AskWhy! Marienbad Muser Plot Generator
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Saturday, 9 August 2008
Abstract
The Marienbad Muser Story Teller
As we have already said in connexion with PoltiPlot, if a computer could write you a story, then you as a storyteller are redundant. These pages are to stimulate your thinking, and help you overcome writer’s block. The plot outliner simply juxtaposes, not in any logical way, some Polti categories to give you ideas for plots. By merging with the Marienbad simulation, the musings of the Polti plot muser bring a degree more unity into the schema which emerges, but not much. It simply helps to remind us or convince ourselves that the attempt is to suggest one story, not several. The logic of your own story is your’s, but an exercise in creativity is to take one of these pages, and to force yourself to make a story, using the elements suggested, it being your choice, of course, what you consider the primary plot and what the subplots.
Can I explain? …Ah, now I am beginning to remember. Am I mysterious and abstract, dear reader? Do you need a different feel or genre for another story, or even this one? You can do it by changing the relationship of the hero to the reader and to the laws of nature. The cases are termed myth, legend, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony. As an example: A hero equal to reader and equal to the Laws of Nature is low mimetic. Mimetic refers to the imitation of natural things as if gods or human, as in pantomine, cartoons and fairy tales. In fairy tales, the movement from an initial equilibrium to a final resolution is precipitated by a supernatural event. In science fiction, the imagined future and its amazing technology is also effectively supernatural, and often merges with fantasy. The story makes it seem natural. So you have these different ways of changing your story merely by changing relationships. The architecture of the hotel and its grounds seems lifeless, geometrical, synthetic. The park is a vast Versailles garden reassuringly arranged, with clipped bushes, and regular paths where we may walk with measured steps, side by side, day after day, within arm’s reach but without ever coming any closer to each other. A vast window opening on to the terrace from the grand entrance and staircase affords us a view of the main avenue with its tiny figures moving from station to station as if choreographed. They seem like simulacra and not real people. Perhaps he—or she—might have neglected an intimate. Did they plan to elope together? Did you and I? Eventually you agreed. And we tried (was it once more?) to leave together. In the end you were ready to leave the hotel with me. The hero’s love is in some sense illegal or improper, like incest between members of the same generation or a man being enamoured of his sister-in-law. The improper passion might not be returned, and any case can be mixed with other crimes of love, rivalries, adulteries, murders, and so on. The distorted love leads on to murder. Any plot could be used in a same sex situation, and illicit homosexuality can be recreated by setting it where it is still illegal so that a man can illegally love another man who yields to his advances breaking a social taboo. Pederasty and abuse of children generates public distaste but needs to be treated because it happens often. The The Chrysippus of Euripides is one of the finest tragedies of antiquity.
You might like…
- Last Year In Marienbad Never ending story. Keep refreshing or clicking the button to find out what happens year after year at Marienbad!
- Literary Criticism Self generating literary criticism
- Bishop Ecclesiasticus Christian-like babble generator
- FIBA (Frederick Ignatius Baines Archive) More Holy Bibble generated
- Impeach the war criminals, Bush and Blair—draft letter generator—for you to send
- Or go to the directory index for “The Great Critic Speaks”, Chomsky-like text generator, and more.







