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PETER BROOKS
defeat, he
is
using the things and gestures of the real world, of social
life as kinds of metaphors which refer us to the realm of spiritual
reality, the realm of latent moral meanings. Things cease to be merely
themselves, gestures cease to be merely tokens of social intercourse
whose meaning is assigned by a social code; they become the vehicles
of metaphors whose tenor suggests another kind of reality, which is
the true object of attention. Likewise, discovery of Mme. de Vionnet's
affair with Chad is essentially a vehicle for discovery of her entrap–
ment and exploitation by "mysterious forces," her victimization by
life.
I.
A.
Richards has given a global definition of metaphor as a
"transaction between contexts," and in
all
these cases there
is
such
a transaction: pressure on the primary context is such that things and
gestures are made to release hidden meanings, to transfer their sig–
nification to another context.
Both Balzac and James weave a rich texture of metaphor
in
their prose, and the metaphors almost always create an expanded
moral context for the narrative. But it is not a question of metaphoric
texture alone;
it
is rather that to the melodramatic imagination,
things are necessarily all in the nature of metaphor because things
are not simply themselves, but refer to, speak of something
else.
If
we consider
in
this light the implications of works like
The Beast
in the Jungle
and
The Sacred Fount,
we find that the more elusive
the tenor of the metaphor becomes - the more difficult it becomes
to put one's finger on the nature of the spiritual reality alluded to–
the more highly charged
is
the vehicle, the more strained with pres–
sure to suggest a meaning beyond. Melodrama may be a drama which
is heightened, hyperbolic
because
the moral realm it wants to evoke
is not immediately visible, and the writer
is
ever conscious of stand–
ing over a void, dealing in conflicts, qualities and quantities whose
very existence
is
uncertain. The violence and extremism of emotion
and moral statement we find in melodrama may then derive from
the fact that they are unjustified, unfounded emotion and ethical
consciousness, qualities that cannot be shown to bear any imperative
relationship to the way life is lived by most people. To the uncertain–
ty of the tenor corresponds the exaggeration, the heightening of the
vehicle. To come at the question in other terms: a definition of
melodrama might be analogous to T. S. Eliot's definition of "senti–
mentality" in his essay on
Hamlet.
Sentimentality he calls emotion
