Review: Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux

I think it’s a reasonable assumption that Andrew Lloyd Webber, might not have expected those in the audience for the debut of his musical, The Phantom Of The Opera ( 1986) to be thinking about incest. Indeed, thoughts running to inevitable mortality, the Darwinian inspired Theory of Degeneration, xenophobia or the existential threat of l’autre, may also have been absent from the audience’s collective musings!

Whilst many derivative adaptations of Leroux’s gothic tale published in 1910 make extensive use of its core motifs as allotropic forms, they do not display or emphasise many of its seminal themes. However, the original novel though undoubtedly eclipsed by its progeny, places these disturbing threads at the centre of its parallax focus. Consequently, that which is eschewed from the musical, or the facinorous 1925 Lon Chaney film, is present within far more thematically rich novel.

Leroux’s literally multi-layered book, is, in my opinion of equal status to the oft-adapted gothic monster tales of greater literary fame such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Horace Walpole’s preface to the second edition of The Castle Of Otranto (1764), generally considered to be the first gothic novel, states that the “gothic story” sets out to blend two kinds of romance, “one controlled by the rules of probability” in “common life” and the other by “imagination and improbability”. For me, Leroux had a deep understanding of this genre and possessed the authorial skills to harness its power.

Walpole’s gothic prodromus sees a young woman, Isabella, being pursued by the castle’s would-be owner, drawing her ever deeper into the, “labyrinth of darkness” of the, “lower part of the castle”. As in Leroux’s novel, the subterranean-dwelling dead violently disrupt the social world above including a cadaverous hermit with, “the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton”. Leroux (1868-1927) had been a globe-trotting journalist before turning to writing and like much gothic literature, he employed a journalistic narrative style for his own version of the genre, taking Walpole’s novel as inspiration. Onto this popular stylistic form, he grafted multifarious themes likely to resonate with his readers of the time. He confronted them with ideas and motifs which are almost always missing from, or at least muted in the novel’s aural and cinematographic mimetic manifestations.

It is these axiomatic themes which in my view distinguish the novel and render its life in the shadows of less potent derivatives rather unjust. I’m a huge admirer of Lloyd Webber’s sensational musical, however it is Pepsi Light as compared to the full fat wonder of Leroux’s unadulterated original. For me, I find myself concluding that the original is best!

The ostensive evidence supporting this perhaps vexatious claim lies in looking at a smattering of the themes which load the novel with its l’appel du vide, and for me give it the status of locus classicus as far as all things ‘Phantom’ are concerned.

Lloyd Webber’s musical and most other adaptations of the novel, present us with a deformed, mask-wearing egomaniac, emotionally scarred and psychologically perverted by a tragic childhood and adult life as an unappreciated cellar dwelling, but cultured outcast. This demented soul lusts for love, artistic musical expression and recognition, if not acceptance. Resistance to his desires is met with emotional and physical violence. This gothic romance is all set within the sparkling opulence of Parisian high society and its gemstone opera house.

The novel on the other hand is far more than a simple pot-au feu consisting of unreciprocated love and a re-working of The Beauty and The Beast story. In the novel a real phantom does not masquerade as a supernatural one; we are confronted with a bona fide ghoul. It is a scintillating admixture of themes calculated to disturb its audience on many levels. Chief amongst these thematic terrors is a Freudian register and its rich symbolism.

Sigmund Freud’s, The Interpretation Of Dreams, first published in 1899 and in English in 1913, was known to Leroux and his audience. Leroux’s novel presents us with a hideous spectre demented by unresolved childhood trauma, exhibited as a carnival freak, and ineluctably driven by an Oedipus complex. Erik breaks every Ego-infused prescriptive in order to satiate his Id-repressed childhood sexual desires. He is obsessed with death, having been born from Death.

Leroux’s Fantôme, is the ghoulish embodiment of a disturbed subconsciousness. He is fixated upon his dead mother and further morally deformed by becoming the father figure to the woman with whom he falls in love, herself a substitute for his mother. Incest, sexual repression and insanity all articulate his anti-social and deeply monstrous behaviour. His subterranean fifth cellar lair and petit chambre are littered with relics and reminders of his mother and her bourgeois homage to Louis Philippe (1830-48).

Luring Christine to the physical manifestation of his subconscious and pursuing her above it in the conscious world of the opera house, allows Leroux to confront his reader with almost every aspect of Freud’s psycho-sexual nightmare and taboo attractions. Erik waivers between Eros and Thanatos, between adult and child and his very monstrosity is a product of anti-hegemonic impulses emerging from his subconscious, in an attempt to satiate his perverse desires and destroy those who have rejected him. He is a classic gothic monster contemporised for the audience of his time.

Freud’s psychological proposition of the death instinct supports Leroux’s use of inevitable personal mortality to further disturb his reader. Coupled with the use of the allegorical Danse Macabre motif, Leroux confronts his reader with the universality of death, regardless of one’s station in life. This provides the novel with both gothic drama and a theme guaranteed to resonate with every living reader.

Into this heady cocktail, Leroux also adds a toxic mix of interdependent idées-fixes permeating the first decade of twentieth century France. The Franco-Prussian War (1870) sowed a deep seated mistrust all things Germanic amongst his target readership. An aversion to Wagner shows itself in the demented Fantôme staging his “Don Juan Triumphant”, perhaps a parody of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The opera house was controlled by the nationalistic attitudes of the abonnés, an elite of society crossing over to the aristocracy. German music was an affront to the status quo and conventional social order as indeed is he Fantôme himself.

Erik chose his name par hasard, setting himself apart as possibly German and definitely foreign. This Germanic racism also manifests as the Fantôme, resonating with Svengali, the repulsive character brought to life in George Du Maurer’s novel Trilby (1894). Leroux’s previous crime novels also cast his murderous villain Ballmeyer as a despicable and nefarious German.

This threat from the foreigner within ties in with numerous associative xenophobic themes. Erik is the ultimate foreigner and threatening agent, the epitome of l’autre, both within us and those invading our world. Leroux exploits this rich ideological seam extensively. Erik is cast at times as albino white or deeply pigmented and always exotic, possessing recondite knowledge gleaned from distant shores. His dexterity with the Punjab lasso is both lethal and disturbingly foreign. This theme also shows itself in the novel’s ability to extract tension from the conflict between the Occidental and the Oriental. The Persian leads the Fantôme’s pursuers to his lair using his rare knowledge and unusual skills. Simply put, Western culture of the time defined itself by contrast with the “other” and that was by overtly rejecting the values and behaviours of the Orient.

From Darwin’s provocative work, On the Origin of Species (1859), society was confronted with the concomitant and unsettling theory of Degeneration; if man can evolve, he can also devolve. Again Leroux uses this to cast Erik as half-man, half-beast. He has degenerated into the primitive within us. He is deeply childish, bringing cheap carnivalesque tricks into the sanctity of the opera house. He is simian-like in his acrobatic boating skills and rope climbing attributes. Yet another threat to social order is manifest in Erik’s perverse Being.

The recent French political tumult is used by Leroux to threaten his reader. The passages used by the insurrectionist outcasts of the radically socialist Paris Commune, who took over the opera house in 1871 in defiance of the State, are those used by The Fantôme. He expertly navigates these to infiltrate and destabilise the world of the opera-going elite. He moves across physical and psychological coterminous boundaries between his subterranean world and that of society above. His invasive omnipotence and rebelliousness perhaps facilitate a disruptive decline towards socialism and worse yet, fascism. Scary stuff!

Like Greek myth, Leroux lets us experience a deeply disturbing world, but restores us to normality, in that an agent sent to destroy us is vanquished. His novel confronts the reader with the skeletons and fears within their subconscious, its coruscant diversity of gothic threats ultimately endured and overcome. So, for me the novel is stuffed to brimming with potent content and is a fabulously rewarding read, distinct from its adaptations and all the better for it.

Given that Leroux tells us “Erik is dead” and his skeleton finally buried, neither my wife or my neighbours risk me responding to his importunate plea to, “Sing, Sing For Me”!