Uses of Melodrama

Arawwala Nandimithra is one of the most well-known Sinhala short story writers. He has won more State Awards (Sahitya Mandala) for his novels and volumes of short stories than perhaps any other Sinhala writer. A selection of his stories (20 in all) has just been published. These have been selected from the twelve volumes of stories he has published so far; they contain 84 stories. Sugath Watagedera has made the selection and edited the volume.

Nandimithra is, undoubtedly, an important Sinhala short story writer. He may lack the gravitas, the controlled lyricism and analytical skills of Gunadasa Amarasekera. However, he displays his own recognizably salient traits, and Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra once told me that he was deeply impressed by Arawwala Nandimithra’s feel for characters and the narrative urgency that marks his work. There are a number of features that characterize these stories. First, the author has chosen for literary textualization facets of experience normally unexplored by Sinhala short story writers.

He deals with lives and loves of the downtrodden and the outcastes. He succeeds in locating his characters in expressive geographies.

By recounting the experiences of these invisible people, he is seeking to acquire a demotic voice in his stories. Second, his preferred art of narration is unorthodox in the sense that he shows little interest in securing a unity of impression favoured by most eminent short story writers; his stories are marked by pluralities of impression. Some critics have faulted him for constructing intersecting circles of narratives. Many of his stories are reminiscent of the structures of the Jataka tales and folk literature. It is interesting to observe the way he puts into play narratives within narratives and language within language.

Third, Arawwala Nandimithra focuses on highly emotionally charged incidents and episodes and his characters heroically battle currents of uncontrollable feeling; his characters most often are in transit, caught in the grip of liminality, experiencing diverse forms of self-transformation.

Despite the emotional turbulence that marks many of his stories, one also observes a certain elegiac quietude at the emotional centre in some of the writings. Arawwala Nandimithra displays a pronounced interest in melodrama, he handles it with dexterity. Melodrama is tricky, and the way a writer engages it, contains it and channels it towards more fertile ground becomes an index of his or her literary competence. It is this idea of melodrama that I wish to focus on.

A few years ago, Cambridge University Press published one of my books titled, ‘Melodrama and Asian Cinema’. In it, I sought to point out how the concept of melodrama has been recuperated in recent times for productive analytical purposes. It is no longer used pejoratively to designate inferior works of art that subscribe to an aesthetic of hyperbole and which are given to sensationalism. Many modern literary and film scholars have begun to investigate the nature, structure and significance of melodrama and the complex ways in which it draws the reader or spectator into the chosen orbit of narration.

Moreover, melodrama has come to be recognized as displaying subversive potential for exposing bourgeois ideology and promoting an enabling vision that can usefully map the interplay between desire and ideology.

With the rise of postmodernist thinking, literary and film theorists are steadily abandoning the received categories of high art and low art, and are paying more attention to the basic issues of representation, ideology and forms of cultural production. Melodrama provides us with a space for the understanding of these complex and demanding issues.

One of the books that has had a deep influence on the study of this genre and provoked fresh thinking on the subject is Peter Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess’.

In it he explores the structural and philosophical underpinnings of melodramatic theatre and how melodrama became a driving force for the modern novel dealing with everyday life. Brook says that his concern is, ‘not melodrama as a theme, or a set of themes, nor the life of the drama per se, but rather melodrama as a mode of conception, as a certain fictional system for making sense of experience, as a semantic field of force’.

For him, melodramatic imagination is profoundly moral, and it provides a space in which we can better understand the nature of human desire in relation to the interdictions of the law. He followed this with ‘Reading for the Plot’, which examines the plot as the principle ordering force of meanings that we seek to wrest from human temporality, and ‘Body Work’, in which he explores the body as an object and motive of narratives.

Peter Brooks is relatively unknown in Sri Lanka, and his writings, which combine literary analysis, psychological thinking and moral imagination, repay close reading. What he says about melodrama, temporality and the human body can illuminate Nandimithra’s short stories in interesting ways.