PARTISAN REVIEW
209
This manner, while they stood for a long minute facing each
other over all they didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden
jar to Densher's protected state. It was a Venice all of evil that
had broken out for them alike, so that they were together in their
anxiety, if they really could have met on it; a Venice of cold, lash–
ing rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging through
narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption, with the people
engaged in all the water-life huddled, stranded and ageless, bored
and cynical, under archways and bridges.
The Jamesian prestidigitation is in full glorious evidence here. Eu–
genio's slight,
too
slight smile is the detailed gesture which indicates a
larger manner which in tum indicates a "rupture of peace" - already
the vocabulary is taking on strong coloration - and this rupture then
becomes the passageway for a flood of evil, conjuring into existence
a new Venice of storm, darkness and suppressed violence.
Reflecting on this metaphorical usage in which gestures express
qualities beyond themselves, we may be struck by the seeming para–
dox that the total expressivity assigned to gesture is
in
fact posited
on the ineffability of what is to be expressed. Gesture is read as con–
taining such meanings because it posits their existence, since it works
as
a metaphorical approach to what cannot be said.
If
we are often
perilously close, in reading these novelists, to a feeling that the rep–
resented world won't bear the weight of the significances placed on
it, this is because the represented world is almost always being used
metaphorically, as sign of the occult moral world. The way the world
is
represented becomes the very process by which the moral occult
is
brought into existence, postulated as a true fact, the most im–
portant fact of human existence.
The melodramatic imagination is, then, perhaps a way of per–
ceiving and imaging the spiritual
in
a world where there is no longer
any
clear idea of the sacred, no generally accepted societal mQraI
imperatives, where the body of the ethical has become a sort of
deus absconditus
which must be sought for, posited, brought into man's
existence through exercise of the spiritualist imagination. Balzac's and
James's melodrama, and the development of the melodramatic mode
from, say, Samuel Richardson to Norman Mailer, is perhaps
first
of
all
a desperate effort to renew contact with the sacred
through
the representation of fallen reality, to insist that behind reality, hid–
den
by it yet indicated within it, there
is
a realm where large moral
