"The Phantom of the Opera's Friend" by Donald Barthelme, 1970

From City Life by Donald Barthelme, 1970

Grade: A+

This is probably the shortest piece I'll be looking at in the entire project--certainly the shortest so far, at only five pages long. Donald Barthelme is a widely-respected and critically-acclaimed postmodernist writer, whose short stories are without exception both incisive and insightful. I've mentioned before that I think it's much harder to write a really good short story than it is to write an entire novel; Barthelme's stories are examples of the craft that the vast majority of us can barely aspire to understand, much less emulate.

The piece, less a story than a snapshot, involves a man (or possibly a woman... I just realized that it never specifies, but the character has a male feel to it) who has befriended the Phantom after the disastrous events of Leroux's novel and who attempts to urge him to join the outside world. The Phantom is never referred to by name, and even only intermittently by his sobriquet; neither he nor his friend, the narrator, are developed as characters. In this case, this is intentional; further development would detract from their roles in the story's message.

The basic theme of the piece is stagnation; the Phantom typifies it by remaining fearful of change and growth and refusing to leave his hidden life beneath the opera for the outside world. His friend urges him on, citing the advances made in plastic surgery, the rehabilitation programs available, the chance for a normal life; the Phantom replies that he is too old, when in reality he is too fearful of the possibilities of the outside world, too afraid that he will be unable to adapt to it and that it has changed beyond his ability to recognize or participate in. The Phantom recognizes the need to break his pattern--indeed, he and the narrator converse over it at length over a period of years--but he seems unable to bring himself to do so.

Christine is mentioned only once, in a small passage wherein the Phantom reminisces about her. She has no bearing on the story; she serves only as a reminder of the past, and a marker of the events that the Phantom is unable to move past in order to have a normal life. He does not use her name.

Not inconsiderable is the secondary theme of separate worlds, which permeates so much of the Phantom literature. In this case, it is parallel to the idea of stagnation--the Phantom's realm is not an achievement, but rather a symptom of his withdrawal, his inability to change and his fast slide into obscurity and self-destruction. The narrator asks on page 2, "Is one man entitled to fix himself at the center of a cosmos of hatred, and remain there?", both underlining the Phantom's ultimately doomed existence as he remains stubbornly isolated, but also noting the curious triumph that this affords him; even as he buries himself alive, the Phantom chooses his own interment.

The unnamed friend spends much of his time in frustration, torn between two modes of thought when it comes to his surreptitious comrade. On the one hand, he bears him a great deal of respect for his genius and a certain amount of sympathy and pity for his uniquely tragic situation, but on the other hand he cannot appreciate his reclusive behavior, and is frustrated by the realization that by his very nature, the Phantom will never behave as a "normal" friend could be expected to. "Why must I have him for a friend?" laments the speaker, as though it were a force beyond his control that binds them together; the helplessness of the relationship is in direct correlation to the Phantom's situation as he laments his lot while refusing to do anything to change it.

In a tiny but incredibly pointed paragraph aside, Gaston Leroux yawns with boredom, sets aside his work on The Phantom of the Opera, and begins to work on The Mystery of the Yellow Room instead. He has plenty of time to finish the Phantom's story later, he reasons. At first glance, this seems to have nothing to do with anything, but in fact it is a sharp reminder of the most awful sort: Leroux's putting off of the narrative is symbolic of the degradation and demise of the Phantom under the weight of years and his own hobbling of himself. The highlight of the Phantom's life, the events of the novel, has passed and gone; he is at this point only a shadow waiting for death, a reminder of the past with no future of his own. The significance of the Phantom's story is ultimately only relevant to him in his solipsistic universe, the separate world he has created and maintained rather than participate in the society of his fellows; stripped of its romantic trappings and the immediacy of present events, it becomes just an exercise in futility, an unimportant legacy of petty crime that would have been entirely forgotten if it weren't for Leroux's silly schlock serial. Events long past have no bearing on the world today, but consume the Phantom's universe utterly; he has never moved on from those days, no matter how much the world has turned. His story has become itself his requiem, for a life that might as well already be dead.

At the age of 65, the Phantom finally capitulates to his friend's urging and declares that he will join society; his ecstatic friend makes preparations for his lodging, his income, for plastic surgery and societal lessons, all to help ease him into things, but when the appointed day comes, the Phantom does not appear, having chosen in the end to remain in his underground kingdom. The Phantom's courage fails him; despite his lifetime longing to be a part of the human race which has rejected him, in the end he cannot bring himself to face the level of growth and change that would be required of him to interact with them. The Phantom's choice of life is often likened to the choice to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven; but Barthelme's Phantom rules nothing except in his own rationalizations. The Phantom has chosen to hide in Hell rather than live free in Heaven.

The Phantom's friend, in a moment of supreme symbolism, sits down in front of the opera house to wait for the Phantom. He states that he will wait forever, barring a reassertion of logic. In this, the Phantom's entrapment in inertia becomes suddenly not just one man's tragic tale, but symptomatic of all of humanity. The Phantom may be trapping himself in his underground world, but his friend likewise traps himself in his determination to aid him; despite the discomfort of being the Phantom's friend and the constant frustration and disappointment of his choices, the unnamed friend, too, falls prey to the same inertia. He is torn between romance and common sense, real life and make-believe; by association, he is as much a part of the endless spiral of indecision and inability to adapt as the Phantom is. The final tragedy is not that the Phantom has doomed himself, but that the Phantom is only one example of the tragic tendency of all mankind to doom themselves to stagnation.

In a tiny, 5-page portrait, Barthelme highlights the true tragedy of the Phantom: that, after finally being offered the one thing that he craved above all others--the acceptance and respect of his fellow men, regardless of his deformity--he does not have the courage to accept it. The events of the novel are petty and peripheral, mere sturm und drang; the real struggle is here in the leaden uncertainty of day to day, and the real battle lost as the Phantom's inability to change sees him, ultimately, defeat himself.

And, of course, the Phantom is no worse than the rest of us, every one of whom succumbs to the cowardice of the known rather than face the possibility of change.

Incidentally, the text mentions acid in a manner that seems to imply that the Phantom's disfigurement is a result of an accident involving the caustic substance.  When combined with a passing reference to Liszt, I wonder more than a little if Barthelme saw the Lubin/Rains film prior to writing this story.  It seems like a logical progression.

It's going to be really hard to top that one, at least in a novel form. I have an amount of material greater than or equal to a small branch library to get to, so I'm sure there will be some excellence to be had; but the fear-spurred self-castration of mankind distilled into five pages of pithy text is going to be an incredibly hard act to follow for anyone.

Rest in peace, Mr. Barthelme. Your works are amazing. Someday, I want to grow up to be you.

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