Narrative and Sexual Excess

Author(s): Robert Burgoyne

Source: October, Vol. 21, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Summer, 1982), pp. 51-61
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778400
Accessed: 14/12/2009 16:39
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

Narrative and Sexual Excess

ROBERT BURGOYNE

The principle protagonist of In a Yearof ThirteenMoons is a transsexual,

someone who has crossed an absolute border, transgressed the fundamental
divide of gender upon which, according to psychoanalytic theory, all societythe systems which compose it, including language itself- is based. Such a thoroughgoing anomaly would seem to demand an extraordinary restructuring of
the narrative form which tells it. Instead, ThirteenMoons exhibits a balanced,
stubbornly rectilinear form apparently indifferent to the transgression which,
by an ordinary logic, should constitute the collapse of its classical symmetry.
This essay examines some of the strategies by which, like the secondary revision of the dream text, the film binds the threatening and potentially disruptive
sexuality to a plot all too familiar, a scenario all too recurrent.
In S/Z, Roland Barthes isolates for discussion five codes that structure the
narrative text: the hermeneutic, which sets up, holds in suspense, and discloses
an enigma; the proairetic, which is the code of actions and gestures; the
cultural or referential, which indicates the system of science, of knowledge
within which the text operates; the semic, which controls the connotative level
or the "character" of the text; and the symbolic, which sets up a system of antitheses and thus allows for classifications and legal substitutions. The classical
realist text is constructed out of a hierarchical arrangement of these codes,
whereby the hermeneutic and proairetic dominate the other codes by imposing
on them an irreversible logico-temporal order. To use Barthes's word, the
hermeneutic and the proairetic "vectorize" the text.
In an elaboration of the relationship among the codes of the realist text,
Peter Wollen has stated that the hermeneutic and proairetic codes are correlated with the symbolic order and encode the textual body with a gender identity,
while the semic and symbolic codes (he does not mention the cultural) are correlated with the semiotic and release a kind of random erotics, a promiscuous
force of uncathected energy. The dominant, sequential codes anchor the nar-

1.
Peter Wollen, in a lecture delivered at New York University, May 1981. Wollen is here introducing Julia Kristeva's distinction between the symbolic - a rationalized structure - and the

52

OCTOBER

rative to an Oedipal scenario which thus becomes the narrative's point of origin
and return, its closure. Instead of a free flow of energy, there is a blockage
formed by the alliance of the voices of truth and empiricism, enigma and action, with the Oedipal drama that institutes society. This blockage forces the
textual energies to grow "thick"and "dense," to be "kept in a kind of pregnancy"
awaiting its full term. Every classical text, in short, is impregnated with the
same gender-defined form "with which Oedipus (in his debate with the Sphinx)
mythically impregnated all Western discourse."2 The textual economy thus enforced delays and defers the discharge of the semiotic energies which would
throw the symbolic structure into imbalance. The avant-garde text, which
transgresses this narrative form, opposes this blockage; it lets loose the dammed
up energies by suspending the dominant classical codes and permitting the efflorescence and excesses of the subordinated codes. Purged of narrative constraints and liberated of the ballast of plot, the avant-garde text will have a
symbolic trajectory free of Oedipal determinants.
Clearly, by this definition, ThirteenMoons is more a classical than an
avant-garde text. Although the film's protagonist remains throughout undefined
by a single gender and, in fact, initiates the narrative by her/his mingling of the
two sides of the male/female opposition, the body of the text itself represses the
contradictions which construct it and presents itself as homogeneous and
whole, at least in its larger structure. In recent psychoanalytic film theory, the
metaphoric correspondences between the filmic spectacle and the body image,
between the vivid sensory and kinetic flow of images and the phantom of a
superior, sovereign body have been forcefully developed.3 The filmic signifier
in its sonic and visual plenitude and its overwhelming presence possesses the
qualities of a phantasmatic body which resembles, in its internal coherence and
heightened definition, the ideal body image of the Imaginary.4 Jean-FranCois
Lyotard has written of the cinema as a "somatography of bodies," a kind of
hieroglyphic band modeled upon the idealized geography of the body.
It is the classical narrative film which reinforces this metaphor at every
turn, with its "seamless construction," "narrative closure," and "textual cartilage." Realism is generally named as the system which is the site of the prosemiotic-a process which is in excess of and cuts across structure- to support the hierarchical
arrangement of codes in realism. Barthes himself uses the distinction between denotation and
connotation in this same way.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hill and Wang, 1974, pp. 62-63.
2.
This analogy can be found in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Apparatus," Camera
3.
Obscura,1 (1976); in Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier,"Screen,vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer
1975); in Raymond Bellour, "Psychosis,Neurosis, Perversion,"CameraObscura,3/4; inJacqueline
Rose, "Paranoiaand the Filmic System," Screen,vol. 17, no. 4; and in Mary Ann Doane, "The
Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," YaleFrenchStudies,60 (1980).
4.
Jacques Lacan's"Imaginary."The best treatment in English of Lacan's fundamental concepts is in FredricJameson, "Imaginaryand Symbolic in Lacan," YaleFrenchStudies,55/6 (1977).

Narrativeand SexualExcess

53

duction of this repression. Fassbinder's film, which also privileges the

hermeneutic and proairetic codes, is governed by a slightly different, but not
completely other system - that of the melodrama. I shall therefore attend to the
singularity of the melodramatic form as it operates in ThirteenMoons, paying
particular attention to a few of its melodramatic moments, each of which is
structured like a theatrical vignette with the equivalent of an opening and a
closing curtain.
Virtually all the standard analyses of the genre oppose the melodramatic
to the tragic protagonist. The tragic protagonist is one who acts-but this action also includes, within tragedy, suffering. Aristotle, who bound character to
narrative action in the Poetics, was able to define history as "what Alcibiades did
and suffered" because action and passion were themselves bound by narrative
form at this time and, indeed, up until the romantic period. At this point there
was a split. This divergence consisted of a differentiation of narrative forms.
Certain forms featured an active hero impervious to emotional pain; others
featured a hero or heroine whose role was to suffer. Melodrama, which is one
of the by-products of this split, characteristically displays protagonists who are
purely passive. The internal conflicts which allowed the embracing of action
and passion in tragedy are exteriorized as conflicts between the active social
world and passive "sympathetic innocents who have done nothing to deserve
their miseries."5
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has pointed out that the opposition active/passive
enfolds another: male/female.6 The melodramatic protagonist is often a
woman, since in bourgeois society it is women who are equated with passivity.
Peter Brooks's analysis in The MelodramaticImagination takes no notice of this
sexual difference, although it does not specifically repudiate it. Instead, Brooks
overlays the active/passive opposition with that of society/individual. He notes
that the private and individual nature of the protagonist's point of view is at
odds with the social; indeed it is the conflictual point on which the melodrama
turns as it attempts to shake itself loose from this troubling individuality which
threatens to unravel the social fabric.7 There is only a step from Brooks's observation to Nowell-Smith's. For, if society's coherence is synonymous with its
patriarchal structure, that is, if it coheres around a male point of view (and its
Oedipal structure ensures that it does), then surely a point of view which opposes this male identity renders society illegible. This is a step of logic which
Fassbinder takes. In speaking of his choice of this genre, evaluating its
strengths over those of other genres, he has said that in melodrama we actually
5.
James I. Smith, "The Critical Idiom," in Melodrama, ed. John D. Jump, New York,
Methuen, 1973, p. 56.
6.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minelli and Melodrama," Screen,vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977),
p. 117.
7.
Peter Brooks, The MelodramaticImagination, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976.

54

OCTOBER

see women think.8 His strategy is to imbricate passivity and gender identity
and set them against the comprehensiveness of patriarchal structures.
The actor who appeared as an ursine being named Gabriel in Chinese
Roulette becomes, in ThirteenMoons, like an angel, essentially sexless. This
creature's first words resonate with the complications of sex and naming:
"Rumpelstiltskin is my name." When we are at last given the real name of this
being in her present form - Elvira - we recognize it as a remarkable condensation of gender signs, a feminine form harboring a masculine root. This condensation, refusal of differentiation, violation of sexual codes, is the mark of a
passive resistance which initiates the narrative process. What ensues is less a
sequence of events than a reception of increasing violence by increasing passivity and resistance.
In the opening sequence, Elvira, dressed as a man, is found wanting by a
hustler. Rebuffed, pummeled, and stripped by his gang of leather boys, she is
left in a slip and stockings, her men's clothes dumped into the river, where they
float unceremoniously away. This introductory presentation of Elvira elaborates a maze of sexual identities: a woman who was once a man dresses like a
man in order to attract men who like men. The reason for this paradoxical behavior confirms the total dislocation of the character in the social order. She
dresses as a man because she is "ashamed" to pay for it "as a woman." The statement of motivation, a classic double bind with obvious feminist resonances, expressly links and divides the sphere of private sexuality with the social and ecoonomic circuits. This overdetermination of the cliche is characteristic of the
text. That a character so blind or indifferent to social convention as to undergo
a sex-change operation - without being gay - should feel obliged to observe the
propriety of a stereotype - that women shouldn't pay for it - is remarkable indeed. It defamiliarizes the cliche; the stereotype is somehow opened to its own
contradictory messages which had previously lain concealed within its seemingly natural formulation. The protagonists of melodrama, however, live these
cliches mechanically, indiscriminately, denied any transcendent position of
awareness. Melodrama projects no ideal future in which its protagonists gain
awareness, only an uneasy and contradictory present in which they suffer from
a failure to be at one with a patriarchal society.
The opening sequence presents this interference between the personal and
the social as a perpetual asymptote between desire and its gratification. Dressed
like a man, Elvira attracts only men for whom her anatomical peculiarity is an
affront to their libidinal proclivities. Dressed like a woman, Elvira is limited by
gender roles: when she does tender an overture, she receives responses like,
"Get lost, you silly cow." This gender ambiguity makes every encounter a con-

8.
Fassbinder, "Six Films by Douglas Sirk," in Douglas Sirk, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jon
Halliday, Edinburgh, 1972, p. 5.

Narrativeand SexualExcess

55

frontation. Although the character wishes to be loved and caressed "just like
everyone else," she is incontrovertibly other in terms of gender identity. For
everyone she meets she is a perverse mirror, a grotesque enactment of gender
stereotype, rebounding from male to female, unable to conform, unalterably
deviant. Elvira confronts a materialistic culture in its most concentrated
regime: that of sexuality. Although sexuality usually seethes in the background
of melodrama, where it is equated with repressed truth, here it is foregrounded
in the form of sexual identity, as the evacuation of truth. Sexual identity in
ThirteenMoons can serve as no index to the natural self.
In a Yearof ThirteenMoons is a tale of evacuation and self-erasure, the playout
of an original lack. Dragged in front of a mirror by her former lover and
ing
commanded to describe what she sees, Elvira says only, "I see myself loving
you." This denial of the self in the mirror underlies the transparency of a
character who is herself the reflector of every other character, male and female,
depending on her aspect. If the narrative follows the peregrinative course of
Erwin/Elvira as she strings together her life story, it happens that each narrative episode closes with an act of self-annihilation: getting beat up, falling off a
car, hysteria, sleeping, weeping, fainting, hanging, suicide.
A castrated being of this sort, who gives unconditionally but who has lost
the means of exchange, constitutes a familiar type in Fassbinder's films: the
protagonists of Mother Kiisters Goes to Heaven, The Merchantof Four Seasons, The
Marriageof Maria Braun, and Effi Briest are all sainted individuals, natural prey.
ThirteenMoons, however, poses the question of the sympathetic innocent irrecoverable for society except through the stark gesture of self-sacrifice.9 Indeed,
this theme is posed with a certain lyric inevitability that makes Fassbinder seem
at one, not with Sirk or Walsh or Godard, but with such filmmakers as Bresson
and Dreyer: the mortification of Elvira becomes a chronicle of corporeal rivening, similar to that of Bresson's Diary of a CountryPriest or Mouchette,or Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc. For Fassbinder's protagonist, however, there is not
even the remote possibility of redemption or epiphany. The eroticization of
death neither liberates nor sanctifies the victims of Fassbinder's melodramas;
rather, it underscores the price paid to society for the borrowed sexual identity.
Although Elvira masturbates while tightening a noose around her neck, and
eventually commits suicide in precisely this manner, the pincers of contradiction will not relax in any final image of ataraxy.
As the problem of Elvira is the problem of the acquisition of a sexual idenand
as this identity is established at the meeting point of family and
tity

9.
In many ways ThirteenMoons appears to be a companion piece with The Marriage of Maria
Braun. In the latter, a woman is forced to masculinize herself; in the former, a man feminizes
himself; in both the return of the long awaited lover eventuates in death.

56

OCTOBER

society - that is, in relation to the father who represents the symbolic law- In a
Yearof ThirteenMoons follows the pattern of a "family romance," the play of fantasies which the child constructs in seeking to define its relation to paternity.
Erwin/Elvira's quest is to reconstruct the past and define his/her origins.
Through this imaginary scenario Elvira hopes to rescue herself from the
nebulous zone in which she is bereft of sexual identity and to be restored to the
system of clear definitions and polar organization, and thereby to the society
which rejects her.
It is in this cause that the proairetic code, as the carrier of sequence,
assumes such importance in the film. The linear and causal relations of the
narrative drive are narrowly and starkly laid out so as to form a kind of defile
through which Elvira must pass in her quest for sexual gender and the answer
to the mystery of her origins. Since the one is dependent upon the other, the
direction of the film is almost exclusively toward a retrieval of the past, a return
trip to memorial landscapes or characters. A journey to the orphanage thus
takes on a privileged status in the fiction. The core of the enigma, the nodal
point of the narrative, seems to be harbored within this scene which precisely
reconstructs the hamartia of the character. Aristotle defined hamartia as a kind
of ignorance, usually of the past or of kinship which causes the characters to
make mistakes and to fall into error. Hamartia is associated with only positive
characters, whose acts "seem like those of a wicked man but are unlike them
because not deliberately bad."10The return to the convent-orphanage, where
Erwin grew up and which he cannot remember, discloses the ancestral guilt
that marks him: the repudiation of little Erwin is connected with the Nazi era.
While the camera moves in a precise and measured tracking shot which
reechoes an earlier scene in a slaughterhouse, Sister Gudrun, the nun who
fostered him, delivers a monologue about Erwin, an illegitimate child whose
adoption was forbidden by his mother out of fear of her exposure. This scene
manifestly makes Elvira the auditor of her own life story, the passive witness of
her own narrative. In tragedy this scene would figure the moment of peripety,
a recognition which would reverse the expectations of the protagonist, but
melodrama, as we said previously, disallows any such transcendence of lack
through a recognition of its significance. The "happy end" of melodrama is the
result of an acceptance, rather than an understanding, of repression.
The enclosed courtyard, the interior garden of the convent, makes this a
characteristic topos for the melodramatic: both in this scene and elsewhere, the
film propels its characters into spaces that initially seem protected, only to
become claustral. The invasive force in this sequence, the evil principle that

10.
Aristotle, in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert, Detroit, Wayne State
University Press, 1962, p. 86.

Narrativeand SexualExcess

57

enters from without, is the past. What is most striking about the sequence,
apart from its dramatis personae consisting of a prostitute, a nun, and a
of whom have sacrificed their natural sexuality for an "imtranssexual-two
possible" love-is the disjoining of the embedded story from its focal subject.
Elvira is "forgotten" by the camera as it follows Sister Gudrun in her processional movements. Occasionally it rediscovers Elvira, poised like some grotesque caryatid against the pillar of the cloister. More frequently the camera
lingers on Zora, the sympathetic prostitute, who weeps for the injustice of the
tale. When the camera finally notices Elvira at the story's close, she has fainted:
she lies prone and unconscious for the fourth time in the film. It is as if the
decentering of the character literalizes the marginal status accorded her in life,
as if this momentary lapse in narrative focalization articulates the character's
displacement from her own life story. The scene illustrates what Thomas
Elsaesser, in a marvelously evocative image, calls "the grotesque distance between the subjective mise-en-scene of the character and the objective mise-enscene of the camera."" The distance interposed here between the protagonist
and the story of her origins is what disjoins her from knowledge. Where the
tragic protagonist's suffering leads to knowledge, it leads here only to more
suffering.
The proairetic code, as we begin to see from this discussion, is intricately
bound up with the hermeneutic, the code which governs the enigma and hence
meaningfulness, significance. This is true of tragedy as well, but in melodrama
the protagonist is a failed rather than a masterful interpreter. Muteness,
Brooks tells us, corresponds to melodrama as blindness does to tragedy and
deafness to comedy. Blinding moments of insight, failures of insight, typify
tragedy; while comedy is based on misapprehension and mistaken communication.'2 The melodramatic text is mute, caught up by fear of the failure of
rendering itself articulate. But where blindness and deafness lead to errors
which are recoverable by reviewing and attending to the very literalness of the
original message, melodrama is a matter of the failure of literalness itself, of the
articulateness of the literal. The melodramatic text does not speak the truth; it
merely points to it, to its existence elsewhere. It is because the literal, which is
rendered through the codes of realism, is grasped as not enough, not sufficiently
significant, that the melodrama is characterized by its spilling over from its
realist constraints into an excess of language, into the metalanguage of
metaphor. Melodrama thus has an allegorical stamp which marks its difference
from realism. The representational codes are de-emphasized; and seemingly
insignificant gestures are exploded, out of realistic proportion, into theatrical

11.
12.

Thomas Elsaesser, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles," Fassbinder,ed. Tony Rayns, London,
BFI, 1980.
Brooks, p. 57.

58

OCTOBER

events worthy of a second level of interpretation. In melodrama, every acan event irtion-the finding of a coin, a salutation on the street-becomes
radiated with possibility, with narrative potential, an event which will perhaps
advance and clarify the character's own textual course, the subject's own
"arabesque of plot." The proairetic code of the narrative is intersected by the
connotations of theatrical performance. The tendency to dramatize, to refract
the quotidian event into highly colored episodes, allows Brooks to say that
melodrama represents the theatrical impulse itself.
Stereotype and cliche are thus only the starting points for the interrogation of reality which melodrama develops. The inordinate attention to the surface of the mundane turns it into a specular surface; events are peered into until they reflect the whole troubled life of the protagonist. It must be emphasized
that this represents a constriction, rather than an enlargement, of the ontological range of the text. It would be easy, from the above description, to misconstrue the genre as a form of the gothic, or its ancestor, romance. In romance,
however, alternative, magical worlds are a definite possibility, while in the
gothic, the oneiric world of visions and telepathic connections occupies an ontological level equivalent or superior to the everyday. There are two diegetic
levels, two diegetic frames to which the text appeals. In melodrama, however,
the overworld of the "moral occult" is denied an equivalent diegetic status,
manifesting itself in the world of the characters only in madness, hysteria,
hallucination.
In ThirteenMoons the quest for a metalanguage which will deliver the
characters from the muteness of their surroundings embeds the film in a proliferation of texts by which the characters probe their lives for concealed metaphors. The status accorded these narratives turns the characters into "storytelling epicenters." The characters seem almost comically eager to unburden
themselves of lengthy anecdotes, parables, histories. They become so many
oracles encountered by the central character on her way to her ritual curtain.
At times, the poetic resonance of these tales is marvelous in its connotative
power. Directly after the slaughterhouse scene, for example, in Elvira's furlined bedroom, Zora tells Elvira a story about a brother and sister who were
metamorphosed into a snail and a mushroom. The snail -the sister--becomes
hungry, and the brother offers a piece of himself to feed her appetite; first she
eats his ear, then his left foot, and so on. Later, Soul Frieda, a friend of Zora's,
tells of a mysterious dream. In a room lit by dozens of candles, and suffused
with the music of the void, Soul Frieda recounts his dream of a cemetery,
where all the dates on the tombstones are of very short duration. Sometimes
only a few days, sometimes only a few hours. The dates represent not the span
of a person's life, says Frieda, but the time that they were truly happy.
When reconnoitering Saitz's office building, prior to throwing herself on
his mercy for exposing their past together, Elvira comes upon a man who has

Narrativeand SexualExcess

59

been staring at Saitz's office window for "eight hours a day, five days a week, for
seventeen months." The man has cancer, and Saitz has fired him for his
malady. As he drinks from a bottle of bitters, he tells Elvira that he now spends
his days exposing Saitz to the evil eye. Later, when Elvira penetrates the office
complex and spends the night preliminary to meeting Saitz, she is visited by a
black man preparing to hang himself. His discourse on the protocol of suicide
includes the statement: "The suicide desires life, but is just dissatisfied with the
conditions under which it has come to him." Insisting that this act of selfdestruction is a confirmation of the will, the character says, "I don't want it to
be possible anymore for things to be real because I perceive them." Elvira at
this point accepts the burden of perceiving reality and tells the man, "I think
you'd better do it now."
This series of embedded narratives bound by Elvira, the consistent
auditor, recalls Dante's Inferno; the circular camera movements linking the
separate scenes and the incarnadine lighting of certain sequences contribute to
this correspondence. Each of the citizens encountered by the protagonist in her
movement of descent delivers his own story of damnation. In the penultimate
scene, the last in which we see Elvira alive, she is sitting on a spiral staircase,
crying. The following shot places us inside the journalist's apartment, where
his naked wife, in a candlelit room, plays Elvira's taped interview. This confession continues until the end of the film, once again making Elvira the auditor,
this time literally absent, of her own narrative.
There is one sequence in Thirteen Moons, however, which is most
emblematic of the hyperbolic "melodramatic imagination" which exponentially enlarges and theatricalizes gestures in an attempt to make them yield
up deeper meanings and secrete suggestions of grandiose forces. This is the
slaughterhouse sequence, which releases a charge of heightened emotion that
both intensifies and releases the pressure of the earlier scenes. As Elvira, accompanied by Zora, provides a guided tour of the packing house where she
previously worked, we are made witnesses to the detailed process of
dismemberment and rendering through all its grisly stages. In this stainless,
antiseptic theater, Elvira recounts her earlier life, her marriage (as a man) to
Irene, and the birth of their child Marie-Ann. She then skips ahead to recall her
affair with Christoph, and how she performed as a prostitute to provide income. As the camera travels in precisionist patterns detailing the rendering
process, Elvira explains how she rehearsed Christoph, an actor, in his roles.
Her voice verges on hysteria as she quotes an extended passage from Goethe's
Tasso. There is, to say the least, a rich counterpoint operating here: the passionate sadness of the music, the emotional frenzy of the voice, the stately flow
of the camera movement all the while recording a kind of cinematic nature
morte. The incongruity of Elvira and Zora walking in high heels and stockings
on the wet tile floor of the slaughterhouse - the flowing blood is constantly hosed
away-wrings a comic moment from this grim material.

60

OCTOBER

The most dissonant aspect of the scene occurs in the juxtaposition of the
surgical proceedings with the discourse of the theater. This can be read as a
condensation, anchored in the phrase "operating theater," recentering the
passage on the particular physicality of Elvira. Later in the film it is revealed
that Saitz, the man for whom Elvira transformed herself, made his fortune initially in meatpacking and prostitution -"he ran his whorehouse like a concentration camp"- analeptically placing the slaughterhouse scene under the sign
of Saitz, the castrative figure.
The diegetic function of this sequence is thoroughly incommensurate with
the hyperbole of its presentation. It is, however, a scene invested with ultimate
significance. For it testifies to the insufficiency of the literal and to the withdrawal of the sacred. This profane setting must be transformed into an allegorical text, a melodramatic scene which is, according to Brooks, "a dramatic
choice between heightened moral alternatives where every gesture . . is
charged with the conflict between darkness and light."'3 It is death, says Elvira
(who "divines" the significance of the scene), that gives meaning to these animals' lives. The parallel to her own life is obvious, and the ensuing scenes propel the narrative into the conflicts of two forces: the desire for self-identity, selfadequation, and the nirvanic impulse towards self-destruction.
Nowell-Smith's analysis of melodrama also focuses on its excess. But
where Brooks describes this excess as a circumventing of the literal by means of
the allegorical, Nowell-Smith describes this same circumvention differentlythrough an analogy with hysteria. Melodrama, he says, somaticizes its excess, or displaces its repressed material onto the "body" of the text. That which
cannot be represented directly, in the actions or the discourse of the characters, is displaced onto the mise-en-scene, or the lighting, or funneled into the
music. The hysterical moment is frequently the place where the mimetic codes
of realism break down. The slaughterhouse sequence of ThirteenMoons represents just such a moment and corresponds to the overt hysteria of Elvira within
the sequence itself. For the most part, however, ThirteenMoons functions in a
somewhat different fashion. It is the character who receives, like stigmata, the
uncathected energy of the text and not the text itself. Rather than fully accommodating the undischarged emotion in the mise-en-scene, Fassbinder projects
it onto the body of the protagonist. This body thus becomes the conflictual center of the narrative.
For both Nowell-Smith and Brooks, however, the excesses of melodrama
tear the text away from the conventions of realism. In ThirteenMoons, as in
melodrama in general, the result is a loosening of the narrative mesh, a vignetting of individual scenes. Dissolves (frequently corresponding to the oblivion of
Elvira) punctuate the narrative flow, dividing rather than linking the discourse,

13.

Ibid., p. 5.

Narrativeand SexualExcess

61

creating a disaggregate structure with most elements of the "textual cartilage"

removed.
Melodrama, like realism, is fraught with nostalgia for origins; it is intent
on the conservation of society. It is, however, unable completely to integrate its
excesses within its structure. Nowell-Smith points to a group fantasy as the
hysterical moment which constitutes the breakdown of the realist conventions
of the film Cobweb."This submerged fantasy," he says, "[is brought] to the surface, but not directly into the articulation of the plot. Realist representation
cannot accommodate the fantasy just as bourgeois society cannot accommodate
its realisation."14
Similarly, as all the characters featured in the film, including Sister Gudrun, gather incongruously at Elvira's apartment, it becomes evident that the
death of Elvira enacts a kind of group fantasy; each of the characters betrays
Elvira, to no particular end. Like a pinball, Elvira rebounds from one character to another, lighting them up as they tell their stories, momentarily delaying her extinction. The suicide, so reminiscent of that of Bresson's Mouchette,
fails however to elicit a sense of moral elevation, of the character ultimately
achieving a kind of "moral sainthood." The character departs with the same ignominy with which she was introduced. Elvira is the excess which must be
repressed in patriarchal society. The melodramatic form of Thirteen Moons
reveals both the necessity of this imperative and the consequent and irreparable
suffering which it entails.

14.

Nowell-Smith,

p. 118.