Phantom of the Opera (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

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