Present and poison: gift exchange in Prosper Merimee's Carmen.(Critical essay)

Prosper Merimee's Carmen (1845-1846) tells the story of a fiery, wayward, seductive, yet unattainable Gypsy cigarrera, or female cigar-maker, who goes about Andalusia as she pleases, using men along the way and breaking her lover's heart. Readings of the novella have produced contradictory interpretations: either critics see Carmen as a product of the French, Romantic, colonialist imagination that sought to demonstrate national superiority by figuring Spain as exotic, oriental, and feminine; (1) or they see in Carmen's behavior the refusal to obey men's rules, heed national boundaries, uphold strict identity categories, and thus, by extension, Spain's refusal to be culturally dominated. (2) This apparent contradiction between sets of critical readings stems from a notable lack of attention to the complex economy of exchange in Carmen. Indeed, acts of exchange abound in the novella, and an understanding of the circulation of goods and people will reveal why the novella seems simultaneously to harm Spain's image, detracting from the country's autonomy as a self-representing nation, and to free the subject--be it Carmen or Spain--from restrictions and the imposition of identity categories.

Carmen is a framed story of passion, betrayal, and murder, but it also purports to be an ethnographic study of interest to archaeologists. Narrated by an unnamed French scholar, who travels through Andalusia in 1830 to research the location of Julius Caesar's victory on the battlefield of Munda in 45 BCE, the story centers on the tragic love affair between don Jose, the bandit, and Carmen, the Gypsy cigarrera. This narrative makes up the first three chapters, which Merimee quickly wrote in 1845, and they were promptly published in the Revue des Deux Mondes as a complete novella. The author then added Chapter Four in 1846, when Carmen was published in book form. (3) The final chapter presents a discussion of Gypsies, or Bohemians, whom Carmen and her clan represent in the novella. The narrator describes their occupations, physical types, general temperament, their ubiquity in Europe, and their linguistic influence in France. Thus, the final version of Carmen's story is framed by the French narrator's scholarly study, first proposed as a search for the location of the battle of Munda and then offered as an expose of the Bohemian people.

By the time of Carmen's first printing, Merimee had already published accounts of his travels to Spain in Parisian journals so that the mid-nineteenth-century public would have easily read Carmen as a "verite vecue," or a lived reality (Clark 189). Moreover, the Revue des Deux Mondes, a journal "of the two worlds," was a cultural travel journal that described fantastical, exotic places in the "primitive" world to readers of Europe's "civilized" world. (4) At this time, Romantic travelers and writers held a certain fascination for Spain, perceiving it to be a place where passion triumphed over reason. Seeking adventures with the exotic and encounters with the unknown, the Romantics found Spain to be more savage than civilized, more Oriental than European, and--given its 700-year history of Moorish rule--more Muslim than Christian. Works such as Victor Hugo's Les Orientales (1829), Notre Dame de Paris (1831), and Theophile Gautier's Voyage en Espagne (1843) represent Spain not only as a culture of raw passion and primitive practices but also as a land of lawless, magic-wielding Gypsies. (5) Conflated with the Orient, Spain, and particularly Andalusia, became a repository for Europe's others: Muslims, Moors, Gypsies, and criminals alike. Having traveled extensively through Spain--indeed, having been one of the first French Romantics to do so, thereby paving the way for others to follow (6)--Merimee possessed the knowledge of first-hand experience, which lent itself to his work of fiction. By publishing Carmen in a journal that purported to reveal the actuality of primitive cultures and by framing his story with scholarly propositions and observations, Merimee covered his tale of adventure and passion with a veneer of authority and truth.

Within this authoritative framing, however, a confusion in the text causes a slippage between the two worlds. This slippage between or mistaking of one world for another paves the path for a circular economy of exchange: a system of contract, obligation, and reciprocity between two cultures. The frame narrator begins the story of Carmen as follows:

 
   J'avais toujours soupconne les geographes de ne savoir ce qu'ils 
   disent lorsqu'ils placent le champ de bataille de Munda dans le 
   pays des Bastuli-Pceni, pres de la moderne Monda, a quelques lieues 
   au nord de Marbella. D'apres mes propres conjectures sur le texte 
   de l'anonyme, auteur du Bellum Hispaniense, et quelques 
   renseignements recueillis dans l'excellente bibliotheque de duc 
   d'Ossuna, je pensais qu'il fallait chercher aux environs de 
   Montilla le lieu memorable ou, pour la derniere fois, Cesar joua 
   quitte ou double contre les champions de la republique. Me trouvant 
   en Andalousie au commencement de l'automne de 1830, je fis une 
   assez longue excursion pour eclaircir les doutes qui me restaient 
   encore. Un memoire que je publierai prochainement ne laissera plus, 
   je l'espere, aucune incertitude dans l'esprit de tous les 
   archeologues de bonne foi. (3-4) 

Like the journal "of the two worlds" in which it was first published, this beginning passage of Carmen announces the subject of two worlds: ancient and modern but also Spain and France. The name of Julius Caesar's Munda differs by only one letter from the Spanish word for world, mundo; and the name of the Spanish town Monda is notably similar to the French word for world, monde. Moreover, the battle of Munda took place in the distant past while Monda exists in the narrative in "modern" times. Thus, through the association of Spain and France with ancient and modern, the ...