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  • Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility by Jonathan Goldberg
  • Anupama Kapse (bio)
Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility
by Jonathan Goldberg. Duke University Press.
2016. $89.95 hardcover; $23.95 paperback; e-book available. 204 pages.

An understanding of affect as an index of the political has been vital to the resurgence of scholarly interest in melodrama. As an affective mode par excellence, at least in the last two decades, melodrama has been associated with the ability to amplify the emotions of marginal and disadvantaged groups.1 Analytically, in cinema studies the challenge has been to uphold melodrama’s capacity to posit individual problems as larger, more complex indices of a desired social imaginary. Jonathan Goldberg’s Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility attempts to offer an interdisciplinary account of melodrama’s political possibilities by returning to its musical roots. Goldberg attempts to retrace melodrama’s original meaning of “drama to which music has been added.” More provocatively, he approaches melodrama as a musical-temporal mode that can incorporate queer desire into its form outside the progressive register of teleology.

Such a project necessarily presents itself as a book for advanced readers. Wasting no time on rehearsing arguments, Goldberg simply assumes the reader’s familiarity with the key conventions and debates of melodrama.2 By and large, following Peter Brooks’s foundational work The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, scholarship on melodrama has foregrounded [End Page 191] victimhood as the primary site of expression and intervention.3 Goldberg privileges a dense, poetic mode of writing: eschewing an overly rationalistic road map of his chapters, he complicates the existing meanings of melodrama as a hyperbolic form to be “explained” away. The style of the book is essayistic—symmetrically arranged readings and fine-grained analyses are themselves presented lyrically instead of being organized chronologically.

Part 1 examines opera and cinema. Part 2 focuses on the novel and cinema. The four chapters in these two parts include an eclectic and often canonical range of examples that are read noncanonically: Beethoven in chapter 1 and Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes in chapter 2. The third chapter is titled “The Art of Murder: Hitchcock and Highsmith.” The fourth and final chapter, “Wildean Aesthetics: From ‘Paul’s Case’ to Lucy Gayheart,” looks at Willa Cather’s novels through a melodic lens. Featuring astute readings of the nonverbal, Goldberg uses musical metaphors to “listen” to queer meanings and otherwise invisible emotional parameters. Whether it is Beethoven’s Fidelio, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), or Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart (1935), he aims to find the “queer lever[s]” that “ignit[e] sites of desire at . . . places of crossing” (xiii).4 These chapters foreground affective intersections, over and above any clear examples of moral certitude. Putting relationality over identity, Goldberg begins with Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1814), an example of how “for male to become female is not to become woman but to enter into the differentially shared space of self-division.”5 Similarly, Todd Haynes’s melodramatic “remakes” of Sirks and Fassbinder’s films enact (or reenact) a “disengagement of the term woman from its referent “woman” setting into motion a “homo-aesthetics” vis-à-vis the politics of a similarity-in-difference.6

Fidelio functions as the book’s analytic center: it is an opera about a cross-dressed protagonist who switches voice, pitch, gender, and tonal registers that are dependent on an identity that collapses as soon as he/she retrieves his/her husband from jail and lapses back into being Leonore. As such, “the thrill of hearing Leonore’s voice ascend into soprano range has a great deal to do with its escape from confinement to the alto register [as Fidelio].”7 As Fidelio descends into the depths of prison to help dig the grave of an unjustly imprisoned man, Beethoven interrupts the separation of the speaking voice and music, joining melos and drama together in a moment the score names technically, formally, as “Melodram.”8 The central argument depends not only on the interpenetration of identities but also on the Melodram as the point at which music and...

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