The melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess : with a new preface

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Tht\;J\1elodramatic Imagination Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess

with a new Preface

Peter Brooks

Yale University Press New Haven and London

Contents

Preface 1995

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Preface to the original edition

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The Melodramatic Imagination 2

The Aesthetics of Astonishment

3 The Text of Muteness 4 Melodrama and Romantic Dramatization

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5 Balzac: Representation and Signification

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6 Henry James and the Melodrama of Consciousness

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Conclusion: Melodrama, A Central Poetry

Copyright © 1976 by Peter Brooks. New Preface Copyright © 1995 by Peter Brooks. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections I 07 and I 08 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress catalog card number: 75-43305 International standard book number: 0-300-06553-1 (pbk.) Set in Baskerville type. Printed in the United States of America. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Notes

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Index

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Preface 1995

THE MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION TWENTY YEARS AFTER

to Sophie Brooks Laing this new edition for another

This book was written out of an attempt to clarify something I didn't quite grasp-an element that I felt to be part of our experience in reading great writers who could not be wholly constrained within a realist aesthetic. This experience appeared to be connected to our response to popular forms of representation that we held to be not quite respectable yet found animating and somehow necessary. Melodrama-less as a genre than as an imaginative mode----came to seem the key to understanding this elusive element. As I began unearthing stage melodramas from the library stacks, the term melodrama imposed itself more and more as the contours of a coherent mode of imagining and representing began to take shape. Work with a neglected or disdained concept such as melodrama inevitably brings a kind of anxiety of solipsism. You find yourself wondering, Does anyone else see it this way? Does anyone else care? Most gratifying has been the gradual discovery that I was not alone in thinking about the role of the melodramatic imagination in modern literature and culture. The book got off to a slow start but has gained a readership that evidently felt, as I did, that melodrama as I've tried to describe it-with critiques and revisions-belongs in our cultural and critical repertory. Since this book's publication in 1976, then, its argument has had a respectable afterlife in literary criticism. A renewed attention to popular cultural forms has brought a willingness to recognize the melodramatic element in the work of such authors as Balzac,James, Dostoevsky, and indeed a recognition that the melodramatic mode is an inescapable dimension of modern consciousnes~. Beyond the confines of literary criticism, one now finds the term melodrama much more frequently used in everyday discussion of literature and other forms of art-not solely through the influence of this book, of course, but because of a convergence of cultural interests. Melodrama has become an issue in modern painting-for instance, in the work of such artists as Robert Longo, whose grandiose canvasses call on the imagery of popular entertainment. Most striking of all to me is my belated discovery that this book early on engaged a readership in a field I had merely alluded to, and of which I then knew practically nothing: film studies. Melodrama was becoming a key concept in the critical discussion of film-particularly Hollywood film of the 1940s and rgsos, and its later avatars, perhaps especially New German cinema-and The Melodramatic Imagination provided a historical and theoretical basis for a body of interesting work. Vll

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The timing of this convergence of interests is remarkable. I published a first sketch of the argument of this book in an essay, "The Melodramatic Imagination," that appeared in Partisan Review in 1972. In Monogram, journal of the British Film Institute, Thomas Elsaesser in 1972 published his seminal essay "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," which provoked a reassessment of Hollywood melodrama, in the films of Douglas Sirk, especially, and Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray, among others, and in the continuities between stage melodrama and silent cinema. Elsaesser's essay and my own, although addressing different bodies of material, crosscut in many ways: in our conception of melodrama as an expressionistic aesthetic, in our understanding of its affinity with certain psychoanalytic formulations, in our attention to the use of music and other nonverbal signs in melodrama's signifying practices, and in our histories of its origins in the bourgeois revolutions of the end of the eighteenth century. Elsaesser at one point even uses the phrase "melodramatic imagination," though so far as I know, neither of us had read the other at that time. Such a convergence of interests suggests that by the early 1970s retrieving and discussing the concept of melodrama had taken on a certain cultural importance: workers in different (though not distant) fields who analyzed the imaginative modes in which cultural forms express dominant social and psychological concerns sensed that the category of the melodramatic needed revival because it pointed to-as no other term quite could-a certain complex of obsessions and aesthetic choices central to our modernity. In our efforts to characterize and describe certain kinds of fictions we confined ourselves to traditional categoriestragedy, comedy, romanticism, and realism. Sooner or later, melodrama--or some cognate thereof-was needed if we were to make sense of cultural forms that mattered to us. Explaining why melodrama has proved so important for cultural critics and historians since the 1970s would be too large a discussion for a Preface, and it would repeat too much of what I tried to say in the Conclusion. I remain largely convinced by my own arguments: that melodrama is a form for a posHacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance even though we cannotderive them from any transcendental system of belief. My thesis has been criticized for overemphasizing the ethical dimension of melodrama, its tendency to postulate a "moral occult": the hidden yet operative domain of yalues that the drama, through its heightening, attempts to make present"within the ordinary. And I readily admit that heightening and sensation for their own sake, a dramaturgy of hyperbole, excess, excitement, and "acting out"-in the psychoanalytic sensemay be the essence of melodrama without any reference to ethical imperatives. I

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would still, however, contend that those melodramas that matter most to us convince us that the dramaturgy of excess and overstatement corresponds to and evokes confrontations and choices that are of heightened importance, because in them we put our lives-however trivial and constricted-on the line. It is perhaps part of our postmodern sophistication that we don't quite take melodrama "straight" anymore-maybe no one ever did-but always with a certain ironic detachment. Yet, remarkably, as spectators we can demur from the melodramatic_:::find it a hoot, at times-and yet still be seriously thrilled by it. Excess can itself be thrilling, even when it is somewhat campy, even when-as in postmodern architecture-it is more a citation of past systems of meaning than a serious investment in present reality. Indeed, postmodernism has reveled in the revival of nineteenth-century melodramas-several have been restaged, especially in London, or reanimated in new versions, such as Sweeney Todd or the musical version of the epic melodramatic novel Les Miserables-as well as film and television transformations. However sophisticated we have become, the appeal of the melodramatic remains a central fact of our culture. In addition to Elsaesser's essay, there have been a host of interesting discussions of film melodrama, especially women's melodrama-th
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Preface to the original edition

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This is a book about excess, about a mode of heightened dramatization inextricably bound up with the modern novel's effort to signify. My argument in the chapters that follow has its source in a movement-that of my own thinking-from adjective to substantive. In teaching and writing about a number of authors, particularly Balzac and Henry James, I found myself using the adjective melodramatic. It seemed to describe, as no other word quite did, the mode of their dramatizations, especially the extravagance of certain representations, and the intensity of moral claim impinging on their characters' consciousness. Within an apparent context of "realism" and the ordinary, they seemed in fact to be staging a heightened and hyperbolic drama, making reference to pure and polar concepts of darkness and light, salvation and damnation. They seemed to place their characters at the point of intersection of primal ethical forces and to confer on the characters' enactments a charge of meaning referred to the clash of these forces. Reading these novelists with a full awareness of their ambitions more and more appeared to me to pose problems and to demand understanding of the melodramatic mode: a certain theatrical substratum used and reworked in the novelistic representations. If melodramatic seemed a necessary descriptive term (the question will be treated in more detail in the first chapter), I yet needed to know more accurately what the word meant. This implied (perhaps with naive realism) an attempt to find out what melodrama itself was. The end of this exploration might have been an impasse: the descriptive use of an adjective--especially when applied in such an extended manner-might have proved to have precious little to do with the noun from which it derived. Yet· I found, to the contrary, that melodrama itself was of the utmost pertinence: to defining the adjective, to controlling and deepening its broader meaning, and to an understanding of such authors as Balzac, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Conrad, James-indeed, to an understanding of an important and abiding mode in the modern imagination. It is this process of reflection, leading from the use of melodramatic as a descriptive term and analytic perspective back to melodrama as a xiii

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dramatic genre and an aesthetic,. that has determined my choice of material and its organization. My "discovery" of the pertinence and importance ofmelodrama no doubt has something to do with a recent renewal of critical interest in the forms of popular literature. The detective story, science fiction, children's literature, popular music, commercial art have all recently come to be seen as valid subjects of critical St\ldy. The renewed attention directed to them may derive in part from an increasing interest in the sociology of culture and in part from an implied lesson of structural anthropology and linguistics, that man's sense-making in sign-systems is omnipresent and that all its forms have functional similarities. Still more important may be the extent to . which contemporary writers and artists have themselves turne