Melodrama and the Modes of the World

Whereas the notion of genre suggests a category within an artistic medium, the notion of mode suggests affinities unencumbered by medium. For this reason, the argument that melodrama operates beyond the confines of its generic conventions and outside the theater itself relies heavily on the notion of mode. In his seminal work on melodrama, Peter Brooks employs the notion of mode to encompass under a single category both stage melodrama and its extrapolated forms in literature, specifically, the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Henry James.¹ In film studies, the term has extended the limited scope of the melodrama genre: Thomas Elsaesser has characterized all silent-film drama as melodramatic; Christine Gledhill has described male genres such as the Western and the gangster film as melodramas; and Linda Williams has proposed melodrama as the dominant mode in American literature, stage, film, and television.²

Perhaps because of its substantial scope, mode has remained an ill-defined, vague concept. Symptomatic of this vagueness is the array of terms Brooks uses to define his object of study: an aesthetic, a mode of the modern imagination, a mode of conception and expression, a cultural form, a semantic force of field, a sense-making system, and an outlook.³ More recently, John Mercer and Martin Shingler have referred to this fluid understanding of melodrama as "style, mode, sensibility, aesthetic, and rhetoric."⁴ This extraordinary metonymic slide results from the fact that, since Brooks's coinage of the melodramatic mode, "mode" has functioned as an empty noun that simply completes the process of substantivizing the adjective "melodramatic."⁵ In fact, Brooks explicitly speaks of a movement "from adjective to substantive."⁶ And to the extent that Brooks attributes agency to the mode—after all, he does suggest that the melodramatic mode shapes the works of Balzac and James—this process of substantivization appears as a textbook case of the critical act of reification.

We may, however, dispel this charge of reification—as well as the charge of vagueness—by distinguishing two senses in which Brooks understands the melodramatic mode: first, as the urge to make sense of a collapsed moral order and, second, as the model of reality that emerges from such an effort. Only as an urge to organize and dramatize experience does the melodramatic mode act upon the world and shape cultural texts. As a model of reality, a mode does not properly exist (that is, it lacks agency); it simply regulates our knowledge of reality without constituting it.⁷ By failing to distinguish these two different acceptations of mode—as the necessity to dramatize experience and as the model that results from this effort—one collapses a primary human function into a metaphysical speculation. For this reason, we should locate the proper level of modes beneath—rather than above or beyond—the level of genre. Modes run across genres lines (and apply to more works than genres) not because they are broader or more abstract, but rather because they involve the primary need of dramatizing experience.

This essay theorizes the melodramatic mode—and modes in general—not as a model of reality based on a set of ideas but as a strategy to solve practical problems of experience. Modes are not overarching conceptions of the world that inform artistic works; fictional works necessarily evoke modes because we, as the protagonists of our own fictions, already employ these strategies to map our own experience. And although these strategies might very well make use of ideas (or models of reality), they don't depend on any specific idea—hence, the impossibility of defining the melodramatic mode in terms of the ideas it employs. I define melodrama as the mode that, in order to ameliorate suffering, tests the efficiency of ideas. To arrive at this notion of melodrama, the essay is structured as follows: the first section discusses the historicity of the notion of mode; the second one outlines the classification of modes within which melodrama acquires its specificity; the third section develops the concept of melodrama; and, finally, the fourth section analyzes Ismael Rodríguez's La...