Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the texts
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction, or confession of a mastodon
- 2 Conrad's Polish background, or from biography to a study of culture
- 3 Joseph Conrad's parents
- 4 Joseph Conrad and Tadeusz Bobrowski
- 5 The Sisters: a grandiose failure
- 6 Lord Jim: a Romantic tragedy of honour
- 7 The Mirror of the Sea
- 8 A Personal Record
- 9 Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, or the melodrama of reality
- 10 Conrad, Russia and Dostoevsky
- 11 Conrad and Rousseau: concepts of man and society
- 12 Conrad and the idea of honour
- 13 Joseph Conrad: a European writer
- 14 Joseph Conrad after a century
- 15 Joseph Conrad in his historical perspective
- 16 Fidelity and art: Joseph Conrad's cultural heritage and literary programme
- Notes
- Index
9 - Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, or the melodrama of reality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the texts
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction, or confession of a mastodon
- 2 Conrad's Polish background, or from biography to a study of culture
- 3 Joseph Conrad's parents
- 4 Joseph Conrad and Tadeusz Bobrowski
- 5 The Sisters: a grandiose failure
- 6 Lord Jim: a Romantic tragedy of honour
- 7 The Mirror of the Sea
- 8 A Personal Record
- 9 Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, or the melodrama of reality
- 10 Conrad, Russia and Dostoevsky
- 11 Conrad and Rousseau: concepts of man and society
- 12 Conrad and the idea of honour
- 13 Joseph Conrad: a European writer
- 14 Joseph Conrad after a century
- 15 Joseph Conrad in his historical perspective
- 16 Fidelity and art: Joseph Conrad's cultural heritage and literary programme
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Melodrama may be most generally defined as a sequence of events for which ‘normality’ (or verisimilitude, if it is represented or described) is claimed, but which is too spectacularly dramatic, too extravagant to be taken as ‘normal’ or realistic. It is, of course, a culturally and historically relative concept: what is melodramatic for a reader of The New Yorker is not so for a reader of True Stories; a novel by Smollett or Balzac is, for us today, inherently more melodramatic than one by Sinclair Lewis or Roger Martin du Gard.
There is the melodrama of events and the melodrama of presentation; the two often overlap, but not necessarily. On the one hand, a straightforward description of the plight of the nineteeth-century immigrants to the United States, of the trenches in Flanders in 1916, or of a Soviet labour camp may strike us as melodramatic by the sheer force of facts related. On the other hand, it is possible to describe hidden psychological developments in a manner which has to be called melodramatic; Henry James would sometimes do that, as has been pointed out by several critics.
In its developed literary and dramatic forms, melodrama rests on the principle of unabashed emotionalism. It strives to call forth unambiguous and strong feelings, plays on polarities of moods, selects plots abounding in emotionally loaded situations, uses starkly contrasted characters and impassioned speech; there is hardly any withholding of anticipated emotional gratification and the denouement is psychologically unequivocal.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Conrad in PerspectiveEssays on Art and Fidelity, pp. 110 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997