More sound and fury, from Gaston

Just as, these days, Europe and the U.S. et al. think of Iran as a source of terror, spearheaded by Iran's President Ahmadinejad, so Persia is a source of terror for Paris in The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux. The Phantom has come back to his birthplace, France, from Persia via Turkey (also a threatening region of the world, when The Phantom of the Opera was published in 1910.) In Persia, the Phantom has turned his architectural skills toward the construction of a torture chamber; he is employing his skills of construction for purposes of destruction. Similarly, he builds a palace for the Shah that allows the Shah to move about unseen and even to disappear utterly; that is, the Phantom has built a defensive weapon (against, quite possibly, the Shah's enemy, the Emir of Afghanistan). Thus, the Phantom perfects his evil in Persia and, after a Persian police chief rescues him from execution, he is able to take this perfected evil back to France, specifically, the Paris Opera.

This Persian police chief, known throughout as the Persian, is inextricably linked to the Phantom (Erik). He knows the Phantom well, as he points out frequently but most specifically and at length in this paragraph, in his narrative:

I knew my Erik too well to feel at all comfortable on jumping into his house [in the cellar of the Opera]. I knew what he had made of a certain palace at Mazenderan [in Persia]. From being the most honest building conceivable, he soon turned it into a house of the very devil, where you could not utter a word but it was overheard or repeated by an echo. With his trapdoors the monster was responsible for endless tragedies of all kinds. He hit upon astonishing inventions. Of these, the most curious, horrible and dangerous was the so-called torture chamber. (179)

The Persian describes the torture chamber as a hexagon lined with mirrors and containing a tree that "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." (192) The Phantom's other inventions well-known to the Persian include the ability to create certain sound effects--such as the roar of a lion or the pattering of rain--intended for torture to the point of insanity and death.

The Persian is well aware of the Phantom's utterly destructive nature. He knows and says that "[Erik] is a real monster--I have seen him at work in Persia, alas..." (171) and "...he was restrained by no scruples and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination...to prey upon his fellow men." (219) Nevertheless, this Persian police chief rescues Erik/the Phantom from execution by the Shah, thereby allowing this "real monster" who is "restrained by no scruples" to travel out of Persia first to Turkey, where he constructs deceptive devices for the Sultan's use, and then to Paris, where he assists in constructing the Opera--which he later decides to make his home--and from where he terrorizes the Opera managers, singers, and dancers et al., and ultimately, secretly, threatens the lives of hundreds of opera-goers.

The Persian, eventually realizing his terrible mistake, decides to lead the jealous, enraged Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, to the Phantom's house in the cellar of the Opera, in order to kill this monstrous Phantom, after all. Instead, the Phantom nearly kills both Raoul and the Persian--who maintains contact with the Phantom even after the near-death event. And especially meaningful contact, too.

The Persian is writing his narrative of events for the Paris newspapers, when the Phantom visits and tells the Persian that he is going to die "of love for [Christine Daae], I...I tell you!...If you knew how beautiful she was...when she let me kiss her...." (211) This kiss is a radical event for this man, whose hideousness drove away his own mother. For the Phantom, this kiss means that a woman has loved him for his own sake, and it is this perpetually frustrated desire, to be loved for his own sake, that has obsessed and driven him all his life. He confides this over-riding desire first to the Persian (on p. 175) and then to Christine herself--"And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (182) No question then--at the core of this story is a universal longing, to be loved for oneself versus being loved for one's good looks--definitely demonstrated by Christine's other admirer, Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny.

And yet, it is the Persian who concludes The Phantom of the Opera and so it is the Persian and, consequently, Persia that stays in the reader's imagination. In this way, the melodramatic horror of The Phantom of the Opera manifests itself within a context of East-West tension--tension that has escalated again especially sharply since 9/11. The tension might be described in this way: the East (Iran, Iraq et al.) terrorizes the West (Europe and the U.S. et al.) which then seeks to conquer, or at least control, the East. But then, on second thought--just as the Phantom initially comes from France--so, clearly, terror can come from anywhere...and so, perhaps, today terror is coming not as much from the East as from the West's persistent portrayal of a maniacal East, which, like the Phantom of the Opera, must then be hunted down....