Nothing Outside the Text

Let’s pretend that you work in a windowless office on Madison, or Lex, or Park in the spring of 1954, and you’re hurrying to Grand Central to avoid the rush back to New Rochelle, or Hempstead, or Weehawken. Walking through the Main Concourse with its Beaux Arts arches and its bronzed clock atop the ticketing booth, its cosmic green ceiling fresco depicting the constellations slowly stained by the accumulated cigarette smoke, you decide to purchase an egg-salad sandwich from a vendor near the display with its ticking symphony of arrivals and departures. You glance down at a stack of slender magazines held together with thick twine. The cover illustration is of a buxom brunette wearing a yellow pa’u skirt and hauling an unconscious astronaut in a silver spacesuit through a tropical forest while fur-covered extraterrestrials look on between the palm trees. It’s entitled Universe Science Fiction. And if you were the sort of Manhattan worker who, after clocking in eight hours at the Seagram Building or the Pan Am Building, settles into the commuter train’s seat—after loosening his black-knit tie and lighting a Lucky Strike while watching Long Island go by—ready to be immersed in tales of space explorers and time travelers, then perhaps you parted with a quarter so that Universe Science Fiction’s cheap print would smudge your gray flannel suit. The sort of reading you’d want to cocoon yourself in with nothing outside the text. As advertised, you find a story of just a few hundred words entitled “The Immortal Bard,” by a writer named Isaac Asimov.

Reprinted three years later in “The Immortal Bard” is set among sherry-quaffing, tweedy university faculty at their Christmas party, where a boozed-up physicist named Phineas Welch corners the English professor Scott Robertson, and explains how he’s invented a method of “temporal transference” able to propel historical figures into the present. Welch resurrects , , and , but “They couldn’t get used to our way of life… They got terribly lonely and frightened. I had to send them back.” Despite their genius, their thought wasn’t universal, and so Welch conjures , believing him to be “someone who knew people well enough to be able to live with them centuries away from his own time.” Robertson humors the physicist, treating such claims with a humanist’s disdain, true to’s observation in that “at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists… Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Welch explains that the Bard was surprised that he was still taught and studied, after all, he wrote in a few weeks, just polishing up an old plot. But when introduced to literary criticism, Shakespeare can’t comprehend anything. “God ha’ mercy! What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!” So, Welch enrolls him in a Shakespeare course, and suddenly Robertson begins to fear that this story isn’t just a delusion, for he remembers the bald man with a strange brogue who had been his student. “I had to send him back,” Welch declares, because our most flexible and universal of minds had been humiliated. The physicist downed his cocktail and mutters “you poor simpleton, you him.”