Prosper Mérimée, le sang et la chair: une poétique du sujet

Abstract

By Christian Chelebourg. (Archives des lettres modernes, 280). Paris — Caen, Minard, 2003. 160 pp. Pb €22.00. The ‘sujet’ that Christian Chelebourg seeks to define lies in Mérimée's imaginaire. This is organized in terms of two complementary complexes (not in a narrowly psychoanalytical sense): one named after the protagonist of Les Âmes du Purgatoire, the other after Prometheus. The don Juan de Maraña complex is preoccupied with violence (literal violence, the fantastic as ‘un excès de plus’ (p. 58), the disruption of accepted forms in theatre and poetry); its origin is traced back to a need to compensate for the trauma of being found unfit for military service because of ‘faiblesse de constitution’. Mérimée's failure to marry represents a second, sociological failure of virility: the second complex shows (to use the terms of his corrrespondence) the cuistre, the cultivated man of letters, as a Promethean prey to the vulture woman who brings out the lecherous vaurien in him; his work until 1852 echoes with the struggle to free himself from that ‘divinité farouche et tyrannique’, ‘le coït’ (p. 71). The male is faced with the alternative of behaving towards women as a ‘manant’ (masculine love declines into brutality) or a ‘niais’. Mérimée's answer is a life of the mind: erudition, history, translation.