Matthew BUSH
Pragmatic Passions
Melodrama and
Latin American Social Narrative
Ediciones de Iberoamericana
Historia y crítica de la literatura, 74
Consejo editorial:
Mechthild Albert,
Enrique García Santo-Tomás,
Aníbal González,
Klaus Meyer-Minnemann,
Katharina Niemeyer,
Emilio Peral Vega,
Roland Spiller,
Janett Reinstädler.
Matthew Bush
Pragmatic Passions
Melodrama and Latin American
Social Narrative
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bush, Matthew, 1976
Pragmatic passions : melodrama and Latin American social narrative / Matthew Bush.
pages cm. --(Ediciones de Iberoamericana ; 74)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-8484898351 -- ISBN 978-3-9548738-0-7 1. Latin American literature--History and criticism. 2. Melodrama. I. Title.
PQ7081.B87 2015
860.9’98--dc23
2014042564
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For my father
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Note on Translations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Stirring Emotion, Assessing Progress
Chapter 1: Doña Bárbara or the Complications of Clear-Cut Melodrama
Chapter 2: Suffering and Retribution: The Politicized Theatrics of El tungsteno
Chapter 3: What More Can One Man Do? Disillusionment and Conformity in El amor brujo
Chapter 4: Romance, Intrigue, and More in Gabriela, Cravo e Canela
Chapter 5: Episodes of Passion and Remorse: The Excesses of La muerte de Artemio Cruz
Postscript: And then… Melodrama Beyond the Boom
Bibliography
Index
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
Throughout this study I provide translated passages from the texts under analysis. When reliable translations have been available, I have employed them, unless otherwise indicated. In the case of Roberto Arlt’s El amor brujo, for which no translation exists, the renditions of the text are entirely mine. Any mistakes here, or anywhere in the arguments presented in this study are solely my responsibility.
M. B.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Though I was not conscious of it at the time, this book began many years ago when I was a student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. It was there that I met my friend and mentor Agustín Pastén who inspired me to pursue an academic career, and to whom I am forever grateful. The study at hand is the culmination of a process of investigation initiated in my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There I had the privilege to study with both Juan Pablo Dabove and Peter Elmore whose examples con-tinue to influence the ways in which I read; even when they cannot be directly quoted, I believe that their intellectual imprint is evident on every page of this book. At the University of Colorado, I also had the opportunity to learn from Leila Gómez, Julio Baena, and Emilio Bejel who selflessly offered their time and guidance, and for that I offer my heartfelt thanks. My thanks also go out to all of my friends and colleagues with whom I shared time in Boulder both in and outside of our seminars.
I thank Lehigh University and the College of Arts and Sciences for a series of writing grants that allowed me to complete this project. I also thank Pat Ward and the Lehigh Libraries staff. In the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh, I have been welcomed into a warm and professionally rewarding academic environment. I thank all of my department colleagues, starting with Marie-Hélène Chabut who was the department chairperson for my first formative years at Lehigh. I am also deeply grateful to my Spanish colleagues Antonio Prieto and Edurne Portela. Both have provided me excellent mentorship and support over the years, including reading early drafts of this study, and for that I owe them my most sincere gratitude.
I would also like to thank several friends who have made helped me to continue to grow both personally and professionally since my arrival in Bethlehem, especially Sara Castro-Klarén and the participants in the Washington Consortium Latin American Theory Seminar. In Peru I thank Alfredo Robles, Irma Moreno, Jeremías Gamboa, Rosario Fraga, Luis Landa, and Malgorzata Siejka, and so many other friends and family who always have graciously received me in my many travels. I also thank my friends from Nebraska for their companionship and support throughout the years.
I thank María Pizarro for her dedication to this project, as well as the series editors for their consideration of my study. I am also grateful to Laura Kremmel for her thorough revisions of this text. I thank Modern Language Notes for permission to reproduce in chapter two of this study a revised version of the article “Sufrimiento y retribución: La teatralidad política de El tungsteno,” which appeared in volume 125.2 (2010) of that journal.
My most heartfelt thanks go out to my family. To my mother, Dori, for her unwavering support and love. To my brother, Tyler, for his steadfast friendship. To my father, David, who passed after a long illness when this book was nearing completion. My dad was my first model reader, and as a boy, I was always amazed when he knew exactly what would happen next in the television police dramas that he loved. Those lessons have stayed with me forever, and I hope this study lives up to standard that he set for me.
Finally, I thank my wife, Leticia Robles-Moreno, who is always my first interlocutor. Her love, patience, and encouragement over the years have made each new day better than the last, and have enriched each word in this study.
Introduction
Stirring Emotion, Assessing Progress
We have seen this story a hundred times over: star-crossed lovers pledge faithfulness as they are torn apart by forces greater than themselves as we bravely hold back our sympathetic tears. Or, in another case, a hero escapes peril at the last possible second while the villain swears revenge, and we gasp, then either nervously chuckle or let out an incredulous groan, recognizing that we have fallen for the bait of melodrama. To be sure, the signatures of melodrama are familiar to all of us, even though we often struggle to articulate a clear understanding of what melodrama entails or to recognize its very pervasiveness. Yet, on any given day, we are bombarded from all angles with melodrama in many different forms, each of which applies dichotomic reasoning while striving to affect its public by conjuring emotion.
We perceive the ineffable quality of melodrama in the thrill of cliffhanger action movies. When reading or watching the daily news, we are repulsed by the abject horrors of crime, but equally are absorbed by the sentimental joys of human-interest pieces. We re-live the exuberance of romance and the pangs of rejection when we listen to sappy love songs on the radio. We are intrigued and give ourselves over to the plots of whodunit mystery novels, and, inevitably, we are goaded one way or another by polarizing political discourse aimed to tug directly at our patriotic heartstrings, provoke fear, or conjure up a deep sense of moral indignation. Indeed, the impulses of melodramatic narrative seem to be everywhere we look. Melodrama is located equally in a longing search for some greater meaning beyond the surface of an ever more superficial, technologic hyper-present where historic time is accelerated progressively and desired truths are increasingly ephemeral, as well as in an auto-reflexively ironic form as has become fashionable in the postmodern era.
But as the resort to melodrama as a basic frame of discourse grows in the postmodern epoch where the negative stigma attached to mass media culture is progressively erased, a methodological conundrum surfaces as we are left with a diagnostic category so overly applied that it runs the risk of losing its interpretative strength. If everything may be interpreted through the lens of melodrama, or if everything is somehow inherently melodramatic, how can we then define where the basic narrative of drama (or that of “reality”) ends and melodrama begins? If we generally understand melodrama, a hyperbolic form of expression, to be that which exceeds everyday reality and basic narrative conventions, then it would follow that it should be possible to properly isolate melodrama from the quotidian, realist experience. But is it? Is it feasible to interpret both textual and actual events independently of their often-unconscious melodramatic underpinnings, or should we consider the melodramatic as that which fundamentally conditions our conception of the real and, in turn, artistic representations of that reality?
We might begin to answer these questions by noting that the connotations of reality –always multiple, always fragmentary, always partisan– are made clear only when inserted into narrative, and as Peter Brooks has lucidly noted, the narrative mode which fundamentally informs our modern sensibility is none other than that of melodrama (Imagination 21). It becomes apparent, then, that melodrama functions not only as a mode for comprehending dramatic action in a given text, but also as a modern means of understanding social and historical processes that are too abstract to grasp in any sort of quantitative manner. Melodrama thus provides a narrative structure that facilitates an understanding of the social. And it is through an active emotional dialogue with the melodramatic text (understood in its broadest sense) that the reader participates in the production of comprehension. Artistic and actual events, perceived through the melodramatic cipher, are grasped as emotionally accentuated episodes to be read as a sequence of interrelated occurrences, engaging the public’s understanding of social order and the means by which it may be altered and bettered.
As an inescapable frame of reference for the comprehension of quotidian and larger historical events alike, the ubiquity of melodrama is a basic fact of our contemporary globalized reality, and clearly, Latin American society and its cultural products are not impervious to melodramatic influence. The melodramatic components of the (post)modern Latin American social experience indeed are readily evident to even the most casual observer. For instance, even an audience unfamiliar with Latin American television programming (including sit-coms, conventional dramas, reality shows, news programs, etc.) can easily identify the emotional theatrics of the region’s most popular melodramatic export, the telenovela (the Latin American equivalent of the United States’ soap opera).1 Yet, when viewed more closely, we may observe that the persistent appeal of melodrama in Latin America goes well beyond that which may be accessed in contemporary television programming. From the era of the wars for independence during the first decades of the nineteenth century onward, melodrama has played an essential role in the process of how Latin America narrates its fictions and how it conceptually organizes and works through conflicts embedded in its very social fabric. Moving fluidly between the spheres of fictional and actual events, melodrama’s adaptability is evidenced in the contemporary Latin American context when it is located equally in “serious” or “high” literature grappling with political and social conflicts, as well as in the bombastic rhetoric voiced by the region’s most outspoken political figures.
To this end, we may note two distinct examples: Peruvian author Alonso Cueto ‘s novel La hora azul (2005), and President Hugo Chávez ‘s use of what New York Times reporter Simon Romero has identified as political theater in exhuming the remains of Venezuelan forefather Simón Bolívar. In the first case, Cueto ‘s novel attempts to account for the period of political violence suffered in Peru from 1980 to 2001 through the narrative of family melodrama.2 To this end, Cueto utilizes an emotionally charged lexicon and repertoire of images to analyze the family as a site of veiled identities and affective bonds, two hallmarks of domestic melodramatic narration. In the latter example, Hugo Chávez employed his melodramatic theatrics –scouring the past for hidden truths, revealing the guilt of a villainous other– in attempts to evidence a Colombian plot to murder the Andean region’s founding father, so stirring up the rivalry between Venezuela and its ideologically opposed neighbor during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. My point is not that these are somehow base or trivial ways of coming to grips with social strife or conceiving political discourse. To the contrary, Cueto ‘s novel is rightly among the most critically recognized works of recent Peruvian fiction, and Chávez ‘s political legacy holds an indisputable position of importance in deciding the course of contemporary Latin American politics. Rather, what these two disparate examples manifest is the wide range of formats that melodrama may assume when informing the Latin American social imaginary.
Melodrama’s unique ability to narrate and make sense of the Latin American social experience is fostered by an understanding of social relations in keeping with the historical development of the region. Melodrama thrives in the Latin American context because its ostensibly all-or-nothing categories of narration (good and evil, fidelity and betrayal, suffering and vindication) attempt to impart a hopeful outlook, while simultaneously playing upon what the public remembers and has learned from the polarizing social realities that gave form to the region’s history.3 And the tale that is Latin America’s history is indeed rife with melodrama. The traces of what we will later recognize as key elements of melodramatic narration are central to the basic posits of the problematic foundational love story between Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his indigenous mistress Doña Marina, “la Malinche .” In this case we may read history as a tale of romance between an imposing adventurer and an illfated indigenous woman, which ultimately produces a trail of destruction and an illegitimate child. Accordingly, the means by which this historical event is frequently accessed has all the makings of a successful telenovela, which is to say that Latin American history proper indeed begins with the components of stories told time and time again in serialized melodramatic fiction: adventure, passion, and the ramifications of love gone wrong.
Moreover, in recent historical times, boom/bust agricultural cycles together with growth and regression in mineral exploitation –both of which continue to shape contemporary Latin American economies without entirely complying with the promise of sustained import substitution industrialization– gave birth to varying sectors of social and political elite, some conservative and some revolutionary. These cycles also gave rise to a proliferating underclass that dared only to dream of acceding to the domain of social power. The abyss that has separated, and continues to separate, the haves from the have nots fomented an understanding of social interactions and a form of social imagining that is common to melodrama: an “us” against “them” form of viewing society that may easily adopt different ideological positions, depending on the social milieu in play. But the limitations of such dichotomic comprehension of social interactions –a schematic perception reflected, but challenged, in artistic works of Latin American melodrama– leads to blind spots in understanding the nature of social workings. Things are never quite as simple as they seem, yet, through melodrama, every attempt is made to present a world in stark black and white contrast.
Focusing on melodrama’s dual capacity to narrate stories about Latin American society and to provide a means of comprehending social structure, this volume analyzes melodrama’s problematic attempts to configure social narratives of the twentieth century in the literary genres of regionalism, indigenismo, urban realism, socialist realism, and the novel of the Mexican Revolution . Reading melodrama as a postcolonial aesthetic, this study observes how the melodramatic mode at once represents new forms of identities resulting from the (post) colonial process, while at the same time taking on the precepts of the melodramatic aesthetic itself. Influenced by the historical developments that shaped the region, Latin American melodrama reformulates the most basic characteristics of the aesthetic in order to make it more applicable to the social realities of the Latin American reader/spectator. Latin American melodrama is thus revealed as a malleable structure that is adapted and readapted so as to provide a means of comprehending social change across narrative genres. But in recognizing the wide-ranging applications of melodrama, this study presents neither a condemnation nor a glorification of melodramatic aesthetics. Rather, my aim is to show just how melodrama attempts to demonstrate the possibilities for social justice, but at the same problematizes and often unwittingly betrays the tenets of the melodramatic mode, thus showing the dynamic complexity of Latin American melodrama as a representational paradigm of social narrative.
It is worth noting that the aesthetic mode that so essentially figures into the comprehension of Latin American art and reality should come not from the autochthonous wellspring, but from a foreign context. Such an observation cannot help but highlight the postcolonial character of modern Latin American melodrama, but it also serves as a point of departure to consider the region’s adaptations of the melodramatic format. Before it provided the aesthetic foundation for the telenovela so widely consumed on a daily basis, melodrama passed through numerous social contexts. It was sometimes praised and just as frequently stigmatized as a “low” narrative mode because of the ostensibly simplistic vision of reality that it presented.
As is generally recognized, melodrama was born in late eighteenth century Europe, specifically during the French Revolution, the historical moment that “marks the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch)” (Brooks, Imagination 15). This definitive break is crucial as it creates a social and ethical void in which no dominant moral perspective holds sway as the voice of reason, a chasm that the melodramatic aesthetic will attempt to fill. In the aftermath of the Revolution, popular theater set to music and heavily reliant on pantomime became one of the privileged sites where a new morality, in tune with the social views of the newly ascendant bourgeoisie, shored up what it meant to be a citizen in the new state and what values should be upheld in an age of social instability.4 This new mor-ally and socially didactic theater would later be recognized as melodrama, and Guilbert de Pixerécourt ‘s play Coelina ou l’enfant du mystère (Coelina or the Child of Mystery [1800] –an adaptation of a popular novel by Ducray-Duminil) is often credited as being the founding work of classical French melodrama (Marcoux 55). Formulaic works filled with angelic characters born to suf fer, mustachioed villains bent on swindling the innocent, hidden family ties, and justice exercised in the nick of time quickly found favor beyond France with audiences in the “Minor Houses” of English theater. A host of English playwrights continued to build on the melodramatic repertoire of British theater and, perhaps not surprisingly, melodramatic aesthetics found acceptance in England’s North American colonies. Yet the United States’ first great work of melodrama would not come in theatrical format (though it was quickly adapted to the stage), but as a novel in Harriet Beecher Stowe ‘s abolitionist classic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852).
The common critical tendency has been to focus on the French/English/ United States’ triad when discussing the growth and proliferation of melodramatic aesthetics. This is true in spite of the fact that melodrama had an uncomplicated route to Latin America given Spain and Portugal’s continual contact with French culture –particularly in the Napoleonic occupations of the Iberian Peninsula, the historical moment in which the seeds of melodramatic narrative are sown in the “Nuevo Mundo.” And though critical inquiry on melodrama has frequently tended to focus on the analysis of theater, and more recently film, it is important to note that concepts of melodrama across all narrative genres, national boundaries, and historical periods aid in the understanding of the melodramatic mode as it is analyzed in this study. Indeed, the early international constellation of both stage and literary melodrama mentioned above shares certain formulaic characteristics that shape our general understanding of melodrama from this initial point in history up to present day.
In the most general sense, melodrama depends fundamentally on the clash of polarized foes, and most importantly, of opposing forces of virtue and vice. The metaphysical forces of good and evil are embodied in characters whose outward appearance is presented as a spectacle of their inner values –the good are physically attractive while the evil’s exterior ugliness mirrors their inner corruption. In this same sense, everything about those characters is presented as an extension of their polarized moral values, including their names, their personal histories, and their physical gestures.5 This dichotomic confrontation is posited in such a way as to draw an emotional response from the audience: in seeing virtue threatened, the public is pushed to fear; in seeing the momentary triumphs of villainy, the spectator is meant to be enraged; and, in seeing the eventual triumph of good, the audience experiences the satisfaction of justice.
These emotional guideposts reside at the core of the melodramatic project, but it is equally important to note that melodrama is perceived as following a predictable narrative scheme. Melodrama is commonly understood as begin-ning in a tranquil setting just before serenity is upset by an unethical action perpetrated by the villain. Injustice then reigns as the hero/victim attempts to reestablish order, and discord is finally resolved as good inevitably triumphs over bad, allowing for recognition of the hero’s moral virtue and a happy ending . These basic characteristics of melodrama have brought about much criti-cal discussion questioning if melodrama may be defined as a particular genre unto itself, which is inevitably plagued by the proliferation of settings in which melodrama may be detected (mystery, romance, the western, etc.).6 We may note, however, that although the characteristics mentioned above are recurrent in melodrama, they are not necessarily present in all melodramatic tales. Such is noted by Robert Heilman in Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (1968) when he observes that melodrama need not end in happiness and may indeed end in disaster, so complicating a static definition of the narrative scheme intrinsic to melodrama (82).
Given the problems inherent to the generic definition of melodrama, it has become the norm to consider the aesthetic following Peter Brooks ‘s criteria of melodrama as a narrative mode, which he first presented in his seminal study The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976). Brooks is explicit on the consideration of genre, and he regards melodrama not as “a theme or set of themes, nor the life of the genre per se, but rather melodrama as a mode of conception and expression, as a certain fictional system for making sense of experience, as a semantic field of force” (xvii). For Brooks, the melodramatic mode works as a “theatrical substratum” (xiii) residing at the heart of a text. Textual theatrics performed through gesture, heightened registers of recorded speech, and hidden meanings decoded from everyday interactions are the measures by which highly emotional messages are commu-nicated and where the “moral occult” is evidenced. Brooks proposes that this “moral occult is not a metaphysical system; it is rather the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth,” summoned up in the text to introduce ethical meaning in a world devoid of any cohesive guiding light (5). Brooks ‘s characterization of the melodramatic mode also evidences that it is deeply invested in the socio-ethical normativity, which melodrama intends to convey under the stresses of post-sacred society. Providing assurance when political and ecclesiastic authorities are unable to present sufficient explanations for the pressures and social paradigms that envelop the common citizen, melodrama, as a narrative mode, recounts tales that propose to illustrate what are believed to be communal truths surpassing material reason: suffering is part of life, hope springs eternal, the just shall prevail.
It is because of its capacity to speak to the basic hopes and needs of the human condition in the face of social strife that melodrama has played such an integral role in the development of Latin American narrative genres. As Nina Gerassi-Navarro has argued in Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America (1999), the melodramatic capacity to convey visions of social stability, as well as to define the external forces that threaten concepts of order, is very much present in the nineteenth century Spanish American novel. As is to be expected, those works that Gerassi-Navarro analyzes are far from ideologically neutral, and the critic comments that such texts were primarily utilized by the ruling elite to conceive its relation to popular classes in the nation-building projects of those fledgling states recently liberated from their colonial yoke (149-51). This fact may serve to evidence the underside of melodrama, an exclusive enterprise concerned primarily with its own retention of power, only tangentially interested in any broad acceptance of social democracy.7 So much is evidenced by Gerassi-Navarro ‘s observations regarding the exclusion of women, indigenous, mulatto, and mestizo figures from the plots of these melodramatic works (160, 177). Nonetheless, the presence of what may be read through the optic of the melodramatic mode in these early works of Spanish American literature analyzed by Gerassi-Navarro is significant, as it establishes melodrama as an aesthetic of primary importance in the development of Latin American literature.
Melodrama is, in fact, a basic building block in the foundation of Latin American literature as it emerges concurrently to the inception of the Latin American nation states and, therefore, serves as the first narrative mode through which the tales of the new Latin American nations are told. For this reason, it is necessary to begin to consider melodrama, not as the exception, but as the rule of Latin American literature –not as the dramatic oddity, but as an inevitable contributor at the core of Latin American narrative, the “high” and the “low” all at once. To better conceptualize the centrality of melodrama in Latin American narrative, we may draw upon Linda Williams ‘s approach to United States’ popular narrative in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (2001) when she comments, “melodrama can be viewed, then, not as a genre, an excess, or an aberration, but what most often typifies popular American narrative in literature, stage, film, and television when it seeks to engage with moral questions” (17). Following Williams’s example, I would propose a parallel thesis: as an aesthetic prevalent during the era of independence in Latin America, when the new modern nations sought to affirm and consolidate their sovereignty, melodrama stands historically at the foundation of the Latin American literary canon. This is not to say, however, that all Latin American literature utilizes melodrama, or that there is some melodramatic exceptionalism inherent to the region on the whole. Rather, I would argue that melodrama is the dominant narrative mode when Latin American literature speaks about politics and social development. Melodrama, then, must be rethought, not as a base or simplistic narrative form of poor taste, but as that which essentially informs the Latin American aesthetic imaginary in the spheres of high and mass media formats alike.8
The coexistence of ostensibly separate “high,” “low,” and popular cultures in Latin America has been outlined clearly in cultural theory.9 Néstor García Canclini ‘s Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1990), for one, laid the groundwork for a radical rethinking of the simultaneity of varying historical epochs and cultural formations, bound together by the uneven modernity lived throughout Latin America. This concept of historical and generic heterogeneity is also fundamental to the conception of the postmodern and its literary formulations. Ana María Amar Sánchez ‘s Juegos de seducción y traición: Literatura y cultura de masas (2000) takes on this problematic as the critic examines how contemporary literary works make use of elements of mass media culture and thus erode the high/low boundary. The suspension of long held beliefs regarding the hierarchy of genres is particularly relevant to this study, which develops lines of contact between literature, film, and television, and authors whose highly-recognized works have yet to have been classified as melodramatic, perhaps for fear of the stigma that such a connotation might carry.
Yet, within the perspective of this study, to be categorized as melodramatic should not be viewed as an insult to the integrity of a work. Melodrama has bolstered more than two centuries’ worth of Latin America’s literary production as a common mode of revealing social and political desires, necessities, and shortcomings, a fact evident in a quick glance at the history of foundational Latin American narratives. From José Mármol ‘s Amalia (1851) in Argentina to Ignacio Manuel Altamirano ‘s Clemencia (1869) in Mexico, from Bernardo Guimarães ‘s A Escrava Isaura (1875) in Brazil to Clorinda Matto de Turner ‘s Aves sin nido (1889) in Peru, melodrama serves as an essential mode of foundational literatures through-out Latin America. Indeed, formed within the romantic imaginary in which values of individual and artistic liberty were the order of the day, each of these works draws upon stark dichotomies of race, class, and political positioning in an attempt to convey an emotionally charged vision of social justice in keeping with the ideological thrust of the text. And, as Doris Sommer has illustrated in Founda-tion Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991), in order to com-ply with their particular socio-political aims, works of classic nationalist fiction like those mentioned above make frequent recourse to romance as a means of il-lustrating harmonious visions of social order. Yet as a consequence of Sommer ‘s readerly approach, melodrama for many readers has become almost synonymous with the idea of romance, which is not entirely the case.
As is developed throughout this study, Latin American melodrama does indeed return time and time again to the motif of romance to illustrate social conditions. In Sommer ‘s reading, however, romance is the narrative cipher through which everything in the tale must take meaning, and generally does so allegorically. While the strength of this form of reading is evident, it also presents certain limitations to the consideration of melodramatic aesthetics in that romance is not where melodrama necessarily ends. What we discover in melodramatic works of Latin American narrative –and particularly in those works in which social commentary is a primary objective– is that the emotional provocations of romance are projected both within and beyond the romantic anecdote. Melodramatic affectivity is equally distributed among political discourse, ethical composure, and characters’ physical posturing and gesticulation. In this sense, love need not allegorically represent the route to justice because those same exalted emotions common to amorous discourse are evenly, and indeed liberally, applied to all textual activity. As such, while romance may present in the text, it is just one narrative element among many others that embodies the exuberant affective discourse of melodrama.
This distinction of melodramatic narrativity, however, does not dispute the fact that Latin American fiction has often turned to the topic of romance as a means of discussing social unity. As Aníbal González has argued in Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel (2010), works of the postBoom era returned to sentimental narrative as a means of depicting social stability and of enabling communication with the growing public readership following the “new” narrative experiments of the Boom . But, as González shows, in works of contemporary sentimental fiction, disinterested social sacrifice does not operate alone, as self-serving passion inevitably figures into the narration. In González ‘s assessment, sentimental writing in the post-Boom era then oscillates between two forms of amorous expression: that of eros (an unattainable passionate desire destined to produce suffering ), and that of agape (a fraternal love, generating communication and understanding) (13-14). González finds a special niche for melodrama in his reading of contemporary sentimentality, noting that “melodrama is, in fact, one of the secrets of the sentimental formula’s success,” functioning as a form of eros that does not conclude in disaster, or functioning as a simulated eros that nearly complies with the communitarian impulse that he perceives in agape (142). Either way, González ‘s perception of melodrama within contemporary forms of literary narrative is crucial as it stands as one of the few examples of where melodrama has been singled out as a form of “serious” literature, not presented within an ironic or parodic format.
Indeed, it is striking to note the general absence of critical discourse on melodrama in Latin American literature from the early to mid-twentieth century, and particularly in the analysis of social narrative. The neglect of melodrama throughout this period is due in no small part to the rise of Modernismo, works of a Vanguardista slant, and the writings of celebrated River Plate authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Julio Cortázar. Critical discourse on melodrama as a mode of high literature falls by the wayside throughout this epoch, as melodrama itself is understood more commonly as a manifestation of those expressions of mass media culture that have gained increasing importance in the field of Latin American cultural studies. For example, Jesús Martín-Barbero traces the lineage of melodrama in Latin America through exclusively mass media narrative forms: the folletín, or serialized periodical fiction of the nineteenth century; radioteatro or radionovelas (serial radio shows); tangos; Mexican film; the crónica roja (sensationalist press); and the telenovela (Laberintos 449-50). Each of these narrative forms could be classified under the nebulous heading of popular narrative genres as they are in-tended for a wide but not necessarily formally-critical public, leaving notably absent any reference to supposedly high literature associated with melodrama.
The works left unaddressed by Martín-Barbero ‘s melodramatic mapping and by the analysis of Latin American melodrama at large –precisely those socially-conscious melodramatic texts addressed in this study produced during the early to mid-twentieth century– stand at a critical juncture in Latin American arrative. In retaking romantic foundational narrative of the nineteenth century influenced by realist and naturalist stylings, and by building toward a crescendo in the innovations of socalled “new” narratives of the Boom, these twentieth century melodramas bridge the gap separating concepts of tradition and innovation. In locating the melodramatic impulses of social realism and the more general “social text “of the early to mid-twentieth century, this study offers a paradigm to comprehend the ubiquity of melodrama, its permutations, and its causes.10 Such a reading equally balances the aesthetic makeup and social concerns of melodrama, which has not always been the case in contemporary Latin American melodramatic investigation.
In fact, while Latin American melodramatic analysis in general is keenly aware of the social significance and ideological underpinnings of narration, it often fails to account for the very functionality –or lack thereof– of the tale. That is, melodramatic investigation in both Latin America and beyond cogently demonstrates how narrative may present a tale that overtly expounds domi-nant, bourgeois rhetoric, or, alternatively, how a tale may stage incorporations of popular culture, so contesting “top-down” narrative form and ostensibly vindicating the subaltern. And while these identifications correctly detect opposing ideological presences in the text, they fail to account for the inevitable complications of fictionality. Such analyses implicitly assume that ideology, whichever it may be, can be communicated effectively and plainly without the text deconstructively undoing the very message that it would propose. In other words, melodramatic analysis has commonly assumed that the tale the melodrama was telling did achieve some pure form of communication, capable of producing a demonstrable social impact. This approach, however, does not adequately account for the blind spots and inevitable lacunae of reason covered up in melodrama.11
It is, nevertheless, the social trajectory of melodrama that concerns most recent analyses of Latin American telenovelas and film. Paramount among those works evidencing the social approach to melodrama is Jesús Martín-Barbero ‘s study De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía (1987). For Martín-Barbero, the strength and importance of melodrama as a narrative mode is its capacity to lend legitimacy, via the telenovela, to a particular form of narrative specific to those social groups that have been excluded from the hegemonic project of modernity imposed by Latin American nations. For that reason, his analysis primarily focuses not on the devices of melodramatic narrative itself, but rather on the mediations carried out by melodrama’s public: how melodrama is understood, how it is retold, how it aids in the acknowledgement of peripheral identities, and how, in echoing outmoded narrative techniques, it arbitrates its public’s participation in hegemonic national discourse. This final point is crucial as it allows Martín-Barbero to construe melodramatic narration as the voice of familiar time, a time marking personal, family events, differentiated from the historical life of the nation (Mediaciones 244). For Martín-Barbero, familiar time has been marginalized by capitalism’s influence in the spheres of work and personal relations, making it “anachronistic.” The recognizable vestige of that anachronistic family time found in everyday society is embodied in melodrama as a narrative form, as well as in its consumption by the populace, allowing for melodrama to be adopted as a paradigm for understanding and renarrating social interactions. From this melodramatic perspective, the Latin American popular imagination transforms the totality of social experience into melodrama, so as to secretly avenge the commercialization of daily life and political and cultural exclusion from above (Mediaciones 245).
Hermann Herlinghaus ‘s perception of melodrama shares many points of contact with Martín-Barbero ‘s concept of anachronism, and he uses this concept to differentiate between the “narration” of melodrama and the ostensibly legitimate “discourse” of modernity. Herlinghaus underlines the precarious space occupied by melodramatic narration, somewhere between the stages of “emergent” and “residual” cultural developments as they are defined by Raymond Williams (Rasgos 48). But this narration is important because of its capacity to communicate knowledge consistent with everyday community practices and justice, inasmuch as those narratives are democratically shared (Rasgos 36). In this, what Herlinghaus views as the “intermedial” quality of melodramatic narration is evidenced as it transcends various genres and forms of communication, so manifesting connections among the anthropologic, psychological, and social dimensions of a given tale, a characteristic of the mode that is fundamental to the analyses that follow (Rasgos 40-42). Yet in its insistence on the anachronistic quality of melodrama, Herlinghaus ‘s analysis, like Martín-Barbero ‘s, may inadvertently draw a negative connotation to the narrative mode.
Both Martín-Barbero ‘s and Herlinghaus ‘s understandings of melodramatic anachronism implicitly present melodrama as that which, according to their terminology, is outside of time, thus somehow not modern and, therefore, temporally and logically incorrect from the perspective of dominant culture. This reasoning, of course, is framed within a context of melodramatic vindication, possible in the heterogeneous social milieu of Latin American society. But the critics would perhaps involuntarily support the charge that melodrama is that which should not be with regards to modern and high art forms (a problematic affirmation when viewed in light of Peter Brooks ‘s comments regarding the centrality of melodrama in the modern social imaginary). A possible dialogue between high and mass media manifestations of melodrama –one masterfully developed in the works of Manuel Puig and more recently by César Aira, for example– is not reflected upon at length in Martín-Barbero ‘s and Herlinghaus ‘s respective approaches. Their primary objectives lie in their attempts to find evidence of a subaltern perspective in the face of an uneven hegemonic reality. Without question, this reading of melodrama is well-developed and indeed necessary, but it may unintentionally maintain melodrama in a ghetto of “low” art, assuming that its greatest achievement is to represent the underrepresented, and so affirming that it is unworthy of serious narrative critique.12 In spite of this fact, Martín-Barbero ‘s and Herlinghaus ‘s analyses, concerned as they are with recognition through melodrama –a topic to which I will return throughout this study– have allowed the social structures interpellated through Latin American melodrama to come more clearly into critical focus.
Following Martín-Barbero ‘s line of social inquiry through melodrama, O. Hugo Benavides in Drugs, Thugs, and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramas in Latin America (2008) has demonstrated how telenovelas and the narco-dramas of Latin America have aided in the articulation of subaltern identities inhabiting the margins (and sometimes the margins of the margins) of postmodern Latin American society. Benavides argues that melodrama is remarkably effective as a cultural practice because it functions within the hegemonic project of Latin American society at large, while at the same time allowing for the presentation and ongoing reformulation of particular identities through narrative (196-97). For Benavides, melodrama’s ambiguous position within hegemonic society lets it function as perhaps being outwardly apolitical, all the while offering “a much more complicated social and political picture than the one embodied in the ini-tial revolutionary postcolonial project, precisely because this was never a concern” (201). Benavides ‘s identification of melodrama as a narrative mode functioning in the Latin American postcolonial social milieu is clearly a strength of his investigation. But what merits closer attention is the manner in which melodramatic aesthetics are transformed in the postcolonial Latin American context.
That aesthetic transformation is a complex and delicate process that, as Neil Larsen notes in Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nation in the Americas (2001), may not offer a panacea against dominant cultural hegemony. Larsen observes that postcolonialist cultural negotiations reflect “the profound transformation of Eurocentrist intellectual culture” (31), while paradoxically reinforcing a hegemonic theoretical approach to the study of the Americas. In spite of this fact, and developing within the context of Latin American cultural “dependency,” Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo comment in Literatura/Sociedad (1983) that the “translations” of cosmopolitan literary tendencies within the Latin American “periphery” are that which constitute the very specificity of the region’s literary production (89).13 For Altamirano and Sarlo, that literary output may participate in this aesthetic modernity in an ambiguous or contradictory manner, but it nevertheless contests a top-down model of dependency in its adaptation of form to the social dynamic of the Latin American “periphery.”
Following this latter analysis, melodrama, then, offers a paradigmatic case study of postcolonial Latin American aesthetics. Surpassing many of the guideposts of Eurocentric melodrama as presented above, the recurring feature uncovered in Latin American social melodrama is its refusal to neatly tie up the loose ends of its narratives and present an entirely happy ending, or to present a cohesive representation of glorified suffering .14 Latin American social melodrama seems to be in a constant battle with its very narrative mode, causing structural fissures that often diverge from standard definitions of melodrama in the United States and Europe. Twentieth century Latin American melodrama in the cases examined here is much more complex in that our heroes are flawed, society is flawed, and the resounding dénouement so necessary to melodrama in the Latin American case frequently serves as much to reveal problems and unresolved conflicts as it does to put a positive spin on the tale.
But in presenting its internal conflicts and schisms, Latin American melodrama manages to steer clear of tragedy, no matter how tragic social reality may seem. Differing from the worldview of tragic narrative, Latin American melodrama’s characters are constantly in action, rarely paralyzed even when torn asunder by inner monologues or fraught with nagging doubt. Unlike tragedy, which assumes that there is no escape from a catastrophic fate, the protagonists of Latin American melodrama continue to fight the good fight, attempting to change society even when their prospects are grim.15 That is, unlike Shakespearian tragedy where characters’ fates are sealed from the start, Latin American melodrama presents an unflinching belief that change is possible, even when efforts to bring it about end in disaster. Such a problematic social vision is undoubtedly much more in step with reality, but in their uncertain resolutions, the tales of Latin American melodrama draw attention to the very postcolonial conundrums that beset Latin American societies: innovation versus tradition, the local versus the global, revolution versus conservatism. These conflicts that bring about fissures in melodramatic solidity are evidenced in each of the works examined in this study, and may be equally located in contemporary mass media melodrama when it attempts to propose more equitable visions of social justice. This, in turn, serves to illustrate the pervasiveness of melodrama and the way in which the mode problematizes concepts of high and low and of intellectual and mass-mediatized cultures. To this end, the recent telenovela Victoria (2008) presents an exemplary case for inspecting some of those same melodramatic impulses present in the works analyzed in this study.
Victoria was adapted for broadcast in the United States by the Telemundo network and was first recorded under the name Señora Isabel (1993) in Colombia, and later as Mirada de mujerVictoriatelenovelasVictoria