SOURCE: "The Narrators of Mérimée's Carmen" in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, November, 1988, pp. 1-12.

[In the following essay, Cogman describes the function of the elder and younger narrative voices in Mérimée's Carmen, noting their relation to the work's themes of freedom and constraint.]

When it was first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1st October 1845, Mérimée's Carmen¹ did not contain the concluding chapter on gypsy customs and language, which was only added in the 1847 publication in volume and in all subsequent editions. This chapter has always posed problems for commentators. Some have just treated it as an excrescence: for Trahard it is a 'dissertation pédante' that weakens the thrust of the story; for A. W. Raitt, it is a 'wilfully perverse' addition; for M. J. Tilby, 'little more than a learned appendix'.² For these critics, the central interest of the story is the study of Don José's passion for Carmen. In the course of time interest has tended to slide back from Carmen herself, no longer the 'personnalité si nette' that Dupouy evoked,³ but seen increasingly as 'unknowable', just as her gypsy world is 'incomprehensible to both Don José and the narrator',⁴ and has shifted to Don José's love for her, whether seen literally⁵ or read allegorically, as it is by Tilby for whom it mirrors the relationship between the Romantic fiction-maker (Carmen, an analogue of the creative writer and of the text)⁶ and his reader, 'as gullible as José and . . . well disposed towards the seductive myth of Carmen the femme fatale.'⁷

Most of those who have attempted to justify the final chapter have done so in terms of external tactics by the author with respect to a real or potential public, by attributing it for instance to a desire to display his philological knowledge or to fill up a thin volume (Parturier),⁸ to attenuate the publication by an Academician and a fonctionnaire ministériel of spicy tales of smugglers and gypsy girls, or out of dandysme, to affect detachment from an exciting narrative (Dupouy).⁹ Similarly for Raitt, it indicates Mérimée's scorn for literature,¹⁰ the attitude of the author to his story. But to the extent that Mérimée might be seeking to guide the reader's response to the story, the pedantry of the chapter functions as a part of the story; the fullest of such 'internal' justifications is given by F. P. Bowman, who sees the 'obtrusive erudition' of the first and last chapters as a deliberate choice, and ultimately designed to provoke our dissociation from the Narrator (as I shall term the savant who relates his two encounters with Don José) and our identification with Don José, and an aesthetic effect of distancing between the story and the reader.¹¹ The main other internal explanation has been to shift the interest from Carmen and Don José and hold that the story is essentially a study of local colour and gypsy life.¹² This would seem to be even more problematic. If we are to learn about gypsy life, why the elaborate narrative framework that Mérimée has set up? Why the fact that if Carmen has survived in multiple versions in different media: opera, ballet (Roland Petit, notably), film both of the story and of Bizet's opera,¹³ with local colour (Francesco Rosi) or updated (Preminger's Carmen Jones, Godard's Prénom Carmen), or even combining the two as in Carlos Saura's flamenco version,¹⁴ it is above all a character (Carmen herself) or the relationship betwen her and Don José (the Narrator almost invariably falls by the wayside) that survive? What I shall seek to demonstrate is the possibility of integrating the final chapter with the story in a way that both relates to the central issues of the story without evacuating traditional human interest, and makes it functional in terms of the elaborate narrative technique that Mérimée has adopted, to show that it is by no means, as Filon argued, 'le moins bien composé de tous ses récits, le plus confus et le moins homogène'.¹⁵

In Barbara Herrnstein Smith's dictum, 'a story is always . . . someone telling someone else that something has happened':¹⁶ relating also in the sense that it sets up a pattern of relationships. The most obvious of these is that between narrator and audience or narratee. But there is also the relationship between narrator and story. In the case of Mérimée, this has generally been explored by critics who have focussed their attention on the reliability or otherwise of Mérimée's narrators, notably that of La Vénus d'Ille: is he a reliable witness who can guarantee the veracity of events,¹⁷ or someone whose limited perspective and restricted understanding allows a supernatural explanation to arise?¹⁸ The same problem arises in Carmen: how do we view Don José's account of Carmen? Is she demonic, as he presents her, and as Dupouy is inclined to agree;¹⁹ or is this just an illusion, or even an illusion which is parallel to our wishful thinking?²⁰ To do so however is to treat Don José as storyteller as a unitary figure, when in a homodiegetic narrative (to use Gérard Genette's term)²¹ such as those of both the Narrator and Don José, in which the narrator plays a part in his own story, a key relationship is that between the narrator who is narrating and the narrator as protagonist of his own narrative. (Differing terms have been proposed for these two aspects of the narrator: erzählendes Ich/erzähltes Ich (Spitzer), narrator/hero (Genette);²² for my purposes, it will be sufficient to distinguish older and younger selves in that the older selves only narrate (Don José in his cell, the Narrator in 1845), the younger selves are the actors in their respective tales.) This is essentially a question of point of view, or focalization: are we restricted to what the younger self sees at the time, or do we see from the angle of the older narrator?—and it is a dimension that is often crucial in Mérimée. An extreme instance is Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia, in which the whole interest of the story depends on the narrator presenting the events just as they were experienced by his younger self. His older self intervenes occasionally to judge critically the character of his younger self:

Je croyais pieusement à l'inflammabilité des dames allemandes, espagnoles et italiennes à la seule vue d'un Français. Bref, à cette époque, j'étais encore bien de mon pays.

He gives no hint²³ however of facts or discoveries to come. This preserves ambiguity (are the events supernatural?) and suspense, which spring from the narrator imagining that he is at the centre of the mysterious events going on (the woman who threw him a flower, the shot from the empty house), whereas in fact they are directed at Don Ottavio (who, though he does not realize it, is his half-brother). But the ambiguity is sustained only by a trick:²⁴ the older narrator suppresses to the end of the story a key fact, namely his resemblance to Don Ottavio.²⁵ We are forced to attribute the fact that he did not notice it when he first met him to his egoism, vanity and self-centred unawareness:²⁶ all he sees (notices) is ' un grand jeune homme pâle, l'air mélancolique, toujours les yeux baissés. . . .'

This suggests that the question of defining focalization is in practice not totally clear-cut, but is above all a question of emphasis. Of the two theoretical focalizations available in a homodiegetic narrative,²⁷ Mérimée takes advantage both of the point of view of the hero (to sustain suspense) and of the narrator (to generate amusement at the expense of his younger self).²⁸ It is in any case prima facie unlikely that an older man would portray things solely as experienced by his younger self, with no sign of later discoveries about the world or about himself, or that he would be content to surrender the narrative advantages of the perspective of the hero by viewing things totally with hindsight. Insofar as one can distinguish between a focalization on the hero and on the narrator, it must be based on a difference between the two (generated by their chronological separation). This difference may consist simply on the level of information (unawareness/knowledge of physical resemblance) or, on a deeper level of self-awareness, it can be produced by age and experience (juvenile vanity/mature detachment). In Carmen Mérimée exploits both possible focalizations (hero or narrator) and the two main types of difference on which they can be based (knowledge of facts or evolution of character).

In the case of Don José's tale, the focalization is not restricted to his younger self. As the older Don José tells his tale to the Narrator in prison, having turned to a life of crime, under sentence of death for 'plusieurs meurtres', having killed Carmen (though neither the Narrator who sees him in gaol nor the reader knows this yet),²⁹ he views the successive incidents of his past life in the light of these later developments. His constant interventions from this vantage point, aware of what his actions are going to lead to, contribute to the sense of fatality that he seeks to instil in his audience.³⁰ These can take the form of pointers to the critical nature of various scenes as they begin: when he first sees Carmen: 'C'était un vendredi, et je ne l'oublierai jamais'; when on guard duty at the colonel's: 'C'est de ce jour-là, je pense[,] que je me mis à l'aimer pour tout de bon'. Or they can be warnings of misfortunes to follow: he first meets Carmen when, anticipating promotion, he is put on guard at the tobacco factory 'pour mon malheur'; she throws the flower, and 'je ne sais ce qui me prit, mais je la ramassai . . . Première sottise!'. There are reminders of his present situation in gaol to which events will lead: 'Je voudrais avoir un confesseur des provinces'; his first day of love with Carmen makes him forget 'demain', i.e. his execution. The older Don José can draw an explicit contrast between what he knows now ('elle mentait') and what in his error he felt then ('je la crus . . .'):

Elle mentait, monsieur, elle a toujours menti. Je ne sais pas si dans sa vie cette fille-là a jamais dit un mot de vérité: mais, quand elle parlait, je la croyais: c'était plus fort que moi. Elle estropiait le basque, je la crus Navarraise; ses yeux seuls et sa bouche et son teint la disait bohémienne. J'étais fou, je ne faisais plus attention à rien.

Or, more insidiously, he inserts proleptic hints whose power is cumulative: 'Je ne tardai pas à savoir qu'ils mentaient'; when Lillas Pastia tells him that he will hear from Carmen, 'il ne se trompait pas', and there follows the episode where he helps them smuggle through the walls of Seville. In the presentation both of Carmen and of his own feelings, the older Don José cannot avoid the loaded phrase which enjoys the benefits of hindsight and which invests events with a seeming (but spurious) inevitability: 'J'étais assez simple pour croire qu'elle s'était véritablement corrigée de ses façons d'autrefois' (she clearly had not); 'Pendant quelques mois, je fus content de Carmen' (it was not to last); when Lucas is first mentioned by Carmen, 'je n'y fis pas attention'.

The creation of a sense of fatality by constant interventions also corresponds to the older Don José's tactics of self-exculpation: it is only after the event that one can seek to apportion (or shift) blame. Not only does he blame Carmen when he kills her: 'Pourtant, tu le sais, c'est toi qui m'as perdu; c'est pour toi que je suis devenu un voleur et un meurtrier'; he presents her (as she herself did) as 'le diable',³¹ while also blaming Carmen's character on her upbringing: 'Pauvre enfant! Ce sont les Calé qui sont coupables pour l'avoir élevée ainsi'. What these inconsistent explanations have in common is that they shift any blame from the young Don José. The older Don José who seeks to do this repeatedly invokes the Narrator's agreement, as narratee, in an appeal for sympathetic understanding of his position, for instance to convey his shock when she throws the flower at him: 'Monsieur, cela me fit l'effet d'une balle qui m'arrivait', or at the scene in the factory after the fight: 'Figurez-vous, monsieur . . . '. The same appeal is revealingly present when he lets Carmen escape for the first time, blaming her and excusing himself: 'Elle mentait, monsieur, . . . J'étais fou, je ne faisais plus attention à rien . . .'; when he is unable to forget Carmen in prison: 'Le croiriezvous, monsieur? ses bas de soie troués qu'elle me faisait voir tout en plein en s'enfuyant, je les avais toujours devant les yeux'; when stressing the humiliation at being reduced to guard duty as a simple soldier: 'Vous ne pouvez vous figurer ce qu'un homme de coeur éprouve en pareille occasion'. Characteristically, the invocation of the Narrator occurs not just at crucial moments of decision or new departures, but also when he underlines his helplessness and her power: 'Monsieur, quand cette fille-là riait, il n'y avait pas moyen de parler raison'.³² It is therefore unsurprising to find it when he is on the point of killing her: 'Tout, monsieur, tout! je lui offris tout, pourvu qu'elle voulût m'aimer encore!'³³

As he relates his past to the Narrator, the older Don José not only retrospectively invests it with inevitability, exculpates himself, and appeals for understanding, but also crucially distorts his career and the image he seeks to give of his own character. In the rapid account he gives of his life before meeting Carmen, we can detect (though he glosses over it) a young Don José resistent to discipline and study: 'On voulait que je fusse d'église, et l'on me fit étudier, mais je ne profitais guère. J'aimais trop à jouer à la paume'; someone whose violence and lack of self-control in a quarrel³⁴ has led to a fight, perhaps to death and flight from the law and the consequences of his actions:

Quand nous jouons à la paume, nous autres Navarrais, nous oublions tout. Un jour que j'avais gagné, un gars de l'Alava me chercha querelle, nous prîmes nos maquilas, et j'eus encore l'avantage; mais cela m'obligea de quitter le pays.³⁵

One could note Don José's characteristic shifting of the blame, firstly to national characteristics, then to the victim as instigator of the quarrel. It is not clear that it actually led to a death. Don José's flight could be explained for other reasons (e.g. fear of revenge attacks), but if so, why should he not say so? If we assume this to be the case, are we not making the assumptions that Don José wants the Narrator (as narratee) to make—to give him the benefit of the doubt? The very lack of explicitness in the account is already a sign of evasiveness, a pointer to a recourse to violence Don José seeks to underplay, a murder he wishes to forget.³⁶ The rapid, perfunctory nature of the narrative is significant in that he wants to locate the start of his life of dishonour and crime with his meeting with Carmen. When he discovers his love for Carmen (on guard duty outside the colonel's party), it is because 'l'idée me vint trois ou quatre fois d'entrer dans le patio, et de donner de mon sabre dans le ventre à tous ces freluquets qui lui contaient fleurettes'. The quarrel with the lieutenant in the rue du Candilejo should therefore come as no surprise, nor should Don José's presentation of it, stressing his own inability to move, his convenient forgetting of his (no doubt insolent) retort, and the suggestion that the officer not only 'started it' (so his response was only self-defence . . .), but in effect killed himself:

Je ne pouvais faire un pas; j'étais comme perclus. L'officier, en colère, voyant que je ne me retirais pas, et que je n'avais pas même ôté mon bonnet de police, me prit au collet et me secoua rudement. Je ne sais ce que je lui dis. Il tira son épée, et je dégainai. La vieille me saisit le bras, et le lieutenant me donna un coup au front, dont je porte encore la marque. Je reculai, et d'un coup de coude je jetai Dorothée à la renverse; puis, comme le lieutenant me poursuivait, je lui mis la pointe au corps, et il s'enferra.

Don José's account of his flight immediately afterwards is coloured by his lack of awareness of what is happening: 'Je . . . me mis à courir, sans savoir où'; '[elles] me firent boire je ne sais quoi'. He jumps over the transition from being a fugitive from justice and the army to involvement at Carmen's suggestion in a smugglers' band: 'Pour le faire court, monsieur . . .': within ten lines he is out of uniform and the bandits are 'nos gens'. In another typically brisk transition he moves rapidly from smuggler to thief: 'Monsieur, on devient coquin sans y penser. Une jolie fille vous fait perdre la tête, on se bat pour elle [this misrepresents jealousy as defence of the helpless!], un malheur arrive, il faut vivre à la montagne, et de contrebandier on devient voleur avant d'avoir réfléchi': he makes it sound as if he didn't have time to do so. The fate of the Englishman in Gibraltar that he sees as his rival, and whom he ambushes, is likewise skipped over:

Je dis au Dancaïre: Je me charge de l'Anglais. Fais peur aux autres, ile ne sont pas armés. L'Anglais avait du coeur. Si Carmen ne lui eût poussé le bras, il me tuait. Bref, je reconquis Carmen ce jour-là.

The standard view of Don José is of a man, weak perhaps, but virtuous, destroyed by love: 'Don José tries to remain true to his duty as a soldier and firmly resists Carmen, but he weakens and his passion plunges him into a world of crime'.³⁷ Raitt speaks of the 'desperate sincerity' of his confession;³⁸ Trahard of 'la lente dégradation d'une âme honnête sous l'influence du vice'.³⁹ Most readers, however sceptical they may be of the way in which his love for Carmen leads him to blame it on her supposed magical powers, tend to overlook the fact that when he meets Carmen, he has already been in a brawl, and perhaps killed a man—as of course he does in his accusation when he is about to kill her: 'C'est toi qui m'as perdu; c'est par toi que je suis devenu un voleur et un meurtrier'.⁴⁰

Against this escamotage and attenuation could be set those things which Don José's account highlights. Recurrent amongst these is the importance he attaches to his (noble) birth. 'Si je prends le don,' as he tells the Narrator at he start of his narrative, 'c'est que j'en ai le droit, et si j'étais à Elizondo je vous montrerais ma généalogie sur parchemin'. He is equally proud of his Basque origins and of his language ('Notre langue, monsieur, est si belle . ..'). Having achieved (after his initial murder) a position in the army, he dwells on his desire, unlike the card-playing and sleeping Spanish soldiers, to occupy himself usefully making a chain, and expects promotion. After his demotion, he remains ambitious: 'Maintenant je me disais: . . . Te voilà mal noté; pour te remettre bien dans l'esprit des chefs, il te faudra travailler dix fois plus que lorsque tu es venu comme conscrit!' He rejects the chance offered by Carmen to escape from prison: 'J'avais encore mon honneur de soldat, et déserter me semblait un grand crime'. He expresses shame at his degradation, at being on guard duty as a 'simple soldat', shame at 'la belle vie que j'ai menée' as a bandit. If he rejects Carmen's proposal to get Garcia killed in ambushing the Englishman, it is again because of his national 'honour': 'pour certaines choses, je serai toujours franc Navarrais, comme dit le proverbe' (my emphasis). Here he is at pains to stress continuity and identity between his past and present selves which he can only do by seeing both from the point of view of the present, striving thereby to impose on the Narrator a false, or at best misleading, image of persistent allegiance to a certain ideal through the vicissitudes of his past life.

The Narrator adopts the other available narrative point of view by restricting his narrative in general to an internal focalization on his younger self. When he first meets Don José, we see the Narrator's growing suspicions about him, implied in the details he notes: the man's ignorance of the region, his knowledge about horses; but the narrative does not go beyond the synthesis that the young Narrator could draw at the time. Likewise he cannot tell why his guide Antonio distrusts the stranger they have met. This is essential to effects of surprise, both when he first meets Don José, and later in Cordoba: 'La porte s'ouvrit tout à coup avec violence, et un homme, enveloppé jusqu'aux yeux dans un manteau brun entra dans la chambre'; it is only then that 'je . . . reconnus mon ami don José'.⁴¹

This distinction between the points of view adopted by Don José and the Narrator in their narratives hinges on the difference in information between their older and younger selves: the Don José who relates his life knows all that will happen to him; the Narrator relating his Spanish adventures presents them as seen by someone not knowing what will happen next. But the distinction can also be made if there is a change in character or self-awareness between the two selves at issue. It is significant in this respect that a considerable time has elapsed between the Narrator's experiences in Spain and the moment of narration. He met Don José in 1830 (the date is given at the start of his narrative); the one specific indication he gives of the time of writing, 'il y a de cela quinze ans', makes it the time of first publication (i.e. 1845), and the idea of a specific time of writing or production of the narrative, posterior by some time to the events narrated, is reinforced by the reference 'forward' to the supposed future monograph on the site of the battle of Munda.

The Narrator, in 1830, is naïve. We see through the account (seen from the point of view of his gullible young self) of the watch incident, and realize what Carmen is up to, as she asks the time to find out if he has a watch worth stealing before deciding whether to accept his invitation to the neveria; and enquires if it is really gold; no surprise for us when it is missing. The young Narrator has demonstrated an incautious ostentation in showing it off in the library, and has something of the foreigner's vanity that characterizes the narrator of Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia: quite apart from his academic convictions about the site of Munda (and the error of those who disagree with him), he knows ('je connaissais . . .') the Spanish character, as he knows Spanish pronunciation, and so feels safe with Don José even if he is a bandit, to the extent of thinking him 'doux et apprivoisé'. We might reflect that the Narrator is lucky in coming across an untypical bandit: a Garcia would not have been that scrupulous. . . .⁴² But this knowledge and the confidence it instils have limits. Worried when he learns of his guide's plan to betray Don José, he takes precautions (moving his gun) before waking him, and his knowledge of pronunciation doesn't help him to pin down Carmen: it is she who has to tell him that she is a gypsy. When he holds forth about José Maria to Don José, the tinge of irony points to the gap between the older Narrator and the overhasty deductions of his younger self: 'J'étais parvenu à lui appliquer le signalement de José Maria'.

The young Narrator abroad also has a fascination with exotic sex. What after all is he doing down by the Guadalquivir at nightfall when the women bathe? He is eager to enjoy 'un spectacle qui a bien son mérite', 'écarquill[ant] les yeux' with the other men there and fondly imagining 'Diane et ses nymphes au bain'. If he knows that the bellringer is now 'incorruptible', Mérimée would seem to be slyly hinting that the Narrator has found out from experience. He is all too willing to let himself be picked up by Carmen, when she comes and sits by him, lets her mantilla slide to reveal her head—she plays the same trick in front of Don José, and when he takes her off to gaol—and initiates the conversation, using smoking as a pretext. Even at the time, the Narrator seems somewhat ashamed of what he has laid himself open to: when he says that he doesn't take steps to recover his watch by recourse to the law, 'diverses considérations' stop him: presumably not just Don José, but also the difficulty of explaining to the corregidor why he was with Carmen at all.⁴³

The older Narrator is readier to admit another curiosity of his younger self, namely magic, though his desire to declare himself free of such superstitions even then ('guéri') points to an interest which clearly extends beyond the merely academic:

Sortant du collège, je l'avouerai à ma honte, j'avais perdu quelque temps à étudier les sciences occultes et même plusieurs fois j'avais tenté de conjurer l'esprit de ténèbres. Guéri depuis longtemps de la passion de semblables recherches, je n'en conservais pas moins un certain attrait de curiosité pour toutes les superstitions, et me faisais une fête d'apprendre jusqu'où s'était élevé l'art de la magie parmi les Bohémiens.

A third aspect of the young Narrator's interest in marginal and forbidden areas lies in his fascination with bandits and illegality. He stays with Don José not only because he feels safe with him after eating and smoking with him, but also because 'j'étais bien aise de savoir ce que c'est qu'un brigand. On n'en voit pas tous les jours, et il y a un certain charme à se trouver auprès d'un être dangereux'. The Narrator's attraction to bandits may happen to echo Mérimée's,⁴⁴ but what is more important is the role of this attraction in the economy of the story. In all three areas (sex, magic, bandits) a gap can be sensed between what he felt then and the ironic attitude of the older self who stresses the difference: 'J'étais alors un tel mécréant.. . .' Insofar as we sense this gap, we can see that the restriction to the point of view of the Narrator's younger self is largely true only of information, to justify effects of surprise,⁴⁵ but less so in terms of moral perspective and self-awareness. A key feature of the tone of the Narrator's account of his experiences of 1830 is the delicate balance maintained between the two selves: we share both the younger Narrator's anxiety, unable to follow the conversation in Romany between Don José and Carmen, and uncertain what is to happen next to him, and the older Narrator's somewhat condescending calm, as he underlines his young self's incomprehension ('il me sembla que', 'j'étais tenté de croire') with a growing literary deliberation and with a wry, detached humour at the expense of the naive youngster who has got himself into this predicament:

Cependant la bohémienne continuait à lui parler dans sa langue. Elle s'animait par degrés .. . Il me sembla qu'elle le pressait vivement de faire quelque chose à quoi il montrait de l'hésitation. Ce que c'était, je croyais ne le comprendre que trop à la voir passer et repasser rapidement sa petite main sous son menton. J'étais tenté de croire qu'il s'agissait d'une gorge à couper, et j'avais quelques soupçons que cette gorge ne fût la mienne.

The final chapter does not have this double perspective.⁴⁶ The footnotes to Don José's narrative have served as a constant reminder that we are not hearing his account at first hand, but the record of it by a Narrator who now knows Romany. The concluding chapter is unambiguously by the older Narrator. The extent to which we identify him with Mérimée (who did make a trip to the Vosges in 1845, like the Narrator)⁴⁷ is again less significant than the gap between his older and younger selves. The final chapter represents the triumph of the academic self and the definitive extinction of juvenile curiosities. It is methodical: he works through the distribution of the gypsies, their jobs (men, then women), their physique, their morality and attitudes to themselves and to others, to death and religion, to magic (a long passage), their origins, their language, of which (unlike the younger Narrator) he now has an extensive knowledge. The gypsies have become just an object of study.⁴⁸ The approach is generally impersonal: 'on en rencontre dans toutes nos foires du Midi . . .': the on implies that the Narrator is just a Frenchman now. If the element of personal experience comes in: 'Je ne crois pas en avoir jamais vu un seul . . .'; 'J'ai visité, il y a quelques mois . . .', he is a witness, an anthropologist who is merely recording, and who is not involved as he was with Carmen and Don José. He makes no difference between direct experience and what other people have told him: 'J'ai remarqué chez les Bohémiens espagnols une horreur singulière pour le contact d'un cadavre'; 'L'année dernière, une Espagnole me racontait l'histoire suivante'. As regards sex, he now shows, not least because he knows that 'la beauté est fort rare parmi les gitanas d'Espagne', not so much fascination as the sardonic attitude to morality of an experienced man: 'Il me semble qu'il y a beaucoup d'exagération dans les éloges qu'il accorde à leur chasteté', and the conversation he quotes as a commentary on Borrow's anecdote which purports to demonstrate their virtue displays a clear cynicism: offers of money to tempt gypsy girls have to be pitched at the right level. He certainly has no longer a gullible fascination with magic: the anecdote of the woman duped about her lost lover and his sardonic comment: 'Je vous laisse penser si la pauvre amante délaissée a revu son fichu et son infidèle' make it clear that gypsy 'spells' dupe only the naïve payllo and serve as a source of profit. Overall we are now offered a generally deromanticized view of gypsy life: smuggling 'et autres pratiques illicites' figure after more conventional activities, such as horsetrader, vet, tinker. Not least, the triumph of the academic can be seen in literary allusions (to Rabelais and Ovid),⁴⁹ in the Narrator's ostentatiously self-deprecating references to 'mes minces connaissances' (after comparing conjugation in German and Spanish Romany dialects!); and in the pride he shows in his obviously very suspect derivation of frimousse.

This distinction of two selves in the Narrator, active/ narrating, Romantic/academic, does not just give a role in the economy of the story to the final chapter. As we have seen, this chapter in any case does no more than develop more explicitly, and with an element of caricature, something that is present in the story from the start, and was consequently already present in the original (1845) version. The distinction is also important in that it highlights a key thematic opposition (if not the key thematic opposition) around which the story is constructed:⁵⁰ that between constraint and freedom.⁵¹ This opposition existed already in the younger Narrator, seduced from his academic quest for Munda first by his curiosity in a bandit, then by a gypsy girl. It takes two forms in Don José. One is external: jealous Don José (constraint) is in conflict with Carmen's desire for freedom. The other, internal, lies in the conflict between the proud and ambitious Don José and instability and violence. After the initial brawl (or murder) he seeks social reintegration, a return to order, by enlisting as a soldier,⁵² When Carmen repeatedly and in various ways seduces him from the path of duty, we know that that duty is the more important to him because of his previous lapses. Finally, Carmen herself is by no means a spirit of pure 'freedom'. She may tell Don José: 'Ce que je veux, c'est être libre et faire ce qui me plaît', or that 'Carmen sera toujours libre'. But she frequently invokes gypsy law or code in argument, as if she were bound by it. Admittedly, with her it is difficult to tell when a statement is just a tactical move (or a lie): for instance, she won't emigrate, she says, because it would involve breaking a promise to her Gibraltar friends. Nevertheless there is a consistency in her attitude to gypsy law⁵³ which leads ultimately to it being, in a sense, the cause of her death and a factor in terms of which she has to define her freedom. When she first gives herself to Don José, she says: 'Je paye mes dettes! c'est la loi des Calés'. Though she admits the next morning that she really did it out of attraction to him ('Tu es un joli garçon, et tu m'as plu'), she nevertheless continues to justify herself in terms of 'notre loi', and to evoke the possibility of him taking 'la loi d'Egypte' and of her becoming his romi. Before Garcia's death, she asserts that Don José has no rights over her because he is not her rom; after his killing, she concedes Don José's new rights under their law: 'Comme mon rom, tu as le droit de tuer ta romi', while at the same time asserting her independence, which can now exercise itself only in death.

Thus for all the characters there exists, in various forms, an opposition between various forms of constraint: duty to friends, debts of honour, family pride, academic integrity on the one hand, and on the other, impulses of passion, violence, personal curiosities, individualistic self-assertion. What interests Mérimée is not so much the value of one or the other, so much as the tensions set up between the two. There is a moral issue, one that the Narrator toys with when he allows Don José to escape the law:

Je me demandais si j'avais eu raison de sauver de la potence un voleur, et peut-être un meurtrier, et cela seulement parce que j'avais mangé du jambon avec lui et du riz à la valencienne. N'avais-je pas trahi mon guide qui soutenait la cause des lois; ne l'avais-je pas exposé à la vengeance d'un scélérat? Mais les devoirs de l'hospitalité!

But the moral issue is not honestly posed by the Narrator here (he may seek to excuse his betrayal of his duty as a citizen in the light of another 'duty', hospitality; in fact it was out of his own capricious fascination with the bandit), and it is in any case eluded at this point by the opportune arrival of the soldiers—'Je flottais encore dans la plus grande incertitude au sujet de la moralité de mon action, lorsque je vis paraître une demi-douzaine de cavaliers avec Antonio'—as it is in the story overall. Not that this matters. We may well feel frustrated in Colomba, where we are led to expect the resolution of the moral issue (should Orso stay true to the primitive vendetta code of Corsica or to that of 'civilized' society?) one way or the other before it is eluded by the ambush which enables Orso to kill in self-defence, an act which satisfies the Corsican code of vengeance without sacrificing what he owes to his European education.⁵⁴ In Carmen it is more a question of the reader being alerted to an issue that gives rise to central thematic tensions, tensions which also inform the narrative structure and give it interest. Garcia's view of Carmen would be of minimal interest because it would contain minimal tension: as le Dancaïre says, 'il . . . l'aurait vendue pour une piastre', there is more in the view of Carmen by a soldier who represents law and order; even more when that soldier is a fugitive from the law trying to achieve social reintegration; even more in a restrained academic's view of Don José's view, especially when that academic is also a Peeping Tom seeking thrills in magic and in consorting with bandits.⁵⁵ In Carmen's and Don José's case, the irreconcilable demands of constraint and freedom lead to their deaths; in the case of the Narrator, the triumph of the law is embodied in the final chapter in the death of his younger self.

Notes

¹ All references in the text are to Prosper Mérimée, Romans et nouvelles, edited by Maurice Parturier, Paris: Gamier, 1967, Vol. II.

² Pierre Trahard, Prosper Mérimée et l x2018;art de la nouvelle (Paris, 1952), p. 39; A. W. Raitt, Prosper Mérimée (London, 1970), p. 197; Mérimée, Carmen et autres nouvelles, edited by M. J. Tilby (London, 1981), p. 36.

³ Auguste Dupouy, 'Carmen ' de Mérimée, les Grands Evénements littéraires (Paris, 1930), p. 98.

⁴ Frank Paul Bowman, Prosper Mérimée: Heroism, Pessimism, and Irony (Berkeley, 1962), p. 46. Cf. Michael Tilby, 'Language and Sexuality in Mérimée's Carmen', Forum for Modern Language Studies, 15 (1979): 255-263 (p. 258).

⁵ As e.g. by Bowman and Raitt (pp. 194-5).

⁶ Tilby, 'Language and Sexuality', p. 260.

⁷Carmen, ed. Tilby, p. 38.

⁸Romans et nouvelles, ed. Parturier, H, 342.

⁹ Dupouy, pp. 118-9.

¹⁰ Raitt, p. 197.

¹¹ Bowman, pp. 88, 171.

¹² As e.g. by the recent Pléiade editors: 'L'aventure romanesque n'est que la parure dont il habille les connaissances d'anthropologie qu'il livre à ses lecteurs . . . Carmen est avant tout une étude sur les gitans' (Théâtre de Clara Gazul, Romans et nouvelles, edited by Jean Mallion and Pierre Salomon (Paris, 1978), p. 1561).

¹³ Peter Berglar counted 22 film versions before 1970 ('Don Juan und Carmen', Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 55 (1973): 166-189 (pp. 177-8).

¹⁴ 1983 was a year of 'Carménite aiguë' (Claude-Gilbert Dubois, 'Métamorphoses de Carmen: un cas de réalisme mythologique', Eidôlon, 25 (October 1984): 9-62 (p. 14), with Saura, Godard and Peter Brook's (triple) La Tragédie de Carmen; Rosi's was released in 1984.

¹⁵ Augustin Filon, Mérimée, Paris, 1922, p. 72.

¹⁶ Quoted by Ross Chambers, Story and Situation. Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 3-4.

¹⁷ Frank Paul Bowman, 'Narrator and Myth in Mérimée's La Vénus d'Ille', French Review, 33 (I960): 475-482 (pp. 478-9). See also Judith Leibowitz, Narrative Purpose in the Novella (The Hague, 1974), p. 39; Raitt, p. 193.

¹⁸ Anthony E. Pilkington, 'Narrator and Supernatural in Mérimée's La Vénus d'Ille ', Nineteenth-century French Studies, 4 (1975-6): 24-30.

¹⁹ Dupouy, p. 93; see also Mallion and Salomon, Pléiade edition, p. 1566.

²⁰ See e.g. Michael Tilby, 'Language and Sexuality'.

²¹Figures III, Paris, 1972.

²² See Genette, p. 259.

²³ Of course there are clues (planted by Mérimée) missed by the hero that the reader picks up, at least on a rereading. See Genette, p. 213, on such indices.

²⁴ See Raitt' s view that it is 'a barc-faced hoax' (Raitt, p. 196).

²⁵ In Genette's terms, a paralipse (Genette, p. 212).

²⁶ Cf. generally his admiration of his own lucidity, hypocrisy and dissimulation but constant misinter-pretation of Don Ottavio's dissimulation; his conviction that Don Ottavio is preoccupied with politics, etc.

²⁷ See Genette, p. 214.

²⁸ For Proust's combination of the two, see Genette's remarks on polymodalité, pp. 214-224.

²⁹ The only clue he (and we) have is that she must be 'une personne qui vous a offensé', and this person is by implication dead.

³⁰ He also, of course, reports Carmen's proleptic insistence on this fatality: e.g. pp. 394, 395, 399: 'C'est écrit'.

³¹ Cf. 'cette diable de fille'; 'un sourire diabolique qu'elle avait dans de certains moments'. For Carmen, see p. 387.

³² Cf. when she proposes to him a smuggler's career: 'Vous le dirai-je, monsieur? Elle me détermina sans beaucoup de peine'.

³³ Contrast Bowman's more favourable view of the Narrator's presence as something that permits a process of self-discovery and self-judgement in Don José (Bowman, p. 170).

³⁴ For the reader, the tone is set the first time that we see him with Carmen (when he surprises Carmen and the Narrator): to the Narrator's surprise, his anger is directed not at himself, but at Carmen, thus prefiguring (in terms of the order of narrative) the jealousy which leads not just to killing his rivals, but to killing Carmen. Cf. also p. 384.

³⁵ This act of violence does survive in the opera, at least in the original (1875) libretto (reproduced in full by Dominique Maingueneau, Carmen. Les Racines d'un mythe, Paris, 1984), which follows Mérimée's words almost verbatim in the account of the fight and its consequences (I, iii, p. 150).

³⁶ Maingueneau also sees the brawl as having led to a death (p. 24), but by not giving reasons for so doing, implies that this is self-evident.

³⁷ Bowman, p. 47. Cf. Peter Berglar: 'Der ursprünglich rechtschaffene Soldat José wird durch seine Leidenschaft für Carmen völlig aus der Bahn geworfen' ('Don Juan und Carmen', p. 174).

³⁸ Raitt, p. 193.

³⁹ Pierre Trahard, Prosper Merimée et l'art de la nouvelle, p. 35.

⁴⁰ Exceptions are Maingueneau (p. 24) and Dubois, who suggestively contrasts Don José's constant instability with respect to his career with his demands of fidelity from Carmen (pp. 20-21).

⁴¹ The same impressionistic portrayal of surprising events is occasionally used by Don José too: e.g. his surprise when the 'femme bien habillée' whose mules he and le Dancaïre are about to take turns out to be Carmen (387-8); and in Gibraltar, when Carmen calls from the window (390).

⁴² If José Maria is, as Tilby implies, the more competent lover ('Language and Sexuality', p. 258), he is also clearly the better (the more ruthless) bandit: see pp. 388-9.

⁴³ He is clearly still embarrassed about the incident later: 'J'aimais mieux perdre ma montre que de témoigner en justice pour faire pendre un pauvre diable, surtout parce que . . . parce que ... ' (364).

⁴⁴ See 'Nicolas Gogol', in Mérimée. Oeuvres, Paris: Divan, 1930, IX, 10-11: 'Je suis de ceux qui goûtent fort les bandits, non que j'aime à les trouver sur mon chemin; mais, malgré moi, l'énergie de ces hommes en lutte contre la société tout entière m'arrache une admiration dont j'ai honte.'

⁴⁵ Even here there are exceptions, e.g. 'une langue à moi inconnue que je sus depuis être la rommani'.

⁴⁶ Bowman, while noting the 'double nature' of the Narrator, sympathetic to Carmen and Don José, but pedantic and separate from events (p. 170), fails to see this temporal basis for it.

⁴⁷ See p. 405 and Parturier's note, p. 675.

⁴⁸ Cf. Leibowitz's suggestion that the final chapter 'is a function of the narrator's inability to cope with Carmen's magic and represents his attempt to reduce her to a biological category in terms of her gypsy race, which he denigrates' (Leibowitz, p. 39).

⁴⁹ Those that are present in the earlier narrative are sometimes reminders of the older (academic) self (e.g. the allusion to Brantôme, 360), but one is made by the younger Narrator (to Milton's Satan, 352), and some are ambiguous (to Gideon, 347; to Diana and Actaeon, 357).

⁵⁰ One that is also central to Bizet's opera, in spite of all the changes produced by the elimination of the two narratives.

⁵¹ On these oppositions, and especially the manner in which they are worked out in Bizet's opera, see Maingueneau, passim.

⁵² See also Maingueneau, p. 65.

⁵³ See also Maingueneau, p. 64: 'Carmen n'est pas sans loi.'

⁵⁴ See Raitt, p. 190, on this manipulation of plot as 'dishonest'.

⁵⁵ It would therefore be mistaken simply to see the conflict between restraint and passion, which is frequent in Mérimée, as a sign of repression in the narrator or in the author, and to 'explain' either fictional character or writer in psychoanalytic terms (e.g. Laurence M. Porter, 'The Subversion of the Narrator in Mérimée's La Vénus d'Ille', Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 10 (1981-2): 268-277 (p. 276): in Mérimée's case, it can be a question of artistic effectiveness, in the 'combination of highly controlled narrative craft and uncontrollable feeling' (Raitt, pp. 130-1); in Carmen, it is also a central issue of the story.