by Naomi Andre
A little later in act 1, after mayhem breaks out in the cigarette factory, Carmen does not give Zuniga spoken answers when he questions her about her role in the disorder. Instead, she responds to him in a sing-song “Tra-la-la-la-la” as she refuses to recognize his authority or implicate herself in his interrogation. Later when she is held in jail, she pointedly sings to seduce Don José to get what she desires. She whispers a lilting melody that eventually erupts into the gyrating rhythmic “Seguidilla” that outlines how she yearns to meet him at Lillas Pastia’s, drink manzanilla, dance the seguidilla. and show him “le vrais plaisirs sont à deux” (the real pleasures that are for two).
As Carmen’s “Seguidilla” was a private number to seduce Don José near the end of act 1, act 2 opens at Lillas Pastia’s tavern, where Carmen leads a full-blown Chanson bohèmien (“Gypsy Song”), which accelerates into a rollicking dance number. Complete with added dancers and brilliant costumes, Carmen very publicly engages those onstage in the tavern as everyone gets caught up in the repetitive music that accelerates to a frenzied presto tempo. Though Carmen has been seducing those onstage since her first entrance, this number is specifically geared toward those of us watching her in the theater. We had witnessed her abilities in act 1, but this is the first time she directs her seductive powers outward to the audeince. With the driving rhythm and onstage dancing bodies, we are also caught up in the fervor and are aroused; this number rarely fails to get an impassioned ovation.
In a microcosm of the main themes of the opera, the Fortune Telling Trio in act 3 provides a view into what is at stake and foretells how things will work out. With characteristically bright and sparkly music reminiscent of the playful music of the smuggler’s quintet in act 2, Fresquita and Mercedes read their fortune in the cards and see just what they want—romantic love and wealth without obligation. The mood drastically changes when Carmen begins to read her own fortune: death for both her and José. The contrapuntal juxtaposition of Carmen’s stark lament and her girlfriends’ bubbling refrain illustrates how Carmen has now entered her own sonic and emotional zone. She was never part of respectable society and she now no longer fits within the world of the nineteenth-century image of the gypsies. In an especially effective setting, Bizet contrasts two near homophones in French “l’amour” (love) and “la mort” (death) as Carmen accepts her fate, which becomes so tightly intertwined with both love and death.
Throughout Mérimée’s novella, the plot is told by the French male narrator and Don José; rarely does Carmen even speak, though she is described in rich detail by the two men who are fascinated and entranced by her. A critical feature of Bizet’s opera is that we finally get to hear Carmen’s voice as she speaks for herself and is given a full musical portrayal. For Bizet’s earliest audiences, her brazen character was beyond the conventions of the family-oriented Opéra-Comique theater. However, the opera caught on in its revised version within months of its premiere and has remained popular ever since.
There seems to be something almost universal in the timelessness of this opera. Multiple adaptations and new productions of Carmen continue to be regularly performed all over the world. Some have estimated the number of adaptations to exceed seventy-five, and there are books devoted to discussing multiple versions and iterations of the Carmen story onstage and in film.3 Updated versions, in addition to the three black settings I will discuss later in further depth, include Flamenco versions (notably by Carlos Saura [1983]); one in a garage with a mechanic in London (The Car Man, choreographed by Matthew Bourne [2001]); another contemporary African setting in Senegal (Karmen Geï by Joséph Gaï Ramaka [2001]), and a Bollywood Carmen (presented live and then in a TV film directed by Indra Bhose with music adapted by D. J. Kuljit Bhamra).4 Clearly, in the new millennium Bizet’s heroine has inspired multiple variations that speak eloquently to current times.
Three Rubrics for Approaching Mérimée and Bizet’s Carmens: Who Is in the Story, Who Speaks, and Who Interprets the Story?
Who Is in the Story?
In the Mérimée and Bizet Carmens, there is a clearly delineated presence of the “exotic outsider”—Carmen and her bohemian friends—juxtaposed to the hegemonic “normative” participant. In these nineteenth-century French tellings, the presence of the migrant bohemians is contextualized by a contrasting Western European presence, a type of entry point “tour guide” figure to help the Western audience feel a bit more oriented in the story, rather than the completely foreign experience with nothing familiar. In Prosper Mérimée’s novella, this normative presence appears immediately in the opening sentences as an unidentified French narrator. Though the French narrator is in all four parts of the serialized novella, his role is the largest in the opening and final sections. In the opening he sets up the story—he is a French scholar who is traveling to Spain to find the precise location of the ancient battle of Caesar (45 bce) in Munda, a town on the Mediterranean coast between Gibraltar and Málaga. The beginning paragraph of the novella posits this as a historical problem with scholars disagreeing about the exact location, and provides a purpose for his journey into southern Spain. In fact, Mérimée did write more about the problem of Munda’s location in an article he published in the Revue archéologique (in June 1844, one year before the Carmen serialized novella), and for those reading the Carmen novella when it was first published in 1845, the voice of this French narrator could certainly feel as if it overlapped with the voice of its real author—Mérimée—in these first sentences.5 Some of the first readers of Carmen might also have known that Prosper Mérimée had himself travelled to Spain and published a series of “Letters from Spain” in the early 1830s in La Revue de Paris, which included dispatches on bullfighting, highway bandits and thievery, and witches—themes and characters all present in the novella.6
To both the nineteenth-century readers of Mérimée’s Carmen novella and to us today, our French narrator comes across as logical and trustworthy; he tells us of his mission in southern Spain to do research on this ancient topic, and his voice of familiarity and ease with these topics is well earned from his past history in his research on classical topics (such as Caesar) and his travel history in Spain. By the end of the first paragraph of Carmen, Mérimée, through the voice of his French narrator, provides the perfect segue between his research and the entertainment of a digression:
Finding myself in Andalusia at the beginning of autumn, 1830, I undertook a rather long excursion to clear up my remaining doubts [regarding the location of Caesar’s battle of Munda]. A monograph that I will soon publish will, I hope, leave no doubt in the minds of any well-intentioned archeologists. While waiting for my dissertation to finally resolve the geographical problem that holds all the savants of Europe in suspense, I would like to tell you a little story, it does not take anything away from the interesting issue of the location of Munda.7
Thus, the saga of Carmen commences through this “little story” as we understand why and how this story has come to be told. Throughout the novella, our French narrator takes us through the action. Don José, the famous Spanish bandit, is introduced through the narrator a couple of paragraphs later in part 1, and the two interact when they share a meal, smoke cigars together, and stay in the same tavern. Though Don José is not fully trustworthy, the narrator has befriended him and shows a code of honor to this friendship when he warns Don José that the authorities are coming to arrest him. In part 2 it is Don José who protects the narrator, repaying him the favor of helping him escape arrest at the end of part 1. Don José saves the narrator from Carmen’s deceptive charms after she lures him to her place for a palm reading, and then directs the narrator safely back to his inn. Later in part 2 and for all of part 3, the narrator visits Don José in his jail cell as the latter awaits execution for his crimes. In part 3 Don José takes over the story in his voice, as he tells of Carmen, her history, and their ill-destined time together. Hence, the novella is told in the presence of the French narrator all of the time, even when he is not the
first-person narrator. At first he is the one who introduces the story, and we (the reader) are led strategically to the landscape and geography of Spain and the variety of people who live there. It is presented as a protected space as these new people and places are told by “one of us”: the French narrator. By part 3, Don José has become more familiar through the narrator. Though Don José is still a foreigner and part of the shady world of the “Other,” the reader feels safe because Don José is locked up in jail and we are given the opportunity to be even closer to the exotic “source” and get his side of the story, without ever being at risk or in any danger. Mérimée’s French raconteur can temporarily relinquish narrative control because the threat is contained as Don José tells his story from jail.
Part 4 of the novella was published the following year (1846) and, as in the opening of part 1, is told in the French narrator’s now-familiar scholarly voice characterizing the behavior, origin, and languages of the Romany to which Carmen belongs. Such a narrative device frames the novella in an implicit academic fashion; in addition to its entertainment value with the local exotic flavors, the French narrator is careful to position Spain in the larger context of Western European knowledge. The rugged physical landscape, the outlaw and marginalized people, and the dialect Romany languages of Spain have been contained at a safe distance, over the Pyrenees, contrasted with the more civilized world of France.
I am not alone in noting the presence of the narrator and authorial voice of Mérimée in the Carmen novella. Paul Robinson and Susan McClary have posited that such a framing device provides Mérimée the narrative control to wrest the story back from Don José and the irresistible Carmen and place it in his own patriarchal voice.8 My point here complements this stance and emphasizes that the person telling the story is also a formative character in the drama. Though the presence of the French narrator might seem small, his role is critically important as the tour guide figure to help the other French and non-Romany people feel engaged and safe with this unfamiliar and unpredictable material. Even when the French narrator is silent and lets Don José tell the story (for most of part 3), he can be invoked, as though he were sitting by our side, listening to the story along with us.
In Bizet’s opera Carmen there is no narrator per se, but I would argue that the function of the tour guide/narrator has now shifted to the re-inscribed figure of Don José.9 Rather than the outlaw bandit that befriends our French narrator, Don José in the opera is a dragoon—an honorable young military officer who is not, at first, distracted by Carmen during her “Habanera” and has been given an upright love interest in Micaëla, who has his mother’s approval as a potential wife. Don José in the opera has been rehabilitated as the tenor hero, and the troubled past so prominent in Mérimée’s novella has been nearly erased so that the quick reference to it is easy to miss.10 Micaëla is a character that the librettists Meilhac and Halévy added in order to present a female character who could be a foil to the brazen Carmen and help make the drama more suitable to the family-nature dramas of the Opéra Comique. In Bizet’s opera, the final scene in act 4 shows the downfall of the tenor hero as he falls in love with the dangerous Other and is pushed over the edge from being a respectable northern Spanish soldier to the obsessed, love-crazed killer who fell prey to the spell Carmen cast on him in act 1.
In both the Mérimée novella and Bizet opera, Don José is from the north, specifically Navarre, and he is identified as being Basque. In the beginning of part 3 of the novella, as the French narrator turns the story over to him, we hear Don José introduce himself.
“I was born,” he said, “at Elizondo, in the Baztán valley. My name is don José Lizarrabengoa, and you know Spain well enough, sir, that my name tells you immediately that I am Basque and old Christian. If I use don it’s because I have the right, and if I were at Elizondo, I would show you my genealogy on parchment. They wanted me to enter the church, and had me study, but I hardly took advantage of it. I liked to play handball too much, that led to my downfall. When we play handball, we other Navarrians, we forget everything.”11
There is no other geographical location that Mérimée could have chosen that would better reflect a dual French-Spanish identity. Located in the northeastern region of Spain, Navarre is part of the Basque country extending between Spain and France across the Pyrenees and approaching the Bay of Biscay in the Atlantic. With a long tradition of having a desire to be its own nation, the Basque identity for Don José from Navarre presents a Spanish man who is as close to France as possible. The Mérimée novella plays up the bandit side of Don José; however, as the quotation above shows, he still has enough of a Western European identity to be able to relate to the French narrator and present a lineage that connects to the church and a class structure that allows him to use the title of don. In Bizet, the opposite shading is used for Don José. The Spanish bandit element is gone, and through his access to the malleable Basque affiliation and its transnational Spanish-French regionalism, Don José maintains his Spanish identity yet has been transformed into a relatable figure for the nineteenth-century French audience. While the action of both the novella and opera is placed in Andalusia around Seville in the southern area of Spain closest to the African continent, the nomadic Romany aspect of Carmen’s background is contrasted with the northern Basque (almost French) identity of Don José. In both nineteenth-century French versions of Carmen, onstage we have the exotic smuggler world of Carmen mitigated through a lens of one of us (whether it be as the non-Bohemian French bourgeoisie or a modern-day audience) interacting with this exotic world, as a proxy—conduit—for access into the drama.
Who Speaks and Who Interprets?
In Mérimée’s novella and Bizet’s opera, the presence of the French narrator and Don José as a tour-guide figure place an “insider” who is relatable to the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie audience inside the action of the drama. Though Carmen in the novella rarely speaks for herself, and is most frequently described by the French narrator or Don José, the enactment of Carmen’s story onstage in the opera allows her to speak for herself. Her voice is delivered through the author and composer of her words and music, as well as the physical body onstage performing her role. While the representation of the non-European “Other” is a central feature of the Carmen story, a critical factor remains: which perspectives are being represented? I separate out these two points because I want to acknowledge the power of having a stage filled with members from other cultural groups (for example, the wandering Romany populations of Mérimée and Bizet) and especially when other cultural groups are marked through brown bodies, as with the African Americans of Carmen Jones and Carmen: A Hip Hopera, and the black South Africans of U-Carmen eKhayelitsha.
The visible physical differences of ethnically/racially marked bodies present an impact that no one today can ignore. Though I think audiences have noticed these phenotypical differences throughout time, I can speak most confidently of the present: audiences notice obvious markers of identity—especially around race and gender.12 Moreover, in an environment where there are so few roles for characters outside the Western standard convention (currently still assumed to be white), the visual impact when there are characters onstage who contrast to this presumed norm makes a dramatic statement.13
These visible differences among the characters onstage (what comes out in their verbal and musical texts and the embodied portrayal by the performers) present a set of codes for the audience to read. How the audience interprets these codes exposes my last rubric in the analysis. Aside from the differences between audiences in the past and present, I start from the assumption that the audience is always heterogeneous and encompasses multiple experiences and vantage points. In this type of analysis it is possible to make generalizations; however, the main point is that there is not a single dominant “correct” interpretation that wipes out other perspectives. Important to such analyses are the different publics in the past and present who view these Carmen productions. Given the a
ll-black settings in the United States, there are cultural references (such as uncredited roles for African Americans who would be recognizable to contemporaneous audiences, and the political shifting during the civil rights movement that resonated differently with black and white audiences). Similarly, the South African dismantling of apartheid had a profound effect on how new possibilities were articulated, and setting the opera in a post-apartheid township cigarette business signaled a specific moment in history for the political and social economy of the working-and middle-class black South Africans.
Carmen Jones
Everyone who has written about Carmen Jones—the 1943 musical and the 1954 movie—has noted and spent time on the fact that this show has an all-black cast. In the context of its time, it followed the first wave of all-black Hollywood films in the 1930s and 1940s (such as Hallelujah [1929, MGM], The Green Pastures [1936, Warner Brothers], Cabin in the Sky ([1943, MGM], and Stormy Weather [1943, 20th Century Fox]) as well as musicals and shows on Broadway (such as Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along [1921] and Hall Johnson’s Run, Little Chillun’ [1933]). Scholars have written about the casting for the musical and Hollywood movie productions.14 My analysis privileges race within the framework I set out above—who is in the story, who tells the story, and who interprets the story—though not necessarily in that order, and then moves on to other contextual information that situates this work in its original time and today.