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utterance is a victory over the repression and censorship of the social
reality principle, a release of psychic energy by the articulation of the
unsayable. One might say that the Gothic quest for renewed contact
with the numinous, the supernatural, the occult forces of the universe,
leads into the moral self.
The melodramatic imagination, I would argue, provides the very
basis of the modern mind's conception of spiritual reality and moral
conflict. We should recognize this mode as a central fact of the mod–
ern sensibility in that modern art - and I take Romanticism to be the
genesis of the modern, of the sensibility within which we are
still
liv–
ing - has typically felt itself to be constructed on, and over, the void,
postulating meanings and symbolic systems which have no certain jus–
tification because they are backed by no religious hermeneutic and no
universally accepted social code. The mad quest of Mallarme for a
Book which would be "the Orphic explanation of the earth," of Yeats
for a synthetic mythology which would enable
him
to hold "in a single
thought reality and justice," of Norman Mailer for dreams adequate
to the moon - these are
all
versions of a reaction to the vertiginous
feeling of standing over the abyss created when the necessary center of
things has been ·evacuated and dispersed. The search to bring into the
drama of man's quotidian existence the higher drama of moral forces
seems to me one of the large quests of the modern imagination, and I
think
that the melodramatic mode as I have described it is an in–
tensified, exemplary version of what most
art,
since the beginnings of
Romanticism, has been about.
What seems to me particularly important in the enterprise of
the social melodramatists - and here one should of course include
many names beyond Balzac and James - is their dual engagement
with the representation of man's social existence, the way he lives
his life, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence.
They write a melodrama
of
manners. On the one hand, they refuse
any metaphysical reduction of real life, and refuse to reduce their
metaphorical enterprise to the cold symbolism of allegory. They rec–
ognize, with Isabel Archer during her intense vigil, that "this base,
ignoble world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for."
On the other hand, they insist that life does contain, dissimulated but
present within reality, a moral occult which is the realm of eventual
value, and
this
insistence finally makes them more nourishing than
