Erik and Gollum

[igenlode]

Some of the elements of Erik's character in Leroux are really very reminiscent of Tolkien's subsequent creation of Gollum; the tendency to weep and cringe and refer to oneself in the third person, to giggle in a nasty way, and of course to be consumed by longing for the unattainable within full view, to the extent of commiting murder to get it ;-p
And there's that scene where he paddles away across the lake with only his two eyes visible, which is an almost palpable echo of the subsequent scene in "The Lord of the Rings" where Gollum is spotted in the dusk paddling along after Frodo's boat.

I wonder if Tolkien ever did read "The Phantom of the Opera"? I'm sure there wasn't any direct influence involved (Gollum was created for "The Hobbit", which draws its imagery largely from fairy-tales), but "The Hobbit" was actually written only about twenty years later -- because "Phantom" is a historical novel, one tends to forget that it was written in quite a different era from that in which it was set.

He would have been about twenty and up at Oxford when it first came out, and not really in the right demographic to take an interest in that sort of thing -- by the time the film was made and the story acquired popular traction in the English-speaking world, he was busy making translations from Middle English and probably not an aficionado of Lon Chaney horror movies ;-D So I feel the odds are that he probably never read Leroux...

Comments

[igenlode]

And now, it's like that entire type of fandom subculture fizzled out, and the people who partook in it have all but went extinct. Or they are fine with twitter and instagram? I don't know.

Well, I was never really around when it was active (the only *active* fandom I've ever been a part of was alt.fan harry-potter on Usenet while the books were
still coming out), so I didn't get to see where it went. It's possible the entire fandom is a lot less active now that the 2004 generation have grown up; it's possible that today's online audience is less skewed towards those with higher education and thus less interested in intellectual debate. (When I was first on the Internet, *everyone* was either accessing it via a university network, a computer geek dialling up from home via Demon Internet, or an American escapee from AOL's walled garden.)

I've heard it hypothesised that most people are now using the Internet on their mobile phones and thus find it a lot harder to type chunks of text beyond a sentence or two, which would tend to impact on all forms of discussion. It may also be a reason why people seem to be commenting less on fan-fiction than was the case back in 2001-2004 -- although I think the fact that the fan-fiction community is now a lot larger and that people don't feel a personal connection with fellow authors probably has a lot to do with that.


Reading, writing, listening and speaking are the standard four components of learning *any* language, and the ones you get examined separately on :-)

I certainly wouldn't attempt to write fanfic in French; I did attempt to comment in German on each successive chapter of a German-language fic, and that was extraordinarily hard work (about a hundred words an hour, although come to think of it that's now my approximate rate of fiction writing in English!)
But I lack basic vocabulary in all languages compared to English, so even for simple critique it's either a case of attempting to find alternative ways to say things using whatever words I do know, or else of spending far too much time checking and double-cross-checking words and phrasings in a dictionary.

One book I simply bought for the pretty pictures, without reading it.

I'm guessing that was the Greg Hildebrandt version?
https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/57079.html

Another, I read when I was 15 and did not connect with it at all. So I guess I can concur that De Mattos' version is no good. XD

I think I read it in the 1980s after listening to the Lloyd Webber soundtrack, or out of curiosity after the 2004 movie came out (I did see that, but was not a fan at the time and didn't become one as a result :-P), possibly looking for answers to plot holes in the movie version! Whenever it was, I do remember that I found the experience very disappointing and wrote the book off as one of those things where the adaptation is much more successful than the original material.

Weirdly enough it never so much as occurred to me (despite the fact that I'd already discovered that "Les Misérables" in French was quite a different experience to reading Hugo's novel in the library's tedious 19th-century English translation) that "The Phantom of the Opera" had been written in French -- I just assumed that the translated text *was* the story, possibly because the Phantom has become part of modern folklore, like Jekyll and Hyde or Dracula. (After all, we never think of Cinderella as French, or Rumplestiltskin as German.) And of course it never for one instant occurred to me that the translator had heavily abridged the content of the book in the process!