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Cap S- High Degree Ofsuspense About Their Resolution 128 THE MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION ALZAC: REPRESENTATION AND SIGNIFICATION 129 observation "penetrated the soul without neglecting the body; or .ospital of Incurables"; chairs are "dismembered," or, in a suite of rather, it seized so well the exterior details that it went at once ~djectives that moves from the objective to the fully animized, "old, beyond" (6:66). This is the power of extrapolation from the present to' '~racked, rotted, wobbly, gnawed, one-armed, one-eyed, invalid, the invisible, from surface to depth. From the plane of representation, ;expiring" (2:851-52).34 The very appearance of the boarders gives we begin to move into the tiers behind, which are themselves plural: ·~~the presentiment of dramas completed or continuing; not those some parts of the significant behind are more available--doser dramas played before the footlights, between painted drops, but living behind-than others." Metaphor works in essentially two ways: by 'and mute dramas, those icy dramas that touch the heart, perpetual creating transactions from part to part, and from surface to behind. It dramas." Then individual figures-Mile Michonneau, Poiret--Iead to hence both reorganizes, in a new provisional totality, and (sometimes more audacious interrogations of the dramatic past lying behind the the one is a consequence of the other) reveals, lays bare the causes and ravaged face: "What acid had stripped this creature of her female principles of the effects. Through the constructive play of metaphor, forms? ..."; "What work could have so shriveled him up? what one can at least accede to the immediate behind-from stage to passion had blackened his bulbous face? ..." (2:855-56). wings-to expose basic social structures and hidden controlling . The action of the plot, after the lengthy introduction of setting and powers. By constructing metaphors upon metaphors, one may reach characters, gets underway amidst darkness and mystery. Rastignac, still further back, until one approaches the realm of a true spiritual who has returned from his first ball in Society and is pursuing occult. Ifthis movement is doomed to a final falling-short of its goal, it ambitious reveries while attempting to study his law books, hears a is yet full of creative vitality in its approach toward the goal: it is the 'groan coming from Goriot's room and looks through the keyhole to very principle of movement, the underlying force-field of desire of the' find the old man twisting silver bowls into an ingot. The questions Comedie Humaine. A more detailed demonstration could work through ;\.raised by this operation are compounded by the phrase Goriot lets fall: one novel's thematization of this movement, to emerge with closer ,"Poor child!" (2:876). Then, as Rastignac is meditating this mystery, definitions of melodramatic technique. Thematically, Lucien de he hears two men coming up the stairs; a light goes on in Vautrin's Rubempre presents himself as the anti-image of the quest to move room, and he detects the clink of gold. Rastignac's first experience of .what are to be the principal lines of plot in which he will be through effects to causes, the very type of failure in the Comedie implicated comes, then, in the stage darkness, with all the mystery, of Humaine.e? The positive image whose career, fully as exemplary as 'an encounter with the villains of stage melodrama. The plot then Lucien's, offers the very type of success, is Eugene de Rastignac. develops as a series of melodramatic encounters that tie the lines tighter, both explicating positions and relationships and creating a II - Cap s- high degree ofsuspense about their resolution. Rastignac's temptation The narrative voice of Le Pere Goriot overtly adopts the breathless­ .' by Vautrin, and his interest in Victorine Taillefer, is brought to crisis ness of melodrama from the opening page, claiming for this tale the .' 'at the same moment as his courtship of Delphine de Nucingen and label of "drama" despite "the abusive and contorted manner in which also Vautrin's detection and arrest; Mme de Beauseant's ball, her it has been used in these times of painful literature" (2 :847).33 But the farewell to society, coincides with Goriot's death agony, Anastasie de drama, the narrator adds, is no exaggeration: "this drama is neither' Restaud's breakdown before her husband, and the final scene in fiction nor novel. All is true." This is explicitly to be the drama of the .. Rastignac's "education." Everything moves toward, prepares, a few real; and in the opening pages (as at the start of La Peau de chagrin) we . thunderous and decisive scenes. can observe the narrator working upon the details of the reality he has Melodramatic representation indeed touches on the central experi­ framed in his "frame of bronze," to make them release latent ence of the novel; it constitutes much of what the book is about. We significances. The famous furniture of the Pension Vauquer itself Can best grasp this through the first major "scene" presented; it occurs becomes the first token of the conflict: the furniture is "proscribed," when Rastignac, leaving behind him the sordid mysteries of the placed in the Pension "as the debris of civilization are put in the' fension, goes to wage combat for entry into "le monde." His first social call, at the hotel de Restaud, is structured on two verbal jurisprudence which, well learned and well practiced, leads to gestures, the first of which opens doors, produces a sense of belonging everything" (2:905-06). Yet the crudity of Balzac's rendering-the and a flood of light on society; the second, obscurity, rejection, and a excess of the comte's successive reactions, the rapidity of Rastignac's permanent barring of passages. If his arrival is obviously a nuisance to complete acceptance and complete rejection-make the labels of the Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud-who is receiving her lover, comedy of manners and social realism inadequate and misleading. If Maxime de Trailles-when the Comte de Restaud enters she nonethe­ we see the scene as such, we will be forced to conclude that it is bad less introduces Rastignac with the "magic" phrase that he is "related social realism: the gestures dramatized by Balzac are the motions of to Mme la Vicomtesse de Beauseant through the Marcillac": a the bull in the china closet; more is broken than need be to make the formulation which is a "stroke of the wand," opening "thirty "point" about Rastignac's social inexpertise (an image which the compartments" in Rastignac's brain, restoring to him "all his .narrator himself suggests when he comments that Rastignac is like prepared wit," and providing a "sudden light" to make him "see clear someone in a curiosity shop who has bumped into a cabinet of in the air of high society" (2:895-96). The comte is then all polite figurines and "knocked off three or four badly glued-on heads"). As attention and discusses ancestors until Rastignac announces his James indicated in his comment on the very similar scene of social acquaintanceship with someone he has just perceived leaving the rejection in Illusions perdues, Balzac's social gestures do not have the hotel de Restaud, Pere Goriot: "At the mention of this name, volume and opacity of those we find in the novel of manners. There, prettified with the title of pere, the comte, who had been attending to gestures are counters which have value in terms of a system, a social the hearth, threw his tongs into the fire as if they had burned his code which forms their context and assigns their meaning. If the first hands and stood up. 'Sir, you could have said Monsieur Goriot,' he "magic phrase," evoking Rastignac's relation to Mme de Beauseant, cried" (2:898). In a moment, Rastignac notes that there has again seems a reasonable equivalent to any social identification found in been a stroke of the wand, but this time with the "inverse effect" of Austen or Stendhal or Forster, his disastrous mention of Pere Goriot "related to Mme la Vicomtesse de Beauseant." The subject is cannot be assimilated to Emma's insult to Miss Bates, or Julien Sorel's changed, Rastignac's departure hastened; and upon his leaving the failure to change into silk stockings for dinner. These refer us to the hotel, we hear the comte give his valet the order that they will never code, in terms of which they are inappropriate, embarrassing, in again be at home to Monsieur de Rastignac. violation. Rastignac's gaffe is other, it is charged in a different An understanding of what has really gone on in this scene can lead manner. It is more than social: it is revolutionary and revelatory. To us to a clearer grasp of the kind ofdramatization that interests Balzac. understand how this is so is to see why Balzac is not writing a crude At first glance, Rastignac seems to have made (without his or our and uneven comedy of manners, but something very different, a quite knowing why) an impolite social gesture, what he qualifies as a melodrama of manners. "gaucherie." Such an outcome to a first venture into society by a The very "Parisian code" that Rastignac must master is only on the young provincial would appear normal to the point of banality. We surface a code of manners. This is indeed suggested by the preliminary might think we were in the medium of comedy of manners, witnessing circumstances of his visit to the Restauds, which we passed over. a scene that could be found, doubtless with much greater subtlety, in Seeking to show that he is a familiar of the house, Rastignac opens the Marivaux or Laclos or Stendhal, Jane Austen or E.
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