The Unseen Genius

Category: Gaston Leroux's Phantom
Summary: Luxa looks at the genius and guises of Erik.Vicomte Raoul de Chagny is a young man overcome with love for young soprano Christine Daa�. However, someone else has been completely consumed by adoration for Christine as well, a mysterious man known as the Opera Ghost, who is described as "...a gentleman in dress-clothes, who had suddenly stood before them in the passage, without their knowing where he came from," and is responsible for odd goings-on around the Opera Garnier. Christine returns Raoul�s affection, and confides in him that she has been visited by the Angel of Music, and he has been giving her voice lessons. �No one ever sees the Angel; but he is heard by those who are meant to hear him,� Christine explains. After much trial, tribulation, rows and an unexplained disappearance and reappearance of Christine, Raoul discovers the truth; �The Opera Ghost and the Angel of Music are one and the same person; and his real name is Erik.�.

Gaston Leroux�s Le Fant�me de l�Op�ra is an intricate tale of these three people; eventually, Erik snatches Christine off the stage as she performs, on the very night she and Raoul planned to elope. Erik lays his conditions on the table for Christine; unless she choose to stay with him, he would blow up the entire Opera Garnier, killing them and innumerable other innocents. Though love may seem to be the most predominant theme in this classic, the less obvious and equally fascinating plotline of truth vs. illusion, particularly where Erik is concerned, is an important one.
Erik is a man of excessive talents; a mad genius if ever there was one. He lives in the cellars of the Opera Garnier, almost completely secluded from the outside world. He keeps no outside contact, because of the way he looks. Christine, on the first occasion she was taken hostage, became overly curious as to why Erik hides his face under a mask. The Phantom�s mask acts as an example of reality vs. illusion in itself. By covering his face, he creates a different truth for himself and others; it shows that he has something to hide. Erik would rather hide behind his mask than face the reality of his deformity. In fact, that is one of his few ground rules with Christine. ��You are in no danger, so long as you do not touch the mask,�� he tells her.

In a moment of lapse, Christine manages to quickly rip it off; needless to say she was horrified with what she saw, for it looked as though he was nothing but literal skin and bone, an animated cadaver. Erik becomes enraged at her actions, forcing her to look at him.

��Look! You want to see! See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul upon my cursed ugliness!�� he shouts at her. ��Know that I am built up of death from head to foot and that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!�. Erik�s rage turns to intense distress as he yells, telling Christine that any woman who has seen his face belongs to him and can never leave him again. This is because he is afraid if he lets her go, now that the reality of his face is revealed, she won�t come back.

Erik himself designed the building of the Opera Garnier so it contained more secret passages and trapdoors than a rabbit�s warren that he alone knows the full extent of; he can disappear and reappear almost instantly. This creates the illusion that Erik is omnipresent, striking fear into the hearts of everyone at the Opera. ��As he seems to be everywhere, I can�t have people telling me they see him nowhere!�� one of the managers exclaims in exasperation Yet the belief that the Opera Ghost exists is so fervent that people hardly dare to venture into his �private box�. In order to live in relative peace with the managers and other staff, Erik sends letters negotiating several rather simple demands, including that Box Five in the theater be left empty at every performance for his private use. The new managers, Richard and Moncharmin, have trouble accepting this, for they have yet to learn that the Opera Ghost means what he says. Madame Giry, Erik�s loyal box-keeper, explains to them time and time again that the box must be left empty, or �a disaster beyond your imaginations� will occur. ��[Mme Giry] you have never seen him; he speaks to you and you believe all he says?�� asks Moncharmin, to which Mme Giry replies a simple, �Yes�. The managers refuse to believe her, however, and insist upon checking the box for themselves. One night, they decide they will personally sit in Box Five and see if they hear any latent voices.

�The two managers collapsed in their chairs and dared not even turn round; they had not the strength; the ghost was chuckling behind their backs! And, at last, they distinctly heard his voice in their right ears, the impossible voice, the mouthless voice, saying: �She is singing to bring the chandelier down!�� And indeed, a few moments later the massive chandelier that hangs above the audience comes crashing down over the spectators heads. Yet, if the managers had had the courage to turn around, they would have seen no one there, for Erik is a most accomplished ventriloquist, as we hear from the Persian � Erik�s only irregular acquaintance, for he once saved the Phantom�s life � as he listens to Erik attempt to distract Christine.

��Here, I raise my mask a little. Oh, only a little! You see my lips, such lips as I have? They're not moving! My mouth is closed � such mouth as I have � and yet you hear my voice. ...Where will you have it? In your left ear? In your right ear? In the table? In those little ebony boxes on the mantelpiece? � And now, crack! Aha! Where is Erik's voice now? Listen, Christine, darling! Listen! It is behind the door of the torture-chamber! Listen! It's myself in the torture-chamber!� � Oh, the ventriloquist's terrible voice! It was everywhere, everywhere. It passed through the little invisible window, through the walls. It ran around us, between us. Erik was there, speaking to us! We made a movement as though to fling ourselves upon him. But, already, swifter, more fleeting than the voice of the echo, Erik's voice had leaped back behind the wall!�

Raoul and the Persian become terrified as they hear Erik project his voice, for they cannot see him; the wall of Erik�s torture chamber in which they find themselves stands between the Phantom and his captives. So as Erik throws his voice all over the place, combined with the deception of the mirrors which line the walls, causes them to become increasingly disorientated, adding to the overall terrorizing atmosphere of the distress in which they have found themselves.

Another place we do not see Erik, but hear him, is when it comes to concealing his house on the lake underneath the Opera Garnier itself, which he guards almost religiously. Though Erik grudgingly allows the Persian to wander his secret passages, he has made it very clear that the Persian is never to attempt to cross the lake to the house. However, when Erik kidnaps Christine the first time, the Persian disregards this warning completely. When he thinks Erik has left, he gets into the boat and attempts to cross the lake. I say �attempts� with reason:

��I stepped into the boat and began to row toward the part of the wall through which I had seen Erik disappear. It was then that I came into contact with the siren who guarded the approach and whose charm was nearly fatal to me� By this time, I was alone in the boat in the middle of the lake; the voice� was beside me, on the water� Fortunately, I come from a country where we are too fond of fantastic things not to know them through and through; and I had no doubt that I was face-to-face with some new invention of Erik�s. But this invention was so perfect that, as I leaned out of the boat, I was impelled less by a desire to discover it trick than to enjoy its charm.�

Told from the Persian�s point of view, he then recounts how he was dragged overboard and nearly drowned before Erik � who himself was the siren � recognizes him and drags him ashore, rebuking him in a dangerous tone. ��You think you are following me, you great booby, whereas it is I who am following you; and I know all that you know about me, here.� The Persian was so entranced by �the siren� that he didn�t care that it was an illusion; he merely wanted to enjoy the song. This shows just how powerful Erik really is.

While Erik is excellent at being nothing but a latent voice, he is also expert when it comes to real, physical optical illusions. His greatest accomplishment is arguably his aforementioned torture chamber, which he himself designed. Again, the Persian gives the most accurate description of the confusing effects:

��the room in which M. le Vicomte de Chagny and I were imprisoned was a regular hexagon, lined entirely with mirrors... A decorative object, such as a column, for instance, was placed in one of the corners and immediately produced a hall of a thousand columns; for, thanks to the mirrors, the real room was multiplied by six hexagonal rooms, each of which, in its turn, was multiplied indefinitely� [Instead of the column], he substituted an iron tree. This tree, with its painted leaves, was absolutely true to life and was made of iron so as to resist all the attacks of the �patient� who was locked into the torture-chamber� The ceiling was capable of being lit up. An ingenious system of electric heating, which has since been imitated, allowed the temperature of the walls and room to be increased at will.�

The overall effect is a brilliant and near immediate sense of being lost, looking for a way out. A Punjab lasso rests at the roots of the tree for those who wish to end the torture themselves. The Persian reminds Raoul when they get trapped in the place together that they must keep themselves sane, constantly remind each other that it�s nothing but a little room, with a way out somewhere. However this does not work well or long, and soon both men have nearly gone mad for want of water, food, and cool air. If it was not for Christine�s choice to remain with Erik, Raoul and the Persian would have died of thirst in a few days time. Here, Erik created an illusion powerful enough to kill.

Erik seems to have a fondness for mirrors; he also has a clever setup in Christine�s dressing room. An extremely large one-way mirror covers a wall inside it, so one could look into the room from one side, but to someone in the room the surface is reflective. This mirror is also rigged to slide open and closed when a vaguely described mechanism is triggered, allowing access to Erik�s underground domain. Raoul experiences the phenomenon of this mirror firsthand:

�Christine walked toward her image in the glass and the image came toward her. The two Christines � the real one and the reflection � ended by touching; and Raoul put out his arms to clasp the two in one embrace. But, by a sort of dazzling miracle that sent him staggering, Raoul was suddenly flung back, while an icy blast swept over his face; he saw not two, but four, eight, twenty Christines spinning round him, laughing at him and fleeing so swiftly he could not touch one of them. At last, everything stood still again, and he saw himself in the glass. But Christine had disappeared.�

The setup of this implies there were more mirrors lining the hall of the passage behind the large one. Here, Erik exercises his power over both Raoul and Christine with illusion by snatching Christine from her dressing room right in front of Raoul�s eyes.

Perhaps Erik was a genius ahead of his time. He was certainly more than a little insane, but it may have been the fact that he was born so deformed that caused him to think in different ways. Because the Phantom hid his face behind a mask, he rejected the reality of his features, to himself as well as others. Erik was a master of illusion: he not only created a torture chamber so effective that it drove its inhabitants mad within hours, but was an accomplished ventriloquist and an expert musician. He guarded his house on the lake religiously; and all for the sake of winning one woman�s affection. The theme of reality vs. illusion where the Opera Ghost is concerned is a predominant one that still leaves much to be desired; many of the strange happenings that go on throughout the story are never fully clarified. ��There are things happening here, Monsieur, which we are unable to explain.�

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The Unseen Genius