatial locality. Groups are defined by scenes as sites, and agents are set there in laboratories, save “Racine (1965), II, 331 = Act II, Scene V. After I suggested the similarities of Athalie with LAP to Simon Schaffer, he proved more adept than I at seeing them; moreover, he made the fascinating observation that while writing his part of LAP he had done a close reading of Lucien Goldman’s Le dieu cache.

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Huygens who wanders. Translocality as ‘publicity’ arises, as seen, through literary technologies for virtual witnessing. Translocalization of the experimental facts depends, however, upon actual transport of agents and/or instruments to sites, the calibration of ‘men and machines’ (ibid., 226, 235,262, 281). To know means to be in a place. Along with metonymy of place, and also apropros of high mimetic decorum, a hyperrealism figures instruments, as seen. LAP goes into detail on air-pumps, their expense, and how hard to operate they were (ibid., 38-39, and esp. Chap. 6). The air-pump in schematic sections pervades the text. LAP contrasts two illustrations from a work by Guericke. We see, first, two men underground and working a pump. This is opposed to a second picture above ground in a baroque chamber, where angels operate the pump, while gentlemen look on (ibid., 279, 335). But it is not work and labor that Boyle and his society stress. They plot the creation of a new moral community and economy. They are against sects in science. Boyle wants autonomy from theology for experimental philosophy (ibid., 215-17). But by this new moral order they mean mostly new sorts of rituals. Conversation, as opposed to dialectics, is the new scientific life. Civility and manners in dispute, Boyle speaks much about (ibid., 69, 72-79, 14344, 177-8, 213-15, 298). The old aristocracy of arms and agonistics is transmuting here into the new aristocracy of money and manners. Law, though called ‘public’, remains under a neo-aristocracy, namely, those who can afford and are allowed in the experimental community. Boyle plays at once an innovator and renovator. Boyle’s notion of expertise would create the experimental community as new elite priesthood, presiding with proper manners and money (ibid., 307, 319). ‘Hobbes’s criticism was that no matter of fact made by an experiment was indefeasible, since it was always possible to display the labour expended on making it and so give a rival account of the matter of fact itself. The decision to display or to mask that labour was a decision to destroy or to protect a form of life’ (ibid., 282). Hobbes is the first sociologist of knowledge, though he formulates this doctrine as its own refutation. It is Hobbes who points out the work in Boyle’s practice, and it is Hobbes who argues the laboratory is not a public space (ibid., 22, 113, 225). Hobbes’s eludication of the labor and negotiation entailed by the air-pump shows that ‘experimental philosophy’ is an oxymoron. In Dialogus physicus Hobbes argues that Boyle’s machinemade technical knowledge cannot identify true causes, which is the goal of (Aristotelian) theoretical knowledge or philosophy (cf. ibid., 14243). In place of Boyle’s trope, Hobbes pleads for traditional natural and civil philosophy, metaphysics and demonstration by geometrical proof (ibid., 80-81, 100). The rupture in history here allows Hobbes to see the world of profane work and politics in which Boyle’s science is conceived, but which will be veiled by Boyle and his chorus, to allow a neo-aristocratic ritualized play of experimentation as puzzle-solving. What results from Boyle’s experimental life and royal society is

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the romantic world of modem scientists. As tragedy, LAP unveils the transit between the end of one aristocratic life-form, preached by Hobbes, and the birth of another, advocated by Boyle. LAP shows, in short, how romance was kidnapped. Hobbes is right about what Boyle’s new covenant and temple entail, but wrong for rejecting them. That is why he is a tragic figure. The Royal Society as tragic chorus embodies the proper moral judgment, even if it connives in kidnapping romance for modem scientists. All this is why LAP is a tragedy, and sooner epic than pathetic. I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a little boy indeed, I used to read Dickens all the time. But now I recall little. Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, Our Mutual Friend, none of these, all of these and more, GDC remains the Dickensonian comedy in the history of science. ‘What normally happens [in comedy] is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will’ (Frye, 1957, 163). Comedies of the scientific sort, like many of the Dickensonian, tend to displace such erotic triangles, for science stories have not usually had women in chief roles. Work in gender studies points the way here. Sedgwick has discussed points made by Girard about erotic triangles in ‘the male-centered novelistic tradition of European high culture’. Girard found that in the typical triangle, where two males sue for a woman’s hand, the woman served often as mediator for an agonistic-erotic relation between the two men. In her book, Sedgwick extends these insights to study male-bonding as ‘homosocial male desire’, erotic while not necessarily sexual, in a culture that is homophobic and misogynist: feminine figures are used as objects to mediate homosocial male relations because the culture is misogynist and homophobic.58 Sedgwick wrote on English literature, but her points carry over, not only to the male-centered novelistic tradition of European high culture, but also to the same tradition of historical writing on science. Tragedy takes the theme of thanatos from romance, while comedy takes eras, more central to it than humor. Comic emplotment in the history of most science entails displaced erotic triangles, as there were few women and male-bonding couldn’t be seen as erotic. ‘The presiding genius of comedy is Eros, and Eros has to adapt himself to the moral facts of society’ (ibid., 181). GDC is a tour de force on non-sexual, homosocial male-bonding in comically normal science. GDC’s triangle does not have a blocking-father for, as seen, it is a rival-suitor comedy. Bourgeois values hold sway over our two leads, Murchison and De la Beche, both heterosexuals and happily married. Though they spend a lot of time traveling with men, there’s no funny stuff going on. And s8See Sedgwick

(1985), esp. 21; see also Clark

(1993).

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it is not each other’s wives they covet. The object of suit lies in the society of straightmen or male chorus characters who embody the displaced feminine or mediating figure in the erotic triangle. The comedy opens with a Pickwickian squabble about recognizing a rustic father, Smith, as outsider. Sedgwick, head of the family as Geological Society, begins the plot by publicly recognizing Smith’s paternity, giving him a medal, but thereby much angering Greenough, the society’s first head, who himself expected the medal. This act may have arisen due to Murchison, next scheduled head of the society (Rudwick, 1985, 63-67). With a rival-suitor dynamic, GDC can only be a comedy if it keeps you guessing, at least for a good part of the story, who the eiron or winning suitor will be. As seen, comedy often even focuses on the losing suitor, and it is De la Beche who seems at first the clear better of the two (cf. ibid., 125). Amazing about GDC is its ability to depict male homosocial bonding in normal science as agonistic-erotic, while not using misogynist or homophobic rhetoric and figures. The male eros permeating this comedy is announced on the book’s cover, also as figure 5.4 in greater detail (ibid., 104). GDC calls attention to the rhetoric of social class in the drawing. On the right stand Lyell, Murchison and part of the chorus. Not only attired as ‘gentle-men’, their posture, above all of the leading man, says ‘potent men’. Alone on the left, De la Beche, dressed as manual worker and taking a step in retreat, also points to his phallic nose, denied as existing by the chorus. Worse than De la Beche, Austen has castration fantasies bordering on being ‘ “swallowed whole and digested” by the metropolitan geologists; “as you know”, he had commented ruefully to De la Beche, “Sedgwick has a most voracious appetite and Murchison great powers of assimilation” ’ (ibid., 288; cf. also 298). But the plot revolves mostly around mundane motifs of male-bonding. The chief dynamic consists in Murchison and De la Beche courting older men, Greenough and Sedgwick, and so laying claims to leader of the pack. Murchison sees himself against an older set led by Greenough (ibid., 69). De la Beche at first sees both elders, Greenough and Sedgwick, as patrons, sending his caricature of the Geological Society to both (ibid., 104). Thereafter, GDC lays out the shifting alliances. De la Beche tries to win over Murchison ‘by detaching him from his alliance with Lyell’, while Murchison plots ‘to detach De la Beche from his London champion’, Greenough (ibid., 112). At first a peacemaker, Sedgwick emerges as key object of the suit, as Murchison seeks to woo him from De la Beche. Murchison finds himself rebuffed not only by Buckland, but also by Sedgwick, who indicates that Murchison should stay away from his turf (ibid., 108, 114, 128-29). After a meeting in Ireland, Murchison convinces Sedgwick to spend part of summer 1836 geologizing with him, such outdoor experiences a key to male-bonding. Coneybeare, who at at first demurred in traveling with Murchison, also soon drifts from De la Beche (ibid., 14243, 150, 167). By early 1837 Sedgwick is very critical of De la Beche, his former favorite, and

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succeeding events show the chorus lining up behind Murchison. De la Beche, still with Greenough on his side, seeks to regain Sedgwick in spring 1837 by detaching him from Murchison, but in vain (ibid., 195, 208-09). Indeed, in January 1837 De la Beche, alone with geologically insignificant mice as chorus, had penned a self-portrait in Cornwall, while Murchison and Sedgwick courted their chorus in London. De la Beche loses but, as comedy aims for a happy ending, he keeps his job and gets knighted (ibid., 182, 390). ‘And They Lived Happily Ever After’ (ibid., 457). As GDC points out, the rhetoric of male suitors here was displaced and self-analysed into the rhetoric of the trial and courtroom (ibid., 456). As LAP concerns the tragic male-birth of ‘gentlemen of science’, GDC concerns their comic conservation amidst controversy in the brood. Though depicted as ‘agonistic field’, good science here has to do with preserving gentlemanly civility, that is, low mimetic decorum (cf. ibid., 17-18, 107-13, 168-69, 287, 440-45). As LAP treats of the revolution leading to modern rituals for normal science, GDC shows how such rituals of conversation, puzzle-solving and the like hold up in the stress of controversy. Apropos to comic emplotment, the story aims at ‘creating a consensus’ (ibid., Chap. 13) in which even the losing suitor may have a place. The schematic chart of the Devonian controversy (ibid., 412-l 3) is a schematization of comic plot per se: it shows the convergence and integration of a social group around a central figure, Murchison, with his rival suitor, De la Beche, forming one extreme of the new society, outside of which two provincial figures lie. As noted above, other elements of low mimetic decorum run through the plot as scene. Money and coal rule the plot fecundly if not faecally.59 Though a gentleman, De la Beche figures manual labor (ibid., 38-39, 104). He seems the only character conscious of the role of work in science, which makes him, like Hobbes, the more fitting an antagonist for modern science. As GDC points out, though geology was ‘time-consuming work’, most geologists acted out ‘the romance of fieldwork’ (ibid., 37-41). And this seems above all a summer romance. From the hyperrealism of the lab we move to the romantic realism of the field. Middle-class recreation, tourism, hovers off stage throughout, with Murchison as a failed soldier become world-class tourist. Waiting in the wings to explain such ‘tourism’ as colonialism and imperialism is, of course, PV. End ‘The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand, I suggest, for a moral meaning . . . [O]nly a moral authority could justify the turn in the 5”Cf. Sedgwick equation or ‘piles’. is repugnance and genital desire into

(1985) Chap. 9, on the anal motif in Our Mutual Friend, as the filth-lucre While eras may be displaced into money in straight comedy, satire, whose motif not desire, may make, a la Freud, money into shit, moving, so to say, comic satiric anal jokes: satire’s humor, unlike comedy’s comes from the bowels.

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narrative which permits it to come to an end.60 ‘End’ is not here set as the resolution of the plot, though it is tied to it. Nor is end, though related to it, identified with a moral of the story or an anagogy of the plot. Nor is end, finally, equated with the poetic audience, even though it is bound to it. ‘End’ will be here taken as a moral authority or, rather, an envisaged moral order legitimating that such-and-such story appear with such-and-such a plot. It is an element mediating plot and audience. End is not why the author wrote this story for its readers; it is, rather, what legitimates the poetic voice to cast this plot for its audience. Following White, this essay takes end to be a view of social and moral order and, without negative nuances, also called ‘ideology’. The ideological moment of historical writing seems a commonplace for the critic. ‘Historians do not tell the truth. They tell parts of the truth, selected and arranged by their own emotions, ignorance, or moral and political bias. Historical narratives, being usually solemn, can be classified with sermons, fiction, and propaganda’.61 Against the historian who believes in stories without end, Levi-Strauss also objects that at the best a presumed code (or generic plot) underlies isolation of relevant facts, and at the worst a political end or ideology does.62 That is what the rhetoric against whig history is about, though in opposing the ideology of the whigs, one perhaps believed a history of science without ideology or end took its place. So in the name of realism or externalism some wrote historical comedies without realizing their end. With symmetry as fearful as Frye’s, White’s schemata have always four terms, and for end or ideology it is no different.63 White derives his four from analyses of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and, while intending generality, only applies them to nineteenth-century works. These four may not work with facility on our four chief texts, but here they are: the end of romance is anarchism; the end of tragedy is radicalism; the end of comedy is conservatism; the end of satire is liberalism. White explicates the four ends in terms of socio-historical change and of time in general. I’ll have to nuance his references to utopia, ci la Mannheim, so as to make this relevant to science, which does, however, seem to set itself in a utopian social order. Thinking about EO, LAP, GDC and PV in terms of these four ends brings striking insights, even if ultimately wanting. Radicals and anarchists envisage great and swift change as possible, while liberals and conservatives see change as much less and slower, the former speaking of progress, and the latter of evolution. Indeed, the conservative is apt to deny that the status quo really changes-generations and controversies come and go, but the more things change, the more they remain the same, and there ““White (1981), 20, 22. 61Highet (1962), 213. 62Ltvi-Strauss (1962), 30748. “‘On the above, see White (1973), 22-29;

id. (1978), 68-71

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is nothing new under the sun. For conservatives, the future is unfolding of ‘the institutional [or conceptual] structure that currently prevails . . .‘, say, in science or society, as this order is the best realistically and all others purely utopian. The liberal sees structural change as possible, but displaces it into a future continuous with the present, so that a radical break or rupture does not emerge, and utopia lies as but remote or distant ideal progressively approached. The radical sees a rupture in history at a specific point, bringing a utopian order promised by historical agents who appear as revolutionaries, be it in science or society. ‘Finally, Anarchists are inclined to idealize a remote past of naturalhuman innocence from which men have fallen into the corrupt “social” state in which they currently find themselves’. Anarchists denigrate society and favor small groups or none at all. ‘Anarchism is the ideological implication of Romanticism . . . The philosophy of history generated by the Romantic mythos does not envision that notion of a fully integrated community realizable in historical time . . . What is unique about Romanticism is its individualistic moment . . .‘64 Anarchism sets moral authority in charismatic individuals, who are, however, bound by a current social order that is no longer governed by true virtue. To make White’s Mannheimian categories applicable beyond the Modern Era, and to bring them above all into Frye’s universe of discourse, we must make the further supposition that anarchism is but one particular manifestation of the aristocratic ideology. Aristocrats admit no social order above themselves as individuals, which is why they make the best anarchists in modern times. The four ideologies or narrative ends would be then (pure or kidnapped) aristocracy or elitism for epic romance, radicalism for tragedy, conservatism for comedy, and liberalism for satire. But I want to offer four other terms now to supplement the above: Tragedy: Public

Satire: Profane

Romance: Sacred + Comedy: Private

Although I’ll also use White’s Manheimian four ideologies below, the above four seem more appropriate to a Fryean analysis of narrative in history or literature. Identification of romance with the sacred as end, and of satire with the profane as end, better illuminates the archaic nature of those two narratives, and brings the notion of ideology away from the modern sense of the merely political, and more towards the religious ci la Durkheim. In this sense we would @‘Id, (1973),22-23, no. II, 25.

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say that the end of romance is to (un)veil the sacred, which may or may not have been kidnapped, while the end of satire is to debunk the supposed sacred in the name of the profane. In the narrative clearing between the sacred and the profane emerge, along with drama and historia, the notions of the public and the private. As we’ve seen, tragedy’s scene and plot, like its end, are of public space and instruments, usually the law, which displace the sacred per se. Finally, the end or ideology of comedy is the celebration of a private sphere, be it domestic or gentlemanly, beyond the public. The special study that Frye devoted to romance was The Secular Scripture, meaning that romance is the preeminent narrative from the ‘secular’ scripture (Frye, 1957, 54-57; id., 1976). By the latter Frye means that romance, no longer mythical or religious, takes over from religion the notion of sacred motifs of which it is a ‘scripture’. A romance of science is then an implicit secular scripture of an activity rendered more or less sacred by the narrative. ‘This book is written in the conviction that it [science] is the distinctive achievement of our history, and that nothing less momentous than the preservation of our culture hangs on understanding its growth and bearing’ (Gillispie, 1960, 154). With EO we meet the Post-War secular sacralization of ‘culture’, of which science is a part. A cultural history of science, in place of a social history, so promises the sort of sacralization as end befitting kidnapped romance. Science in romance is pure, clean, ideal (as idol), removed from profane work, rendered as ritual or play or games, intellectualized and price-less, like the highest culture. EO notes the social nature of modern science with disdain: ‘worker-bees in the Baconian hive’; Baconism is ‘comfortable democratic doctrine’, popular in societies ‘which confide not it aristocracies, whether or birth or brains, but in a wisdom to be elicited from common pursuits . .’ (ibid., 75, 81; cf. 74-82, 108-09, 246). The men making science, as we’ve seen, though often embodying the spirit of a folk, act as agents alone, as prophets and orderers, sometimes with helpers. The metaphysics of the sacred, as bearing good luck and genius, correlates with the anarchistically aristocratic end of science that many practising scientists seem to hold, and which absolves them of social responsibility for their acts. For EO, however, ‘classical’ science is a utopian order set in the past. and is so not like modern science’s Baconian hive. EO’s tone of sublimity comes in part from the apocalyptic state into which it casts the current, non-classical order, where the non-western world threatens to appropriate the ultimate fruits of classical science (ibid., 8-9, 81, 115-16).65 The end of EO is the memory of the classical or Anglo-Franc0 quest of objectivity amidst the decline of Western Civilization or Culture. Say what one may against EO’s romantic end or ideology, if Durkheim is correct that the very possibility of social order requires something be sacred or “‘On anarchism

and apocalypse.

see ihid.. 22, no.

II

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untouchable, then a moment of romance seems necessary for the social bond in the scientific community itself. Romances of science, of the old aristocratic sort, readily recognizable as whig history, or of the new elitist ‘cultural history’ variety, or even some of the new feminist heroizations of women in science, would on this account fulfil a role in the stabilization of social order within science itself, or in relation to the broader society, even if the nature of the sacred varies. If histories of science find nothing sacred in it, they can at best depict a state of scientific civil war where, save for the few Machiavellian princes, life is nasty, brutish and short. Or perhaps not, if we move in the direction of tragedy . . . Tragedy belongs chiefly to . . . fifth century Athens and seventeenth century Europe Both belong to a period in social history in which an aristocracy is fast losing effective power but still retains a good deal of ideological prestige . . . It can hardly be an accident that the two great developments of tragic drama. . . were contemporary with the rise of Ionian science and of Renaissance [or Baroque] science (Frye, 1957, 37, 208).

EO and many other stories about the birth and rebirth of European science have tended to privilege those two ‘classical’ ages of tragedy. Tragedy catches the transit between the decline of an aristocracy, but before the rise of a bourgeoisie, some part of which which may recast itself as neoaristocracy. Once a tragic view has emerged, the sacred may no longer legitimately be found in charismatic persons or things, as heroes and fetishes, even if ‘cultural’. The sacred gives way in tragedy to the abstraction of public law, whose illumination is tragedy’s end. Against aristocratic tendencies to fuse the private and public, tragic end cleaves the noble’s sphere and crystallizes a public law, which is made legitimate, not by appeal to ancestry or nobility, but by appeal to nature. Thus ‘tragedy seems to lead up to an epiphany of law. . . In such a world-view nature is seen as an impersonal process which human law imitates as best it can, and this direct relation of man and natural law is in the foreground’ (ibid., 208). The tragic world-view would thus open the possibility for science as a social practice that itself essays a mimesis of nature as impersonal process-in this sense, the sacred in science is sooner public law as natural-social, not charismatic persons and powers. Given Yeats’s view that ‘tragedy is at the heart of Classical civilization, comedy at the heart of the Christian one’ (id., 1976, 90), one could see why stories of the ‘rebirth’ of science tend to fall in tragedy’s second classical age, the Renaissance or, really rather more, the Baroque, the great secularizing rupture in European history. In relation to time and order, tragedy also figures a rupture, the moment and point between incommensurables. The ideology of tragedy is so radical or revolutionary. History is not circular or spiral but rather linear and punctual. Great ruptures in history take place. This end-illumination of a scientific revolution by which public

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space and law displace the sacred or charismatic genius and luck vested in epic heroes-legitimates writing a tragic history. LAP is a radical work, though one must take this in the right way. In deployment of irony, tragedy stands second only to satire. The assessment of the utopia on this side of history may then be viewed differently by LAP’s agents and voice. The rupture in history here lies between the philosophical mind and the experimental theater. These are irreconcilable (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985,72). A transit cleaves them as great as the journey between Eden and the Promised Land. The Promised Land is where modern science abides. ‘[Hlistorians are in wide agreement in identifying Boyle as a founder of the experimental world in which scientists now live and operate’ (ibid., 5). Unlike epic romance, tragic drama reflects a past reverberating into the present, still embraced by the utopian order promised by the rupture in history. The experimental world of modern science is morally superior to Hobbes’s utopia, for the Royal Society, as tragic chorus embodying a new public sphere, sided with Boyle. To call LAP’s emplotment ‘whig history’, and intend something derogatory, is tantamount to advocating moral superiority of the social order at the opening of the Orestia over that at its end (which is the view of the anarchist). The laboratory and the apparatus of experiment and observation is, however, held by modern science as a utopia that liberates it from the ideologies of philosophical schools. So LAP is ironic tragedy, since the utopia of modern science envisaged by its agents-the laboratory as public space, and the experiment as epiphany of natural-social law-is questioned by LAP’s voice. ‘Now we live in a less certain age . . . Our society is said to be democratic, but the public cannot call to account what they cannot comprehend. A form of knowledge that is the most open in principle has become the most closed in practice. To entertain these doubts about our science is to question the constitution of our society’ (ibid., 343). So LAP’s radicalism. It is about the revolution inaugurating modernity, which it now puts in question without rendering immoral. Latour was wrong. Comedy, especially of the realistic sort so common to low mimetic literature, like the detective novel, as well as much academic history, has a conservative end. ‘There is a strongly conservative element at the core of realism, an acceptance of society in its present structure . . .’ (Frye, 1976, 164; also 138). This legitimates writing the history of a scientific controversy as a comedy. As tragedy shows an aristocratic order in question but not supplanted by a new order, comedy has a bourgeoisie, even if gentlemanly or cultured, as status quo. When of generational conflict, comedy can emplot much change, which usually, however, entails restoration of an originary order. Generations and ideas come and go, but fundamental values and methods do not. With marvelous economic rationality and stability, comedy promises much apparent change for the least real.

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The total mythos of comedy. . . has regularly. . . a ternary form: the hero’s society rebels against the society of the senex and triumphs, but the hero’s society is a Satumalia, a reversal of social standards which recalls a golden age in the past before the main action of the play begins. Thus we have a stable and harmonious order disrupted by folly, obsession, forgetfulness, ‘pride and prejudice’, . . and then restored. Often there is a benevolent grandfather, so to speak. . . (id., 1957, 171).

A controversy may question the errors of the fathers and, in the name of the grandfathers or tradition, be resolved for the greater good. Realistic comedy would seem the safest academic antidote to the romantic consciousness of the scientists. It transforms the anarchistic or solipsistic scientific fixation on the adventures of heroes into the normal team-work of modern life. Comedy achieves its happy end(ing) since the ‘social context’, as it is called, always prevails, this being the primary end of comedy or its ‘social interest’ (ibid., 43 167-68; id., 1976, 149). It comes as no surprise that the attack on whig or romantic intellectual history has produced, in effect, a whig or comic social history of science. Here one speaks of mature scientific disciplines as those with properly socialized entities-journals, societies, seminars, laboratories and so on-in which ‘paradigms’ and practices are ultimately embedded. Historians as cultural critics or social scientists have only displaced the natural scientists’ ideology with their own. Transition from romantic to comic end in historical writing on science seems bound to its professionalization, seen in terms of the Anglo-American ‘culturalist’ ideology of academia as private or social sphere, opposed to a public sphere as state or governmental. Our modernly comic social history of science works best when its end is to legitimate a social sphere for science, and for the history of science, that is not public but sooner ‘gentlemanly’ or, in a modern idiom, ‘cultural’, in the sense of a non-domestic thus public sphere, but as private or societal, in view of the state or law as public sphere. The context of comic science is part of Gesellschuft or civil society, not Staat, which may indeed enact a tragic subplot (as when the ‘state’ tries to control the outcome of the controversy or threatens to withhold the central instrument of comedy, money, and in so far as science is gendered as feminine, comic history will want to save her from being a ‘public woman’). Public law, essential emblem of the state, is not the surrogate for the sacred in comedy. As in the novel, if not money and manners, then privacy and civil society are. The end of comic (social) history of science is to legitimate science as ‘private enterprise’: a necessarily autonomous but conservatively productive part of civil society, in need of public money, but outside public law. Whereas LAP’s chorus is a ‘Royal Society’, GDC’s is not. In a few pages GDC (Rudwick, 1985, 11-14, 17) moves from reviving narrative to depicting the ‘arenas of gentlemanly debate’. Here those are mostly the Geological Society and the BAAS, since Britain is the chief scene. Science as geology, when not in the field or in correspondence, takes place in such ‘societies’ and their

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transactions and proceedings. There are also journals and magazines which, along with the former, embody the epitome of private enterprise or civil society in science. The controversy ‘goes public’ and is resolved in and by such institutions of civil society. Essentially a public fund, the state hovers in the wings in the person of De la Beche as civil servant, marked negatively so. ‘Murchison saw it as a struggle between the “individual enterprise” of independent, gentlemanly specialists like Lye11 and himself, on the one hand, and the institutional “Ordinance forces” of governmental science, on the other’ (ibid., 194) De la Beche, who might have won, but it must still have been through institutions of civil society and not of state. GDC (ibid., 456) as seen, uses the trope of the court case, central to drama, but by its story has made it clear that, befitting comedy, the controversy is resolved on the model of a civil suit, not a criminal or constitutional one: we are in the domain of ‘private’ or civil law, not ‘public’ law. Central to GDC’s story is that the resolution of the conflict came by way of specialists who are not civil servants but rather private citizens. Specialization in science is not a tragic fate brought about by state bureaucracy; it is a fortuitous effect of gentlemanly private enterprise (cf. ibid., 17-18). The essential end of satire is to debunk sacred cows, even should they assume the more modern form of a sacralized public or private sphere. Satire’s ‘genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene’ (Frye, 1957, 235). Satire speaks profanely, in the eyes of the ‘civilized’ or ‘cultured’, since it speaks in the name of those profaned by this civilization or culture. The end of satire is thus to legitimate the profaned outsider or the ‘Other’ by delegitimating the sacralizing discourse or narrative deployed by the masterful ‘Ego’. Satire has had much to do with mocking erudition and science, which may go over into generic forms walking a fine line between the satirical and the serious, such as the ‘anatomy’ or the ‘encylopaedia’, thus Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the strangest books in any language (ibid., 227-33, 308-12-and here, by implication, Frye means also to mark his Anatomy of Criticism). Though of the profane, satire does not seem perforce associated with a liberal ideology, and so White’s Mannheimian categories may fail with satire. Even without becoming mere invective, satire may offer no alternative to the secular scriptures or utopian ideologies it endeavors to profane; indeed, in the final phases of satire, traced by Frye (ibid., 237-39), utopia goes over into dystopia or nihilism. Liberalism arises in satire in so far as its end is to improve social order by the profane. PV is a liberal work because it traces progress in science growing from change in the institutions of science itself, which do not however offer a utopian order in a realizable future. As satire, PV deconstructs the dystopia of modern science, be it in the laboratory, museum or field. Women partake of primatology from Delia Akeley onward, and by Part 3 are essential individuals transforming it. But it ‘was not a natural result of their sex; it was an historical

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product of their positioning in particular cognitive and political structures of science, race, and gender’ (Haraway, 1989, 303), which structures they change. The transformation of science, which comes to fruition in the 1970s and 198Os, cannot be said to have been a revolution in social order. Though PV sees them as feminists, it is also as practicing scientists that the women alter primatology. Finally, PV’s move toward irony in Part 3 indicates that the old dystopia of science will not be a utopia in some soon promised future present. For the liberal, the future remains open; further progress is always possible; utopia but an ideal. Science with women in it is better science, but not perfect. PV is, moreover, a satire in the most essential sense since its end lies in revealing primatology as a potent source of discourse and narrative deployed to produce the profaned or Other for the ‘West’. PV calls primatology ‘simian orientalism’ (ibid., lo), using Said’s work on ‘orientalism’: the Orient or East as phantasized Other for the constitution of the ‘occidental’ self. Simian orientalism means that western primatology has been about the construction of the [occidental] self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal, the clarity of the white from the obscurity of color, the issue of man from the body of woman, the elaboration of gender from the resource of sex, the emergence of mind by the activation of body (ibid., 11).

PV speaks for these things profaned with primatology’s complicity in the name of the occidental (religious and scientific) self: nature, animal, color, woman, sex and the body. Audience

The rhetorical category of the public or reader falls to historical critique, which concerns itself with who did or did not read such-and-such texts, what they did or did not write about those texts, and so on. The historical critic’s reader or public is the correlate to the juridical author: it lives outside the work, and serves or fails to serve as the author’s critic. The subject of this section, to distinguish it, will be called poetic ‘audience’: it abides in the text and serves as a poetic voice’s correlate.66 As much as voice, audience is fictioned or fabricated in the text. A measure of text’s success consists in the extent to which an historical public identifies itself with poetic audience or, more radically, the extent to which poetic audience realizes itself as an historical public. Historically embedded in social class when we move to the public or readers, audience is a literary topos of generic values bound with ends. The public or reader need not be identical with the audience, but must rather be able to identify with or at least comprehend it. The notion of ‘audience’ brings us back to the rhetorical aspect of ‘voice’, which together embrace the four internal causes. The category ““Cf. Ray (1990). 15-17. Modern ‘reader-response’ theory is not intended here; on that, see Freund (1987): ~6 also de Man (1986), 5&72.

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of audience, as opposed to public, is not meant to sever poetics from rhetoric in this essay; rather, it’s a means, like voice, to mediate linkage to rhetoric. In the essay I have implicitly taken science as part of the mythical area of the modern world. In view of audience, the role of the modern historian, writing of Galileo or Einstein, is not dissimilar to the role of the ancient poet singing of Zeus or Achilles. ‘The central mythical area is an area of special authority, which means that people in authority take it over. It becomes the center also of education, and the literature based on it thus becomes highly allusive and erudite . .’ (Frye, 1976, 27), one of the tendencies of some histories of science. The mythical area may become, as seen, a secular scripture in a history of science. Romance, as the preeminent form drawn from the secular scripture, is favored by ‘people in authority’ to take over the mythical area formed by science in the modern world. ‘In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threat to their ascendancy’ (id., 1957, 186). When the ascendant class alters, then the conditions constituting aristocracy in an audience may need to alter, for instance, from birth to brains. ‘This is the process of what we called “kidnapping” romance, the absorbing of it into the ideology of an ascendant class’ (id., 1976, 57). Satire is the primary means to contest the central mythical area with kidnappers of romance. But by the iron laws of dialectics, the success of satire, fabricating its audience into a numerous public, enables this public to become the people in authority, as audience for whom romance may be kidnapped. In his theory of narrative genre, cited in the introduction of this essay, Aristotle had epic or romance, on the one hand, and lampoon or satire on the other, as coeval and traditional, while the internal realm of mimetic drama (tragedy and comedy) was the later phenomenon historically, perhaps dependent on certain socio-cultural developments-the division of labor and all that-which allow something like secular drama to emerge. This seems sensible since subsequent emergence of new genres also usually further articulates the internal realm between romance and satire. As applied to this section’s theme, we should say then that the audiences for romance and satire are the original and primary two. Romance’s audience desires to legitimate the people in authority, while satire’s wishes to delegitimate them. Given a Freudian ambivalence in the human psyche as basic, these antipodal audiences may be instantiated in the same readers: people in authority can be of two minds about themselves, and so take perhaps perverse delight in satires. (At the level of agents in myth and romance, this is the coexistence of the trickster or prankster alongside heroes.) Tragedy and comedy have as audiences those cast somewhere between the extremes of legitimating and delegitimating authorities. As seen, when EO speaks in the first person plural, it is of ‘our own culture’ or ‘our own world of the West’ or ‘western civilization’ (Gillispie, 1960, 8-9).

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These phrases are polemical and rhetorical. They imply an audience and its Other. While in debt to Grecian, Hebraic and Islamic cultures, the audience is essentially Christian and, mindful of the confessions and natures of the heroic folks, somewhat ecumenical and secularized (ibid., 13, 114-15). Polemical constitution of the audience as essentially the Christian West poses it in a position recalling the Middle Ages: the Other is threatening. Such a threatened audience is perfect for an epic romance of the medieval Christian sort. But, as seen, in the plot per se the underworld figures, like in The Quest of the Holy Grail, come from within the West itself: ‘Goethe was no Christian’ (ibid., 263). The audience so risks being riven by an Other within. Here emerges EO’s second polemic, which embodies an original gesture in the European tradition and whereby non-fiction imposes itself: the ‘historian’ conceives himself by casting the ‘poet’ or ‘man of letters’ as the Other. Goethe provides the transition and key here as well. In Germany, however, Goethe, the scientist, has always been taken seriously . . . It eloquently reinforced that bent [to Idealism] with the prestige of Germany’s greatest man of letters . . . Goethe’s influence may be taken as an instance . of the anxiety of cultured scientists not to be divorced from culture by their own creation of science . . Nevertheless, the historian is bound to represent this Goethean intrusion as profoundly hostile to science . (ibid., 19697). German and non-Christian, Goethe embodies the man of letters too. At the level of agents he is the Other of the good scientist, and someone whom the good historian is bound to see as hostile to science. Goethe’s double at the level of audience is Arthur Koestler: ‘It must prove very interesting to the historian of science that a leading man of letters of our own time should write upon his subject’ (ibid., 43). EO then exposits the main plot of Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, where ‘Kepler is the hero of the story’ and ‘Galileo is the villain’ (ibid., 4344). Though EO simply inverts this epic casting, it proclaims its voice as ‘historian of science’, against a man of letters whose intrusion is bound to be represented as hostile to science. The Other is, after all, the man of letters, or literature itself.6’ The ‘historian of science alludes to the interpretation [of Koestler] as an instance of the offense that science does give to the literary intelligence’ and one ‘might ponder it [this offense] amidst all the wishful slogans about some ultimate unity in science and the humanities’ (ibid., 43). Prising apart the man of science and the man of letters, EO’s voice declares itself as historian of science, denying not only the unity of science and humanities but also the unity of humanities. It calls forth or kidnaps its audience for a new order between science and humanities. The dedication page reads, ‘To the [Princeton] Undergraduates of Humanities 3041Who in 1956, 1957, and 1958 responded/with charm and forbearance/to the presentation of this history . . .’ The Historian of Science conceives itself here to kidnap an “‘This is not far-fetched:

cf. Todorov

(1971). 75-80,

on The Quest oflhe Holy Grail.

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erstwhile Humanities audience from Literature, and so take over a central mythical area of special authority: science. And it has been the ironic fate of EO that part of the great public that it helped fabricate has found it too literary, its voice too much the Man of Letters for professionals. Like Cambridge and Edinburgh in 1985, the audiences of LAP and GDC are somewhat closer and mixed, than Princeton and Santz Cruz from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. The Other for LAP and GDC is not of epic dimensions. It is not the non-occidental or non-male, is not the Man of Letters, not the Humanist, not Literature. The Other is the ‘scientist’. This estrangement from the ‘scientist’ constitutes an anthropological turn in both works. Instead of putting the scientific community against the backdrop of alien, literary and popular knowledge, LAP and GDC make the scientific community into the Other for the audience (cf. Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, 47; Rudwick, 1985, 5-7). It is the scientists who become the aliens; but, because anthropological historians are part of the scientific community in the broad sense, LAP and GDC run the razor’s edge in relation to legitimation of themselves. This self-estrangement forms an ironic moment in the audience. Linked to hermeneutical objectivity in the human sciences, this irony constitutes an ‘academic’ audience for LAP and GDC, which meant by the mid 1980s a disembodied one, of no particular race, religion, class or gender. A fascinating inversion arises between the agents of these mimetic dramas, who are embodied in natural and social contexts, as opposed to the audience, which is freed of context, academically pure spirit, as it were. The ironic distanciation from self-context, though constituting the audience as ‘academic’, does so opposed to a ‘professionalism’ won by opposition to a public as Other unable to be a reader: so LAP and GDC are largely free of the jargon and technical language by which some works fashion a professional audience. LAP’s and GDC’s audiences are academics and others interested in science studies. Audiences in both cases (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985,8-9; Rudwick, 1985, 12) are polemically opposed to whig history of science by the anthropological turn. LAP’s audience, torn from whig history, seeks the proper relations between history, philosophy and sociology. ‘It will not escape our readers’ notice that this book is an exercise in the sociology of scientific knowledge’ (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, 15) by which LAP means to cast its audience. Written here as exercise in sociology of knowledge, history of science runs fully conversant with philosophy, that of Wittgenstein cited as most appropriate. LAP’s audience is, in short, the science studies trinity of the 1980s perhaps finally canonized by this work into a numerous public. Though LAP narrates, it does so, appropriate to tragic voice, in a sooner forensic spirit. LAP’s audience lies between two tribes-philosophers and sociologists-hostile to narrative. At the level of audience, LAP achieves consonance with tragic causes, in particular plot. Hobbes, the natural philosopher, tragically falls to make way for Boyle, the

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natural historian: theory as mere metaphysics falls to make way for experimentation as empirical study. The same can be said of audience. Within science studies, LAP calls forth an audience in which study of theory, dominated by a bad philosophy of science, gives way to study of experiment, helped by a good sociology of science. Like Hobbes, who was tragically right, the Philosopher of Science in the audience falls victim to the Sociologist of Science, who has won over the Historian of Science. In this tale of two cities, Cambridge and Edinburgh, ‘HPS’ orthodoxy is violated from the inside and, like Boyle’s tragic chorus, an audience cast for experimental life. Likewise ironically academic, likewise opposed to whig history, likewise interested in science studies, the audience of GDC is however appropriate to comedy. No tragic transition from philosophy to sociology haunts this body. Here the Historian of Science speaks to an audience at peace with itself. One reader confessed to me that she found GDC, while not much ado about nothing, surely too much about too little. GDC addresses itself, parenthetically, to such so, ‘Readers who find themselves bogged down in the narrative can skip straight to the analysis in chapter fifteen . . .’ (Rudwick, 1985, 13), which means skipping from page 61 to page 401! Such readers are of course not the audience. Here the audience are those who want history as a narrative. GDC’ s ‘revival of narrative’ (ibid., 11-14) occurs in this light. In GDC the audience has been pacified sufficiently for the Historian of Science to return to narrative which, now opposed as it is to whig history, will ‘rigorously and self-consciously avoid hindsight’ (ibid., 12). Quoting Butterfield, ‘ “We must have the kind of story in which . . . we can never quite guess, at any given moment, what is going to happen next” ’ (ibid., 13). This ‘we’, which can never quite guess what is going to happen next, is the audience of comedy. While both LAP and PV have been accused of being whig histories, I know of no such accusation against GDC. Yet, if this term has any meaning, then, as surely as EO is whiggish, so too is GDC. EO conceives the Historian of Science to legitimate the authority of the Man of Science and preserve him from a Man of Letters; over the Man of Science, GDC legitimates the authority of the Historian of Science as storyteller. With comedy, the Historian of Science has legitimated not science, but itself and as no toady to the Man of Science. PV partakes of the 1980s anthropological turn, anouncing its subject matter, primatology, as simian orientalism. Giving the profaned Other voice, PV calls forth an audience to contest the sacred or occidental scientific self and audience. ‘Maybe in the humanities there is no recourse from representation, mediation, storytelling, and social saturation . . . The natural sciences are the “other” to the human sciences, with their tragic orientalisms. But these pleas [by natural scientists] do not survive scrutiny’ (Haraway, 1989, 12). The Man of Science, like Man the Hunter, aided and abetted by some grim professionals in science studies, has been cast as a hero in the Master Narrative on science. Required for

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fashioning this Man’s audience, the Other-as Humanist or Woman the Gatherer or the (Wo)man of Letters-no longer plays the part as plotted. The audience to whom PV speaks no longer accepts the feminine or the oriental or the humanistic or the animal as required Other for the occidental scientific male. But as good satire is never mere invective, the people in authority against whom PV speaks are invited into the audience (cf. ibid., 13-15). In this way, satire nears at the level of audience a normal resolution of comic plot, where antagonist and protagonist may meet at the end’s audience. PV’s audience also no longer sees fiction or literature as the simple Other for history or science, as PV puts itself over toward the domain of science-fiction or ‘SF’ (cf. ibid., 3-5 13-15). PV’s essential tension lies not in the science studies trinity; feminism and postmodernism rather set the stage. The first casts an audience seeing some serious problems have to be solved, while the second casts an audience not taking itself too too seriously. Cast between feminism and postmodernism as SF dissolving the fact-fiction divide, PV calls forth an audience ready to ironize professionalism, above all in science studies. Postscript

Though this will also be a conclusion, I shall raise some new points. There three subsections here: (a) Narrative and Genre; (b) Narrative and History; Narrative and Knowledge. Whole tracts can be and have been written on one of these three topics. In my brief remarks I’ll only try to point beyond essay. (a) Narrative

are (c) any this

and Genre

Not all studies of narrative focus on genre. Given the modern academic division of labor, critics can spend a life engaged with texts at such a micro-level that the issue of genre never arises. Some approaches and ends of literary criticism may also lead one to ignore or even deny genre. In one place, dealing with this, Frye uses ‘rhetorical’ where one would better read ‘formalist’, including thereby some deconstructivist approaches: ‘the rhetorical [formalist] critic analyzes what is in front of him without much regard to whether it is a play, a lyric, or a novel. He may in fact even assert that there are no genres in literature. That is because he is concerned with his structure simply as a work of art, not as an artifact with a possible function’ (Frye, 1957, 95). A text gains a possible function as soon as the voice and audience are seen, in their rhetorical roles, as pointing towards an author and reader. I think genre emerges as an issue once the rhetorical aspects of a text are taken seriously. I therefore follow Frye’s use of ‘rhetorical’ tied to genre: ‘The basis of generic criticism . . . is rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public’ (ibid., 247; cf. also 52-67). Interest in

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social practice and interest in genre are bedfellows, and lack of one seems to lead to lack of the other. So, like a good Aristotelian, Ricoeur sets poetics between ethics and rhetoric, all three as praxis and mimesis. This resists the neo-romantic impulse to contemplate a literary or historical work as a unique individual creation completely severed from ties to a genre or society. Even deconstructivists may resist this impulse. De Man, for instance, has tied the modern ‘resistance to theory’ to the modern resistance to ‘reading’, by which he means the dissolution of rhetoric. Using the medieval trivium, he claims that the modern move is to reduce rhetorical dimensions of a text to either the grammatical or the logical, by way of linguistics, linguistic analysis and semiotics.69 This leads to the apotheosis of the genreless ‘code’ over voice and audience. In reading as opposed to decoding texts, a primary step properly consists in recognition of the generic aspects: What kind of text is this? What voice speaks? What audience is cast? How do four causes-scene, agents, plot, endinterrelate? Concern with the genres informing a text need not entail a belief in genre essentialism. The ultimate nature of literary genre is a problem for historical and philosophical critique and, for the latter, moves onto the well worn turf of philosophical realism versus nominalism. Hempfer has given a survey of the possible nature of genre: universals, archetypes, natural kinds, families, (ideal) types, norms, regulatory hypotheses, . . . phenomenological entities.70 What is certain is that genres persist in our language and may be taken seriously or just ignored. When seriously studied, the isolation of genres ‘is based on analogies in form’ (Frye, 1957, 95) that is, on patterns in writing. As a good Blake scholar, Frye sees these as archetypes, and in terms his four ‘mythoi’, using ‘plot’ to translate ‘mythos’. So for Frye there are four archetypal mythoi: the romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric. One might also take these as historical stereotypes or social patterns which, following Ricoeur on followability, set up the ‘self-evident’, the socially generic expectations, in terms of which the specific contents of a given (hi)story achieve sense. And one may mix genres. As exhibited above, Frye’s four genres stem ultimately from Aristotle’s analysis of Greek literary works. Other places and times may feel the need for more or fewer genres. Tragedy seems to be rare and strangely bound up with stories of the birth and rebirth of European science, as seen above. ‘Civilizations which stress the desirable rather than the real, and the religious as opposed to the scientific perspective, think of drama almost entirely in terms of comedy’ (ibid., 171). So it comes as no suprise that the typical narrative genres of the Christian Middle Ages were romance and comedy (ibid., 181; id., 1976, esp. 90, 171). The Renaissance and Baroque revived the classical four and, 68Ricoeur (1983-S), I, Chap. 3. 69De Man (1986), 15-17. Derrida ‘“See Hempfer (1973), Chap. 3.

(1981) is a brilliant

subversion

of ‘genre’ as tied to ‘law’.

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especially in France, pushed a strict theory of genre based on Aristotle. Then and thereafter one can see a multiplication of types and a reduction to one. Scholes, for instance, has further articulated Frye’s types to reflect this.71 Scholes begins with the Aristotelian opposition between romance and satire, and puts history as mediating between them. He pictures this as a large ‘V’. At the top of one side of the V is satire, at the top of the other is romance, and at the base, supporting and cleaving all genres is history! The sense of this is that ‘history’ was the most developed prose form before the novel. On the side with satire, and descending down to history, Scholes has picaresque and comedy; on the side with romance, and descending down to history, he has tragedy and ‘sentiment’. Spanning the middle of the V, adjoining comedy and sentiment, and closest to history, emerges ‘realism’; while at the top of the middle field, able as it were to move in any direction, from history to romance to satire, is the novel. The eighteenth-century novel was able to reduce and embrace all earlier genres, like the bourgeoisie did to all other classes. M&eon exposits a view of the novel as ‘the modern genre, the newcomer that arrives upon a scene already articulated into conventional generic categories and that proceeds to cannibalize and incorporate bits of other forms. . .‘72 In this sense, the Modern Era did not so much break with the four classical genres of narrative, as it sooner digested them in the novel. So, for instance, in a novel the world of (naive) romance may be displaced in ‘abnormal’ or ‘naive’ minds, for example, of criminals, savages, children, women or even the dreams of the normal burgher, the dream being as well the great repository of the tragic worldview. The novel points to the mixing of traditional types into a super-genre, as realistic comedy able to transmute into almost all other genres. We might then see the novelistic mixing of genres in history of science as the most typical practice, and avail ourselves of Frye’s myth. The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent ., and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anugnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archtypal theme of comedy (id., 1957, 192). “Scholes

(1974), 132-37.

‘*McKeon (1987) 11. Watt’s work shows how early eighteenth century novelists saw the new genre as digesting other genres, especially along the axis of history, comedy, romance: see Watt (1957), esp. 66-69, 77-79, 84, 100, 135, 16667, 185-87, 239. From Auerbach (1946), one can see the novel as comedy or low mimetic moving to realism and then absorbing other genres. McKeon (1987), 20, and Chap. 1, ties the emergence of the novel as super-genre, from the Baroque to the Enlightenment, to: (i) a new instability of conventional generic categories in relation to telling truth in narrative, and (ii) a new instability of social categories in relation to external social order and internal moral order. This shows again the tie of genre to social practice.

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On the same page, Frye articulates this central quest-myth as emplotted, which we may extend to cover science. First comes agon or conflict to a community that had been at peace, so that the play of romantic scientists, normal puzzle-solving, itself may become puzzling. Pathos or catastrophe may strike a puzzled community, when the conflict cannot be resolved and a revolution threatens. Sparagmos or anarchy may emerge if the pathos becomes prolonged, a revolutionary period recognized or paradigms lost. Anagnorisis or reconciliation appears when an eiron forges a new paradigm, allowing the conception of new riddles and puzzles, so that normal or romantic science may seek adventures anew. We could take this as a central myth for science studies, and hold an archetypally or stereotypically perfected study as one that weaves all four mythoi into an historically realistic story. For most historical works, however, given the modern professionalism, the moments of pathos and sparagmos, thus of tragedy and satire, will probably find much less favor. Thus one would do better to focus on agon and anagnorisis, on agonistics and reconciliation, as the radicals of romance and comedy. This will lead to stories of heroes and adventures for the romantic, and of controversies and reconciliations for the comic. As in literature, tension and effect may arise in histories of science from counter-casting, such as putting a romantic or tragic hero in a comic plot, or by sub- or even counter-ploting, and so on. One may mix genres. In the final analysis, my goal is to obviate or at least to ameliorate any generic imperialism. In linking four canonical histories of science to narrative genres, my strategy has been to relativize claims that histories of science must or should be written in this or that way. For, aside from the few who can write in classical genres, if historians of science, in so far as they narrate, tend to write after the manner of the novel, must it be reduced to ‘formal’ or bourgeois realism? Must history of science be frozen into a narrative pose long since forsaken by (post)-modern novelists? The low status of naive or traditional romance, moreover, comes from the nineteenth century notion that romance was for peasants, children and women, and properly sanitized from the naive to the sentimental. Resist the notion that historical realism is self-evidently better than ‘whig history’, for we might just as well say that historical realism is whig history. Who is to say that history must be low mimetic or modern realism? Imposition of conventions of representation is a political move. Humpty Dumpty was right. (b)

Narrative

and History

‘For a long time the relation of history to literature was not notably problematic. History was a branch of literature’.” With the emergence of "Grossman (1978), 3. Lepenies (1976) shows the tie of natural history and literature up to the nineteenth century, when a split emerged between ‘Literature’ and life sciences, with old topoi of natural history living on in the novel. Lepenies (1985) traces a similar but later relation between literature and sociology.

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‘Aesthetics’ in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and the apotheosis of ‘Literature’ toward the end of the eighteenth century, history became something apart. In so far as history did not trace its provenance to poetics, its other great bearer was rhetoric. The historian’s office had been as mythologue and ideologue, annalist and advocate. The rise of eighteenth-century realism, and its triumph in the novel, seemed to do away with genre altogether and with literature’s ties to rhetoric, replaced then by ‘aesthetics’. Perhaps belatedly, historical realism trod a like path. The nineteenth century embodied the century of historical narrative as realism which, as White has argued, was rich enough to deploy all four of Frye’s mythoi. 74 I shall maintain the pious silence of the truly ignorant on the ideological self-consciousness of nineteenth century historians. On the twentieth century, I’d like to say that we see, on the one hand, an attack on realism and the novel per se and, on the other hand, an attack, not on historical realism, but rather on narrative and self-consciously rhetorical or ideological history altogether. The French Annales school, for instance, has tried to make historical writing more ‘scientific’ by forsaking narrative and searching for synchronic structures, statistics, and the like.75 Displacing historical narrative, with its ties to poetics and rhetoric, are such scientific things as geography, demography, prosopography, economics, sociology and all things quantifiable. This history, as is urged, thus has no ideology. I object, and smugly, that, whatever it is, writing without narrative is not history. Here we return through the looking-glass: Can a work be a called ‘a history’ and not narrate, not have a plot and so not have an end? If the people in authority or the masters of the profession define ‘history’ as a non-narratival practice, it remains, only to ask why they might do so. In one place White said, ‘The important point is that every history, even the most “synchronic” or “structural” of them, will be emplotted in some way’.76 Is plot the objectionable aspect for the narratophobic? Reconsider the aspects of narrative: voice, scene, agents, plot, end, and audience. Conflation of the poetic voice with the juridical author, we saw as a rhetorical strategy whereby historical writing imposes itself as such. This (juridical) fiction seems to be the price paid for ‘non-fiction’ and is the essential promise that the text will not beguile or otherwise practice deception. But in this regard, the historian most resembles the epic poet or naive romancer, as opposed to the modern novelist whose voice may be a

74White (1973) Chaps 336. “Cf. Ricoeur (1983385), 1. 171-216. ‘“White (1973). 8. In later writing, he concedes that not all history need be narratival, though by dint of the above he might still hold that all history will be emplotted; indeed, he has argued that even Foucault’s Les mof~ et /es chases has a plot: id (1981), 1-2; id. (1978), 236. Ricoeur likewise holds that historical discourse must involve temporality, and this ends up emplotted, even if truncated. See Ricoeur (1983-85). I, 269-70.

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persona, like Dickens’ in Bleak House, and which may even be unreliable.77 Resistence to audience seems even more complex than voice for, under the spell of Romanticism and a resistance to rhetoric, a novelistic tradition preaches the same.78 Audience has good presence in EO, LAP, GDC and PV, which facilitates bringing their ends to light, which is to say that these four histories make no attempt to conceal their rhetorical aspects. Concealing the (perhaps kidnapped) audience helps conceal the end or ideology. What we get from such is an implicit audience as the ‘historical profession’ and, while often couched in terms of a metanarrative, such as the ‘progress of research’ or ‘cultural understanding’, the end of such histories seems simply self-legitimation and reproduction of the profession as end-in-itself. If anything deserves to be called ‘whig history’, such encomia to professionalism do.T9 Under scene we saw two typical moves to suppress narrative which, by the scene-agent equation, may amount to the same. One can ignore the scene or transmute it to agents, such as F’olksgeist, effecting an historical idealism; or one can focus on scene to such an extent that it provides the agency in the history, producing an historical materialism. Call this the Scylla of philosophical internalism versus the Charybdis of geo-sociological externalism. As argued above, history does not so much liberate itself from narrative by giving itself to one or the other; it is, rather, freed but from realism and ends in epic if not mythic modes.80 Agents seem to be the least problematic aspects of historical writing, and only most extreme approaches do away with them. A consequent idealism may trade human agents for ideas or theories, while a consequent materialism may give them up for social classes or exchange networks. In the end, I think fear of the plot with its end (the sacred or profane or public or private) causes most “On the classical division of genre, from the view of the author or poet, into lyric, epic, and drama cf. Genette (1979) 112P18, 130-37; Frye (1957). ‘Fourth Essay’. In lyric only the author speaks; in epic the author and agents of the work may speak alternately; in classical drama (on stage) only the agents may speak; satire may activate any of these three modes. The historian typically plays the epic author become prosaic, though a dramatic pose is possible and this, especially in tragic poses, creates an imposing prose of ‘objectivity’ as only the agents and events, as it were, speak for themselves. Modern novelists discovered the fictive nature of poetic voice and, in Booth’s formulation, after rejecting the rule, ‘True Novels Must Be Realistic’, also call in question the rule, ‘All Authors Should Be Objective’; indeed what we have instead is a multiplication of narrative voices, from the impersonal to the unreliable: see Booth (1961); also Ray (1990). In regard to this and other aspects, Marcus (1985). esp. 6466, remarked that Freud’s case history of ‘Dora’ reads like a modern, non-linear novel with an unreliable narrator, a good bit of which is effected by Freud’s amazing footnotes. ‘*Continuing with Booth’s (1961) rules, put in question, the third is ‘True Art Ignores the Audience’. “Butterfield (1931). as the remedy for whig history, preaches professionalism throughout: specialization ameliorates ideology. This is simply the ideology of Smithian political economy for knowledge. As Simon Schaffer pointed out to me, ‘whig history’ epitomizes the transition from a seemingly progressive or liberal ideology to a conservative one; cf. also McKeon (1987) on the like in the novel. ‘%t regard to Charybdis in particular, applying Barthes’ work, Grossman argues that this approach in history produces an analogue of myth. See Grossman (1978) 33-36; on things as agents, cf. White (1981). 4; Ricoeur (1983-85). I, 269-76; Beer (1983) esp. 9911, 19-21.

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narratophobia. ‘Insofar as historical stories can be completed, can be given narrative closure, can be shown to have had a plot all along, they have to give reality

the odor of the ideal. This is why the plot of a historical

always

an embarrassment

and has to be presented

as “found”

narrative

is

in the events

rather than put there by the narrative techniques . . .‘*I We need then to obtain clarity about plot. The Philosopher

says:

‘by

“plot” (mtithon) I mean here the arrangement of the incidents’.82 ‘Plot’ is used for the Greek ‘mythos’ and is a fair translation. As something above the arrangement

of the

‘incidents’

or

events

and

facts,

Aristotle’s

‘plot’

or

‘mythos’ coheres with a modern distinction from the Russian formalists between ‘plot’ and ‘story’.83 There are a number of ways to articulate this difference, but 1’11 leave most of the nuances aside. Ploting or emplotment weaves bits of story, like editing does to bits of film, telling parts of a story faster or slower, leaving some out, inverting time orders or perspectives so that, from the ideally same story or facts, several plots may emerge, depending on the author or editor. Thus ‘it is fair to say that the facts of life are to history as the story is to the plot’.84 Story is a writing of facts and incidents set in linear time, a chronicle with an opening and ending; plot or mythos arranges or fashions story-elements or a chronicle into a unity other than the strictly

topographical

and chronological.

Clearly the plot (mz2hous) must be constructed as in a tragedy, dramatically, round a single piece of action, whole and complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, so that like a single living organism it may produce its own peculiar form of pleasure. It must not be such as we normally find in (hi)stories, where what is required is an exposition not of a single piece of action but of a single period of time, showing all that within the period befell one or more persons, events that have a merely causal relation to each other.*5

In view of Aristotle’s citation

more philosophical fictioned

last remark

from him opening

here about

history

this essay, the paradox

by becoming

and plots, as well as the

arises that history

more poetic or mythical,

plot, an odor of the ideal, as opposed

becomes

that is, by having

to a mere factual

chronicle

stories. I think, moreover, that the ‘story’ is the real idealization and narrative, fictional or historical, must have a plot or arrangement incidents, even if only by chronicle and not organic, that is, ‘(hi)storic’

a of

that all of the and not

“White (1981). 20. “Aristotle (1932). 25 = 1559a. “On story versus plot and plot generally, see Tomashevsky (1965). 6678; Lemon and Reis (1965). 25-27: Scholes and Kellogg (lY66), Chap. 6; White (1973), 5--l I; id. (1978). 57-67; id. (1981), 4-9. 19; Prince (1982): Brooks (1984). Chap. 1: Ricoeur (1983-85). I. 286-310. “Scholes ( 1974). 80. ‘“Aristotle (1932). Y1 [translation revised]= 1459a.

Narratology and the History of Science

65

poetic. Judicial process, since it is bound up with narrative, helps.86 ‘Story’ would be the events or facts which historical or judicial method and process try to recover. In the English system, each attorney recounts a ‘plot’, taken technically, from which judge and jury attempt to find the true story, the facts or events. If historians are like attorneys who weave bits of stories into the plots of their cases, who then is judge and jury of history? In one sense, it would be the audience or, rather, the readers; in other sense, we see that a judge and jury for historical writing are ideal constructs. In this last sense, claiming to write a history that is more than mere chronicle, but without a plot, would be tantamount to setting oneself up as the judge and jury of the true story. To write the true (hi)story, but without the perspective and end induced by plot, would entail one could isolate all facts and events relevant to the story or incident, and tell them all at once in the synchronicdiachronic order in which they occurred. That is a mimetic fantasy wishing to supplant the human perspective with a divine chronicle. If one takes that as the historian’s goal, then it seems impossible to complete or, more likely, implicitly postulates criteria by which it can ignore most possible facts. This abstraction, allowing isolation of the relevant facts of a story, is for Levi-Strauss a code, and for White, as for this essay, it is a plot or mythos, fabricated by the historian.87 In historical writing, the true story is as much an idealization as its judge and jury. The true story or real chronicle is only a regulative ideal, which is posited, like the identity of author and voice, and so defines the plot as non-fiction. Writing history entails fashioning and selecting story-elements, so entails emplotment as formal cause of the text. The plot lets you move over synchronic and diachronic gaps in the ideally true story: for your plot, the chronic lacunae are the dead and empty topoi of history when ‘nothing really happened’. Histories become generic or ideal since followability is enhanced by generic plots or mythoi.88 As seen, Aristotle sets the difference between history and literature not in that of prose versus poetry, but rather in terms of modal categories. If we take our modals from Kant’s table of categories, and add science, we get this: science treats of the necessary, history of the actual, and literature of the possible. Following Ricoeur and, in a backhanded way, Aristotle himself, the approach of this essay is to make history more philosophical by pushing it in the direction not of science but literature. History as narrative, though not reducing to literature, acquires a modal moment from which its wins also an ethical one. Some critics have no problem setting historical writing into fictional categories. That is easy to do in the case of satire, where the bounds between fact and “In another dimension, Todorov (1971), 9-19, argues that the police or detective novel is a sort of plot about story, and so perhaps the most sophisticated genre. In the typical detective novel or short story, the ‘crime’ is the sought story whose recounting is the goal of the ‘inquest’ or plot per se. “‘Levi-Strauss (1962) 305-13; White (1978) 55-59; and, critique of the former from Fabian (1983) 52-69. ’ s8White (1978), 57-68; id. (1973) 5-l 1.

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66

fiction are fluid.89 And it’s no accident that our satirist, Haraway, is explicit about the fine line between history and literature. Setting satire, per Aristotle, as one of the primal narratives, and looking at the other one, romance as epic and folktale, we see that the fact-fiction divide also blurs there, especially as romance goes into myth, legend and saga. From the view of the literary critic, the same phenomena that allowed emergence of Greek drama, tragedy and comedy, are doubtless tied to the co-temporal emergence of ‘real history’ then, as opposed to mere chronicle. In other words, in the case of historia and drama emerging from romance and satire, we have like literary effects above and beyond a distinction between fact and fiction. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we see, moreover, a similar, even if perhaps temporally disjoint, movement toward modern realism in the narratives of history and the novel. The twentieth century literary critique of realism and the novel, as said, seems to have its counterpart in historical critique as a phobia for narrative and a desire to purge itself of plots. But do historians of science really want to be social scientists? (c)

Narrative

and Knowledge

‘Indeed, in forms nearly infinite, narrative is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; narrative begins with the history of humanity itself; there is not, there has never been at all a people without narrative; all classes, all human groups have their narratives . . .‘90 Natural and social scientists do not seem to have narratives. Ergo, natural and social scientists must either not exist or not be humans. ‘So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity would appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or . . . programmatically refused’.9l Should historians of science refuse to admit they have plots? In place of a plot, should or can an historian of science substitute an argument? Seeing Herodotus called ‘the father of lies’, should historians side with Heraclitus over Homer, side with logos over mythos? Darwin said The Origin of Species was just one long argument, though Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots shows such natural history is not free of emplotment. Should we believe historians of things human who tell us their work is one long, unplotted argument, a philosophical history of ideas or a sociological history of knowledge? Anyway, why should we want to believe knowledge may not be conceived in narrative? Plato had no problems with narrative and his ‘Socratic conversations’ were clearly seen by Aristotle and others as comedies, with Socrates as the archetypal eiron .92 Something seems to have gone wrong “‘On satire-irony and non-fiction or history, see Highet (1962), cf. also Frye (1957), 308-12. ‘OBarthes (1966) 7. cf. Hart (1994). 93, 102, on Frye’s view of the same in regard to mythologies. “White (1981). ;. ’ “See Cooper (1922), 98-I 16.

Narratology and the History of Science

61

with Plato’s pupils who, lost inside Socrates’ head as scene, forgot where they were. Lyotard has written, ‘Science from its origin has been in conflict with narratives (La science est d’origine en conjlit avec les r&its)‘.93 The riddle of Plato aside, that seems more or less true. Lyotard casts science, however, between two sorts of narrative practices. There is, on the one hand, the narrative practice of archaic, traditional, popular society. Lyotard argues that here narrative forms the ‘social bond’: social groups are constituted and preserved by the narratives the members mutually recount. In modern society, television plays a big part in forming the social bond by narrative and thus (Habermas to the contrary) it is good that so much television news is narratival or ‘human interest’ oriented, as opposed to argumentative or academic. Lyotard argues, on the other hand, that science for its legitimation in society needs a ‘grand R&it’ or ‘metarecit’, such as the Enlightenment metanarrative of ‘progress’ or the Romantic metanarrative of ‘culture’. Later Lyotard took back some of the importance of narrative .94 But one need neither presume philosophers to be their own best interpreters nor believe them to be like wine in ageing. Lyotard had shown that science is hostile toward the narrative practices of archaic or traditional or popular society, and that the aim of scientists, both natural and social, has been to expropriate the knowledge producing power of popular narrative for scientific means and ends, eventually denying the epistemic function of narrative, so consigned as Literature to ‘aesthetics’, unlike rhetoric, a domain of pleasure not knowledge. In this sense, the grandest irony of the Modern Era was the emergence of the History of Science, as a discipline whose practitioners expropriated the narratives of the scientists themselves! But the ‘postmodern condition’ should be not only incredulity toward the metanarratives of scientists or others; it should be as well, as Primate Visions shows, incredulity toward the proposition that science as practice does not need narrative to forge its own social bonds. Woe betide us if historians of science plot the very same fictions as the scientists do. What types of knowledge do you wish to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: ‘Is it a science’? Which speaking, discoursing subjects . . do you then want to ‘diminish’ when you say: ‘I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’? . . . As to the problem of fiction, it seems to me a very important one; I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth . . . One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.95

‘3Lyotard (1979), 7. 941d (1988) 38%39-in any event, an extremely “Foucault i1980), 85, 193.

clever book

Studies in History and Philosophy

68 Acknowledgements-Constant

encouragement

of Science

and advice from Nicholas Jardine turned what

seemed a wild idea into an essay. This essay is in part an apologia for an (I hope) infamous commentary I gave on a paper by Simon Schaffer, who helped me with this essay in pubs in Oldenburg and Berlin, and on a train ride to Gottingen. Marina Frasca-Spada, Michael Hagner and Robert Westman gave me incisive, constructive critique on the penultimate draft. This essay was written mostly only on weekends and holidays, or in trains or planes or curious places, such as the guest room of Newnham College, Cambridge, where a good part of the final draft was completed: I hereby acknowledge the genii locorum et temporum and hope they found their way into the essay.

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