JOSÉ F. COLMEIRO

EXORCISING EXOTICISM:  CARMEN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ORIENTAL SPAIN

SEVERAL UNDERLYING MYTHS deeply imbedded in the European imagination converge on the construction of Carmen. On the one hand, the orientalization of Spain in the 19th century, or the cultural conflation of Spain with the Orient. On another, the romantic mythification of the bohemian as gypsy, or the imaginary conflation of Bohéme (the region where many Gypsies lived) and Bohème (the "gypsy way of life"). Finally, the conflation of Gypsy, Andalusian, and Spanish identities as mutually interchangeable signifiers. This multiple conflation of national, ethnic and racial identities created a profound cultural remapping that repositioned both Spain and Gypsies in Europe as exotic internal others. It also gave way to the cultural appropriation of the Gypsies’s mystique, their commodification as embodiments of the exotic, and their ambiguous relocation to the symbolic center as icons of Spanishness.

The cultural construction of the Gypsy in the modern European imagination is intimately linked to the orientalist discourses of Romanticism as a projection of its ambivalent feelings of fear and desire towards the other. Carmen epitomizes this ambiguity in the white European male consciousness, for she embodies a highly marked racialized other (non-white, non-European, non-male), while displaying a rebellious, subversive, and free spirit. The same love/hate scenario replayed in all the versions of the Carmen myth reflects the simultaneous repulsion and attraction toward the other. This ambiguity conforms to the romantic fascination with the marginal, bohemian, exotic, and premodern, but also reveals the need to tame it, to control it, and ultimately to neutralize it and destroy it. Exorcising the exotic other that does not conform to European bourgeois culture is a way to exorcise its own demons, its own split desire in the process. Inexorably, Carmen always must die in the end. The analysis of the ideological underpinnings of this most enduring of all Spanish Gypsy myths -in its development from novella to opera and its establishment as an icon of Spanishness- reveals this same ambiguous impulse driving the exotic construction of oriental Spain.