Instead of witnessing real actions, we seem to glide through an eerily silent gallery of melodramatic waxworks: "He clenched his fists and an evil smile curled his lips as he repeated, like a threat, the name of that terrible and most mysterious criminal, of whose hellish influence he seemed to be made conscious yet once again." As John Ashbery points out in his affectionate and gently demystifying introduction, Allain and Souvestre were far from the only-and far from the ablest-practicioners in this French mode of sharply etched unreality. Banality is essential, a banality underscored by the wooden rhythms of of the anonymous 1915 translation. Fantômas stays dead on the page unless animated by a particular set of expectations the reader may have the illusion of submitting to an experience, but really he imparts imaginative energy to an otherwise inert set of signals. No better example could be found of genre fiction's tendency to make the individual work virtually irrelevant.
Slot them together and you can extract an unmistakable poetry of mechanization. All you need is a stock company of puppetlike characters (the Baroness, The Heiress, The Diplomat, The Rubber Merchant), a box of props (masks, daggers, cryptograms, gems, maps) and a set of early-modern backdrops (a railroad station, a suburban street, a proletarian tavern, the foredeck of a luxury liner). Once you grasp the concept you can conjure up unlimited Fantômas adventures. The text, banal in itself, suggests a thousand potential scenarios of infinite fascination. Just as their malevolent hero-a genius of crime, waging war on bourgeois society-terrifies most surely by his invisibility, the Fantômas novels are more powerful imagined than read. Allain and Souvestre's creation has imposed itself through sheer aura.
If the name Fantômas has lingered on in the English-speaking world, it's due largely to the praise lavished by the likes of Apollinaire ("from the imaginative standpoint.one of the richest works that exist"), Cendrars ("the modern Aeneid"), and Cocteau ("absurd and magnificent lyricism"), who elevated a crudely written, wildly plotted, and interminable roman feuilleton into a harbinger of Surrealism.
Here is a book as phantasmal as its unseen hero: a legendary crime novel (first of a 32-volume series) unavailable in English for many decades, source of an equally legendary and equally inaccessible silent movie serial by Louis Feuillade. From the Village Voice, August 18, 1986: review of Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, New York: William Morrow, 1986 Who Is Fantômas? "Crime After Crime", by Geoffrey O'Brien.
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