Prosper Merimee's tale La Venus d'Ille (1837) leaves readers at an interpretative crossroads by suggesting both a rational and a supernatural explanation for a mysterious homicide. If this between competing interpretative options has often been viewed as a hermeneutic problem typical of literature, far less attention has been given to the possible cultural significance of such a within a specific historical context. I seek here, precisely, to explore how fantastic hesitation in Merimee's text might disguise a conflictual encounter between tradition-bound views of temporality and the empirical aims of romantic historicism. Narrating the tale is a Parisian archaeologist recounting a visit to the southern village of Ille. His host is M. de Peyrehorade, a fellow antiquarian who has recently unearthed a superb bronze statue of Venus. As it happens, Peyrehorade's only son, Alphonse, is about to marry. On the morning of the big day, Alphonse challenges a group of Spanish mule drivers to a match of jeu de paume. Wishing to safeguard the ring intended for his promised, he places it on the finger of his father's newly discovered statue. Having defeated his opponent, he then goes to church, realizing belatedly that he has forgotten to retrieve his ring. He quickly produces a substitute, and the wedding ceremony goes off without a snag. The next morning, however, he is found dead in his bed. According to his bride's deposition, Alphonse was crushed in a deadly embrace by the bronze Venus. The latter, as Merimee invites us to imagine, had visited their bedroom in the middle of the night to claim the groom who had earlier wed her with his ring. The more skeptical narrator, suspecting foul play on the part of one of the mule drivers, assists in a police inquiry that ultimately proves inconclusive. All now would seem to point to the statue. The moment in this text, as Tzvetan Todorov would tell us, arises from our as to whether or not the statue of Venus is indeed responsible for the death of Alphonse. Has something supernatural taken place, or are we to construe his death as a strange event with a rational, albeit unapparent, explanation? Although Merimee takes meticulous care to strew his text with interpretative leads, he ultimately infirms any option that might confer closure to his narrative. Instead, we are left with ambiguity and the unsettling prospect of non-meaning. Indeed, the narrator of La Venus d'Ille has abdicated his role as organizer of meaning within the tale be is telling. Nowhere are we offered a final opinion on the events that have transpired. The narrator provides us with hearsay and implications, implications that be himself balks to comment upon or corroborate. The text remains open. This, of course, is in the very nature of the gente, according to Todorov. Is it the case, however, that as readers of La Venus d'Ille, we are simply engaged in a hermeneutic pastime, or can we instead ascribe cultural relevance to this very absence of closure? We might begin to answer this last question by considering the limitations of the narrator's perspective. Is our itinerant archaeologist the right person for the telling of this tale? Inscribed within the text are two distinct modes of considering the narrated events, and it is precisely in the opposition between these modes that a new space for interpretation emerges. We observe on the one hand the narrator's (and M. de Peyrehorade's) insistence on viewing the Venus as a historical object, and on the other the quite different perspective of the inhabitants of Ille, who know the statue only as the idole. Within which of these perspectives might the tale make sense, and what is to be said of the failure of the other? The gap between these two perspectives is apparent from the moment the narrator approaches the village of Ille with his Catalonian guide. The latter attempts to guess at the reason for the narrator's visit: Tenez, je parierais que vous venez a Ille pour voir l'idole? …
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Jan 1, 2015
Joosik Min 
Open Access