Marxism and Melodrama by Bruno Bosteels

He thought about his savings, about using all of them, without sparing a cent, in order to construct that new life-unexpected, miraculous, finally the peace and quiet-that they would live together, Mario Cobián and she, as husband and wife. - José Revueltas, Los errores

The two worlds that only precariously cohabit in Los errores are in similar ways marked by an internal disjunction. It is this disjunction that really defines the text's melodramatic nature. What is at stake, therefore, is not so much the history or the social function of the genre so much as its formal structure: a dual, or Manichaean structure, which tends to oppose good and evil, justice and injustice, ethics and corruption, in a pseudodialectical opposition-an opposition that is dialectical only in appearance. This is because the notions of good, justice, and salvation, due to the extreme dualism in which they are portrayed, do not genuinely enter into contradiction with the otherwise no less patent realities of evil, injustice, and exploitation. In the final analysis, there is no true contradiction, only the projection of good conscience onto real conditions of existence. This projection continues to depend on old ideological elements, such as religion, which have nothing in common, really, with the life of the underworld in the name of which melodrama speaks. "In this sense, melodrama is a foreign consciousness as a veneer on a real condition," Althusser writes in a brilliant discussion of Brecht and Bertolazzi's theatre. "The dialectic of melodramatic consciousness is only possible at this price: this consciousness must be borrowed from outside (from the world of alibis, sublimations, and lies of bourgeois morality), and it must still be lived as the consciousness of a condition (that of the poor underworld) even though this condition is radically foreign to the consciousness. "9 Several features considered typical of melodrama, such as the rhetorical excess of moralizing polarities, can best be explained if we start from the disjuncture that serves as their structural base.