Such is the strange vitality of fiction that it often overshadows the identity of its inventor. We know next to nothing of Homer, but Agamemnon and Achilles, Circe and Helen, are stable, habitual landmarks by which our culture finds its bearings. The historical fact of Shakespeare is enigmatic, but Lear and Macbeth, Cleopatra and Caliban, Malvolio and Prince Hal, are as distinct and familiar as the air we breathe. We discern our own features in their fictive presence. Who but the scholar can identify the first begetters of Faust and Don Juan? Yet these two names, which signify man’s untarrying ascent of the ladder of desire, are household words.
Without these personages our inward past would be a crypt of the speechless dead. From Homer and the Socrates whom Plato dreamed, down to our own time, to the Charlus of Proust or Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, it is from fiction that we draw the landmarks of our truth. It is this dialogue between the unquenched shades and the living that gives to our words their echoing power. To have brought off the miracle of persistent life is an artist’s supreme achievement. Only then will he have realized le dur désir de durer, the harsh desire to endure beyond the shortness of mortality. But though each period produces innumerable characters in art, poetry, or fiction, only a few have in them the spark of grace. Only a few can leap the gulf from momentary substance to lasting shadow. Of that number is Carmen.
Cigar girl, Gypsy, thief, tramp, seducer, victim, Carmen has secured her place in modern mythology. Sung in every opera house the world over, mimed in countless ballets, filmed, decked out in traditional or contemporary garb, as the Sevillian gitana or Carmen Jones, she has passed into the language. The black-haired girl with the rose in her teeth, the castanets clacking over her tossing head, the stiletto in her belt, has slipped across frontiers as easily as past the sentinels of Granada or Málaga. France and Spain claim her for their own; she has had an immense vogue in German letters and on the German stage; she is a familiar demon to millions of Russian readers who think her native to the Caucasus; there is a Chinese version of her tale.
At first glance it is not easy to say why Carmen should have blazed into such profusion of life. The fatal lady, the doomed temptress with the black, riveting eye, was a cliché of romantic fiction. Descended from the vampire women of the Gothic ballad, she had by the 1840s become a shopworn fixture of pulp and pathos. Nor was there anything new in the authentic local color and exotic circumstances of the story. Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and Delacroix had surfeited the public with outlandish settings and garish plots. By 1845, when Carmen was first published, the hot, violent tints, the Gypsies and the heroic brigands of Spain, were commonplace. No—the spell of Carmen lies deeper.
Carmen is an addict of freedom. She would rather die than yield a jot of her wanton sovereignty. “Carmen will always be free”: that imperious claim to liberty resounds through the novella, again and again, like fire crouching and leaping in the wind. Yet, at the same time, she recognizes the bondage of love. It is not a servitude she herself can long endure. Yielding so little of herself, Carmen glides from man to man with ironic ease. But she knows that in others love can be a lasting venom. She senses that José will kill her. Indeed, she acknowledges his right to do so: “you have the right to kill your romi.” When he strikes, she accepts the blow as if it were a gust of wind.
It is this lightness of death that gives the story its great force. Though she has read the imminence of doom in her fortune-teller’s cards, though she sees murder writ large in star and coffee grounds, Carmen does nothing to evade José’s knife. Freedom is stronger than love and stronger than fear. She goes toward death with somber yet amused majesty. She refuses to lie in order to save her life—“I do not wish to take the trouble.” Falsehood is a kind of slavery. “Death, where is thy sting?” That is the meaning of the tale, and it plucks at one of the major, hidden chords of human subversion. In each of us there lurks, in some hour, the thought of mocking death, of showing up the summoner for what he is, a mere importunate scarecrow, a beggar at the door of our freedom. Shallow, exotic, frivolous as she may be, Carmen shares with other enduring fictions an essential trait: she speaks something of our own innermost meaning. Like all great characters in art, she is part mirror and part dream.
Yet, ask the common reader who created this superbly vivid being, and he will, if at all, venture the name of Bizet. As opera, Carmen is unquestionably a masterpiece. It fulfills the peculiar conditions of its genre, being at once meretricious and sublime, full of bright froth and strong motion. And it was in her musical garb that Carmen went to the ends of the earth, from Paris to Carson City, from Rio to Moscow. But Bizet and his shrewd librettists went to work thirty years after Carmen had been invented. What they added—the bleached, redeeming Micaela—merely weakened the plot. In all else the opera owes its sweeping simplicity and strength of feeling to the novella. But as is true in so many instances of classic art, the imagined being glows before us vivid and substantial, whereas the creator has faded.
Not altogether unjustly. For although he was a compact, richly talented, and successful man, Prosper Mérimée cuts a somewhat pallid figure amid the bright concourse of his contemporaries. Born in 1803, Mérimée belongs to the generation that grew up under the brass bands and turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars. Come of age, he and his generation found a world gone gray and nervous. Old men were in power, and the whole of Romanticism was an attempt to recapture in the realm of fancy the tension, the eloquence, and the high feats that had been banished from the realm of fact. Those who entered into adult life in the late 1820s had at their backs a vastness of glory, and before them the pale noon of the industrial and bourgeois age.
Ripeness of art came to Mérimée at one stroke. At twenty-six he published his only full-length novel, La Chronique du temps de Charles IX, and a set of tales as concise and arresting as any he produced. By 1846 he had written nearly all that makes his performance memorable. Mérimée never grew: from the start he measured the exact range and tonality of his keyboard and played on it with trim virtuosity. He shared in the boisterous triumph of the Romantic movement; Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Sainte-Beuve were of his circle. But Mérimée’s own career, like that of the Goncourts, had a spinsterish and urbane tenor.
Trained as an administrator and a historian, Mérimée pursued a decorous career in the French civil service. After serving in the departments of the navy and of commerce, he was appointed Inspector of Historical Monuments. This made of him an official custodian of the past. Each year, he traveled across France, surveying and reporting on historical sites, buildings, and archives. The ornaments of office came to him with easy grace: he was elected to the French Academy in 1844 and achieved the rank of Grand Officier in the Legion of Honor. His long-standing amity with Eugénie de Montijo, who became the wife of Louis Napoleon, assured Mérimée of a privileged place under the Second Empire. A frequent guest of the imperial household, he was appointed to the Senate in 1853. He died in the dread autumn of 1870, seeing the France he knew go down before the Prussian hammer.
This scholarly, officious mode of life has its bearing on Méimée’s art. He was both a master and a servant of history. His imagination leaned heavily on a scaffolding of antiquarian records or local historical circumstance. He used his own times with shrewd deference, expending on the past what wildness or secrecy of spirit he possessed. What is more important: Mérimée wrote, as it were, from a distance. Literature was to him an eminent craft, not an obsession or the whole of life. He looked on it as his mistress; his marriage lay on more solid ground. And it is precisely the virtues of a liaison rather than of a deepening commitment that we find in Mérimée’s best work.
Even in his most ardent narratives there is a touch of arrogance, the self-mocking condescension of a gentleman who entertains his guests with an after-dinner tale. Mérimée’s characteristic device, the assertion that he is recounting events at second-hand, that the story has been told to him by someone else, is both a literary convention and a piece of snobbery. Amid the tight, professional skein of his art, one comes across the gaucheries of an amateur. When he published Carmen in book form, Mérimée added a final chapter on the manners and language of Spanish Gypsies. The fierce climax is blighted by this pedantic epilogue. Only an amateur or a writer in whom there is some covert disdain for his own trade would have committed this error.
Mérimée was a close friend and admirer of Stendhal. Together they incarnate the survival in the Romantic era of eighteenth-century ideals of irony, reserve, and nonchalance. There was in them a touch of the dandy. They were neither priests nor servants to literature, but lovers and familiars. But whereas Stendhal made of this attitude a mask for his genius, it became the actual guise of Mérimée’s great talent. The wonder is that Mérimée should have achieved so much with so sparse an enlistment of his soul.
Nietzsche, with his flair for the aristocratic and the playful, regarded Mérimée as one of the masters of modern prose. But, having the discretion of complete command, Mérimée’s style is not easy to describe. It is hard of surface, swift and sinuous of pace. Like Stendhal, Mérimée is a virtuoso of the short sentence and the full stop. His eloquence consists in the unflagging progress of his narrative and in the bare, nervous immediacy of his dialogue, not in the music of words. Mérimée worked consciously against the Romantic trend, rejecting the poetic glitter and sonority of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. He stands in a classic lineage, in the tradition of Voltaire and Laclos. To cite an English counterpart, one would turn most accurately to the urbane, lithe prose of Hume and Chesterfield.
Observe the climax of The Venus of Ille: “Un coq chanta. Alors la statue sortit du lit, laissa tomber le cadavre et sortit. Madame Alphonse se pendit à la sonnette, et vous savez le reste.” The crow of the rooster proclaims the hellish allegory of the fable. The weight of the bronze visitant is gathered in the implacable tread of the verbs (the repetition of sortit being both a piece of carelessness and a fine stroke). No epithet, no pedal-point of oratory, heightens the effect. The end is an urbane gambit. Mérimée appears to be saying: “This is how a gentleman tells a story. If you want anything more garish or clamorous, go to the scribblers.”
Yet this cool manner can bring off moments of formidable emotion. Little outside Poe or Dostoevsky rivals the malignity, the tangle of hatred and contempt, rendered in the last scene of Colomba. All passion spent, the four principals are traveling in Italy. The mood is nuptial. “Farewell to daggers,” says Colomba; her only weapon now is a fan. But hazard sets old Barricini in her path. Robbed of his two sons, the old man is an invalid waiting for death. Having sought to banish the nightmare of recollection, his mind is vacant. Colomba advances toward him “till her shadow took away his sunlight.” She stares at him until the ravaged mayor recognizes his relentless foe. In broken tones he pleads for compassion. He asks, “But why did you kill the two of them [my sons]?” Colomba’s reply is a piece of sheer, cold horror:
I had to have both… The branches have been hewn away. And if the root had not been rotten, I would have torn it up. Come, don’t complain. You haven’t long to suffer. I have suffered for two years!
She returns to Colonel Nevil, light of step. In the garden, the old man has withered. “Who the devil are you talking about?” inquires the colonel. Colomba answers with feigned indifference: “Oh, some senile person from my country.… From time to time I shall send for news of him.” On this note, as inhuman as the purr of a cat, the story ends.
Though nothing else in his work quite matches the incandescence of Carmen and Colomba, nearly all of Mérimée’s tales show a comparable economy and strength. The Storming of the Redoubt is a memorable sketch. One does not easily forget the vision of the Russian grenadiers, motionless, arms primed, above the heads of their assailants. The entire account of the chaotic, brutal mauling is a model of clarity. In The Etruscan Vase, Mérimée writes in the vein of Pushkin, whom he in fact helped introduce to Western European readers. The story is slight, yet it casts a grim spell. It plays on the nervousness and frivolous heroics of the post-Napoleonic generation. Amid the morass of peace, these dandies and ex-soldiers seek in dueling the lost fervor of battle. The Game of Backgammon is a classic in a genre characteristic of the nineteenth century—the gambling tale. Again we note the curious mixture of casualness and reserve in Mérimée’s style. At the very instant of its pathetic climax, the story is cut short by a trivial interruption.
There is no more stringent test of narrative than violent physical action. Whether it be in the nocturnal brawl of Don Juan, in his account of a naval battle, or in the extraordinary scene of the ambush in Colomba, Mérimée’s control never falters. He had taken no part in the Napoleonic Wars, but the experience of intense personal danger was part of his immediate inheritance. It gives his stories their particular vision. Mérimée is the poet of “nerve.”
The nineteenth century marks the end of the classic status of narrative. Kleist, Poe, Stevenson, Leskov, and Mérimée himself are among the last of the pure storytellers. The revaluation brought on in modern literature through the work of Conrad, Henry James, Kafka, and Joyce has made of plot the agent of more complex intent. The story as such has been demoted and become the carrier of ideological, philosophical, or psychological motives. The narrative, the chain of happenings, is diminished to the thread on which the modern master strings his meaning. Often, as in James and Kafka, the actual fiction vanishes beneath the structure of argument and allegory. Consider the novels most expressive of the modern mode: The Trial, The Golden Bowl, Conrad’s Nostromo, The Sound and the Fury. How much of their persuasion is borne by the story, by the immemorial fascination of “what happens next”?
Today, that fascination is exercised principally by the movies, by cheap fiction, by the slick-magazine romance. Some deep, tacit break has occurred between the novelist and the natural spinner of tales. With certain exceptions—the early Hemingway, Mauriac, Graham Greene—each goes his own way to mutual disadvantage.
Why this should be so is a vast, intractable theme. It is directly related to the decline in our habit of life of silence and private discourse. Hardly any of us read aloud to each other; only children gather to hear stories at nightfall. We spend most of our waking time in a loud vortex. At every moment the avalanche of print, the radio, the flicker of the television screen, solicit our dispersed and shallow attention. We drone from noise to noise, from headline to headline, like bees smoked out of their hive. The ancient craft of the storyteller requires a stillness in the air, even boredom. It relies on the inward drift of expectation as the hours stale toward evening. We are no longer bored in the old mellow sense, only harrowed or blasé. Hurled at us from every quarter, enforced by all the shocks of immediate vision, the day’s news steeps us in more drama, more rawness of feeling, than any classic story would dare evoke. Only the writer of lurid pulp or science fiction can compete in the market of excitement. Imagination lags behind the garish extremity of fact.
Above all, the art of the story demands a listener, for even beneath the most sophisticated of classic narrative styles there sounds the antique cadence of the spoken word. A story is something told; it lives in the hearing. But we have lost the art of listening; we no longer delight in the digressions and lapses of the unrehearsed voice. Made lazy by the profusion of brilliant, instantaneous graphic devices—the photograph, the poster, the moving picture, the comic strip—we have grown to be spectators rather than audience. Today the only listeners are the children, and that is why so many of the classics of narrative, from Aesop to Dickens, are in their keeping.
Confronted with this turbulence and cheapening of emotion, the art of fiction has drawn inward. It seeks to rouse our attention by difficulty of technique. What has thus been achieved in richening of language and formal resource is obviously very great. But at a price. I keep thinking that a “natural” novelist is a man capable of telling an impromptu story and holding spellbound the passengers of a second-class railway carriage on a hot day. It is a trial to which I should not want to expose too many of our present masters.
But Mérimeée would emerge triumphant. Once that somewhat clipped, elegant voice has begun a tale, it becomes nearly impossible to turn away.