The circumstances surrounding the construction of the Opera Garnier were the material of legend and lore. On an 1858 visit to the then-official opera house on the rue le Peletier, Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was the target of a politically motivated attack that ultimately spared him but resulted in the death of 150 people. It was at this moment that the Emperor conceived of replacing the rue le Peletier building (which had been designated the home of the Paris Opera following the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820 at the previous opera house at the square Louvois) with a new, more secure structure (with a private, imperial entrance), one whose grandeur would be representative of his ambitious reign. He gave his controversial city planner, Baron Haussmann, who was in the process of reconfiguring Paris with a new layout, the task of organizing a competition to select an architect to design the new building, which would be one of the hubs of his plan of connected boulevards and avenues. Chosen from among the nearly 200 entries was that of the more or less unknown Charles Garnier. Garnier impressed the judges by labeling his eclectic architectural approach “Napoleon III style,” and the resulting structure indeed remains the prime example of Second Empire construction in Paris.
Erecting such a daunting edifice—distinguished by its imposing polygonal shape, crowning dome, ornately sculptured facade, and gigantic interior complete with an enormous foyer and a majestic, gilded double staircase—was a monumental task that was stymied during nearly a twenty-year period by financing issues, construction difficulties, and most directly, political upheaval. The French defeat at Sedan during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 resulted in the Emperor’s capture. A Third Republic was proclaimed, but the fragile provisional government was then menaced by the siege of the capital by German troops. The still-unfinished Opera House was designated an arsenal and warehouse, and then became the headquarters and eventually a military prison of the Communards—the name given to working-class Parisians who formed their own army in an effort to overthrow those at the helm of the new French regime following France’s capitulation. The violent civil revolution lasted three months and resulted in the loss of thousands of lives before the rebellion was squashed by government forces in May 1871. It was not until 1875 that Garnier’s building—whose cost had escalated to more than 47 million francs—was finally ready to be unveiled with a gala event thrown more to demonstrate the political stability attained by the Third Republic than to celebrate the architect’s achievement (Garnier, in fact, was famously asked to pay to attend the opening!). The Paris Opera—which also had its own ballet company—would draw an increasingly large public during the next few decades as cultural appreciation took on a new importance as part of the joie de vivre mentality that enveloped France before World War I.
In addition to the visible edifice of the Opera House—divided into one zone for public and administrative use and another for private use—an entire underground portion was devised by Garnier for both structural and practical reasons. A stream running beneath the site required extensive excavation, draining, and the design of a specially fortified foundation. The extraordinary depth then allowed for the construction of a number of separate, subterranean levels. One, for example, housed a complete working stable with more than a dozen horses that were used in opera productions, while another held a man-made lake first used to power hydraulic stage equipment and later as a reservoir in case of fire. The costume and set designers had their own workshops and ample storage space for all of the sets and props that were necessary for the staging of the operas, which were often given in rotation. These various cellars, which were connected by staircases, passageways, tunnels, and ramps, combined to form a vast underworld network designed to render seamless and professional the more and more visually complicated operas being performed above.
Upon his visit to these lower depths, Leroux was struck at once by the intricacies of Garnier’s master plan, by the important role that the cellars had played in the political events of the early 1870s, by the increasingly ominous nature of each descending level (the lowest of which had not been visited in more than twenty years), and by the degree to which these combined elements lent themselves perfectly to a novel of urban mystery. The investigative impulse that had propelled and characterized Leroux’s career in journalism (he had once notably interviewed an accused man prior to his trial in an effort to solve the case himself) and that had become central to the narrative style of his earlier fiction—in novels such as Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; The Mystery of the Yellow Room) and Le Parfum de la Dame en noir (1908-1909; The Perfume of the Lady in Black)—found its most insistent outlet yet in The Phantom of the Opera, which purports to discredit a “long-held belief’ that the Opera House was haunted.
In the novel, emphasis is repeatedly and persistently placed on the notions of inquiry, certainty, proof, reason, and logic, from the confident claim made in the title of the novel’s prologue—“ In Which the Author of this Singular Work Informs the Reader How He Acquired the Certainty that the Opera Ghost Really Existed”—to the conclusion drawn in the epilogue: “There are today so many proofs of his existence within the reach of everybody that we can follow Erik’s actions logically through the whole tragedy of the Chagnys” (p. 252). Indeed, the constant reminders of the task at hand—disentangling the unsolved or incorrectly resolved mystery of the Count de Chagny’s death and the disappearances of Christine Daaé and Raoul de Chagny, and establishing irrefutably the existence of the opera ghost, Erik—and the multiple forms of “evidence” that the narrator provides serve at once as the glue that holds the novel’s various threads together and the motor that drives the story forward.
The story itself, of course, is the purest of fictions. Combining the visual record of his descent below the Opera House with research on the building’s construction and history, Leroux set to imagining an individual who would have reason to—and could—survive indefinitely in the Opera’s mysterious lower depths. The result was the creation of a human monster, suffering the physical and mental effects of a deformity so severe that he was completely rejected by society. Among other texts, Leroux was inspired in this macabre conjuring by the Gothic backdrop and terror of such novels as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). From a thematic perspective, Leroux’s thoughts were stirred in great part by the message about inner beauty set forth in Charles Perrault’s La Belle et la Bête (1697; The Beauty and the Beast), the impossible love depicted in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and, even more directly, the legend of Faust.
Familiar with both Goethe’s 1808 play and the opera it had inspired (Charles Gounod’s Faust of 1859), Leroux found in the character of Faust a model for the psychological underpinnings of the monster he was shaping. Indeed—although the circumstances of Erik’s unhappy past and of the “present” depicted in the novel differ markedly from those that lead to Faust’s pact with the devil—the notion of a genius whose power is fueled by dark creative energy is central to the two tales and their resolutions. The author’s choice of Faust, which is performed in a number of scenes—including, most significantly, the one in which Christine disappears—reinforces this parallel between two souls bursting with knowledge and truncated by their hatred of humanity.
The influence of the tradition of fantastic literature of the nineteenth century upon The Phantom of the Opera is also of central importance to our understanding of the text. This genre, which began to emerge in France in the 1830s following a translation into French of stories by German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, flourished for a period of more than sixty years, and was addressed by such authors as Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Prosper Mérimée, and Guy de Maupassant. In its early manifestations, the short stories, novellas, and novels of the fantastic combined realistic and plausible elements with elements of fantasy, reverie, and the supernatural (such as ghosts, demons, and spells). Unlike the fairytale, which had lo
ng flourished in France and which was itself replete with supernatural characters and improbable actions and events, the fantastic tale in no way sought to provide a neat, packaged, or moral resolution to conflicts: On the contrary, multiple possibilities were advanced, and the ending never pronounced the validity of one over another. In this way, the reader was constantly faced with an uncertainty that was part of the text’s inherent design.
The crowning achievement of the early fantastic was Mérimée’s La Vénus de L‘Ille (1837; The Venus of Ille), which insistently suggests—all the while proposing other, far more rational explanations—that a jealous statue comes to life and murders a would-be groom on his wedding night. The author succeeds amazingly in engaging the reader’s desire for understanding in such a way that the solution is indefinitely and stubbornly suspended. While later writers of the fantastic, such as Maupassant and Barbey d’Aurevilly, continued to rely on the creation of multiple, concurrent potential meanings, the realistic footings and markers that had characterized earlier examples of fantastic literature tended to disappear. The reader engaged more and more in a pact to suspend disbelief, and some of the more extreme texts written during this period—such as Auguste de Villiers de l‘Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (Tomorrow’s Eve)—can be seen as precursors to modern science-fiction writing.
From the physical characteristics and mind-boggling abilities of the opera ghost, to the exotic character of the Persian, to the rat-catcher and the spectral “shade” who polices the underground, to the elaborately detailed torture chamber, elements of the fantastic abound and multiply in The Phantom of the Opera. Yet the defining features of the genre are in large part turned on their head by Leroux, who, positing himself as the narrator in the novel’s prologue, firmly promises from the novel’s opening paragraph to deliver clarity and indisputable proof—not purposeful confusion. In immediately asserting that the opera ghost “existed in flesh and blood” (p. 5), he seemingly deflates the possibility, inherent to fantastic literature, that multiple, contradictory explanations for the events described can coexist. However, one can find in the novel, also from this opening paragraph, a palpable tension between the reasonable accounts that are unrelentingly provided at every turn—that is to say, the compulsion to demystify the motivations and actions of the ghost in question—and an emphasis on the fantastic. Indeed, curiously, and quite paradoxically, the more the narrator insists upon the veracity of the events at the Opera House that he has uncovered, reinterpreted, and elucidated for the reader, and the more he stresses that the “ghost” was in reality just a normal man, the more fantastic the ghost’s story and actions become.
As mentioned above, the narrator’s insistence upon the ghost’s existence is at every moment supported by the multi-p le, layered forms of corroborating proof (all of which are, of course, fictional) that he furnishes and cites at length, from the memoirs of Monsieur Armand Moncharmin (one of the Opera House’s two bumbling managers), to Christine Daaé’s papers (scrupulously studied by the narrator to assure their authenticity), to the Persian’s manuscript, to which five chapters of the novel are dedicated to reproducing—“verbatim” (p. 199). In addition, numerous police reports and documents, statements by and interviews with key participants and witnesses, and historical sources are referenced by the narrator in his quest to have the definitive word on the subject. While the narrator’s voice is in turn serious, mocking, condescending, and ironic, it never wavers—from the novel’s first page to its last—from this intransigent authoritative stance. Yet, at the same time, the stability and objectivity of this elaborately constructed fictional framework is undercut by the narrator’s unadulterated, nonjournalistic pleasure in recreating for the reader the terror that the opera ghost inspired and in slowly revealing how he orchestrated his various mystifying feats.
In the manner of all good serial novelists, who understand that the foundation of their genre—developed in France in the early part of the nineteenth century primarily as a gimmick to sell newspapers—is prolonged suspense, Leroux the novelist knew, above all, how to shape Leroux the narrator and the story in such a way that the reader is left constantly wanting to know more. It is in this way, for example, that many of the descriptive details provided—such as those relative to the Opera House’s interior, rooftop, and lower depths—have more to do with establishing the fantastic mood that envelops the story than with furthering the “investigation.” Similarly, as a way of drawing out the essential core of the information that the narrator has but the reader does not, throughout the book Leroux uses the technique employed by most serial novelists of the time (who were generally paid by the word and thus invested in extending the length of their novels): building anticipation by alternating a serious tone with a more comic one. Lighter chapters, such as those which recount the managers’ exploits surrounding the ghost’s “payment,” serve in this fashion to offset the more dire events. It is thus in merging reworked conventions of the fantastic with the techniques of the serial novelist and the rational, explicit approach favored in the burgeoning detective story that Leroux arrives at his particular method of creating and prolonging suspense—precisely by deflating it: The reader knows the novel’s outcome from the beginning, but must patiently wait for the narrator to unravel the mystery of the characters’ motivation.
In addition to the twists and turns of this slow disclosure, what is revealed little by little in The Phantom of the Opera is the world of illusion that is the theater. Indeed, beyond its historical significance, the setting of the Opera Garnier (where all but a select few of the novel’s scenes take place) constantly draws our attention to the relationship between reality and appearance, between art and artifice. As with two sides of a coin, we witness both creation (the onstage production of operas such as Faust) and the behind-the-scenes preparations and dramatics as dancers, singers, stagehands, costume and set designers, directors, and managers perform their functions with various degrees of enthusiasm and competency. We also are privy to the inner workings of the technical side of the Opera House, to the secrets of production that are used to create the imaginary world of the stage.
This panoramic vision of what it takes to stage an opera is mirrored by what is ultimately a panoramic vision of the most grandiose portrayal of all: the role of opera ghost as played by Erik. It is through Erik—a master of creating and maintaining illusions—that the powers of artifice are exemplified. Among the many tricks in Erik’s bag are magic, ventriloquism, skills in the construction of secret and trap doors, and the ability to create elaborate visual illusions (such as those of the torture chamber) and to (over)hear conversations at seemingly impossible distances. Artifice is also underscored in a very deliberate way by the mask that Erik wears, which separates—literally—the reality of his existence (his horrifically mutilated human face) from the perception that he wants to give to others (that of an apparition). The great disparity among the numerous eyewitness accounts of sightings of the ghost—from a walking skeleton, to a headless body, to a blazing skull, to glowing yellow cat’s eyes—speaks both to the natural complicity between artifice and imagination and to the ways in which Erik uses artifice to his advantage, understanding that terror is a more valuable currency than revulsion, and capitalizing upon the fear that he inspires.
Yet Erik, for all of the artifice that surrounds him and with which he protects himself from the world, is truly a gifted artist. Indeed, his uncanny and fantastic talents and abilities pale in comparison to his outright genius as a singer and a composer, and it is precisely as a result of his artistic magnetism that he succeeds in entrancing Christine with his promise of tutelage and glory. This relationship, from its inception, suggests a powerful link between art and suffering. Christine, afflicted since her beloved father’s death by numbing grief and artistic mediocrity, finds the “angel” that she has been waiting for in the mesmerizing voice that beckons her from the walls of her dressing room. Believing that the voice has been sent by her father (as he had promis
ed on his deathbed), she entrusts herself to the voice, only to encounter a suffering of a different sort once she is introduced to the dreadful reality and the limits of its world. Despite this, even after her discovery of the link between her “angel” and the opera ghost and the awakening of her dormant amorous feelings for Raoul, Christine remains captivated by both Erik’s art and his suffering. The intoxicating power of the music that he composes—music that is born, as Christine describes to Raoul, of “‘every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable’” (p. 130)—transcends her horror and tempers Christine’s repulsion with an equally strong attraction that allows for not romantic but spiritual and artistic ecstasy.
For Erik, art and suffering have long been inextricably connected. First, as we learn from the Persian’s revelatory narrative near the end of the novel, Erik spent most of his youth traveling in fairs as a freakish attraction, his grotesque physical deformity (he is billed as a “‘living corpse’” (p. 257) and private anguish on exhibit for all to set eyes upon. Over time this spectacle of revulsion leads by its very repetition—despite the doors that open for him as a result of his singularity—to the atrophy of his soul and his capacity for good and to a penchant for gratuitous evil, as witnessed, for example, by the adventures recounted of his time in the employment of the Shah. Hardened slowly and resolutely by the unkind and cruel behavior toward him, Erik, as the Persian comments, develops a profound hatred for humanity and an unquenchable thirst for revenge: “‘He was restrained by no scruples and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination, which he had received by way of compensation for his extraordinary ugliness, to prey upon his fellowmen’” (p. 256).
Phantom of the Opera (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2