Notes on the Soap Opera Apparatus: Televisual Style and "As the World Turns"

Abstract

narrative structure and spectator positioning); demographic analysis of the soap opera audience; empirical research on the effects of soap opera on that audience; and content analysis of the world of the soap There is much to learn from each of these methods of inquiry, but the work done to date has been incomplete in its approach to the genre as a televisual signifying system, an apparatus that generates meaning. In our desire to comprehend the soap opera audience and the genre's narrative form, we have given short shrift to basic questions about the soap opera's manipulation of sound and image. We have yet to fully articulate the components of soap opera style and the function of that style in the soap opera apparatus. Feminist analysis has thus far taught us the most about soap opera as a signifying system.2 Tania Modleski's relatively early (1979) essay sparked much of the feminist rethinking of the genre.3 She contends that soap opera may prove to be the most (only?) feminist televisual form. Invoking Roland Barthes's hermeneutic code, Modleski sees feminist potential in three aspects of the soap opera: its disrupted narrative form, its avoidance of narrative closure, and its construction of a fragmented spectatorial viewpoint. Consequently, her argument is not concerned so much with what might be called a feminist televisual style, but with narrative form and the feminine spectator's relationship to that form. She spends very little time on the actual use of sound and image. Modleski shares this concentration on narrative structure with many of the writers drawing on literary and cinematic analytical traditions. The idea of an endless story has captivated those accustomed to narrative closure, largely because narrative aperture-the open text-is a trait normally associated with modernist or progressive texts, not forms of popular culture as seemingly conservative as soap opera. Jean-Luc Godard used to joke that his films have a beginning, a middle, and an end-but not necessarily in that order. Soap opera, as has frequently