Melodrama conceals the absence of genuine individual interrelation

Evidence

Indeed, melodrama (as in Zola) is one of the principal devices by which modern literature has sought to conceal its contradictions: the violent clash between larger-than-life collective units (the mob in Germinal, the barbarians in Salammbô) or between absolute good and evil conceals the absence of any genuine human interrelationship on the individual level, in individual lived experience. And where modernism resolutely assumes its situation, it abandons plot entirely, renounces narration in the older sense, and seeks to make a strength of its basic weakness. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401

Categorization

• XREF: This reading of melodrama as ideological concealment of real social relations anticipates Jameson’s later work on romance and on Lukács, and resonates with the Frankfurt critique of the culture industry’s pseudo-individualism. — connects to: Some strangeness denies the stranger even general human commonality, making the relation a non-relation — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9648; Representation makes the absent present through a fundamental paradox
• SEED: An essay angle: melodrama as the literary form of reification — the more individual relation disappears, the bigger the collective clash staged to hide it.

Broader Connections

• Some strangeness denies the stranger even general human commonality, making the relation a non-relation #expands (0.75) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9648
• Representation makes the absent present through a fundamental paradox #expands (0.70)