Adelphiasoplot
Fantasy Plots: Georg Polti Plots or Storylines - The 36 Dramatic or Tragic Situations
Abstract
Wise Women Discuss—Plot!
Fantasy Plots
Fantasy derives its drama from the unnatural—that which cannot happen in the real world—and so cannot be poetry or allegory for in both the unnatural is permitted, in the one case for poetic expression and in the other to effect the extended metaphor (“Allegory is an extended metaphor”, Quintillian).
There are two genres related to fantasy, the uncanny and the marvellous. Theuncanny is a continuation of the past but the marvellous is the beginning of the future. Fantasy proper is at the boundary of the two—the present.
If, at the resolution of the drama, the events seem to have occurred with the rules of the real world intact (the apparently supernatural is explained naturally) then the genre is that of the uncanny. Typically uncanny is the Horror genre which evinces the reaction of fear. Explanations for the Uncanny might be accident, coincidence, dreams, drugs, tricks and illusions, delusions and madness. The Uncanny genre fades into general fiction in one direction and in the other is bounded by fantasy.
If they were outside of the realm of the real world and the laws of nature are not what we thought (the supernatural is accepted) then we are in the genre of the marvellous. Fairy Tales, The Arabian Nights and Science Fiction are all examples of the marvellous. The marvellous is expressed in terms of size (giants, elves), distant lands, instruments(magic wands, mirrors) and scientific developments (mechanical horses, the paraphernalia of SF). In SF the marvellous is nominally explained by science but, since it is hypothetical science of the future, it is no more an explanation than a magic wand.
If the ending which resolves the conflict by indicating whether we are in the realm of the uncanny or the marvellous is suppressed then we have a fantasy story. The fantastic can be used to surmount a taboo or censureship by transgressing the taboo in an acceptable way. An implied taboo gives a quality to the fantastic theme.
Many vampire and alien stories are of the fantastic genre, leaving doubt about the victim’s illness or psychotic nature. When the stake reduces the vampire to ashes then the fantastic becomes the marvellous—the explanation is supernatural.
Doubt is the essence of fantasy. The feeling in the reader and the main character of hesitation about the nature of an uncanny event is the drama’s characteristic. The aim of the feeling of hesitation in apparently simple drama is to lead to doubt: Did the related events really occur? Did we imagine it? Are we mad or going mad? The prime example in film is, perhaps, “Last Year in Marienbad”.
The fantastic has affinities with the genre of Detective Stories which has several likely solutions but all prove to be wrong and one unlikely solution which proves to be correct and is revealed at the end. The fantastic story has likely solutions but they all involve the supernatural whereas only the unlikely solution is natural. In the detective story the solution provides the purpose of the story but, in the fantastic, it is the doubts or hesitation between the possibilities that maintains the story.
Elements of the Fantastic
- A narrator
- A supernatural happening or creature
Technique
The feeling of hesitation comes out of ambiguity created by using:
- The imperfect tense which is easier in foreign languages than in English. English uses “I used to…” implying that you no longer do, giving a dreamlike unsureness and other worldliness to the narrative. The narrator might even be, or seem to be, a competely different person.
- Modulation or modifying sentences with words like: it seemed, I thought, I believed, I felt, possibly, etc. These devices keep us in the world of reality when otherwise it would have been a world of marvels. The effect is of a state of madness allowing us to see clearer what might exist or have existed.
- Use of “I” a lot. The narrator has to be in the action or observing it from within the scene. If the narrator had normal writer’s omniscience, the doubt would dissipate because their omniscience would solve the ambiguity. The involved first person makes the reader identify with the narrator and therefore share his doubts. To help this identification of the two people the narrator is normally quite ordinary. Conversely tales of the marvellous rarely need to use the first person. The objective observer authenticates the marvellous more successfully.
- Composition. Slowly rising tension until the ghost or ghoul appears, narrator first speaking vaguely then getting more precise.
- Strict temporality. The drama must be read in order, if the denouement is not to fall flat. Such stories cannot be successfully read twice other than for analysis. It is like knowing a joke or the ending of a detective story. Once you know it, you are only interested in the method of getting there.
Themes
- The Devil and his allies, pacts with the Devil, Faust Goethe
- Death personified and appearing among the living, The Masque of the Red Death, Poe
- The curse involving dreadful and supernatural consequences, disease, madness, degeneration, the mummy
- Supernatural life; ghosts, phantoms, vampires, werewolves, witches, witchcraft, invisible entities, animal spectres, aliens, hauntings by dismembered parts of the human body, the statue that comes to life with deadly consequences
- An anguished soul needing something to happen to achieve peace, the spectredoomed to an incoherent and endless journey
- The undefinable invisible "thing" that haunts, something in the cupboard, inthe celler or under the bed, the seductive and deadly phantom woman from beyond
- The inversion of dream and reality, the room, garden, house, street, villageerased from existence, the cessation or repetition of time
- The pathology of personality—psychophantasy
- Uncontrollable urges especially sexuality. Any of the Devil, libido, evil mightbe the seducer in the guise of woman or not. Incest; sadism; cruelty; tortureand abuse; death and necrophilia—vampires. In Little Red Riding Hood getting into bed with the wolf, of the opposite sex, is death for the littlegirl.
- The erosion of the boundaries between matter and mind, reality and imagination, delusions, changing form, half-forgotten serial murder the result of madness or sucumbing to forbidden desire, multiple personality Psycho, Hitchcock
- The interplay of visible and invisible
- Attributing chance to supernatural beings, pan-determinism, distortion of space and time, strange causality, confusion of subject and object—Piaget: Fourfundamental processes characterise the intellectual explosion in the first two years of existence—the constructions of the categories of object and of space, of causality and of time
- Example—Last Year in Marienbad
The following scheme broadly defines literature. The characters have a material (1) and a conscious (2) existence in a world of material (3) and spatial or dimensional (4) objects in which some action (5) takes place which is controlled by a cause (6) and/or motivated by some goal (7) in time (8). Transgression of any of the eight elements gives us the Fantastic.
- Georg Polti, The 36 Dramatic Situations.
- Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology.
- Ernest Jones, The Connection between Nightmare and Certain Medieval Superstitions.
- Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction.
- Wilold Ostrowsky, The Fantastic and Realistic in Literature
- Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction.
