Carmen

Carmen by Ring Lardner (1913)

A group of couples—the narrator and his wife, and their friends the Hatches—play rummy one evening. The Hatches win, and Mrs. Hatch proposes spending the winnings on a night out at the opera, selecting a performance of the grand opera Carmen at the Auditorium. Despite Hatch's reluctance and the narrator's own lack of enthusiasm, both men yield to their wives' excitement. On the night of the performance, the narrator dresses in his formal evening suit, only to discover that Hatch has arrived in mismatched, casual clothes. This creates an awkward tension among the group, though they all proceed to the theater regardless. The seats Hatch has purchased are extraordinarily high up in the venue, prompting the narrator to make sardonic remarks about altitude and aviators. Because all the singing is performed in a foreign language, the narrator and the Hatches understand nothing of what is happening on stage. However, the narrator manages to obtain a libretto—a printed program containing an English translation—that Hatch discreetly lifts from a woman seated in front of them. Using this booklet, the narrator reads through the entire story of Carmen between acts and narrates the plot in his own distinctly comic vernacular. In his retelling, the opera becomes something altogether different from the tragic European drama it actually is. Carmen is reimagined as a cigarette factory worker in a neighborhood resembling a Chicago immigrant district. Don José becomes a Chinese restaurant cook turned soldier, referred to variously as "the Chink" or "the Joss party." The smugglers become gangsters or dips. Escamillo, the bullfighter celebrated in the famous Toreador song, is renamed "Eskimo Bill" and reimagined as a meatpacker from the Chicago stockyards. Micaëla, the virtuous country girl in love with Don José, becomes "the Michaels girl from Janesville," arriving from Wisconsin to deliver messages and kisses from the hero's mother. The narrator follows the opera's plot through all four acts, describing Carmen's arrest, her manipulation of Don José into freeing her, their time spent with outlaws at a roadside tavern, a picnic scene in the countryside involving card-playing and fortune-telling, and ultimately the climactic confrontation outside the bullfighting arena. The knife fight in the final scene is rendered as a clumsy and ineffective scuffle with carving utensils. Carmen's death, rather than being the result of a passionate stabbing, is attributed by the narrator to probable heart trouble, since he observes that Don José never actually made contact with her. Throughout the performance, Hatch disappears for much of the second and third acts, returning smelling of drink and falling asleep, requiring his wife to jab him periodically with a hatpin to prevent him from snoring. On the streetcar ride home, the two wives discuss the singers and their costumes with great enthusiasm, while the narrator deflates their commentary with comic observations, claiming Genevieve Farrar's voice "yodeled in the upstairs registers" and that the tenor's voice "hissed in the downstairs radiators." The following morning the narrator's wife searches the newspaper for the society column covering the opera audience, hoping to find herself mentioned, though they had been seated too high up for any reporter to notice. The narrator proposes returning the Hatches' hospitality by inviting them to a future opera but secretly purchasing box seats for himself and his wife while leaving the Hatches to sit in the cheap upper gallery, telling them the seats could not be obtained together. However, at their next card game, Hatch wins eight dollars and refuses to spend any of it on another opera outing, declaring he never attends the same show twice and that no opera company will be changing his winnings. The narrator dismisses Hatch as a cheapskate but concludes cheerfully that he and his wife will attend the next opera on their own, planning to sit in far better seats near the ground floor for a new production whose title he assumes is probably named after a brand of soap.

By Ring Lardner · First published 1913 · Genre: Short Story, Satire, Literary Fiction · 7,969 words

First lines

We was playin' rummy over to Hatch's, and Hatch must of fell in a bed of four-leaf clovers on his way home the night before, because he plays rummy like he does everything else; but this night I refer to you couldn't beat him, and besides him havin' all the luck my Missus played like she'd been bought off, so when we come to settle up we was plain seven and a half out. You know who paid it. So Hatch says:

"They must be some game you can play."

Genres

Tags

short story · American literature · humor · satire · romance · jealousy · passion · melodrama · social commentary · working-class life · urban setting · early twentieth century

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Carmen is listed on Textopian as a short story by Ring Lardner, dated 1913 CE.

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