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

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 long 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