Phantom Thoughts pt. 8

[zellephantom]

{Raoul leaned against the panel to ease his pain. His heart, which had seemed gone for ever, returned to his breast and was throbbing loudly. The whole passage echoed with its beating and Raoul's ears were deafened. Surely, if his heart continued to make such a noise, they would hear it inside, they would open the door and the young man would be turned away in disgrace.}

Poor heartbroken Raoul. Feelings can be intense, especially young love. One minute, you're on cloud nine and the next you're down in the dumps. His current feelings remind me of this line from Charles Dance's Phantom in the 90s miniseries: "When you sing, I live in the Heavens. When you do not, down below."

I really want to know why his heart (presumably referring to romantic feelings?) had seemed "gone forever". Did he catch feelings for a nice foreign girl on his trip around the world, only to be rejected and forever parted from her? Is he just numb from Philippe's attempts to find him a girl in Paris? Had he buried his feelings in pursuit of a Navy career?

{What a position for a Chagny! To be caught listening behind a door!}

And yet he's not leaving... And he eavesdrops even more later in the novel, if I'm not mistaken...
Maybe this is just his mental interjection of 'What would Philippe do?', the answer being 'find a nice girl to flirt with while you're on furlough but don't marry her if she's not of high enough social status ALSO DON'T EAVESDROP AND SHAME THE FAMILY NAME'.

{The man's voice spoke again: "Are you very tired?"

"Oh, to-night I gave you my soul and I am dead!" Christine replied.

"Your soul is a beautiful thing, child," replied the grave man's voice, "and I thank you. No emperor ever received so fair a gift. THE ANGELS WEPT TONIGHT."}

Oh, my E/C shipper heart is bursting with feels!

But I'm still wondering if Raoul, due to his worries about his heartbeat being too loud, missed part of the conversation after "I sing only for you". Or maybe the Phantom is just trying to segue away from a topic that is clearly making Christine upset. (Now I have the mental image of the Phantom riding around on a Segway. Enjoy!)

Oooh, change in descriptions. First, he was masterful, and now he is merely grave (and probably feeling old and solemn and tired and reverent all at once).

I should also write a meta about the Phantom calling Christine 'Angel' in ALW, despite him being the one in the Angel role.

Comments

[igenlode]

There is also an interesting article to be written on who uses 'tu' to whom and when they do it (which is something that I'm not at all sensitive to, as I'm not a native French-speaker; I can spot it if I actively look for it, but I don't get the subliminal nuances of people switching from 'vous' to 'tu').

Erik uses both to Christine, for example: in the scene overheard by Raoul he initially says
Vous devez être bien fatiguée? (You (vous) must be very tired?) and then, momens later, Ton âme est bien belle, mon enfant, et je te remercie (Your soul is a beautiful thing, my child, and I thank you (tu)).
I'm sure the deliberate switch here is supposed to be conveying all sorts of overtones, but I don't know what... At a guess, he is switching to a more 'paternal'/priestly form of address, but that's a fairly wild stab in the dark.

He uses 'vous' to her after he reveals himself up until the unmasking, when he starts yelling at her with 'tu': "Tu as voulu voir! Vois!" (So this is what you wanted to see -- then look!)
He continues to do so during their next directly reported conversation, after he has kidnapped her and tied her up, but when she quotes him as saying 'I restore you your liberty on condition you wear this ring' he is using 'vous' in the interim, and I'd guess he probably reverts at the point where he is weeping and clutching the hem of her skirt; at this point he is once again treating her with respect.

And then there is another sudden mid-scene switch at the point where she attempts to get the bag with the keys to the torture chamber: at the start of Chapter 11, he is addressing her as 'tu' ('Veux-tu bien me render mon sac?'; give me back my bag)
Then for some reason completely unclear to me he abruptly switches to 'vous': 'Vous savez bien qu'il n'y a là-dedans que deux clefs' (you know very well that there is nothing in it but two keys). And we get 'rendez-moi mon sac' (using the vous-form of the verb) imediately followed by 'veux-tu laisser la clef' within the same set of quotation marks.
I really don't know what's going on here, other than that Erik is probably trying to make some kind of point; 'vous' equals sarcastic politeness?

And he reverts to 'vous' again for his speech about the scorpion and the grasshopper, at the point where he is calling her 'mademoiselle' and obviously making a point of addressing her with icy politeness, then back to 'tu' when he returns ("Tu ne veux pas du scorpion?": so you don't want to turn the scorpion?)

And, oddly, he apparently uses 'tu' to her after he kisses her forehead: "Je sais que tu l'aimes, le jeune homme"... "prends ça pour toi... et pour lui" ("I know you love that young man"/"take [this ring] for you and him").

So he clearly means all sorts of different things by it in different contexts; we can't say that he uses 'tu' when he wants to be intimate and 'vous' when he wants to be distant, for example.

The managers address one another as 'tu', which to me is unexpected; unsurprisingly, Erik uses 'tu' with the Daroga. Raoul and the Daroga use 'vous' in their conversations with one another.

Philippe uses 'tu' to his baby brother and Raoul uses 'vous' back to him in return, which for some reason I find rather endearing as a reflection of their relationship ;-)

Christine calls almost everybody 'vous' almost all the time, like the well-brought-up young lady she is, but there are a couple of points where she uses 'tu' on Raoul in a reversion to childhood, not because she is expressing love for him (she mostly seems to call him mon ami (literally 'my friend') as a term of affection, which really doesn't translate, particularly when Raoul is using it to implore her in tones of despair...) but because she is annoyed with him. But she also uses it in her relief to find that he is still alive after his sojourn in the 'torture-chamber', where it's clearly from very different motives.

Raoul uses 'tu' to Christine in pathetic appeal during his hallucinations about her in the torture-chamber ("Christine, arrête-toi!... Tu vois bien que je suis épuisé!": Christine, wait! Can't you see I'm exhausted?)
I don't think he ever does it to her face, even when they are quarrelling, but there are too many of those scenes to check :-p
[Edit: yes, he does so at least once, in the line when he tells her that she should turn the scorpion and save the Opera. 'Va donc, Christine, ma femme adorée': 'go on, Christine, my darling']

I think Christine calls Erik 'tu' just once, at the point where she is begging him to swear that it really is the scorpion which will avert the explosion: 'me jures-tu, monstre, me jures-tu sur ton infernal amour' (you monster, will you swear by your hellish love) -- here she is clearly insulting him rather than attempting to appeal to him by addressing him fondly.

The trouble is that the use of 'tu' versus 'vous' has all sorts of potential implications beyond the simple school-book dogma of "'tu' is for friends, 'vous' is for strangers", particularly at this era (i.e. before it become fashionable to call complete strangers 'tu' to emphasise your accessibility and informality: "hey, you guys!" versus "ladies and gentlemen"). And as I said, unless I go looking for the shifts in pronoun I'm not even conscious of them, so I may be missing lots...

[zellephantom]

That is absolutely fascinating to read about! It's too bad that there really isn't a good way to convey that kind of nuance in English translation. 'Sarcastic politeness' seems very Erik to me, especially given the performances of certain ALW Phantoms like Hugh Panaro. The shift from vous to tu in the 'your soul is a beautiful thing to give' exchange maybe makes me think that Erik is slipping up momentarily, not quite maintaining complete control over his Angel act and reflecting his desire to be close to Christine in the way he addresses her. That might be why he also says 'my child' right after that- like 'oops I slipped up with tu- got to say something to reinforce that I'm supposed to be this heavenly authority figure who's formal and above her'.

Lately, I've been reading quite a bit of My Hero Academia fanfiction (I assume it shows up in other anime fanworks as well, but frankly MHA is the only anime I've ever watched), so what it immediately reminds me of is the sort of subtle displays of relationship and changing dynamics between characters in what honorific suffixes they use when referring to each other by name, like -san, -kun, -chan, etc.

[igenlode]

The shift from vous to tu in the 'your soul is a beautiful thing to give' exchange maybe makes me think that Erik is slipping up momentarily, not quite maintaining complete control over his Angel act and reflecting his desire to be close to Christine in the way he addresses her. That might be why he also says 'my child' right after that- like 'oops I slipped up with tu- got to say something to reinforce that I'm supposed to be this heavenly authority figure who's formal and above her'.

Rereading the passage, I was thinking 'he is definitely going for a priestly aura there'; a priest would normally be addressed as mon père, 'my father', and address a member of his congregation as ma fille (my daughter).
Then looked at the post and saw I'd already suggested that ;-)

But what I mean is that it comes across not so much that he uses 'mon enfant' to cover up for having used 'tu', but more that it follows naturally on from it with similar implications.

what it immediately reminds me of is the sort of subtle displays of relationship and changing dynamics between characters in what honorific suffixes they use when referring to each other by name, like -san, -kun, -chan, etc

I don't know much about anime, but from what I've gathered it's exactly the same sort of thing (and an equal problem in translation). You also get the same problem of characters calling each other things like "Little Brother" which *can* be translated, but don't sound natural in English conversation...

[zellephantom]

So with the 'fatherly' priestly role comes the ability to use a more familiar form of address? I could see that.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever addressed my actual younger brother as 'little brother', unless it was before he was born when I was a kid talking about how I was going to have a little brother. It just doesn't sound right, even though it's a factual description of our relationship.

[igenlode]

Whereas Raoul and Philippe will address each other quite naturally as mon frère -- I'm not sure how common that is in modern-day spoken French (<disappears down rabbit-hole> apparently it's now 'urban' slang used by both sexes: "Hey, bro!") but it was certainly normal in their day, and presumably remains so in modern Japanese.

[zellephantom]

Interesting- so bro is some degree of international slang! Assuming that you did mean Japanese and not French in that last part, it makes sense, at least from my narrow realm of experience in My Hero Academia fanfiction, with some characters, particularly Kirishima, referring to each other as bro.

I don't remember off the top of my head if it's present much in the English dub of the show, but it's become relatively accepted fanon practice that Kirishima calls his close friend Bakugou 'Bakubro' and sometimes tries to fit bro in the names of his other friends if the fic involves them becoming better friends, i.e. 'Todobroki' for Todoroki, 'Midoribro' for Midoriya, and I've sometimes even seen 'Brochako' used to address the female character Uraraka Ochako. IDK how present it actually is in the original Japanese or non-English fanworks, so ymmv, but that's just what I've seen.

[igenlode]

I did mean Japanese, but I didn't mean that either they or the French literally say "bro"; that was just the 'street' translation being given in the studies I was looking at concerning the use of mon frère as a form of address by modern inner-city French youth.

For all I know modern Japanese *does* include the syllable "bro" in the way that it (apparently) uses traditional honorifics -- my knowledge of Japanese is entirely at second-hand from hearing other people complaining about anime fanfics. But what I was trying to say was that I've heard people complaining about fanfic using 'Little Brother' as a form of direct address, and that this was presumably as normal in Japanese as the corresponding form is in 19th-century French... and which happens to sound stilted in English, where it's *not* the custom.

My guess, as a complete non-Japanese-speaker, would be that this 'friendly-brother-suffix' (going by my knowledge of Japanese as a syllabic language with appended honorifics) is probably being added to the ends of characters' names in the original Japanese in order to indicate an honorary relationship, and that the English dub is trying to emulate this by inserting the syllable 'bro' into their names. Which is quite ingenious as a way of translating the untranslatable, if true.

But that is a complete stab in the dark!

[zellephantom]

Yes, I understood that- bro as in casual address for brother being used as slang, not literally the syllable bro :) I'm guessing what you mentioned is probably the case, but I don't really care to watch through the subs version and confirm it. (I watched subs for the first two seasons of Miraculous Ladybug, but NEVER AGAIN. Dubs are easier for me, even if certain shows feature... certain deliberate mistranslations *cough* the Miraculous Ladybug English dub changing Chat Noir's "I thought I lost you." in the original French to "That was a wild ride!" *cough*)

Thankfully, I've never read enough anime fanfic to complain about it- or maybe my standards are just very high for fanfiction nowadays. (For example, go on AO3, sort by bookmarks, usually filter for completed works only, exclude a bunch of tags and ships I dislike.. I'll pretty much only go on fanfiction.net if I've had a specific fic recommended to me that's only found there, which is often the case for Phantom fic.)

[igenlode]

I enjoy watching subtitled films when I speak the language to at least some degree, because I get the interest of doing the 'back-translation' from the meaning of what was said to identifying the actual words used -- something in Japanese might just as well be dubbed for all the difference it makes to me. (Subtitled Swedish was about the furthest I got from comprehensibility -- and I have a feeling it was a subtitled Swedish *silent* film, so I was comparing the written version in the two languages via my intermediate knowledge of German ;-)

It's a salutory experience to realise that when I have the [English] subtitles on a French film, I can pick up pretty much every word of the original French, but as soon as the subtitles cut out for any reason I really start to struggle to follow the dialogue -- knowing the *meaning* of a phrase in advance is sufficient to narrow down all the possibilities enormously, which gives an entirely spurious impression of fluency.

(I've got an archive DVD of the French TV production of Leroux's "La Poupée Sanglante", which is very good -- better than the original book, which gets rushed and facetious in the second half -- and because it wasn't commercially marketed to England, it only has French subtitles. On the other hand, because it's 'classic' TV from the 1970s, I can actually understand almost every word of the dialogue unsubtitled because it is all beautifully enunciated... but I come unstuck the instant a working-class dialect pops up. This is the point at which I have to enable the subtitles so that I can *read* what was supposed to have been said ;-p)

cough* the Miraculous Ladybug English dub changing Chat Noir's "I thought I lost you." in the original French to "That was a wild ride!" *cough*

That's a fairly major alteration of implication...

I'll pretty much only go on fanfiction.net if I've had a specific fic recommended to me that's only found there, which is often the case for Phantom fic.

I only go on AOL if I've met with a specific link pointing there -- the navigation is pretty rudimentary without JavaScript (the mobile FFnet is actually quite accessible), it has a fairly well-earned reputation for being full of mindless smut, and the tags are pretty useless, because people tag for *everything*. (An R/C tag might indicate that Raoul and Christine are married in the first chapter before she sees the error of her ways and escapes from her abusive husband, for example...)

But I can eliminate over 90% of what is posted to FFnet at a glance, either from tags or summaries; I once spent an evening working chronologically backwards through about three thousand stories over a period of several years, because there was a suspicious gap in my favourites list (mostly culled from looking at other people's favourites) and I wanted to see what I'd missed. I found *two* stories that were good enough to add :-(
(Plus, to be fair, a couple that I had already from that period.)

I did get a horrendous case of fanfic indigestion ;-p