Discourse and the film text: Four readings of<i>Carmen</i>

Abstract

‘Quoi du reste’, to paraphrase Derrida on Hegel in Glas , ‘ici, maintenant, d'une Carmen? ’ What's left of Carmen here and now? Aside from its intrinsic interest, the question seems worth asking in light of a bias that recent treatments of opera – particularly those influenced by poststrucuralist theory – seem to betray. The most prominent, Catherine Clément's Opera, or The Undoing of Women , Michel Poizat's The Angel's Cry and Jeremy Tambling's Opera, Ideology, and Film , regard opera as an institution rather than as a body of texts. Each of the authors, to my mind at least, allows a prior structure or structures – the systemic presence of male domination and its construction of women in society, a quasi-Lacanian understanding of unconscious fantasy, the bourgeois construction of operatic experience – to constrain what operas, and opera, can mean. They thus produce what are in effect reception studies or analyses of the audience, which is perhaps why they operate at some distance from the detail of the texts, musical or verbal, of the operas they analyse.