Fancies and Goodnights [antikvár]

Foreword THE LOGIC OP LUNACY 'il P' y ¦ WHAT MAKES John Collier funny is the logic of lunacy. To accept the fantastic as a matter of commonplace fact, to describe the wildly improbable and the morally outrageous without raising the voice or rolling the eyes or visibly disguising a smile, should mark a man as a lunatic in the congregation of the sober. But it is only the assumptions of a Collier piece that are lunatic; once he has established the premises of his topsy-turvy world he proceeds to build upon them with a logical consistency which the most earth-bound must find reasonable. The posture called dead-pan, that is to say, the suppression of horror or glee in the presence of the revolting or preposterous, has been cultivated by many artists and artistes who have sought to evoke laughter—^in itself a wholly praiseworthy enterprise. Collier's art makes the technique serve a higher order of creativity, for he not only destroys existing and sometimes unexamined assumptions but may at times offer alternative assumptions. Literature, and John Collier's kind more than most, is after all artifice, and our appreciation of any art may be enhanced by reference to the great pioneers in a given genre. Our judgment of contemporary drama, for example, is inevitably affected by our acquaintance with Shakespeare and Shaw, Because the antecedents of Collier's art are less obvious it may be useful to mention some of them here. To introduce him, or indeed any contemporary, into such rarefied company as Aristophanes and Ariosto, Rabelais and ix m I ' ' rl., ^ ) ; ' I ' , I . t t i ,