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L A R R Y D U F F Y
Perdue en traduction: Translation, Betrayal
and Death in Mérimée’s Carmen
Abstract: This essay explores Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen as a docu-
ment concerned at several discursive levels with the dissemination of
information about other cultures, and at the same time as a document
which is morbidly fascinated with this precise area of activity as a site
of mortal risk. The intradiegetic narratives of Don José and Carmen
are rich in the use of words from other languages, and in the discus-
sion of the use of foreign terms and languages as strategies of deceit.
This essay argues that the themes of betrayal and death, central to the
tale of Carmen and Don José, are inextricably linked to the motifs of
language, translation, exoticism and cross-cultural communication
which are key elements of Mérimée’s wider project.
One of the most striking features of Prosper Mérimée’s novella Car-
men (1845-47) is its preoccupation with translation, which, as traduc-
tion, is suggestively bound up, etymologically and/or pseudo-
etymologically, with notions of treachery and betrayal – precisely the
kind of couleur locale one associates with exoticizing nineteenth-
century accounts of southern European cultures not too far removed,
either geographically or discursively, from an Orient undergoing
colonization.1 Indeed, the exoticizing context appears to make transla-
1
‘Traduction. (1530; ‘livraison’, XIIIe, d’apr. le lat. traductio). […] 2. (fin xviii)
Expression, transposition.
Traduire. (1480; lat. traducere, proprem. ‘faire passer’) I: citer, déférer. II.1
(1520). Faire que ce qui etait énoncé dans une langue le soit dans une autre, en
tendant à l’équivalence sémantique et expressive des deux énoncés. […] 2. Exprimer,
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tion, on the part of text, internal narratives, narrators and characters,
an essential mechanism in pinning down the essence of various Oth-
ers: Andalusians, Basques, Gypsies, women, Spanish people in gen-
eral, particularly in terms of their proximity to North Africa – basi-
cally, in expressing a version of anyone not French, bourgeois, classi-
cally educated and male. 2
The fact that death – in this case the demise of two of the three
principal characters, one by stabbing, the other by garrotting, as well
as that of several others – is an apparent consequence of activities to
which the relative ability to translate, and wilfully to mistranslate, is
central, seems almost incidental, secondary to the foregrounded theme
of cross-cultural transfer, and itself part of the story’s exoticization of
Mediterranean and Romany culture, just part of couleur locale.
However, what becomes apparent on close examination of
Mérimée’s story is that what the text actually does is to problematize
translation as part of a generalized problematization of the idea of
resolution, in which death as ultimate resolution is a key element. Fur-
thermore, translation is exploited as a strategy precisely to prevent the
essentialization of cultures. What I wish to suggest is that although on
the surface the nouvelle’s narrative seeks to essentialize various cul-
tures and their representatives, and although its underlying purpose
may well be to convey to a particular French readership in terms it can
understand (or recognize as exotic and different) an idea of Spain, and,
problematically, one of Romany culture, the story ultimately, perhaps
unwittingly, subverts its own essentializing discourse and highlights
the difficulties and indeed contradictions involved in translation con-
sidered as a straightforward process of exchange and equivalence, of
conversion from one state to another, of resolution.
———————————————————————–––
de façon plus ou moins directe, en utilisant les moyens du langage ou d’un art.’ (Le
Petit Robert)
2
The novella’s Orientalist discourses have been comprehensively discussed in
readings by, amongst others, David Mickelsen, ‘Travel, Transgression and Possession
in Mérimée’s Carmen’, Romanic Review, 87 (1996), 329-44; José Colmeiro, ‘Exorcis-
ing Exoticism: Carmen and the Construction of Oriental Spain’, Comparative Litera-
ture, 54 (2002), 127-44; Peter Robinson, ‘Mérimée’s Carmen’, in Georges Bizet:
Carmen, ed. by Susan McClary, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.
1-12; Luke Bouvier, ‘Where Spain Lies: Narrative Dispossession and the Seductions
of Speech in Mérimée’s Carmen’, Romanic Review, 90 (1999), 353-77.
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The novella’s main narrative frame purports to be the reminis-
cence, at fifteen years’ remove, of a travelling scholar inspecting ar-
chaeological sites in Spain, recounting, as light relief from his serious
academic work, a series of suitably exotic events following on two
related encounters, one with the honourable hidalgo-soldier-turned-
outlaw Don José, one with the mysterious bohémienne Carmen. These
encounters are related respectively in the first two chapters. The third
chapter is Don José’s account of being led astray into a life of banditry
by Carmen, who turns out to be a ‘traîtresse’, betraying him with sev-
eral men (both criminal associates and victims of their crimes, who
meet their death at José’s hands), and whom he ultimately murders
when she tends to her picador lover, Lucas, gored by a bull, before
being sentenced to death himself. 3 We learn of José’s fate at the end of
the second chapter when the primary narrator meets him in jail. The
fourth chapter, added in 1847 with the work’s first appearance in book
form two years after its original publication (in the Revue des deux
mondes), is a pseudo-scholarly disquisition on the language and cus-
toms of the Romany people, heavily informed by the work of the Eng-
lish missionary George Borrow, author of An Account of the Gypsies
in Spain (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1842).4
What is inescapably present in each of these four main sections
which make up the text is discourse originally enunciated in languages
other than French (ranging from titles of texts, to narratives, to prov-
erbs, to dialogue and explanatory footnotes): in chapter I, the narrator
refers to scholarly and semi-scholarly works in Latin, and in French
translation from Latin, as well as to dialogue flagged as being origi-
nally in Spanish; in chapter II, there are utterances in Spanish and
Romany; chapter III, we are expected to believe, is somehow tran-
scribed and translated from the Spanish of Don José, himself translat-
ing entire conversations from his native Basque and the Romany spo-
ken by Carmen; chapter IV, whose narrator, despite scholarly style, is
not necessarily the frame narrator – not least since ‘les lecteurs de
3
Prosper Mérimée, Carmen, in Romans et nouvelles, ed. by Maurice Parturier, 2
vols (Paris: Garnier, 1967), II, 337-409 (p. 392). All subseqent references are to this
edition and are given after quotations in the text.
4
George Borrow, The Zincali; or an Account of the Gypsies in Spain (Philadel-
phia: James M. Campbell, 1843) and The Bible in Spain; or the Journeys, Adventures,
and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the
Peninsula (Philadelphia: James M. Campbell, 1843).
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Carmen’, which story has its own narrator, are referred to – discusses
versions of Romany in various countries, and explicitly mentions two
works on the subject in English by George Borrow. There are many
more examples; the important thing is that the promiscuity of utter-
ances and the languages in which they are voiced is closely linked to
the complexity of the narrative. Plausibility is also an issue from the
outset: as Luke Bouvier remarks in relation to the novella’s first para-
graph, beginning with the words, ‘J’avais toujours soupçonné les
géographes de ne savoir ce qu’ils disent...’ (p. 345), the text ‘opens
precisely by evoking problems of a textual nature – the deceptive ap-
pearance of words, the distinction between the oral and the written,
the relationship between fiction and history’.5
Language as a tool of deception as well as facilitator of under-
standing is a key theme throughout the story. Dexterity with language
is foregrounded not only as evidence of the reliability of the tale’s nar-
rative, but also of the plausibility of the narratives of its various char-
acters. And it is here precisely that the greatest caution must be exer-
cised, as their dexterity with language is what is exploited by the key
characters to dupe others, including the narrator, who has an inflated
opinion of both his capabilities as a translator and his knowledgeabil-
ity about language.
Sometimes the utterances in the text are flagged as being trans-
lated, sometimes they are not translated at all. In the opening chapter,
for instance, the most explicit reference to the fact that what we are
reading necessarily involves translation occurs when the primary nar-
rator first encounters Don José. Responding to the narrator’s attempt
to establish that they are conversant in the homosocial code of to-
bacco, which is a recurrent feature in the story, the stranger replies in
the affirmative. 6 His ‘oui, monsieur’ (p. 347) is followed by the narra-
tor’s commentary on how it has been pronounced in Spanish (‘je re-
marquai qu’il ne prononçait pas l’s à la manière andalouse’), not only
highlighting further the narrator’s idea of himself as an expert on lan-
5
Luke Bouvier, ‘Where Spain Lies: Narrative Dispossession and the Seductions
of Speech in Mérimée’s Carmen’, Romanic Review, 90 (1999), 353-77 (p. 355).
6
See Carmen Mayer-Robin, ‘Wine, Tobacco and Narcotica: Substances of Bour-
geois Decorum and Bohemian Pretensions in Mérimée, Baudelaire and De Quincey’,
Romance Notes, 43 (2003), 231-39: ‘In Mérimée’s Bohemian novella, the sharing of
cigars and papelitos, Carmen’s favorite, brings together the most unlikely people and
engenders instant amicability, trust, respect and of course, love’ (p. 232).
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guages and regional pronunciation and variation within languages, but
also informing the reader of the text that the utterance has been trans-
lated, and signalling that future utterances on Don José’s part related
in French should be presumed to be in Spanish, translated into French
by the narrator as here. On the other hand, the narrator sees no need to
translate or explain an anonymously authored book entitled Bellum
Hispaniense, mentioned in the first paragraph (p. 345). This classical
scholar also reads works in translation, having packed his Commen-
taires de César (pp. 345-46) as travel reading, lumped in with
‘quelques chemises’ as part of ‘tout bagage’.
Most conspicuously untranslated, however, is yet another quota-
tion from a work in another language: the epigram at the very start of
the story (p. 345) from the classical Greek poet Palladas of Alexan-
dria. The transliteration is of interest primarily for two of the words
which occur in it:
Pasa gyne cholos estin; echei d’agathas duo horas,
Ten mian en thalamo, ten mian en thanato.
Now, the English translation of this (I cite the English since it remains
conspicuously untranslated in Mérimée’s text), is something along the
lines of: ‘Every woman is a poison who has only two good hours; one
in bed, the other in death.’7 What is interesting here, apart from the
idea of poison, to which we shall return, is that the two words which
resemble each other are inflected forms of the nouns thalamos and
thanatos, and mean respectively bed, specifically the bridal bed in
which sex implicitly occurs, and death: women are poisonous, only
good for sex and death.
This brings us to Carmen. Likened to ‘un caméléon’, she is every
woman, in that she is able effortlessly to occupy a number of roles and
cultural identities. Furthermore, she cannot be tied to any particular
one of these identities; as the narrator remarks on the subject of his
first encounter with her, ‘je doute fort que mademoiselle Carmen fût
de race pure’ (which also indicates a privileging of certainty, in the
form of racial purity). Carmen is the consummate translator, the con-
summate transgressor of boundaries, whether these be political, geo-
graphical, cultural, sexual, moral or linguistic. And it is precisely be-
7
For this translation I acknowledge David R. Ellison, ‘The Place of Carmen’,
French Literature Series, 30 (2003), 73-85 (p. 79).
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cause of the difficulties wrought for men by her capacity for trans-
gression that, as the epigram appears to imply, she must either be
someone’s lover or die. That is, the difficulties she wreaks must be
resolved, through death. And the difficulties she creates are usually
related to the fact that being someone’s lover is for her highly prob-
lematic. Various men (two in particular in the story) wish to own her,
but she refuses to be owned, to be understood once and for all, so the
only way to achieve resolution for Don José, an inferior translator who
is at first lured by her mastery of language, is to kill her.
What then of Carmen’s talents? From the outset, she is able to
manipulate others through her use of language, all the more impres-
sive for her being the only central character not also to be a narrator.
She encounters the primary narrator in chapter II, emerging from a
communal bath, unveiling herself in a tobacco-related context remi-
niscent of that in which the former encounters Don José, except this
time it is a case of implied removal of, rather than shared celebration
of, the phallus:
En arrivant auprès de moi, ma baigneuse laissa glisser sur ses épaules la
mantille qui lui couvrait la tête [...]. Je jetai mon cigare aussitôt. Elle
comprit cette attention d’une politesse toute française, et se hâta de me dire
qu’elle aimait beaucoup l’odeur du tabac. (p. 358)
Once he has thereupon offered her a cigar, her next move is a faux-
naïf enquiry about linguistic and cultural origin. While the narrator in
this episode, as elsewhere, is playing up his self-appointed status as
porte-parole and interpreter for all things Spanish, as well as his sup-
posed talent for determining the cultural origins and relative confor-
mity to type of his interlocutors, Carmen indulges a pompous naivety
of which she appears instinctively aware, teasing various presumptu-
ous and erroneous diagnoses out of him (‘vous êtes probablement de
Cordoue?’; ‘Vous êtes du moins Andalouse. Il me semble le recon-
naître à votre doux parler’). These fit progressively more intensely
into orientalist discourses on Spain, and finally move from Andalusia
to the speculation: ‘Alors, vous seriez donc Moresque, ou... je
m’arrêtai, n’osant dire: juive’ (p. 359).
Once Carmen reveals her cultural identity (‘vous voyez bien que
je suis bohémienne’), the narrative shifts abruptly, via her offer to
‘di[re] la baji’, that is, to indulge in fortune-telling, to talk, on the nar-
rator’s part, of sorcery and the fact that he is in the company of a ‘ser-
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vante du diable’ (p. 359). Carmen’s demonization is followed by ex-
tension of her perceived ruthlessness to the Romany people, with the
aid of a translated Spanish proverb, ‘œil de bohémien, œil de loup’ (p.
360), which itself represents a form of translation in that it sets up an
equivalence between ‘bohémien’ and ‘loup’, stating that one is the
other in order to render it understandable. Furthermore, the proverb,
‘qui dénote une bonne observation’ (p. 360), has its meaning modified
to imply ruthlessness; this is done through the use of yet another
‘translation’, the expression of something in terms of something else:
‘Si vous n’avez pas le temps d’aller au Jardin des Plantes pour étudier
le regard d’un loup, considérez votre chat quand il guette un moineau’
(pp. 360-61).
This easy transferability of species further parallels the ease with
which Carmen inhabits multiple identities. And indeed, in Don José’s
subsequent narrative, it is precisely in her eyes that this promiscuity is
signalled: having just displayed her ruthlessness in slashing her female
colleague in the tobacco factory, ‘avec le couteau dont elle coupait le
bout des cigares’ (p. 369), we are told that ‘elle roulait des yeux
comme un caméléon’ (ibid.). This is the context in which she meets
Don José, who arrests her and then is persuaded into releasing her,
clearly susceptible to her charms (‘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’ (p. 371)), but also fearful of her as potential castratrix. This
susceptibility is due precisely to her ability to speak his language, and
thus appear to take on his cultural identity, even if she is not com-
pletely convincing, to the point of deforming the Basque tongue: ‘Elle
estropiait le basque, et je la crus Navarraise; ses yeux seuls et sa
bouche et son teint la disaient bohémienne’ (p. 371). Again, her eyes
are the giveaway, but against his better judgment he is swayed by her;
he is a masochist, in that he senses the possibility of castration but wil-
fully indulges her. There thus commences a romance and professional
partnership which results in Don José’s transition from soldier rising
through the ranks, to smuggler and outlaw, having accepted what
Carmen routinely refers to as ‘la loi d’Égypte’, an allusion to the sup-
posedly Egyptian origins of the Gypsies, discussed later in the sup-
plementary fourth chapter. And their success in moving contraband
across borders derives precisely from their shared linguistic and cul-
tural marginality in the context of Castilian Spain. However, some
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people are more marginal than others: Don José still has a very dis-
tinct sense of cultural origin, and of his status within his own culture;
furthermore, although he is capable of shifting between Basque and
Spanish, he does not necessarily enjoy or find easy a multiplicity of
voices: in the quasi-harem of the tobacco factory, he is made uneasy
by the ‘trois cents femmes [...], toutes criant, hurlant, gesticulant, fai-
sant un vacarme à ne pas entendre Dieu tonner’ (p. 368); he also re-
marks of Gibraltar, the interstitial locus of much of his and Carmen’s
later criminal activity, that:
Il y a là force canaille de tous les pays du monde, et c’est la tour de Babel,
car on ne saurait faire dix pas dans une rue sans entendre parler autant de
langues. Je voyais bien des gens d’Égypte, mais je n’osais guère m’y fier; je
les tâtais, et ils me tâtaient. (p. 390)
He feels uneasy here, not least because he is forced to act the uncom-
prehending fool in Carmen’s deception of the English mylord, to
whom she mistranslates Don José’s serious threats uttered in Basque,
‘éclatant de rire à sa traduction’ (p. 391), and hence minimizes and
ridicules them. But Don José’s unease also stems from the fact that
fluidity of cultural identity is not his thing: ‘Je ne suis Égyptien que
par hasard; et, pour certaines choses, je serai toujours franc Navarrais,
comme dit le proverbe’ (p. 393), footnoted as Navarro fino by the
would-be polymath primary narrator, still very much present in this
section narrated by Don José. In short, Don José likes certainty, and
suffers anxiety in uncertain contexts, not least where culture is con-
cerned. The particular cultural context in which he finds himself con-
fronted by Carmen’s polymath capriciousness and ruthlessness is al-
ready one in which he is uncertain of his own cultural identity: he is a
Basque in Castilian Spain. On the one hand he is noticeable as being
from a particular area, but on the other, his social identity is less obvi-
ous. Furthermore, he is not merely in Castilian Spain, he is in Andalu-
sia. A rather curious detail mentioned by the narrator in his footnote to
his first encounter with José’s accent is that ‘[l]es Andalous aspirent
l’s, et la confondent dans la prononciation avec le c doux et le z, que
les Espagnols prononcent comme le th anglais’ (p. 348). Amidst the
general promiscuity of languages and dialects here, it must surely
emerge as significant that someone named José Lizarrabengoa is a
Basque, that is, someone for whom s and z are distinct sounds (and
also someone as close to France as one can find if one is looking for a
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protagonist with whom French readers can identify), in a cultural con-
text where there is no distinction between these letters, and where he
falls in love with someone whose destruction (and transgression) of
cultural, linguistic and indeed sexual boundaries is a central factor in
undermining his own sense of security. Comparison is surely invited
with Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, in which the Parisian protagonist,
whose name is pronounced as if its second s is a z, falls into confusion
over his own identity because of his love for a similarly ambiguous
figure in another Southern European setting: la Zambinella, the singer
mistaken for a woman but in fact a castrato. And surely Roland
Barthes’s reading of the anxiety-inducing interchangeability of the
letters s and z is particularly apposite in both cases: ‘Z est la lettre de
la mutilation: phonétiquement, Z est cinglant à la façon d’un fouet
châtieur, d’un insecte érinnyque’; ‘graphiquement [...], il coupe, il
barre, il zèbre’; Z is ‘la lettre de la déviance’, ‘l’initiale de la
castration’. 8 While not as pronounced as in Sarrasine, where the pro-
tagonist ‘contemple en Zambinella sa propre castration’ (ibid.), the s/z
confusion in Carmen might be seen as part of a generalized anxiety
linked to an implicit running theme of castration. Carmen is the ulti-
mate generator of this anxiety as she is the very embodiment of lin-
guistic flexibility, ambiguity and confusion, in a world where some-
one like Don José, foreign, yet not completely foreign, feels already
unsure of his sense of self. Carmen is like a hypertrophied reflection
of himself: he may straddle Basque and Spanish identities, whereas
she occupies several more. What Carmen appears to be aware of is the
notion that signification is an entity in constant circulation, whereas
Don José sees signification as a simple process of exchange, equiva-
lent gain for equivalent loss. In love, as in translation, Don José ex-
pects a quid pro quo, and nothing ambiguous. Precisely because he
expects things to be this way, Carmen becomes estranged from him.
This expectation of equivalence is not particular to his relationship
with Carmen. Earlier in the story, he remarks to the primary narrator:
‘votre guide m’a trahi, mais il me le payera’ (p. 355), that is to say that
betrayal has a price (as it turns out in this case, the primary narrator’s
warning that the authorities are coming), but only insofar as all phe-
nomena have measurable equivalents. José is ultimately incapable of
8
Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 113.
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rendering Carmen a certainty for himself, of resolving her status as his
lover, because he bargains: he attempts to establish a quid pro quo.
Having been taunted by Carmen for his reluctance to participate in a
smuggling operation, he backs down: ‘J’eus la faiblesse de la rappeler,
et je promis de laisser passer toute la bohème, s’il le fallait, pourvu
que j’obtinsse la seule récompense que je désirais’ (pp. 380-81). So,
his agreement to participate in one form of translation, the transfer of
what are referred to as ‘marchandises anglaises’ across a legal bound-
ary, is conditional upon another transaction. But although Carmen
agrees to ‘tenir parole’ (p. 381), apparently colluding in the transac-
tional nature of language in which José believes, she later announces
to him:
Tu m’as rendu un plus grand service la première fois, sans savoir si tu y
gagnerais quelque chose. Hier, tu as marchandé avec moi. Je ne sais pas
pourquoi je suis venue, car je ne t’aime plus. Tiens, va-t’en, voilà un douro
pour ta peine. (p. 381)
The detail of the coin clearly accentuates Carmen’s contempt for
money and for conventional transaction and exchange. She is so suc-
cessful at manipulating people through language precisely because of
her refusal to see things in terms of equivalences. The sort of transac-
tions she does accept are those connected with her self-proclaimed
role as sorceress: it is to be expected that she should bring ill luck to
any man who expects to engage with her on conventional terms.
There is however one area where Carmen does participate in a
kind of exchange, that of healing. When Don José has been cut in the
forehead by the sword of his superior officer, another of Carmen’s
dupes, whom he then kills, Carmen shows that she is a healer as much
as a slasher. Tending to his wound she remarks: ‘Je te l’ai dit que je te
porterai malheur. Allons, il y a remède à tout, quand on a pour bonne
amie une Flamande de Rome’ (p. 382).9 Ill luck and healing are men-
tioned in close proximity. The fact that there is a remedy for every-
thing does not however mean that there is a simple opposition of anti-
dote and cure for each individual ailment. Uncertainty surrounds the
nature of the cure which Carmen offers. Don José recounts: ‘Elle et
9
The term ‘Flamande de Rome’ is comprehensively footnoted by the frame narra-
tor (p. 382), who explains that the term Flamenca derives from the fact that the first
Gypsies seen in Spain had come from the low countries.
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une autre bohémienne me lavèrent, me pansèrent mieux que n’eût pu
le faire un chirurgien-major, me firent boire je ne sais quoi’ (p. 383).
The cure provided, if not embodied, by Carmen, is, like herself, of
indefinable quality. It is not a precise antidote which cures a particular
illness by process of exchange. And it is clearly linked to Carmen’s
presumed sorcery: this ‘diable de fille’ (pp. 383-84) is a dispenser of
‘ces drogues assoupissantes dont elles [les bohémiennes] ont le secret’
(p. 383). It would seem, then, that Carmen is both poisoner and cure,
if not, as the Greek epigram suggests, an actual poison. Carmen might
therefore be regarded as an archetype of the pharmakon, the harmful-
ness of which, in Derrida’s reading of Plato, ‘est accusée au moment
précis où tout le contexte semble autoriser sa traduction par «remède»
plutôt que par poison’. 10 Carmen, also readable as the scapegoated
pharmakos (‘sorcier, magicien, empoisonneur’11), is neither one thing
nor the other, neither fully inside nor outside the society in which she
operates, and her perceived wickedness is linked precisely with this
status. As well as being ‘from nowhere and from everywhere’, 12 Car-
men is every woman and yet a distinctive individual. She has highly
specific skills, and is yet generalizable to the poisonous castrating fe-
male whom every man fears. What makes her particularly terrifying is
precisely her ambiguous, uncertain status, especially in a narrative
context where there is such concern for certainty, voiced at the outset
by the frame narrator, who hopes to resolve scholarly doubts through
the publication of a text, ‘un mémoire’, which has already been writ-
ten. In relation to his investigations, he remarks that he had ‘toujours
soupçonné les géographes de ne savoir ce qu’ils disent’; his thoughts
on the accurate location of a site whose whereabouts has been con-
fused by faulty translation are based on his ‘propres conjectures’ on an
anonymous Latin text; and his ‘mémoire’ ‘ne laissera plus’, he hopes,
‘aucune incertitude dans l’esprit de tous les archéologues de bonne
foi’ (p. 345). That is, once his ‘mémoire’ is given authenticity by pub-
lication as a book, there will be no more ambiguity. But it is precisely
through writing, in what is acknowledged in the story’s later supple-
ment as a work which people have read, that ambiguity is intensified,
10
Jacques Derrida, La Pharmacie de Platon (1969), in La Dissemination (Paris:
Seuil, 1972), p. 125.
11
Ibid., p. 149.
12
Mickelsen, p. 330.
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that the certainty that the narrator hopes to create once and for all is
shown to be vain and open to question, that his cultural knowledge
and language skills are shown to be not as sound as he might imagine
them to be, that we see that plausibility as a notion is unreliable, as are
statements of the kind ‘X is Y’, and that attempts to rule out ambiguity
through some kind of final resolution are problematic and fruitless.
‘Comme mon rom, tu as le droit de tuer ta romi; mais Carmen sera
toujours libre’ (p. 401), says Carmen before she is murdered, suggest-
ing that her death is only meaningful in the limited context of a con-
tractual relationship, in this case marriage, but that beyond this limited
contract, this particular death is not real. ‘L’immortalité et la
perfection d’un vivant consistent à n’avoir rapport à aucun dehors’,
writes Derrida in La Pharmacie de Platon (p. 115). Carmen will al-
ways be free, and is implicitly immortal, precisely because there is no
outside for her. She is only an outsider in the terms of reference of the
particular society she inhabits, and it is only in such a context that she
can be killed.
Indeed, the question is raised of who is really dead here. The ap-
pending of a pseudo-academic supplement on language and dialect
which enlightens us no further on the story just related serves as if to
kill off the narrator, and to render his story somehow incomplete. All
this supplement does is to highlight the undecidability of Romany cul-
ture, thus in a sense undermining the attempts in the story preceding it
to resolve Carmen in death, or to resolve linguistic and cultural differ-
ence through a particular form of translation or cultural transfer under-
stood in a limiting sense. Mérimée’s text may be complicit in what, in
this reading, it implicitly criticizes, but at least it indicates an aware-
ness that the project of cross-cultural representation in which it is en-
gaged is inherently problematic. Carmen can only be killed within the
text, but it is clear that the text is extendable, open-ended; again, once
it is acknowledged that in terms of the ambiguous linguistic operations
performed by Carmen in the text bearing her name, ‘il n’y a pas de
hors-texte’, it is clear that she cannot be written off, except in the con-
text of a limited and inflexible understanding of language and textual-
ity. 13 It is to be noted that while there is no reference to the narrator or
Don José in the final chapter (discussing precisely the linguistic and
13
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 227.
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cultural polyvalency of the Romany people), there is a reference to
‘[les] lecteurs de Carmen’ (p. 409). The lack of italics would seem to
indicate that whereas the men, in whose discourses she has been
framed, translated for consumption by specific audiences, no longer
have any meaningful existence, she still enjoys an existence whose
supposedly merely textual nature remains ambiguously open to ques-
tion; she cannot be reduced or confined to the text she (temporarily,
provisionally) inhabits, despite attempts to translate her once and for
all.
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