PARTISAN REVIEW
205
in exee&':) of the objective correlative which ought to embody emo–
tion - that is to say, unfounded emotion.
But melodrama
in
Balzac and James seems to me less to
in–
dicate a failure to adequate objective correlative to emotion as the
impossibility of doing
SO;
it suggests a Promethean attempt to reach
beyond the visible conditions of man's quotidian drama to its occult
issues. My argument here has analogies with that of James Guetti
in
The Limits of Metaphor.
He maintains that the work of Melville,
Conrad and Faulkner shows ever more audacious and desperate at–
tempts to understand and speak of a central "darkness" which is
finally unexpressible, which can finally only be alluded to, can never
become the center or object of the narrative that it claims to be. It
is,
like Marlow's discovery in the heart of darkness, "unspeakable,"
and the whole narrative is a metaphor whose tenor is ineffable, a
tenuous "as if' construction which can never say its meaning and its
goal.
The Beast in the Jungle
is a perfectly parallel case, because the
beast lying in wait for Marcher is finally nothing, nothingness, the
void of his life, the very absence of event - yet this absence
is
of
course charged with terrible and unspeakable meaning by the life
lived in its terms, lived in order to reach it. I suppose that
The Sacred
Fount
would be the ultimate development of a fiction
in
which the
"lurid document" has become completely indistinguishable from the
"baseless fabric of a vision": the narrator's image of the world may
be
either, and he cannot himself be sure which. All we can say
is
that the lurid document, the highly colored reportage of his percep–
tions, seems to be a function of the baselessness of the vision: the
more the melodramatic imagination soars
in
flight, the more highly
it charges the documentary terms, the vehicles which must carry its
message. And
if
The Sacred Fount
probably fails ultimately, it is be–
cause the vehicle has been overcharged, and can't bear the weight.
I'm conscious that I have until now been using the word "melo–
drama" without any attempt to justify it or define it historically.
I think that we all receive pretty much the same connotations from
the word: extravagant expression, moral polarization, emotional hy–
perbole, extreme states of being. But it may be useful to dwell for a
moment on the historical aesthetics of melodrama, which show
in
clear skeletal form many of the elements I have been discussing in
Balzac's and James's fictional dramatizations, and can help to e1uci-
