Erik’s Effects: The Phantom, the Gesamtkunstwerk and the Monstrosity of Spectacle

Virginia Woolf famously dated the origins of the modern sensibility to December 1910. This chapter, using the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art ’ as its theoretical starting point, argues that Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, published in the same year, represents a distinct product of this sensibility. Enacting a compelling narrative of ‘monstrous ’ unsettlement within mass culture, the novel is one of the iconic monster fictions of the twentieth century, although it continues to be critically neglected compared to similar literary horror classics. The Opera Ghost, Erik, a grotesque social outcast, is a special effects artist on a grand scale, a fairground magician and inspired architect as well as a torturer, assassin and psychotic obsessive. Beneath the Palais Garnier he creates a world of trapdoors, pulleys and costumes, of smoke and mirrors, of flame effects and water, creating a Gesamtkunstwerk within a Gesamtkunstwerk. His legacy is a troubled, prophetic and inexhaustible allegory of emergent modernity, in particular of mass media spectacle and shared popular fantasy. As charismatic as he is terrifying, as tragic as he is cruel, this beast in search of beauty seems to embody both the fear and the fascination of a complex mediated environment. Ultimately, the spaces he inhabits offer singular perspectives from which to explore the cultural conditions of the last hundred years