PARTISAN
REVIEW
199
lesson by the old antiques dealer, "Desire sets us afire and power
destroys us" - tenns which reveal the true' locus and the stakes of
his drama. Eugene de Rastignac, in
Pere Coriot,
is summoned to
choose between Obedience, represented by the family, and Revolt,
represented by the outlaw Vautrin. The metaphoric texture of the
prose itself suggests polarization into moral absolutes: Rastignac's
"last tear of youth," shed over Goriot's grave, from the earth where
it falls "rebounds up to heaven." The world
is
subsumed by an under–
lying manichaeism, and the narrative creates the excitement of its
drama by putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil
played out under the surface of things - just as description of the
surfaces of the modern metropolis pierces through to a mythological
realm where the imagination can find a habitat for its play with large
moral entities.
If
we consider the prevalence of hidden relationships
and masked personages and occult powers in Balzac, we find that
they derive from a sense that the novelist's true subject is hidden
and masked - because the center of his interest and the scene of his
drama
is
in fact what we might call the "moral occult," the domain
of operative spiritual values which
is
both indicated within and
masked by the surface of reality. The moral occult is not a meta–
physical system; it
is
closer to unconscious mind: a sphere of being
where our most basic desires and interdictions lie, a realm which
in
quotidian existence may appear closer off from us, but which
we can get in touch with, must get in touch with since it is the realm
of meaning and value. The melodramatic mode exists to locate and
to articulate the moral occult.
I shall come back to these fonnulations. I want first to try to
extend our understanding of the melodrama of manners, and the
kinds
of representations of social life that it gives. And I want to ex–
tend the argument beyond Balzac by calling upon his greatest admirer
among subsequent novelists, Henry James. The melodramatic tenor
of James's imagination was beautifully caught by his secretary,
Theodora Bosanquet, when she wrote:
When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the world and
looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of
prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the
doomed, defenceless children of light.
[Henry James at Work]l
1.
Leo
B. Levy
also quotes this in his
Versions of Melodrama.
