Fantômas is a cheap, nasty little book. It indulges itself in
gory revelations and sleazy voyeurism all designed, not to shock its audience -
because the reader has a fairly good idea what they’re letting themselves in
for - but to allow them to enjoy the delicious and vicarious thrills of wanton,
licentious rapine. The complete trashiness of its writing style, even given the
fact of translation from the original French, is a saving grace: melodrama is
always too corny to be accepted as reality. It is, in short, pulpy
entertainment for the masses.
Back in the ‘Eighties, Picador re-released the first
eponymous novel and it was the first printing in ages that had taken place
outside of France: reading it then I caught the spirit of the concept and even
wrote a roleplaying game based upon it. I have since discovered that that
edition – the only one available in English at the time – had been hacked
almost into illegibility by its editors. If you’re interested in exploring Fantômas’
world, try to find the Dover edition (ISBN: 0-486-44971-8) which is a faithful
translation of the entire text.
So, why did it become so popular? At the time of its
first release in 1911, it took the Parisians by storm, and in short order, the
Dadaists, the Futurists and the Surrealist art movements all took up the
Fantômas cause and hoisted the masked villain onto the hero’s pedestal. After
its release, the writers, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, were kept busy
pumping out sequels and produced thirty-one such novels in the next few years
for an audience that waited with baited breath. The French poet Guillame
Apollinaire established the SAF, or Societé
des Amis de Fantômas (Society for the Friends of Fantômas) in 1913, an
organisation which counted some of Paris’ most illustrious intellects among its
members, including Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. In 1913, Louis Feuillade
also directed the first of a handful of “Fantômas”
movies.
How did all these people become so enthralled?
Personally, I believe the marketing that went on around the release of the
books helped a lot. The famous poster of the villain Fantômas, looming like a
giant over the city of Paris with a dagger in hand, was plastered over the
walls of Paris in the lead-up to the novel’s release: this image has all the
hallmarks of the Surrealist’s manifesto - a disturbing, dreamlike and strange
image. No wonder these artists leapt onto it! A later sequel, The Bride of Fantômas, has as its cover
an image of a domino-masked bride being clutched at by many male hands,
reaching in from the edges of the picture: can such an image not have
influenced Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride
Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even”? Even in motion pictures the influence
of Fantômas lingers: in the 1931
production of “Dracula” directed by
Tod Browning, the caped Count looks much more like the dashing Fantômas than
Bram Stoker’s bestial vampire.
Fantômas wasn’t even particularly original: there were other
writers at the time mining a similar vein of popular interest and their styles
were, arguably, better than Allain and Souvestre’s: Germany had Dr. Mabuse; England had the legacy of
Moriarty. What Fantômas did have was
a sense of time and place: readers of the era related to the fantastic antics
of the anti-hero because he was placed against a backdrop of minute sketches of
the life of the time. Whenever the characters confront each other in the
novels, they do so in places and surroundings of which most Parisians had
intimate knowledge and which other French nationals had little trouble
imagining. Areas of the French capital were painstakingly detailed and the mood
of those (often very dodgy places) was convincingly sketched out – the denizens
of Paris thrilled to the horrors that just might possibly have taken place
around them. Even now, these sharp observations of Parisian life in the early
nineteen hundreds are intriguing to the modern reader.
In the Fantômas
novels, many outrageous connections were established before the series finally
concluded. For instance, Fantômas and his sometime lover Lady Maud produce a
daughter who grows up and becomes romantically involved with the intrepid
reporter and Fantômas–trailer Jerome Fandor, who ultimately is discovered to be
the son of Fantômas from an earlier tryst. Such forbidden love must have had
the reading public drooling!
In other areas, Allain and Souvestre were completely
clueless, especially in the realm of police procedure. No policeman in a
Fantômas novel – especially Juve, Fantômas’ intrepid nemesis - behaves in a
credible fashion. They are anal to the point of ineptitude, bumbling and wholly
specious in their views. They are blinkered by notions of race and class and
they are completely unrestrained by legislation when it best suits the story
for them to be so. In effect, they are the mortar that binds the authors’ world
together, and they facilitate the action by never getting in the way of it.
Disguise is one example of this. Allain and Souvestre’s
cops adopt the weirdest outfits to try and blend in to the Paris scene. They
have putty noses and greasepaint and they wander about as ‘fishwives’ or
‘retired cavalry officers’ – Juve spends a lot of time congratulating them on
each bizarre incarnation, despite the fact that he and Fandor usually recognise
them in a heartbeat. It’s a continuation of the Malorian tradition whereby, if
one states that one is disguised, then one is simply unrecognisable.
Allain and Souvestre’s other failings in the realm of
knowledge are just as remarkable, given the types of stories that they’re
telling. In The Silent Executioner,
Fantômas dispatches his victims by means of a python, trained to infiltrate
houses, target enemies and specifically to strike whilst they’re in bed. Now,
boa constrictors aren’t stupid, but they’re simply not this smart, or this aggressive.
They also describe the creature as being “wet and slimy” and as having “scales
like a fish” –a rather unnatural snake! Nevertheless, all citizens of Paris
recoil in fear at the mere sight of it!
Of course, these kind of lapses in accuracy can be all
written off as the authors’ not letting the facts get in the way of a good yarn
and, since the tales are a testament to the marketing value of this approach,
who are we to judge? Improbability is the meat of this genre.
I guess it’s easy for us, a century later at the
beginning of the Twenty-First Century, to wonder what all the fuss was about
and, I guess, the dwindling interest in all things “Enfantômastic” (thank-you,
Mr. Joyce!) reflects the limited longevity and relevance of such a creation.
However, we live in a time when ‘getting away with it’ seems to be regarded as
somehow clever and laudable, and our mass-media heroes – The Fast & The Furious; Dexter;
Ocean’s 11 – are all anti-heroes,
slipping like Fantômas through the net of the Law; catching a sense of that
spirit, of the magic of books - even bad ones - and having fun while doing it
are entertaining goals to vicariously enjoy. Enter if you dare - Fantômas is
waiting!
*****
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