Christians think the rest of us are jealous because the voices talk only to them.

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 Polti Plot Outline
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Abstract

Gozzi, the author of Turandot, according to Goethe, had found 36 tragic, by which he meant dramatic, situations, but he never published them. In 1921, George Polti, a French academic in his fifties, claimed to have rediscovered these 36 plots. He maintained they correspond to the no more than 36 emotions, which he believed humans can experience. PoltiPlot is presented elsewhere but here is a refinement, an indulgence. Polti in Marienbad! It serves the same purpose, but is set Last Year in Marienbad, also simulated in these pages.

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.

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Other Websites or Blogs

God’s Own Summary of the Bible—Magi Mike’s Blog
I explain here in a criticism of a book by F S Collins: “We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two… ”
Magi Mike’s Blog—http://mikemagee.wordpress.com/.
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Before you go, think about this…

Has a man the right to express his honest thought? How has the church in every age, when in authority, defended itself? Always by a statue against blasphemy, against argument, against free speech. And there never was such a statute that did not stain the book that it was in, and that did not certify to the savagery of the man that passed it. Never. By making a statute, and by defining blasphemy, the church sought to prevent discussion, sought to prevent argument, sought to prevent a man giving his honest opinion. Certainly, a tenet, a doctrine, a dogma, is safe when hedged about by a statute that prevents your speaking against it. In the silence of slavery it exists. It lives because lips are locked. It lives because men are slaves. No man can blaspheme a book. No man can commit a blasphemy by telling his honest thought. No man can blaspheme a God, or a Holy Ghost, or a Son of God. The Infinite cannot be blasphemed.

R Ingersoll