Conclusion

Abstract

In its problematizing of the visible as a means of securing truth and its search for an alternate, secular moral universe—a nonreligious spirituality, or a moral occult that is not guaranteed via religious faith—melodrama is “modern.” This particular impulse also informs the work of the many modernists who did not simply reject signification but rather sought to refer to a reality beyond the immediately visible, from the cubists to the Futurists to the Metaphysical painters; from Kandinsky’s to Rothko’s concerns with the spiritual in art; from Virginia Woolf¹ to Ama Ata Aidoo; from André Bazin to Germaine Dulac.² Such work is ultimately better understood as allegorical rather than mimetic, the modernist artwork not a mirror of the universe but a heterocosm that nonetheless refers, via allegory, to a real.