Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility by Jonathan Goldberg (review)

Students of melodrama have long been drilled in the term's literal meaning: music + drama. But before Jonathan Goldberg's Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility, few have had the chance to take the music seriously. With a rare combination of musical expertise and critical acumen, Goldberg puts the pieces together in this book. Objects of musical analysis include a repetitive piano piece in a Hitchcock film, the theme of a "life in music" among Cather's musician characters, and the ceaseless invention of Beethoven's sole opera, and in every case, Goldberg challenges "the limits of an analysis of the music as simply underscoring some singular point of reference" (147, 7). "Literally elusive," music models an aesthetic of overflowing categories (97). Thus to follow the music of melodrama is to transform the drama as well. No longer a matter of the "moral occult," as in Peter Brooks's landmark study, in which the story line achieves the recognition of virtue, melodrama actually makes such categorical thinking impossible.¹ A problem of desire more than logic, this impossibility arises from the fiction of singular identity. We want many things because we are many things, and these desires include wanting to be alone as much as in relationships. To that end, Melodrama tracks the desire to be social and antisocial at the same time. Its many insights flow from that special attunement.

Melodrama is a book in which the artists' names alone invite you, but these names never stand alone. Sirk-Fassbinder-Haynes, Hitchcock and Highsmith, Wilde and Cather, and, most surprisingly, Beethoven-Sirk-Euripides (eyeing the impossible situation of Alcestis) cluster in "aesthetic network[s] of authorial transport," networks in which no agony of influence can contain the ecstasy of identification (163). But identification would not be "along the lines of identity" (31). It is rather "confusion," "something impersonal, relational, nonverbal" (98, 35) that goes by many names in this book, including telepathy and coincidence, but its most prominent name is, again, music. Both literal and a metaphor for the way art exceeds us, music is melodrama's—and Melodrama's—organizing principle. As such, it sticks in our heads, as do Goldberg's own stylistic refrains, pulled from his melodramas' evocative song titles such as "I'm Not There" and "The Band Played On." And the point comes no more from the lyrics than from the transfer itself: "if melodrama has a message, it is about this other life that persists as aesthetic connection," a connection at once impersonal and deeply intimate (151). Indeed, the most seductive register of Melodrama, and one of its favorite words, is intimation. Beneath the louder proclamations of academic argument, Goldberg whispers secrets of aesthetic life.

It is therefore all the more bracing when Goldberg boldly opens fire on academic adversaries. Less restrained in tone than his recent (and also excellent) book on Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Melodrama makes short work of critics attached to rigid political and historical categories, particularly those who approach melodrama "on the lookout for didactic instruction in political desire" (40).² If we try to situate the book intellectually, a roster emerges of confederates variously at war with conventional criticism: D. A. Miller, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, and Lauren Berlant are among the most prominent in the book and in the profession. Other potential allies remain unmentioned. Film scholars, for instance, might hear an echo of Eugenie Brinkema's challenging concept of mise-n'en-scène in Goldberg's ideas about cinematic understatement: "Alongside what we hear or see [in films] there is something unheard and unseen. The relationship between what is there and what isn't is far from evident" (83).³ Unlike Brinkema, Goldberg never comes across as obfuscating, but he does not shy away from "being difficult" in the social sense, even as he so passionately and cogently seeks to persuade. There is ultimately in this intellectual stance something more of the impossible, a wish to...