Relire les Lettres d’Espagne de Mérimée by François Géal

Abstract

evaluation is pessimistic: “Djebar interrogates the utility of autobiography both as a source of recapturing in the present an erased female past, and as a means of relating a text to a multiplicity of lives [...] what is the point, the writer seems to be asking, of writing the archive at all?” (86). Edwards’s case is thoroughly supported by her own close reading of each aspect of the novel, and her interpretation raises important questions about interpretations of Djebar’s literary project. The texts of the four writers Edwards has selected provide firm support for her conclusion that the “non-unitary subjectivity” she describes does not offer a solution to personal or societal problems, nor is it “a simple, cathartic or liberating mode of self-writing” (144). Yet, she contends, it “may indeed be a hallmark of contemporary women’s writing in French” (144). Dartmouth College (NH) Mary Jean Green GÉAL, FRANÇOIS. Relire les Lettres d’Espagne de Mérimée. Paris: Garnier, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8124-0195-4. Pp. 414. 54 a. With this study, Géal has authored the definitive work on Mérimée’s 1831 epistolary depiction of Spain. Following a recent trend, Géal, editor of Les lettres d’Espagne for the new edition of Mérimée’s Œuvres complètes, comes to Mérimée from a discipline outside French literary studies. Art historians, historians specializing in Spain, even museum curators, have recently published works on Mérimée, appropriately reflecting the diverse oeuvre of the author himself. Géal specializes in classical Spain and is therefore well trained to situate Mérimée’s Lettres in the context of Spanish studies and to bring a fresh perspective to them. French authors published some two hundred works on Spain from 1800–50 alone. In his introduction, Géal explains that this French fascination with the other side of the Pyrenees stems in part from the Spanish War of Independence (1808–14) that undoubtedly resonated with French liberals and their own revolutionary ideals. Géal carefully considers how Mérimée’s Lettres exploit or ignore the clichés of the récit de voyage and the stereotypes of a Romantic, savage, exotic Spain. He underscores that Mérimée is primarily concerned with “la contestation des hiérarchies traditionnelles au profit de valeurs plus authentiques incarnées par les hommes du peuple” (73). The book is organized into five chapters, each focusing on one of Mérimée’s letters. The chapter on Spanish bullfights situates Mérimée’s account in the contexts of the history of Spanish bullfighting, French travelers writing about the bullfight, and French and Spanish theater. I found Géal’s discussion of the corrida as carnival—where social hierarchies are erased and where good and evil are exchanged —particularly interesting. In the next chapter, analyzing Mérimée’s letter about a hanging in Valencia, Géal discusses Mérimée’s storytelling process, the likely connotations a hanging would have had for French readers in the 1830s, and the letter’s rejection of local color. But much of the chapter focuses on Mérimée’s marked preference for the people and his denigration of the upper class, implying the emergence of a political engagement on Mérimée’s part, in favor of the populace and against the bourgeoisie and civil authorities. Géal’s chapter on “Les voleurs” provides a great deal of background on both thieves in French travel narratives and on the geographic, political, and economic situations 824 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 in Andalusia that made thievery such an attractive option in the early nineteenth century. In what is possibly the book’s strongest chapter, Géal argues that the letter on “Les sorcières espagnoles” can be read as Mérimée’s attempt to undermine conventions of the récit de voyage and to attack the logic of Enlightenment Europe: “Les certitudes de l’homme du Nord cultivé, socialement et intellectuellement en position de force, vont peu à peu s’effriter” (263). Finally, Géal looks at Mérimée’s fifth letter, usually not included in editions...