206
PETER BROOKS
date the tropes that they employ, the metaphorical nature of their
enterprise and particularly the way in which they use the gestures of
social reality to imply states of moral being.
Melodrama, most would agree, represents a degenerate form of
the tragic - a form of the tragic, we might say, for a world in which
there
is
no longer a tenable idea of the sacred. It
is
also
a popular
form of the tragic, exploiting similar emotions within the context of
the ordinary.
If
we return to someone like Guilbert de Pixerecourt,
who reigned as king of Parisian melodrama for some thirty years at
the start of the nineteenth century, we find a spectacular theater ex–
ploiting extreme emotional states of being, which are often represent–
ed by extreme physical states: most plays will have a blind man, a
mute or someone dramatically mutilated. (How often do Balzac and
James create invalids, and make illness a point of view?) Charactm
tend to express these extreme states in a language of polarized moral
abstractions; they
say
their emotional condition, and the
drama
is
a clear clash of the claims of goodness against the claims of badness.
If
the world at the start of a melodrama seems charged with moral
ambiguities - suggested by such titles as
The Woman with Two
Husbands
or
The Man with Three Faces
- these ambiguities are not
inherent to ethics. They are rather appearances to
be
penetrated,
mysteries to
be
cleared up, so that the world may bathe in the stark
moral lighting of manichaeism - the final fixity of the Count and
Countess Restaud, of Gilbert Osmond, of Kate Croy condemned to
the solitude of her egotism. Ambiguities are cleared up by total ex–
pression: first of the characters to the audience, then of characters
to one another. As much as in Greek tragedy, the audience must
know where truth and justice lie. But the catharsis sought by melo–
drama comes less from pity and terror than from the total articula–
tion and vigorous acting out of the emotions: the last act contains
chases, duels, struggles which bring the physical release of violence
and clear statements of the victory of light over darkness. The hidden
identities, mysteries, evils of melodrama are never the result of chance
or fate, but of conscious plotting: evil
is
concerted, volitional–
which is not to say that it is motivated. Indeed, the more it
is
un–
motivated the more it becomes a pure product of will, demonstrating
that the world
is
inhabited by a Satanism as re3.I as it
is
gratuitous.
There further seems to me to be an underlying aesthetic prin–
ciple in stage melodrama which
is
even more pertinent to
the
fic-
