Not Recommended

A reductionist's triumph, this book analyzes all of Western drama since Aristotle and until the time of its writing, 1921. Polti was inspired by an (unreferenced) quote that states a prior academician named Gozzi "maintained that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations." Polti says in his introduction that he wondered if that was true, and set to prove or disprove it. As the title reveals, Polti indeed came to the same number.

Frankly, I find this pretty hard to swallow. I am comfortable with categorizing and classifying; reduction and synthesis form the basis of many philosophies, including the formal scientific method (which is of course rarely practiced in its pure form). And there is no shortage of using these ideas to classify people: most cultures recognize that people tend to fall into a few general categories; our most recent local move on this front has been the popularization of the Enneagram and Myers-Brigg classification methods. Nevertheless, people are individuals, and the works they produce from their imaginations are even more individual. Applying tight classification ideas to literature is an audacious step.

On a simple, structural level, this isn't a hard job. Even more simple than Polti's approach is the famous theatre field "folk theorem" that there are only three types of dramas: man versus nature, man versus man, and man versus himself. Incidentally, though we now interpret these statements in a gender-free way, to the early Greeks all protagonists were decidedly male. But Polti doesn't even refer to this trio; perhaps it is too simple to pose an interesting problem for analysis.

And there is the essential problem with this book, and indeed all books of this type. The author necessarily creates an artificial line between what is a "new" situation, and what is merely a variant on and old one. Polti would argue that the three categories I described in the last paragraph are too broad, but I can counter that his categories are similarly too broad or too narrow. When one aspires to pigeonhole all of Western drama, one had better be very sure of one's categories. The thirty-six categories Polti came up with are reasonable and sensible, but one could argue that there are too many or too few. But it does provide a nice structural foundation for analyzing plots, which are just a sequence of dramatic situations.

Polti has gone over the top with this reductionistic approach. In the conclusion, he states that one can only be surprised by a movement from a calm state to a conflict, or from a conflict to calm, or from one conflict to another. Since there are 36 basic conflicts, we have 72 surprises representing transitions to and from calmness. And from one dramatic state to another, each of the 36 states can go to any of the other 35, giving 36*35 = 1260 surprises. Adding these together, Polti concludes that "we cannot ... receive from the drama, or from life, more than 1332 surprises." Good grief!

Like all analytic works, this book offers no synthetic information. Reading Polti, one does not walk away with a clear vision of how to write a story, construct a plot, or even develop a meaningful dramatic situation. But you can categorize the ones that already exist! I don't see the value of such strong reductionism without a structural framework. By analogy, consider a book which asserts that ever since the well-tempered scale was developed, Western music all takes place in one of twelve basic musical keys. It then names the keys (A, B-flat, B, C, and so on), and then classifies each major movement of thousands of works into one of these twelve keys. What would we have learned? From the analysis, I think very little.

Perhaps some large-scale patterns could be found as a result of the analysis, and that might be of value to the composer. But I don't think it heightens one's appreciation of a work to know, definitively, that it begins in B minor, modulates to D minor, and ends in E minor. If later a composer recognizes this as a particular pattern to emulate, then we have something. I don't see much chance of such a realization coming from the breakdown in this book, but I think there's a small chance of it. It's worth flipping through for a half-hour and getting acquainted with Polti's categories, just to get a feeling for this kind of approach in case one is in a situation where it could be useful.