ABSTRACT
The first act of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen opens with a chorus of soldiers who are killing time watching people pass by in the street. The dragoons are ostensibly part of a Spanish army, yet they are of a significantly different class, ethnic, and even—by implication—national constituency from those they observe. In Merimee's novella, the figure of Carmen was always multiply mediated: through Jose's recollections, through the French narrator, through Merimee's self-consciously literary language. In Carmen, both connotations are crucial, and they continually play off of one another as a kind of grim and deadly pun. For the motive will later be linked explicitly both with Carmen and with Don José's fatal, anguished attraction to her. Carmen belongs both to the flashy exotic world already introduced in the Prelude and to the succession of women who have been ogled by the dragoons since the curtain went up.
