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PETER BROOKS
forces ·are operative, where large choices of ways of being must be
made. I have called
this
realm the moral occult:
it
is occult in a
world where there
is
no clear system of sacred myth, no unity of
belief, no accepted metaphorical chain leading from the phenomenal
to the spiritual, only a fragmented society and fragments of myths.
Yet the most Promethean of modem writers
insist
that
this
realm does
exist, and write their fictions to make it exist, to show its primacy
in
life.
We can conceive of the melodramatic imagination as coming
into being during the later eighteenth century, with the finalliquida–
tion of a world and a society theoretically organized around sacred
myth and sacred history, and the decadence of those literary forms–
neoclassical tragedy and comedy of manners - which image a spirit–
ually and ·socially unified community. That
is,
the melodramatic
mode arises in an era which demands rediscovery of the spiritual
within and behind a phenomenal realm which seems to have
been
deprived of possibilities for transcendence. Stage melodrama
is
one
early response to
this
demand, the Gothic novel
is
another. With
its exploration of mystery, horror, terror; its graveyards and cata–
combs, putrid corpses and bloody ghosts, the Gothic novel, as
Lowry
Nelson has argued in "Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel," suggests
a reassertion of the sacred in its most primitive form, as forces
in
the phenomenal world that must be propitiated, and to be propitiat–
ed must be recognized. In
his
study entitled
The Gothic Flame,
D. P.
Varma calls the Gothic enterprise a "quest for the numinous."
This
seems to me accurate:
books
like
The Monk
and
Frankenstein
insist
that life cannot be accounted for in terms of social manners and
interpersonal conflict alone, that every step man takes on earth
calls
spirits from the vastY deep, which he must then reckon with. These
spirits may of course be read as dwelling within man himself,
in
areas which the daylight and the
social
realm takes insufficient ac–
count of. The Gothic castle itself, with the pinnacles and dungeons,
crenellations, moats, drawbridges, spiraling staircases and concealed
doors, can be read as a first draft of the Freudian model of the mind,
the structure of consciousness and the unconscious, and their treach–
erous relationship. The numinous of the Gothic imagination
is
at
one stage the unconsCious, and
this
reading can, as I suggested earlier,
.be
eXtended ·to Balzac and James as
well:
the melodramatic mode of
