198
PETER BROOKS
I have deliberately chosen an extreme example here, and
in
quoting it out of its context, I run the risk of confirming the
view, popularized by Martin Turnell and others, that Balzac is
a popular melodramatist whose versions of life are cheap, over–
wrought and hollow. Balzac's use of hyperbolic figures, of lurid
and grandiose events, masked relationships and disguised identities,
abductions, slow-acting poisons, secret societies, mysterious parentage
and other elements from the melodramatic repertory; and even more,
his
forcing of narrative voice to the breathless pitch of melodrama,
his
insistence that life be always seen through highly colored lenses,
have of course always been the object of critical attack. "His melo–
drama," Tumell comments
in
The Novel in France,
"reminds us not
so much of Simenon or even Mrs. Christie as of the daily serial
in
the BBC's Light Programme." In
his
most waspish
Scrutiny
manner,
he adds: "it must be confessed that our experience in reading Balzac
is
not always very elevated and that his interests are by no means al–
ways those of the adult.
To the extent that the "interests of the adult" imply repression,
sacrifice of the pleasure principle and a refusal to live beyond the
quotidian, Tumell
is
right, but his rightness misses the point of Bal–
zac's drive to push
through
manners to deeper sources of being. Such
representations as the scene I quoted from
Gobseck
are necessary
culminations to the kind of drama Balzac is trying to evoke. The
progress of the narrative elicits and authorizes such terminal articula–
tions. The scene represents a victory over repression, a climactic
moment at which the characters are able to confront one another
with full expressivity, to fix in large gestures the meaning of their
existences.
As
in the interrogations of
La
Peau de chagrin
we saw
a desire to push through surfaces to a "drama" in the realm of
emotional and spiritual reality, so in the scene from
Gobseck
we
find a desire to make articulate
all
that
this
.family tragedy has
come to be about.
This desire to expres:l all seems a primary characteristic of the
melodramatic mode. Nothing
is
spared because nothing
is
left un–
said; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give
voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and
polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship.
Life tends, in this fiction, toward ever more concentrated and totally
expressive gestures and statements. Raphael de Valentin
is
given a
