SOURCE: Carpenter, Scott D. “Diversions in Reading: Esthetics and Mérimée's ‘La Chambre Bleu’.” French Forum 14, no. 3 (September 1989): 303-10.

In the following essay, Carpenter offers a stylistic analysis of “La Chambre bleue,” focusing on Mérimée's use of distinct narrative threads in the story and its relationship to a general aesthetic theory of fiction.

How does one distinguish between major and minor literary works or between essential and contingent elements within them? The assumption that such distinctions are possible underlies the entire enterprise of literary studies or even, as Jacques Derrida has argued, all of Western esthetics.¹ While the privileging of one element of a work over another often appears arbitrary or impressionistic, this act generally conforms to a set of principles which permit the formulation of paradigms for reading and writing; thus, most obviously, literary critics identify the distinguishing characteristics of Romanticism, of Realism, of...