SOURCE: "Narrator and Supernatural in Mérimée's La Vénus D'Ille" in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. IV, Nos. 1-2, Fall-Winter, 1975-76, pp. 24-30.

[In the following essay, Pilkington examines the "gap between objective reality and subjective viewpoint" elicited by the narrator of "La Vénus d'Ille"]

The role of the narrator and the theme of the supernatural in La Vénus d'Ille have received a good deal of critical attention. This paper will attempt to relate to each other the narrative and thematic aspects of the tale, in order to define something of the distinctive quality of Mérimée's achievement in the story which he considered to be his masterpiece.

The narrator, whom Mérimée includes in a number of his tales, has been variously held to be a projection of the author himself or a means of setting the story within an artistic framework. Both views have been effectively challenged and shown to be inadequate.¹ The view now generally accepted holds that the narrator in a story such as La Vénus d'Ille fulfils an important functional role: a level-headed man, a sober academic, sceptical about mystery and superstition, unlikely to be given to romance, he is our sole source of information; we know only what he witnesses or is told, and the fact that he is not simply a neutral and uninvolved observer but a character in his own right with the attitudes defined above, guarantees his reliability and authenticates his account of a series of events which might in themselves strain the credulity of the reader.²

There is evidence in La Vénus d'Ille, however, that Mérimée may not have intended his narrator to be relied upon uncritically for an accurate and objective account of events or for a perspective on those events which the reader can accept, at least without some reservations. There are a number of hints that Mérimée is here seeking to exploit a contrast between the implication of the tale as they strike the reader and as they strike the narrator, with the specific consequence that the reader can be more sceptical than the narrator about the supernatural dimension which the latter finally comes to accept. The postscript to the tale is revealing in this regard, and suggestive of a principle operative elsewhere within it: the narrator reports, but without comment, the news from his friend M. de P. that the statue of Venus has been melted down and cast into a bell but that its enduring malevolence is demonstrated by the fact that the vineyards have sinve been twice the victims of severe frosts. Need we accept, as the narrator through his silence appears to do, that we are here faced with an event unaccountable other than in terms of the continued operation of a supernatural agency?³ The reader need not take this 'evidence' at face value, as the narrator appears to do, if he recalls, as the narrator does not, that the guide at the beginning of the tale had mentioned that the olive-tree (which was being uprooted when the statue was unearthed) has the previous year been the victim of an unusually severe frost. Mérimée is relying on the reader's critical sense to connect the episodes and thus to see in the postcript a suggestion that what is operative here—and perhaps by implication elsewhere in the tale—is a very human psychological tendency to look to supernatural explanations of perfectly natural phenomena. The narrator provides the reader with the facts, yet appears less than understanding in the use which he makes of them; and the irony is heightened by the fact that the reader cannot possess more information than the narrator yet is not necessarily committed to the latter's perspective.

An anticipation of this investing of a natural event with supernatural significance is provided by the episode of the workman's broken leg, which is the first suggestion of the statue's 'malevolence'. The guide who ascribes a simple accident to the 'méchanceté' of the Venus is plainly naive; this is apparent from, among other things, his declaration that the statue is even more beautiful than the plaster bust of Louis-Philippe in the local mairie—a deliberately incongruous and naive comparison. Through his non-committal narrator, Mérimée here leaves the options open as to whether mere chance or active malevolence is at work. He leaves each reader to come to his own conclusion, but calls into question indirectly the view that the accident was the result of a supernatural agency by putting this view into the mouth of a naively superstitious character. The psychology recalls that of the hero of La Chambre bleue, who leaps to a dramatic but quite unfounded and irrational explanation of a banal event, when he takes the wine trickling under the door of his room from a broken bottle to be the blood of a murdered man.

Similar ironies are operative in the crucial episode of the ring. The narrator describes the transfer to the finger of the statue as follows:

Il ôta, non sans peine, sa bague de diamants: je m'approchais pour la recevoir; mais il me prévint, courut à la Vénus, lui passa la bague au doigt annulaire, et reprit son poste à la tête des Illois.⁴

In this briefly economical description, there are two excellent examples of Mérimée's use of small but significant detail. It is important to bear this passage in mind (although the narrator does not) when Alphonse subsequently claims to be unable to remove the ring from the statue's finger, sinceèlle a serré le doigt', as he tells the narrator. There is here not only the obvious uncertainty created by the fact that the claim is made by a man who has been drinking heavily and whose testimony therefore falls under suspicion. Mérimée expects us to recall the small, but not gratuitous, detail that Alphonse had had difficulty in removing the ring from his own finger in the first place, which suggests that this young man with 'ses mains grosses et hâlées' resembling 'des mains de laboureur'⁵ —one of the few details given of the appearance of Alphonse—is maladroit with his fingers. His inability to remove the ring from the finger of the statue is less disturbing when we recall that he had had difficulty in removing it from his own. Alphonse's claim that the statue has bent her finger since he placed his ring on it also appears in a quite different perspective if we recall that the ring-finger of the statue was in reality slightly bent: the narrator had commented on this when he first described the statue ('le pouce et les deux premiers doigts étendus, les deux autres légèrement ployés'). Here again, then, Mérimée expects the reader to make better use of facts reported by his narrator than the narrator does himself. There is at least a possibility of rational explanation of a mysterious event, in terms of the inability of a habitually clumsy man to remove a ring from a finger which was already bent when he had slipped it on, which the narrator fails to explore or even to call to mind; if it remains an inconclusive explanation, this is in part precisely because it is not explored.

The same principle appears to operate in the incident of the footprints discovered in the garden after the murder. The Spaniard who falls under suspicion is disculpated at least in part by the fact that his shoes are larger than the footprints. The narrator in reporting this fails to connect the difference in size with his own earlier observation that the heavy rain had so soaked the earth that it could not possibly have preserved a clear imprint of a footmark. The implication which arises when the reader connects the two facts, as the narrator fails to, would be that the effect of the heavy rain would make any footprints smaller by blurring their outline in the wet ground. This is not of course conclusive evidence against the Spaniard, and therefore in favour of the rational as opposed to the supernatural explanation; nonetheless the use here by Mérimée of small but significant details—and this is of course characteristic of his art in general—which can be connected and evaluated by the attentive reader means that the reader need not feel so readily compelled as the narrator does to accept the supernatural as the most plausible explanation of events.

This technique, which enables the attentive reader to be more sceptical than the narrator, is used in the wife's testimony. It is reported that she saw her husband 'entre les bras d'une espèce de géant verdâtre qui l'étreignait avec force' and that she recognised in this figure the bronze Venus.⁶ Her description of what she saw immediately suggests to the reader, but not to the narrator to indeed to anyone else, the narrator's earlier description of the Spaniard defeated at pelota by Alphonse: a 'géant espagnol', striking in that 'sa peau olivâtre avait une teinte presque aussi foncée que le bronze de la Vénus'.⁷ The ressemblances in stature and colouring are of course no more conclusive than the question of the footprints in the sodden earth, when it comes to resolving the mystery, which remains intractable. Mérimée leaves the options open for a reader who is free to conclude immediately that the supernatural is at work (like the guide), to end by accepting this explanation (like the narrator), or to remain more sceptical than either (like Mérimée himself?) simply because he can see connections between facts and possibilities in events which Mérimée refuses to spell out and which the narrator is incapable of spelling out.

At other points in the tale, the presence of the narrator works in a way less implicitly critical of that narrator's understanding, but acts nonetheless to make the reader uncertain rather than confident. An event (which might or might not have supernatural significance) occurs when the stone flung at the statue rebounds (or is flung back?) to strike the thrower. The incident occurs at night, and is witnessed by the narrator from a distance. The fact that he can only record what he sees and hears creates not only the obvious uncertainty—did the stone rebound, or was it flung back?—but leaves the reader in doubt as to whether it did either, since the young man's clutching his head and crying out 'elle me l'a rejetée' could in context be no more than a further piece of high-spirited joking on his part. The narrator sees neither movement on the part of the statue nor the rebound of the stone itself. His remark that 'il était évident que la pierre avait rebondi sur le métal, et avait puni ce drôle de l'outrage qu'il faisait à la déesse' is no more than his interpretation of what happened. Indeed his academic standpoint here, far from providing a warrant of veracity, perhaps influences his judgment since he cheerfully concludes: "Encore un Vandale puni par Vénus! Puissent tous les destructeurs de nos vieux monuments avoir ainsi la tête cassée!"⁸ Here we feel the narrator to be a less reliable guarantee of accuracy than a straightforward third-person account would be, although the latter narrative mode, necessarily unambiguous, would have the disadvantage of failing to leave options open for the reader and this Mérimée here insists upon.

The gap between objective reality and subjective viewpoint is exploited subtly in the description of the statue itself. Here the presence of the narrator enables Mérimée to reserve entirely his own position; we cannot with certainty ascribe to him the view that "dédain, ironie, cruauté, se lisaient sur ce visage d'une incroyable beauté cependant,"⁹ since this is what his archaeologist thinks and it is shown to be a subjective view in the context of the tale by the quite different view taken by, for example, Peyrehorade, who sees nothing disturbing in the statue. The narrator's own view of the statue is not stable but changes according to his own state of mind; shortly after the discovery of the frightful scene of the murder, the narrator looks at the statue and notes:

Cette fois, je l'avouerai, je ne pus contempler sans effroi son expression de méchanceté ironique; et, la tête toute pleine des scènes horribles dont je venais d'être le témoin, il me sembla voir une divinité infernale applaudissant au malheur qui frappait cette maison.¹⁰

Here it is plain that the statue only looks like a 'divinité infernale' because of the narrator's state of mind, and this highly subjective description is as eloquent of the spectator's mood as it is of the object "described."

The tale then might in some sense be seen as a challenge to the reader not to feel the 'frisson subit' which shakes the narrator when Alphonse claims that the statue will not release the ring and not to feel something of the irrational contagion which affects the narrator when he ends by feeling the "terreur superstitieuse que la déposition de madame Alphonse avait répandue dans toute la maison."¹¹ Thus while it is true that in one sense the narrator does serve here to "fence off from the reader the abyss of the supernatural and the irrational which the tale opens up, he is in another sense partly responsible for it opening up at all, given his lack of the alertness and scepticism which Mérimée plainly expects the reader to display. A head-on collision between the rational and the supernatural is therefore avoided by the presence of a narrator whose limited perspective and restricted understanding are in part responsible for allowing the "supernatural" dimension to arise. It is thus not so much that the reader is finally convinced of, or ready to accept, the supernatural, since someone (that is, the narrator) at least as sceptical as the reader himself is finally ready to accept it; rather is it that a reader more critical than the narrator can see how supernatural explanations of ordinary events might arise, as a result of the irrationality of men and their failure to be objective—a defect as evident in the simple Catalan guide as in the learned archaeologist.

Unlike Balzac, Nerval, and Nodier, then, Mérimée does not set out to persuade his readers of the reality of a supernatural dimension of which he was himself unconvinced. The "mystery" of Il Viccolo is seen not to be a mystery at all, once the circumstances are explained; in Djoûmane Mérimée anticipates Maupassant by providing a rational explanation of weird events in terms of hallucinations and psychology; in La Chambre bleue, a sinister event proves to have no basis in anything except the characters' tendency to entertain uncritical misconceptions about perfectly ordinary people and events. All these tales deflate the bubble of the strange of the supernatural, in a conclusive way. La Vénus d'Ille is distinctive and perhaps superior—somewhat in the manner of Lokis with which it has much in common—by virtue of Mérimée's subtle use of the narrator (who becomes a character in his own right and is directly involved in events) to create in a sustained way the possibility of a double perspective.

Notes

¹ See F. P. Bowman, Prosper Mérimée, University of California Press, 1962, p. 169.

² F. P. Bowman in his excellent study has argued that in Carmen and Lokis Mérimée has exploited a narrator who fails to grasp the full significance of the events which he relates, and has pointed out that the implications which a tale has for the narrator may contrast with those which it suggests to the reader. The starting-point of this paper is an attempt to show in detail the extent to which this principle is operative in La Vénus d'Ille. What I call the generally accepted view is argued by F. P. Bowman himself:

"The narrator of La Vénus d'Ille . . . procures a greater 'suspension of disbelief', which in this fantastic tale is essential. A man like ourselves, he stands in relation to the events in a position similar to that of the reader. He witnesses, everything that happens and guarantees its veracity. He is depicted as hesitant and unwilling to believe at first, and finally overwhelmed by the force of the evidence; the reader's reactions go along with his" (p. 172).

F. P. Bowman's interpretation has been echoed by J. B. Ratermanis:

"Ce dernier (that is, the narrator) se présente en archéologue, en savant, exempt de tout soupçon de partialité; sa qualité garantit l'exactitude des faits qu'il relate et l'authenticité des êtres qu'il introduit, y compris la statue" ('La perspective temporelle dans La Vénus d'Ille de P. Mérimée', Le Français moderne, July 1963, p. 208).

It has been put forward more recently by A. W. Raitt, who argues, in connection with the rather pedantic discussion as to the meaning of the inscription on the statue, that "Mérimée was prepared to risk boring some readers in order to establish the impeccable academic qualifications of his narrator, a man so immersed in archaeology that he could never be suspected of romancing" (Prosper Mérimée, 1970, p. 186). The aim of this paper is to argue that this seemingly reliable narrator is, for the attentive and critical reader, in fact unreliable.

³ See M. A. Smith, Prosper Mérimée, 1972, p. 133. P.

⁴ Mérimée, Romans et nouvelles, ed. M. Parturier, Garnier, 1967, vol. II, p. 107; all references are to this edition.

⁵ Ibid., p. 91.

⁶ Ibid., p. 116.

⁷ Ibid., p. 107.

⁸ Ibid., p. 96.

⁹ Ibid., p. 97.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 115.

¹¹ Ibid., pp. 112, 118.