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igenlodeCollected thoughts on Erik and fanfiction (a companion piece to C
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vicomte_de_chagny)
I cringe whenever I see fan-fiction in which 'Erik' is routinely best friends with 'Nadir' -- this just doesn't exist unless you're writing a story set in Susan Kay's world, which is in itself fan-fiction. The Persian in Leroux finds Erik both pitiful and terrible, but he isn't his friend -- more a sort of tolerated watcher who knows that he may some day have to take action. One can extrapolate a complex relationship from that, but simply importing Kay's names wholesale into a world that doesn't share her backstory because you want to give Erik someone to club around with feels like pure laziness to me :-(
The fandom tends to treat both Raoul and Christine as effectively inconsequential, with almost all their interest revolving around an idealised Phantom; it's something I find difficult to understand, given that the musical is basically Christine's story and the novel is largely seen from Raoul's point of view.
I'm not sure how you get devoted to a character to the degree that you ignore most of his original conception (smells of rotten flesh; laughs insanely; blackmails people for outrageously large sums of money; designs and installs torture chambers for fun; intends to blow up a full theatre during a performance; randomly pretends to be a ghost) and impose on him your own self-identification of the helpless unloved outsider... or at least, that's my best guess at the psychology behind it. I feel that people think of *themselves* as the poor Phantom whom everybody hates unreasonably, and whose cause they can passionately espouse, and transfer that into wanting to force Christine to love him as a reward for his sufferings.
I'm conscious, however, that I'm guilty of taking a rather similar attitude to Raoul where Christine is concerned -- not that I want to 'reward him for his sufferings', of course, but that I'm more concerned in fanfiction that he 'gets Christine' than that she is happy (which is why I can read tragic endings, in which one or all of the characters die, with more equanimity than endings in which Christine is taught that what she really wants is Erik after all!
I haven't read Kay... and am probably not going to, because from what I gather it's pretty much a love-letter to Erik; I had rather more sympathy for the character before I discovered the fandom, which has rather soured me on him. When people say "I liked it, but", the 'but' is usually the treatment of the actual Opera section, and the bit they liked is usually the poor persecuted childhood and the Snarky Erik in Persia. Well, I'm unlikely to enjoy Woobie Erik, and I've seen too much of Nadir where he doesn't belong :-(
I also find it hard to forgive Kay for filling the fandom with Evil Gypsies, because that's *not* in Leroux -- where the gypsies are presented as a sort of university education in magic and wise knowledge, and where Erik has been earning his living as a performer employing his own showman long before he met them. She chose to make Erik's pre-Opera history as traumatic as possible in order -- presumably -- to explain his bizarre behaviour in later life... and possibly to try to fix the inconsistency in Leroux where we are told by the author that Erik has been exiled from the human race, but actually *shown* the history of a man who seems to have done rather well for himself, performing before crowned heads, being sought out and famous across the East, and then being equally successful in establishing himself in a 'ordinary' life back in France when he wishes to do so. He isn't driven under the Opera by persecution from the mob; he apparently gets bored of his role constructing workaday buildings and decides to build himself a magical residence for fun. Erik's whole backstory is a bit inconsistent, and one gets the impression that Leroux made it up at the last minute for his epilogue ;-p
But Leroux's take on the 'travelling fair' is that Erik was his own boss: "il s'était exhibé dans les foires, où son impresario le montrait comme «mort vivant»" (he put *himself* on show at fairs, where his barker advertised him as "the Living Death") and he travelled across Europe from fair to fair, finally completing his strange education in artistry and stage magic with the original masters of these arts, the gypsies, before he reached Russia. We aren't even told what age he was when he left home, other than that he did so as soon as possible, "de bonne heure".
The musical describes Erik as a man in a cage as an *adult* (note that according to Madame Giry he has already been to work for the Shah of Persia at this point, in addition to being an educated architect, composer, etc!) -- this is Lloyd Webber's attempt to get all Erik's backstory into a single scene, just as he uses the "Little Lotte" scene to indicate the Perros-Guirec backstory for Raoul and Christine. So he quite reasonably simplifies it enormously.
So quite where Kay got her concept that he was imprisoned, abused, and exploited as a small child by the gypsies, I don't know -- other than a desire to make people feel sorry for him :-(
Anyway, Kay wanted a sympathetic Erik, so she invented a backstory that would make him not mad but sad, as it were. And she created sarcastic, smooth-talking Erik in place of the Gollum-like Phantom whom we actually see interacting with the daroga (there's a scene where the latter describes the grotesque figure sculling away on his boat with a pair of glowing eyes just visible, which sounds *very* much like a proto-Gollum!)
That's not entirely fair, because there are scenes where they interact in a much more fluent and sane way -- and Erik functions on a quite sophisticated level with Christine while he still has his illusion of masked normality. And despite the fact that in every scene they share one of them is warning or threatening the other, they presumably *must* have had some kind of guarded mutual acknowledgement off the page, as it were, or Erik wouldn't allow the daroga the relative liberties that he does (i.e. talking first and killing afterwards :-p)
To clarify: Kay had every right to create her own version of the characters, just as Frederick Forsyth had for "The Phantom of Manhattan". And people have every right to choose to write fan-fiction of her version, if that's the universe they want to play in.
I'm certainly not recommending "The Phantom of Manhattan" :-p
(You can argue that it's actually less of a travesty in what it does to the original characters than "Love never Dies", but "Love Never Dies" has got good music in it, and "Phantom of Manhattan" is not a good book... though that said, it's still better-written than 90% of fan-fiction, simply because it had to meet professional publication standards!) I'm citing it as a controversial example of a derivative work that, ultimately, has no more and no less ethical validity than Kay's "Phantom": the fact that the fandom *likes* the view of Erik shown in the one and doesn't like the view of Erik shown in the other doesn't make Kay any more 'canon'.
But I think a lot of people treat Kay's Phantom backstory as canon fact, when it isn't -- and what's worse (from my point of view), they haven't even read Kay's novel in order to do so. They're just doing a sort of Chinese Whispers from other stuff on FFnet. Which is how you end up with a sort of fan-evolved snuggly universe that is the accepted setting for a majority -- if not an overwhelming majority -- of stories in this fandom, and which bears jarringly little resemblance to the original work[s] of which the writers are supposedly fans, once you go back and take a fresh look at what Lloyd Webber or Leroux actually *wrote* :-P
(Or even, I suspect, what Kay wrote, but since my knowledge of that is limited to what other people have written *about* it, I can't be sure.)
Erik pretty much *is* off-the-rocker insane :-p
(Although note that in Leroux, he does in fact leave the Opera regularly and interact with other people, using his patent papier-maché nose and false moustache; on at least one of the occasions when the daroga meets him, he is simply going shopping! And he shows up at the directors' banquet and makes tasteless remarks about Buquet (almost as if he's afraid that no-one will notice his clever murder if he doesn't draw attention to it :-p) So the fan-concept of him as a recluse trembling in fear and darkness in case someone might see his face doesn't really hold water; Erik doesn't -- so far as we know -- have friends, but he does talk to shopkeepers and so on. He probably has a laundress, as well... and unless he has an unseen kitchen, he patronises cook-shops :-D)
The daroga's own stated motive for spending time with Erik is that after discovering that he had moved in under the Opera (and what a disturbing revelation *that* must have been, given that the daroga had apparently been exiled to Paris without the slightest idea that the cause of his exile was going to turn up there too!) he wanted to keep an eye on him in case he did something dreadful. However, I think it's true that he must have felt some sense of responsibility on a personal level as well as a duty to protect his adopted city and its denizens from potential disaster ;-D
After all, he doesn't *only* sneak around and spy on Erik's doings in secret; he also talks to him (and indeed asks for permission to see inside his residence), and allows Erik to boast to him. So he isn't merely acting as a policeman, but attempting to gain Erik's trust.
One has to bear in mind that Leroux's story was not written as a romance -- it's not intended as a love-triangle but as a horror-mystery, with Raoul playing detective and Erik taking the role of the monster under the bed :-p (Leroux was a successful author of detective fiction, not a literary novelist or a writer of women's magazine stories, and in fact this book wasn't particularly well received compared to his regular output.)
So the love-elements in the story exist chiefly to provide motivation -- to keep Raoul investigating the supposedly supernatural occurrences and to explain Erik's impersonation. I would guess that Leroux first of all came up with the concept of a lunatic under the Opera House scaring everyone by pretending to be an apparition (the central 'pitch' of the book is "The Ghost was a flesh and blood man") and then worked out a reason *why* he would be doing this...
(Note that in the novel, it's specifically stated that the manifestations of the Ghost only began a few months before the gala performance, despite the fact that Erik had been living there for some time; apparently it wasn't until he started coaching Christine (which also began only a few months before her performance) that he laid claim to Box 5 via Madame Giry, and the 'accidents' started! According to the daroga, the whole Phantom business was set up simply because Erik wanted money to set up house with Christine, and sought the easiest way of obtaining large amounts: fraud and blackmail ;-D)
So if readers find the book unsatisfactory when they are in search of romantic interactions, that may be because it wasn't written with those in mind ;-p
I think Leroux regards Erik chiefly in the light of a plot device, although he *doesn't* write him as an unmitigated monster -- as he easily could. Partly I think that's necessary in order to explain the behaviour of Christine and the Daroga (which is necessary to the plot!), but also I think it's key to the moral of the story. And I'm not sure the trope would have lasted so long if the Phantom had been completely unsympathetic (although Dracula seemed to manage quite well, and Frankenstein's Monster has generally been made into *more* of a monster than the original, not less :-p)
I've heard people criticising the story for being 'bigoted about disabled people' because the ugly, unpopular character is depicted as a threat and doesn't get the girl he loves, and -- quite apart from this being a wildly anachronistic standard of judgement -- I think they've got the working of the story backwards. Leroux set out to write a mystery about a man living under the Opera pretending to be a ghost. He then made him deformed and mad in order to make him *more* sympathetic and his actions understandable; if he had made Erik a normal man who brainwashed, blackmailed and tortured people to death because he was evil and ambitious, and hid away underground so that his crimes didn't catch up with him, you'd end up with a Bond villain instead of a pitiable monster :-P
He did not set out to write a story about a disfigured man being rewarded by the love of a beautiful woman, any more than Victor Hugo did.
I think Christine feels terribly betrayed by Erik's transformation ("what I used to dream, I now dread" -- and I think she's talking there as much about performing as she is about Erik and his world); someone she trusted absolutely has turned out to be a selfish monster whose touch taints everything she loves. She wants to reclaim him from being a pitiful "creature of darkness", and she has the wisdom to perceive, despite her anger and her own hurt feelings, that it's not all his fault. He simply doesn't *understand* about love or about how other people work. He isn't a loving, protective teacher; he's a damaged toddler in the body of a powerful adult, effectively.
Erik does love Christine, and very powerfully; it's the only thing he can focus on, and it's the most important thing in this world to him. He doesn't think about it from *her* point of view at all, of course (and let's be fair, how many of us in the grip of that kind of passion can?) He wants her. He needs her. He needs her to want him. From the way he is acting, he has quite possibly never felt this for anyone before; all he knows is the effect she has on him, and he will do *anything* for that fix. And when she doesn't do what he wants -- when she wakes from her trance to find herself alone with a masked stranger in a place she has only the vaguest memories of reaching, and tries to find out who he is; when she kisses Raoul, and laughs with joy -- then he lashes out at her, and at the world.
But he *needs* her. Even when he is sick with hatred for himself he needs her, because his universe has totally reconfigured itself to revolve around her existence, and nothing that had any meaning for him before has any meaning now unless it touches on her. And the depths of that need drive him into an escalation of desperation that culminates in quite insane acts, all of which seemed like the logical next step towards her at the time...
And when he wakes up -- when he sees himself with clear eyes, and sees what he has done -- then his whole constructed universe tumbles around him, and all he can do is recoil into willed self-destruction, and send her away in a purging agony of despair. Because there is nothing left, really. And in that sane, bleak world of his own monstrosity, he is already dead. Without her, he should be dead. Without her, there should be no world... and this, by a different route, is pretty much the point that Leroux-Erik has reached when he *wants* Christine to turn the grasshopper.
He doesn't expect her to turn the scorpion; no-one could face that prospect. He wants the whole thing over; he wants the Opera destroyed, he wants Raoul destroyed, he wants his weary underground life destroyed, he wants Christine destroyed (and frankly he isn't very much concerned one way or the other about the daroga ;-p) And he wants her to make that choice for him, but if not, he will do it himself.
It's suicide-by-Christine, basically.
And Raoul? Raoul is very simple and (in the musical at least) very straightforward. He is delighted to see Christine again, he is excited about her great triumph, and all he wants to do is go off and celebrate. And then it turns out things aren't so simple after all... and all he can do is try to get Christine out of this strange, confused, half-superstitious and half-criminal conspiracy that seems to have wound itself around the Opera. He is Christine's voice of sanity and reason, and steadfast, reliable anchor to a past that is what it seems and to a future that is no lie. He promises her safety and freedom and whatever she needs to get her out of this... and he truly means to keep those promises, whatever it takes to do it. Only it turns out he can't, and that he has only made matters worse. And all he can do is beg her to save herself, and not count the cost; he doesn't want to be the cause of selling her into precisely that fate which she most dreads. He doesn't even *want* to live in such a world -- he would rather not see it.
(So the two men have something in common after all... save that Raoul would rather use his life to buy her freedom, and the Phantom has no value for his if she is free.)
ollected thoughts on Raoul posted to
vicomte_de_chagny)I cringe whenever I see fan-fiction in which 'Erik' is routinely best friends with 'Nadir' -- this just doesn't exist unless you're writing a story set in Susan Kay's world, which is in itself fan-fiction. The Persian in Leroux finds Erik both pitiful and terrible, but he isn't his friend -- more a sort of tolerated watcher who knows that he may some day have to take action. One can extrapolate a complex relationship from that, but simply importing Kay's names wholesale into a world that doesn't share her backstory because you want to give Erik someone to club around with feels like pure laziness to me :-(
The fandom tends to treat both Raoul and Christine as effectively inconsequential, with almost all their interest revolving around an idealised Phantom; it's something I find difficult to understand, given that the musical is basically Christine's story and the novel is largely seen from Raoul's point of view.
I'm not sure how you get devoted to a character to the degree that you ignore most of his original conception (smells of rotten flesh; laughs insanely; blackmails people for outrageously large sums of money; designs and installs torture chambers for fun; intends to blow up a full theatre during a performance; randomly pretends to be a ghost) and impose on him your own self-identification of the helpless unloved outsider... or at least, that's my best guess at the psychology behind it. I feel that people think of *themselves* as the poor Phantom whom everybody hates unreasonably, and whose cause they can passionately espouse, and transfer that into wanting to force Christine to love him as a reward for his sufferings.
I'm conscious, however, that I'm guilty of taking a rather similar attitude to Raoul where Christine is concerned -- not that I want to 'reward him for his sufferings', of course, but that I'm more concerned in fanfiction that he 'gets Christine' than that she is happy (which is why I can read tragic endings, in which one or all of the characters die, with more equanimity than endings in which Christine is taught that what she really wants is Erik after all!
Susan Kay's Erik
I haven't read Kay... and am probably not going to, because from what I gather it's pretty much a love-letter to Erik; I had rather more sympathy for the character before I discovered the fandom, which has rather soured me on him. When people say "I liked it, but", the 'but' is usually the treatment of the actual Opera section, and the bit they liked is usually the poor persecuted childhood and the Snarky Erik in Persia. Well, I'm unlikely to enjoy Woobie Erik, and I've seen too much of Nadir where he doesn't belong :-(
I also find it hard to forgive Kay for filling the fandom with Evil Gypsies, because that's *not* in Leroux -- where the gypsies are presented as a sort of university education in magic and wise knowledge, and where Erik has been earning his living as a performer employing his own showman long before he met them. She chose to make Erik's pre-Opera history as traumatic as possible in order -- presumably -- to explain his bizarre behaviour in later life... and possibly to try to fix the inconsistency in Leroux where we are told by the author that Erik has been exiled from the human race, but actually *shown* the history of a man who seems to have done rather well for himself, performing before crowned heads, being sought out and famous across the East, and then being equally successful in establishing himself in a 'ordinary' life back in France when he wishes to do so. He isn't driven under the Opera by persecution from the mob; he apparently gets bored of his role constructing workaday buildings and decides to build himself a magical residence for fun. Erik's whole backstory is a bit inconsistent, and one gets the impression that Leroux made it up at the last minute for his epilogue ;-p
But Leroux's take on the 'travelling fair' is that Erik was his own boss: "il s'était exhibé dans les foires, où son impresario le montrait comme «mort vivant»" (he put *himself* on show at fairs, where his barker advertised him as "the Living Death") and he travelled across Europe from fair to fair, finally completing his strange education in artistry and stage magic with the original masters of these arts, the gypsies, before he reached Russia. We aren't even told what age he was when he left home, other than that he did so as soon as possible, "de bonne heure".
The musical describes Erik as a man in a cage as an *adult* (note that according to Madame Giry he has already been to work for the Shah of Persia at this point, in addition to being an educated architect, composer, etc!) -- this is Lloyd Webber's attempt to get all Erik's backstory into a single scene, just as he uses the "Little Lotte" scene to indicate the Perros-Guirec backstory for Raoul and Christine. So he quite reasonably simplifies it enormously.
So quite where Kay got her concept that he was imprisoned, abused, and exploited as a small child by the gypsies, I don't know -- other than a desire to make people feel sorry for him :-(
Anyway, Kay wanted a sympathetic Erik, so she invented a backstory that would make him not mad but sad, as it were. And she created sarcastic, smooth-talking Erik in place of the Gollum-like Phantom whom we actually see interacting with the daroga (there's a scene where the latter describes the grotesque figure sculling away on his boat with a pair of glowing eyes just visible, which sounds *very* much like a proto-Gollum!)
That's not entirely fair, because there are scenes where they interact in a much more fluent and sane way -- and Erik functions on a quite sophisticated level with Christine while he still has his illusion of masked normality. And despite the fact that in every scene they share one of them is warning or threatening the other, they presumably *must* have had some kind of guarded mutual acknowledgement off the page, as it were, or Erik wouldn't allow the daroga the relative liberties that he does (i.e. talking first and killing afterwards :-p)
To clarify: Kay had every right to create her own version of the characters, just as Frederick Forsyth had for "The Phantom of Manhattan". And people have every right to choose to write fan-fiction of her version, if that's the universe they want to play in.
I'm certainly not recommending "The Phantom of Manhattan" :-p
(You can argue that it's actually less of a travesty in what it does to the original characters than "Love never Dies", but "Love Never Dies" has got good music in it, and "Phantom of Manhattan" is not a good book... though that said, it's still better-written than 90% of fan-fiction, simply because it had to meet professional publication standards!) I'm citing it as a controversial example of a derivative work that, ultimately, has no more and no less ethical validity than Kay's "Phantom": the fact that the fandom *likes* the view of Erik shown in the one and doesn't like the view of Erik shown in the other doesn't make Kay any more 'canon'.
But I think a lot of people treat Kay's Phantom backstory as canon fact, when it isn't -- and what's worse (from my point of view), they haven't even read Kay's novel in order to do so. They're just doing a sort of Chinese Whispers from other stuff on FFnet. Which is how you end up with a sort of fan-evolved snuggly universe that is the accepted setting for a majority -- if not an overwhelming majority -- of stories in this fandom, and which bears jarringly little resemblance to the original work[s] of which the writers are supposedly fans, once you go back and take a fresh look at what Lloyd Webber or Leroux actually *wrote* :-P
(Or even, I suspect, what Kay wrote, but since my knowledge of that is limited to what other people have written *about* it, I can't be sure.)
Erik pretty much *is* off-the-rocker insane :-p
(Although note that in Leroux, he does in fact leave the Opera regularly and interact with other people, using his patent papier-maché nose and false moustache; on at least one of the occasions when the daroga meets him, he is simply going shopping! And he shows up at the directors' banquet and makes tasteless remarks about Buquet (almost as if he's afraid that no-one will notice his clever murder if he doesn't draw attention to it :-p) So the fan-concept of him as a recluse trembling in fear and darkness in case someone might see his face doesn't really hold water; Erik doesn't -- so far as we know -- have friends, but he does talk to shopkeepers and so on. He probably has a laundress, as well... and unless he has an unseen kitchen, he patronises cook-shops :-D)
The Persian
The daroga's own stated motive for spending time with Erik is that after discovering that he had moved in under the Opera (and what a disturbing revelation *that* must have been, given that the daroga had apparently been exiled to Paris without the slightest idea that the cause of his exile was going to turn up there too!) he wanted to keep an eye on him in case he did something dreadful. However, I think it's true that he must have felt some sense of responsibility on a personal level as well as a duty to protect his adopted city and its denizens from potential disaster ;-D
After all, he doesn't *only* sneak around and spy on Erik's doings in secret; he also talks to him (and indeed asks for permission to see inside his residence), and allows Erik to boast to him. So he isn't merely acting as a policeman, but attempting to gain Erik's trust.
Erik as plot device
One has to bear in mind that Leroux's story was not written as a romance -- it's not intended as a love-triangle but as a horror-mystery, with Raoul playing detective and Erik taking the role of the monster under the bed :-p (Leroux was a successful author of detective fiction, not a literary novelist or a writer of women's magazine stories, and in fact this book wasn't particularly well received compared to his regular output.)
So the love-elements in the story exist chiefly to provide motivation -- to keep Raoul investigating the supposedly supernatural occurrences and to explain Erik's impersonation. I would guess that Leroux first of all came up with the concept of a lunatic under the Opera House scaring everyone by pretending to be an apparition (the central 'pitch' of the book is "The Ghost was a flesh and blood man") and then worked out a reason *why* he would be doing this...
(Note that in the novel, it's specifically stated that the manifestations of the Ghost only began a few months before the gala performance, despite the fact that Erik had been living there for some time; apparently it wasn't until he started coaching Christine (which also began only a few months before her performance) that he laid claim to Box 5 via Madame Giry, and the 'accidents' started! According to the daroga, the whole Phantom business was set up simply because Erik wanted money to set up house with Christine, and sought the easiest way of obtaining large amounts: fraud and blackmail ;-D)
So if readers find the book unsatisfactory when they are in search of romantic interactions, that may be because it wasn't written with those in mind ;-p
I think Leroux regards Erik chiefly in the light of a plot device, although he *doesn't* write him as an unmitigated monster -- as he easily could. Partly I think that's necessary in order to explain the behaviour of Christine and the Daroga (which is necessary to the plot!), but also I think it's key to the moral of the story. And I'm not sure the trope would have lasted so long if the Phantom had been completely unsympathetic (although Dracula seemed to manage quite well, and Frankenstein's Monster has generally been made into *more* of a monster than the original, not less :-p)
I've heard people criticising the story for being 'bigoted about disabled people' because the ugly, unpopular character is depicted as a threat and doesn't get the girl he loves, and -- quite apart from this being a wildly anachronistic standard of judgement -- I think they've got the working of the story backwards. Leroux set out to write a mystery about a man living under the Opera pretending to be a ghost. He then made him deformed and mad in order to make him *more* sympathetic and his actions understandable; if he had made Erik a normal man who brainwashed, blackmailed and tortured people to death because he was evil and ambitious, and hid away underground so that his crimes didn't catch up with him, you'd end up with a Bond villain instead of a pitiable monster :-P
He did not set out to write a story about a disfigured man being rewarded by the love of a beautiful woman, any more than Victor Hugo did.
Erik's passion for Christine
I think Christine feels terribly betrayed by Erik's transformation ("what I used to dream, I now dread" -- and I think she's talking there as much about performing as she is about Erik and his world); someone she trusted absolutely has turned out to be a selfish monster whose touch taints everything she loves. She wants to reclaim him from being a pitiful "creature of darkness", and she has the wisdom to perceive, despite her anger and her own hurt feelings, that it's not all his fault. He simply doesn't *understand* about love or about how other people work. He isn't a loving, protective teacher; he's a damaged toddler in the body of a powerful adult, effectively.
Erik does love Christine, and very powerfully; it's the only thing he can focus on, and it's the most important thing in this world to him. He doesn't think about it from *her* point of view at all, of course (and let's be fair, how many of us in the grip of that kind of passion can?) He wants her. He needs her. He needs her to want him. From the way he is acting, he has quite possibly never felt this for anyone before; all he knows is the effect she has on him, and he will do *anything* for that fix. And when she doesn't do what he wants -- when she wakes from her trance to find herself alone with a masked stranger in a place she has only the vaguest memories of reaching, and tries to find out who he is; when she kisses Raoul, and laughs with joy -- then he lashes out at her, and at the world.
But he *needs* her. Even when he is sick with hatred for himself he needs her, because his universe has totally reconfigured itself to revolve around her existence, and nothing that had any meaning for him before has any meaning now unless it touches on her. And the depths of that need drive him into an escalation of desperation that culminates in quite insane acts, all of which seemed like the logical next step towards her at the time...
And when he wakes up -- when he sees himself with clear eyes, and sees what he has done -- then his whole constructed universe tumbles around him, and all he can do is recoil into willed self-destruction, and send her away in a purging agony of despair. Because there is nothing left, really. And in that sane, bleak world of his own monstrosity, he is already dead. Without her, he should be dead. Without her, there should be no world... and this, by a different route, is pretty much the point that Leroux-Erik has reached when he *wants* Christine to turn the grasshopper.
He doesn't expect her to turn the scorpion; no-one could face that prospect. He wants the whole thing over; he wants the Opera destroyed, he wants Raoul destroyed, he wants his weary underground life destroyed, he wants Christine destroyed (and frankly he isn't very much concerned one way or the other about the daroga ;-p) And he wants her to make that choice for him, but if not, he will do it himself.
It's suicide-by-Christine, basically.
And Raoul? Raoul is very simple and (in the musical at least) very straightforward. He is delighted to see Christine again, he is excited about her great triumph, and all he wants to do is go off and celebrate. And then it turns out things aren't so simple after all... and all he can do is try to get Christine out of this strange, confused, half-superstitious and half-criminal conspiracy that seems to have wound itself around the Opera. He is Christine's voice of sanity and reason, and steadfast, reliable anchor to a past that is what it seems and to a future that is no lie. He promises her safety and freedom and whatever she needs to get her out of this... and he truly means to keep those promises, whatever it takes to do it. Only it turns out he can't, and that he has only made matters worse. And all he can do is beg her to save herself, and not count the cost; he doesn't want to be the cause of selling her into precisely that fate which she most dreads. He doesn't even *want* to live in such a world -- he would rather not see it.
(So the two men have something in common after all... save that Raoul would rather use his life to buy her freedom, and the Phantom has no value for his if she is free.)