Phantom Thoughts pt. 27
Jan. 15th, 2019 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zellephantom{"On the contrary, mademoiselle," said the young man, in a voice which he tried to make firm and brave, but which still trembled, "anything that concerns you interests me to an extent which perhaps you will one day understand. I do not deny that my surprise equals my pleasure at finding you with your adopted mother and that, after what happened between us yesterday, after what you said and what I was able to guess, I hardly expected to see you here so soon. I should be the first to delight at your return, if you were not so bent on preserving a secrecy that may be fatal to you ... and I have been your friend too long not to be alarmed, with Mme. Valerius, at a disastrous adventure which will remain dangerous so long as we have not unraveled its threads and of which you will certainly end by being the victim, Christine."}
Why are you so stuck on the possibility of her getting murdered???
{"An impostor is abusing her good faith."
"Is the Angel of Music an impostor?"
"She told you herself that there is no Angel of Music."
"But then what is it, in Heaven's name? You will be the death of me!"
"There is a terrible mystery around us, madame, around you, around Christine, a mystery much more to be feared than any number of ghosts or genii!"}
Remind me, when did she tell Mrs. Valerius that? Because I don't recall her ever disabusing the notion that her absences were simply her visiting the Angel of Music. EDIT: no, wait- she did! though in more of an 'I'm just saying this to get you to calm down' way
Also, isn't the plural of genie genies??
{"That is what you must promise, Christine. It is the only thing that can reassure your mother and me. We will undertake not to ask you a single question about the past, if you promise us to remain under our protection in future."}
That's.. nice. 'Yeah, we won't make you answer any questions about the weird things that are happening, but you can't disappear or have music lessons with this 'angel' ever again.'
(Also, Raoul sort of manipulating her by holding the conversation within earshot of her adoptive mother and deliberately making her worry in order to ensure that Christine will stay? Not cool, man.)
{"That is an undertaking which I have not asked of you and a promise which I refuse to make you!" said the young girl haughtily. "I am mistress of my own actions, M. de Chagny: you have no right to control them, and I will beg you to desist henceforth. As to what I have done during the last fortnight, there is only one man in the world who has the right to demand an account of me: my husband! Well, I have no husband and I never mean to marry!"}
YOU GO, CHRISTINE. YOU AREN'T MARRIED TO HIM AND YOU SHOULDN'T LET ANYONE ELSE CONTROL YOUR ACTIONS. (this mean you, Erik.) IF YOU DON'T WANT TO TELL THEM WHAT HAPPENED, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO. ALSO RAOUL IS BEING RATHER NOSY AND OVERSTEPPING HIS BOUNDS.
{"You have no husband and yet you wear a wedding-ring."
He tried to seize her hand, but she swiftly drew it back.
"That's a present!" she said, blushing once more and vainly striving to hide her embarrassment.}
Yeah, maybe don't grab someone without asking, especially while you're in the middle of a disagreement.
{"Christine! As you have no husband, that ring can only have been given by one who hopes to make you his wife! Why deceive us further? Why torture me still more? That ring is a promise; and that promise has been accepted!"}
Ah, yes, why torture me still more, because my feelings are the only ones that matter... It's not her fault that you didn't notice the ring before and thus assumed she was free to be with you.
{"What I chose," said Christine, driven to exasperation. "Don't you think, monsieur, that this cross-examination has lasted long enough? As far as I am concerned ..."
Raoul was afraid to let her finish her speech. He interrupted her}
LET HER SPEAK. Just a minute ago, you demanded an explanation. Now, you might be getting one but you cut her off because you're afraid of what you might hear.
{"I beg your pardon for speaking as I did, mademoiselle. You know the good intentions that make me meddle, just now, in matters which, you no doubt think, have nothing to do with me. But allow me to tell you what I have seen—and I have seen more than you suspect, Christine—or what I thought I saw, for, to tell you the truth, I have sometimes been inclined to doubt the evidence of my eyes."}
Frankly, you should be getting down on your knees and *begging* her to let you associate with her again. Also, I really don't think 'good intentions' is a good excuse for your recent behavior, nor does it justify meddling, no matter how close you were in the past.
*insert Wicked's "my road of good intentions/led where such roads always lead" here*
by the way, she thinks the matters have nothing to do with you, and she's right! they don't. Respect the lady's wishes, Raoul.
{"I saw your ecstasy AT THE SOUND OF THE VOICE, Christine: the voice that came from the wall or the next room to yours ... yes, YOUR ECSTASY! And that is what makes me alarmed on your behalf. You are under a very dangerous spell. And yet it seems that you are aware of the imposture, because you say to-day THAT THERE IS NO ANGEL OF MUSIC! In that case, Christine, why did you follow him that time? Why did you stand up, with radiant features, as though you were really hearing angels? ... Ah, it is a very dangerous voice, Christine, for I myself, when I heard it, was so much fascinated by it that you vanished before my eyes without my seeing which way you passed! Christine, Christine, in the name of Heaven, in the name of your father who is in Heaven now and who loved you so dearly and who loved me too, Christine, tell us, tell your benefactress and me, to whom does that voice belong? If you do, we will save you in spite of yourself. Come, Christine, the name of the man! The name of the man who had the audacity to put a ring on your finger!"}
As I recall, you were pretty entrance by the voice too, Raoul, so you have no room to criticize in that regard... Also, I just hate that he says 'we will save you in spite of yourself', like he's the hero and she's the poor frightened manipulated child.
I suspect that Raoul's fatal flaw is, much like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, a 'saving people thing'. And maybe a little of Emma Woodhouse's 'I know people better than they know themselves, which justifies any manipulation of them because it's for their own good, even if they don't realize it yet' as well. (If you haven't read Jane Austen's Emma and are now thinking 'wow, this person sounds horrible'- don't worry. She gets better.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-16 10:48 am (UTC)I've just done the necessary which should open things up for you as my blog is partly f-locked.
All Helpful Urges Should Be Circumvented
Date: 2019-01-16 11:21 am (UTC)I'm mostly familiar with the musical so I'm really glad you're doing these readings! It's fascinating to see the differences.
Re: All Helpful Urges Should Be Circumvented
Date: 2019-01-16 03:43 pm (UTC)It *is* fascinating. (Also an unfortunately good way to procrastinate doing homework...)
Was I Really Seeking Good or Just Seeking Attention?
Date: 2019-01-16 04:12 pm (UTC)You know, once I saw you make the No Good Deed reference, all these other surprisingly relevant lyrics just popped out.
I think, Leroux is a writer of his time and incorporates the attitudes of his day. For him, it's a logical progression, a portrait of the people around him. Which is interesting to consider when analyzing and gives us important contextual perspective. On the other hand, it's a pain in the ass to read!! It boils my blood! The one good thing is that Christine seems to have more of an obvious backbone in the novel. It's more subtle in the musical I feel.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 06:39 am (UTC)I think Raoul is rather more worried by the prospect of her undergoing a fate worse than death -- he thinks she is the victim of a cynical seducer who has set all this up in order to ruin her and make her his mistress.
Which isn't actually all that far from the truth, although he has no idea that the stories about the Phantom of the Opera are in any way related to this...
It's the plural of 'genius' -- as in "he is her evil genius" rather than as in "he is a mathematical genius".
Nobody is suggesting that Erik is an Aladdin-style genie.
She didn't have that ring before.
She came back from her 'disappearance' wearing "une alliance" -- not just a ring, but explicitly, in the French, a wedding ring -- and yet she has just declared that she is not married, and goes scarlet when Raoul mentions it. So it's unsurprising that he jumps to the conclusion that she is lying (and that if she isn't married, then at the very least she must have become engaged to someone) -- especially after Madame Valerius says that she had just the same reaction when she first noticed it.
(We are not told how on earth Christine managed to explain away Erik's ring to the management, either, who must surely have assumed that it indicated an impending marriage and hence her departure from the stage -- something they really ought to be informed about! If Erik wanted her to carry a symbol of her promise to return to visit him, couldn't he have chosen something a little less... suggestive? After all, he doesn't appear to consider Christine as his fiancée until she turns the scorpion -- he clearly hasn't made a proposal, and she hasn't accepted it -- so why does he tell her she has to wear a wedding ring in order to ensure her safety, thus putting her in such an awkward situation?)
Yet again de Mattos edits out Raoul's characterisation.
The reason why Raoul is "afraid to let her finish" is that the original text reads:
"Raoul, très ému, craignit de lui laisser prononcer les paroles d’une rupture définitive" -- he interrupts her because he is terrified she is about to dismiss him from her presence for ever, and he rushes to blurt out his apology before the fatal words can be uttered.
They don't, but... Madame Valerius is obviously no sort of protection for Christine at all; Raoul isn't exactly worldly (in fact, he suffers terribly from the idea that Christine is far more sophisticated than he is), but he has at least some idea of what happens to unmarried girls who go off with mysterious protectors, and how they traditionally end up afterwards (i.e. in the gutter).
Now, he isn't acting out of any sort of disinterested concern for Christine's moral wellbeing -- even if he tries to persuade everyone present that he is -- but he can at least see that whatever is being done to Christine is evidently not of heavenly origin but is the handiwork of someone far more base and ignoble, and that Madame Valerius is obviously completely incapable of protecting her.
And that Christine is either lying on behalf of this unknown stranger (and is therefore already his sexual dupe/victim) or else is in terrible danger through her own credulity, if she really believes what she is saying...
Pretty much :-D
And also, I think, a gnawing insecurity; he has, after all, been the 'baby brother' his entire life, orphaned at a young age and brought up in a family of much older siblings, and cooed over by all the old ladies of his acquaintance who proceed to tell everyone how much too delicate he is to be going off on that nasty expedition to the Arctic (it really doesn't help that he looks young for his age, either -- very probably why he tried to grow that moustache). He has never been to Paris before Philippe decides that it's time to 'educate' him in the ways of the world, and he is completely inexperienced when it comes to women. Every time he tries to confront Christine she runs rings round him; I don't think he once wins an argument in the entire book. He keeps quarrelling with her without even intending to. And nobody ever listens to him or takes him seriously, from the landlady in Perros-Guirec to the concierge at the opera.
"Ah! le misérable, petit, insignifiant et niais jeune homme que M. le vicomte de Chagny" -- this is how he sees himself, and fears that the world sees him.
I have a head-canon that Raoul read far too many of his sisters' novels when he was growing up, and is trying to model himself on a storybook hero in the face of a complete lack of co-operation from the real world...
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 12:52 pm (UTC)Okay, that fate worse than death thing makes his actions make SO much more sense.
As for the evil genius thing, would you say it's referring more to the first definition you provided or the second? (If it's the first, then Madame Valerius' references to the Angel of Music as Christine's "good genius" gains more significance in my mind than just a simple odd turn of phrase.)
Yeah, that is a good question as to how she managed to explain away the ring to the management. My first instinct would be that they didn't notice it because they were busy with other things, but now that Christine is playing a much more prominent role in the opera, I'd think they'd keep a closer eye on her, especially if they suspected they were about to lose her. I would also think that there had to be something less suggestive that would also work as a signifier, but I'm blanking at the thought of coming up with one. If it wasn't specifically a wedding ring, I'd assume it was like in the ALW musical where the ring was something he already had before he gave it to her.
I wonder why de Mattos seems to redact Raoul's characterization specifically so much? Perhaps he was something of an E/C shipper, and wanted to emphasize that relationship?
And I know it probably means something totally different in french, but reading the first part of that sentence just makes me picture Raoul as an emu XD
So Raoul basically thinks that it might not be his business, but he loves Christine and no one else in her life seems willing or able to protect her, so he must.
That is an excellent summation of Raoul's insecurity- when I've attempted to characterize him in my own works, I've tried to depict him as innocent to the machinations of the world and deeply insecure about everything, especially regarding whether Christine really loves him or is just playing with his feelings. He puts on a show of bravado and assurance, but inside he's torn between the expectations put on him by his family and social class, and what he truly wants to do with his life. At several points, I've gone back to Leroux and remembered that there is definitely a basis in the text for it, and I'm not just reading into it traits I think would make him more interesting. (I guess I'm just so used to the criminally underwritten ALW Raoul that often comes off to me as rather stiff and generic that I have to remember that he does have some complexity.)
Yes, I'd absolutely love to know more about his life with his sisters than the brief few lines we get in the novel, and I could totally see that headcanon as accurate!
no subject
Date: 2020-11-14 04:45 am (UTC)I don't think de Mattos was especially an E/C shipper; I get the impression he just did a really sloppy job on a novel that was barely worth the English publisher's while to translate. (I read an unflattering analysis on the Web somewhere that claims that the random sentences he leaves out are generally the ones that have awkward sections in them and would cause problems for a translator -- although apparently he also inserts 'false friends', i.e. words that sound similar in English but don't have the same implications as the original.) The thing is that "Le Fantôme de L'Opéra" wasn't a great success in France for Leroux, being a departure from his popular detective stories, and presumably wasn't a promising prospect for an English-language edition. So I'm guessing that it just got rushed through and abridged in order to have a token volume to put on the market (maybe they were under a contractual obligation of some kind? I don't know the history behind it).
Edit: here's a sample side-by-side comparison of the level of detail that de Mattos leaves out: https://phantomstheater.weebly.com/translations-and-errors.html
As I understand it, the book didn't really take off until after it was used as a Lon Chaney horror film vehicle -- it was the success of the cinematic adaptation that sold the novel in the English-speaking market, not vice versa. But of course nobody went back and started doing a new translation at that point; after all, it was presumably the de Mattos version that had inspired the film in the first place, and anyway not that many people would even have been in a position to notice that the two versions were different (or even that the French version was quite significantly longer).
My guess would be that somebody (possibly but not necessarily de Mattos himself) felt that a book entitled "The Phantom of the Opera" really ought to be more focused on the title character, and cut what was seen as excess material (Raoul's journey from the railway station across the Breton moors and down to Perros, for instance, or the associated backstory of Carlotta's croak). Another suggestion is that some of what de Mattos cut was material that would have been considered too shocking for the English publishing market at the time; Christine's resolve to stab herself rather than suffer rape at Erik's hands, for example, or her 'ecstasy of death' while singing the duet from "Othello".
The drawback is that the cuts actually detract considerably from the interest and enjoyability of the book. I read it out of curiosity back when the Andrew Lloyd Webber version became big, and like so many other people dismissed the novel in disappointment as being stilted and boring. It hadn't even occurred to me back then -- as I suspect it doesn't to most people -- that not only had the original story not been written in English, but that there was nothing particularly set in stone about any given translation of a foreign-language text, and that multiple versions could exist and potentially differ quite widely. And of course I certainly had no idea that the English version had been abridged, which wasn't exactly something that had ever been publicised!
In the interval before I read the book again, the 1911 copyright had elapsed, and new translations did come out. After writing a fan-fic based on a recording of the stage version, I was in the library and saw a copy of "The Phantom of the Opera" on the shelves, and was mildly interested enough to give it another go... and it just so happened by chance that this was a brand-new translation that had only just been published, and not the same volume that I had read previously. I was astonished to find that the book had somehow become ever so much more entertaining than I remembered ;-p
(No, I don't actually read it in French; my French is good enough that I can if I need to, but I generally only refer back to the original text -- which is out of copyright and freely available online -- when I need to check up on specific wording for analysis. I've seen enough arguments online that hinge on micro-interpretation of de Mattos to have sympathy for theology students confronted by fundamentalists who base their creed on the unintended implications perpetrated by King James's translators ;-p)
And yes, Raoul becomes very much more understandable and relatable -- though having read comments by fans, I think a lot of modern teenage girls suffer from a yawning generational gap where they are simply unable to enter into that world at all. I grew up reading Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels alongside 'modern' children's literature (and my parents' and grandparents' worn-out childhood classics), and the whole mindset of 'a-fate-worse-than-death' and a world of servants, class distinction and men at the mercy of women who toy with their emotions is to me both familiar and instantly comprehensible; they, on the other hand, have been taught that such things, if they are even aware of their existence, are evil and oppressive. (Hence the constant demands for Christine to 'grow a backbone' despite the fact that she is not only self-evidently a stronger character than than her unhappy lover, but that the text even explicitly says so.)
I'm afraid my reaction to encountering the online fandom (a discovery which frankly rather shocked me) was to become an instant partisan of Raoul, who was at that time written fairly mindlessly into fan-fiction as either a laughing-stock or a default villain; I couldn't even understand how anyone could be a fan of a novel written from Raoul's point of view while being so completely hostile to its protagonist. Then I came across "Love Never Dies", which pretty much sealed things so far as partisanship went ;-p
(My customary explanation is that Raoul in LND has effectively been exchanged with the Phantom's role in the original musical, and that my response to the character was thus similar to the fangirls' response to the Phantom; LND is Raoul's tragedy where POTO is the Phantom's, but its main problem is that it apparently doesn't realise that...)
'ému' comes from the same verb as 'émotion' (which means the same in French as it does in English); in English we might say that Raoul was 'moved' by his feelings, using a verb that bears a similar relationship to the word 'motion'. And 'prononcer' is the same verb as the English 'pronounce', along with 'rupture' and 'definitive'; he was afraid she would pronounce (in the judicial sense) a definitive rupture ;-)
A lot of foreign words correspond to lessser-known usages of similar English words, so when learning languages it helps if you have an exhaustive knowledge of your own, especially of older terms.
It's always the first definition wherever it occurs in the text (one of the examples of de Mattos' 'false friends', although to be fair there isn't really any good alternative translation; it's just that when people say 'genius' in English they almost never mean it in that sense). When Erik tells Christine that he is not a genius, he isn't casting aspersions on his own intellect (indeed he probably believes, possibly not without justification, that he *is* a genius ;-p) but assuring her that he is no supernatural guardian, any more than he is a phantom or an angel-- he is just Erik, only a man like any other.
I've written a couple of glimpses of Raoul's relationship with his sisters and/or his aunt in my stories (and in my unpublished novel); once you look at the various snippets of information Leroux gives us about the Chagny family, the timeline gets a bit awkward :-(
(Consistency was *not* Leroux's strong point; he was knocking out pulp fiction. not world-building!)
For example, he tells us at one point that Raoul's sisters were both married on the same day and *after* Philippe inherited from their father, in another that the old Comte died when Raoul was twelve, and in another that Raoul's sisters helped bring him up after his father died. But Philippe was thirty-two when he inherited his title -- just how old were those sisters by the time they got to marry? They were almost certainly quite a bit older than Raoul, who was the afterthought child of elderly parents (and probably a 'mistake' on the part of his menopausal mother ;-p)
Anyway, I've done my best in various stories... and taken pride in coming up with a fresh version of the family each time :-D