POLTI FOREWORD

From Gordian Plot

FOREWORD

The prefaces of many books are more enduring than the printed copy they introduce. It is as if an authors afterthoughts more nearly express his real thoughts than his well-considered, neatly planned succession of chapters. The reason for this, though a natural one, came to me only as I read and re-read the proofs of "The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations": as an author's work is unrolled before him in the type of the galley-proofs, the first sight of the printed words induces a freshness of mind that is near relative to the fine frenzy of first conception; added to this mental freshness there is a maturity-- for are not months of thought behind the chapters of the work?-- that makes the author's thoughts as grandparents with the enthusiasms of youth. In the prefaces, then, the authors find outlets to express their own reactions to their own thoughts.

I have been stepfather to Lucile Ray's translation of Georges Polti's book. My own vague notions of the text, gained by awkward concentration and persistent use of Spiers and Surenne, became clear ideas as I read page after page of Miss Ray's manuscript. As my understanding of Polti's analyses and classifications grew I thought I perceived the need for an introduction that might help to convince authors, and those other readers, not authors, who are likely to find Polti's work suggestive, of the practical value of the work, and the need to read it slowly, and contemplatively; if Situation is compared with Situation, as the reading progresses, I thought, the real value of the work will become evident. I had not finished the first reading of Miss Ray's translation, however, before I realized that Polti's book would need no recommendation. I must add, then, that I write this Foreword merely because these two pages, in the last section of the book to go to press, would look unseemly if not clothed in print!

Certain of my thoughts, as I read proof after proof of the book, may prove stimulating. Polti nowhere tells what he means by a Dramatic Situation. In the Conclusion of the book he makes it very clear, however, that he believes in the invention of plot, the building up of incident upon incident, to make a story, which, likely as not, serves only to enable the author to use his plot; Polti seems to scorn the artistic use of plot to interest readers in the expression of the author's outlook on or opinion of a certain aspect of a moral issue. I have tried to find words to express what I understand as a dramatic or story situation. Tentatively I offer it that a situation results, in the course of action of a story or a play, when the characters are brought together, as a logical outcome of preceding incidents of the story, so that their contrasting qualities are proved to readers, and the central character is faced with a decision to be made, or a change to be suffered, or an obstacle to be overcome, and an end that the reader or spectator desires, or anticipates, or dreads, is made imminent.

It also came to me as I pondered some of Polti's sub-classifications, that often the business of the story maker, and sometimes the art of the story artist, consists in making the inexplicable seem explicable! As a corollary I wondered if art in story writing and play writing does not consist in the arrangement of facts or incidents, which may or may not have any basis in actuality, in order to convey to readers a notion of the author's that either changes or emphasizes the moral attitude of the reader toward the universe.

I must offer a word of sympathy to the few readers who expect to find in this book a list of plots-- such a list as would make needless the use of one's power of invention or one's imagination. Polti's work is more than the list of plots you hoped to find: it is a thought engine, an engine that even Goethe and Gozzi would have used to burnish their conceptions of life, and the possible complexities of human existence. If you came to "The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations" to find a story ready- made, I beg you stay to have your wits sharpened and your power of invention stimulated.

The work to which Polti refers in the Conclusion, "The Laws of Literary Invention," has not yet been published. I hope that when France has served civilization to the full, Polti may be living to finish this other book.

WILLIAM R. KANE.

Ridgewood, New Jersey,

December 1st, 1916.

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