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From Clarissa to Dynasty: Melodrama: The Never-ending Story
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16116 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1989 |
2,618 Words |
| Author
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Paul Coates
Paul Coates is professor of literature at McGill University,
Montreal, Canada. |
Tragedy may have been born of the spirit of music, and music may be a defining part (the melos) of melodrama, but the two forms should not be confused. The distinguishing feature of melodrama, which sets it clearly apart from tragedy, is its dependence upon the sensation of shock--upon shock to induce sensation per se.
In tragedy, all the reversals and catastrophes grow logically out of the original dramatic material. In melodrama, however, they arrive unexpectedly: Disaster is not precipitated by profoundly rooted character traits (harmartia) or the deep structures of reality (myth and the workings of the gods), but by fortuitous events. The paradigm is perhaps the way Tess's letter in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles slides under the door ... and then under the carpet. If tragic events unfold with the appearance of inevitability, the accidental nature of melodramatic occurrences implies that things could always have been different. This sense of possible difference is not Musil's Moglichkeitsdenken but Hollywood's willingness to overhaul the product to render it more salable.
Fortuitous Nature
Melodrama does not draw the modernist conclusion from the fortuitous, unforeseen nature of events in the modern world; it does not juxtapose the alternatives with one another (though the fact that melodramatic works do tend to generate alternative endings can be seen at work in early texts, such as William Godwin's Caleb Williams or several of the novels of Dickens) but keeps them in reserve to tantalize the public (who shot J.R.?). It torments one with an excruciating sense of "if only this had not happened."
One of the consequences of melodrama's lack of inevitability is its potential endlessness. The author of a melodrama is not restricted to the material with which he begins, which imposes its own logic, but is able to throw in extraneous matter as and when he likes. Thus the melodrama is an expansionist form--the form of Balzac or Dickens--founded on serial accumulation. This expansionism is most apparent in the compulsive additiveness of nineteenth-century melodrama, a concomitant of the perennial additions being made to the world by science, colonialism, and capitalism. If tragedy is the expression of a closed society, melodrama embodies the modern ideology of endless growth. In the twentieth century, the endlessness is more often that of successive permutations of a basic set of characters, none of whom can die, and whose varying fortunes ultimately become absurd or grotesque (as in
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