First Rough Draft: Hugo and the Digital Age

This is a definite rough draft, but here's what I've got so far.  Let me know how I can improve.

Victor Hugo in the Digital Age

“The one will kill the other…. It was the presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, would also change its mode of expression; that the leading idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same material in the same fashion” (Hugo 169-170).

            While it may have been most common for people to experience a book, then want to see the movie, or in more recently, to see the movie then read the book, in most recent cases, it is increasingly the case that we experience many different media in our exploration of a piece of literature.  It is common now for people to have read a work of literature in eBook format downloaded onto the Kindle or Nook, or to have listened to the audiobook version from Librivox.  Many people’s first experience with a work of literature came first from seeing the play or movie adaptation.  Some people are first exposed to an adaptation of these kinds through social media sites like YouTube.  The way that people experience literature in the digital age is very much affected by digital media versions of a particular work.

Clearly, the digital age has revolutionized the way that people interact with literature by widening its sphere of influence through various mediums.  The presence of digital media has created an age dominated by multiple primary texts.  A separate medium can become so naturalized that it is seen as the primary medium.  There is no way to read any work of literature in isolation anymore.  The various mediums act as modems to spread the textual work abroad to larger and larger audiences.  These factors have created an appendage to the literary canon, a format canon that has started to gain a hierarchy in itself by ranking the various mediums.  The necessity to incorporate the various digital media resources in the study of literature is becoming more and more apparent.  Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame gives examples of how this revolution of mediums has happened before and how to visualize the changes occurring to the study of literature due to the digital age.

Victor Hugo describes in detail the cathedral of Notre Dame, the focus of the novel.  He describes the archdeacon’s anxiety that “the one will kill the other” meaning that the printing press will kill architecture.  Hugo describes this transformation when he says “that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, must make way for the book of papers still more solid and enduring” (170).  The Hunchback of Notre Dame is set in 1482, at the heart of the transition between the middle ages and the Renaissance.  The Gutenberg printing press has emerged and is gaining power that competes with the power of the church:

“Human thought discovered a means of perpetuation, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but also simpler and easier.  Architecture was dethroned…. The invention of printing was the greatest event in history…. It was the renewed and renovated form of expression of humanity; it is human thought laying off one form and assuming another” (176).

At the heart of all this revolution and recreation is the transformation of mediums. 

Most people would consider the physical book of The Hunchback of Notre Dame to be the primary text.  There is a discrepancy with this assumption, however, because the book actually started as Notre Dame de Paris, in French.  The English translation, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is actually a secondary text to that one.  There are discrepancies between the French text and the English translation because all the cultural nuances can never be translated fully across language.  This is made apparent by the discrepancies among the various English translations.  For example, the second chapter of the fifth book in Notre Dame de Paris is entitled “Ceci Tuera Cela.”  In the audiobook English translation read by Mark Nelson, translates this chapter to be “This Will Kill That”; however, in the textual, Barnes and Noble edition, “Ceci Tuera Cela” translates as “The One Will Kill the Other.”  Now, arguably, these two translations vary little in meaning, but the fact still stands that the translations obviously vary depending on the translator. 

My experience reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame brought me to this conclusion.  I had not realized that when I prided myself in loving what I considered the original, primary text, that it was in fact not the primary text at all.

If we take this reasoning, of varying primary texts, out a little farther, the book itself is a textual medium to the actual cathedral in Paris.  So really, by the time one reads the English translation, what would generally be known as a primary text, he or she has been exposed to at least three different mediums of the same subject.  It goes to show in the case of the English translation, that a secondary, or even tertiary, medium can become so naturalized that it is accepted as a primary text. 

To bring this point a little close to home, take as another example, the American post bellum novel Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.  When most people think of Gone With the Wind, they do not think of the original text.  They immediately envision the iconic embrace between Rhett and Scarlett of the 1939 movie with the charismatic Clark Gable and captivating Vivien Leigh.  In fact, there are people having critical discussions about Gone With the Wind, but not in reference to the book, in reference to the movie.  The movie is their first, and most likely only, impression of the story of Gone With the Wind, and it colors their perception of the book when and if they actually read it.  Even those who did read the novel to begin with can hardly expect to talk about it with any number of people without referencing the movie.  Sorry Margaret Mitchell, but in this case, the movie has dominated the text.  In a sense, it has become the primary text.  Few people read the book and watch the movie in that order.  It is the movie that persuades people to tackle the massive textual edition.  This demonstrates a very important digital principle:  no one can read in isolation.  It is not just about the book anymore.  In order to have a discussion, thoroughly or otherwise, of a piece of literature with any number of people, one has to have experienced or at least been exposed to it through these several different mediums.

There are several parallels that can be drawn from the detailed image Hugo presents of the Notre Dame cathedral in comparison with the world of digital media today.  Take the cathedral to mean the actual, physical textual work.  As the single, primary medium, one would have to go to Paris in order to experience it.  By limiting oneself to one medium, it is like being limited to Paris when in actuality, it is possible to experience the piece of literature in the comfort of one’s own home, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.  They are these other mediums that open the literary work to the rest of the world.  That is the beauty of the digital world.  It makes interests, such as in literature, accessible to people all over the world.  Not only through, for example a movie, can the world of literature be brought to more and more audiences of the same cultural sphere, but also those movies can be translated into other languages, or even take on certain attributes of distant cultures that make the story pertinent to those audiences.  Language, cultural, geographic, and special interest barriers disappear when it comes to digital media.

For example, take one of the most beloved and widely acclaimed Western pieces of literature, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  This story has been translated into a number of languages, and has had been the framework for more than one movie adaptation.  In 2004, Pride and Prejudice was taken by Bollywood and made into the Indian musical movie version, Bride and Prejudice.  Now, of course the accuracy of the movie to the story is another topic entirely, but what stands is that now the story of Pride and Prejudice has been taken to a very wide audience who love Indian dance, music, and drama.  These people may never have been interested in reading the English textual edition of a nineteenth century British romantic novel, but now they can get the same story but in a way that sparks their own interests.  Perhaps then, having been exposed to the story in that way, one of these Bollywood aficionados would be interested in reading Pride and Prejudice.  See how that works?  By adapting the original novel into another medium, the same story gets circulated in many different ways to a much larger group of people. 

In my own experience, it has often been other mediums of a text that brought me to the text in the first place, or back to the text had I already read it.  For example, I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame in ninth grade and have always remembered loving the story, mostly because I would get into critical discussions about it with people who had not enjoyed the book as I did.  Just recently, years later, I found the musical adaptation of Notre Dame de Paris.  I fell in love with it.  Watching clips of it on YouTube, hearing the music and seeing the story unfold visually in that way brought me back to the work, and I read it again if only to compare it with the musical.  I have contacted another who had a similar experience.  Jess Nalbandian, the founder of the Hunchblog, came to the book because she too fell in love with the musical.  The difference in our experience lies in the fact that she had not originally read the book.  It was the musical that sparked her interest and persuaded her to read the book in order to compare the two.  Arguably, her primary text is first the musical because that is to what she based her interest and in what light she read the book.  All these mediums play different roles and color the way we experience the story as a whole.  Each of them serving in their own way as a primary text, depending in which light they are placed and to what purpose they are trying to serve. 

I have been met with varied responses as to the validity and legitimacy of experiencing different formats as the primary text.  In an English class I took, my professor was looking for someone who had read Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  No one said anything except myself saying I had listened to the audiobook.  My professor scoffed at me saying that did not “count”.  Now, it is an indisputable fact that reading the actual, textual volume of Moby Dick is not the primary medium in which most people experience that work of literature.  Its statistics in that category are probably fewer than even Gone With the Wind; my professor had not even read or listened to Moby Dick.   Yet, the fact that I had listened to the book was viewed as subservient to reading it.  This fact changes depending upon with whom one is speaking, but I will say Moby Dick is a perfect example of a canonical work that has been taken over by other primary texts.  It is impossible to try to read Moby Dick or talk about Moby Dick in isolation from any other medium.  This brings us into the canon.  Though a medium canon would be considered by most literary scholastics to be subservient to the literary canon, there is a medium canon closely linked to the literary canon about which many people are having critical discussions.  Just as the printing press killed architecture, multi-media is killing our traditional sense of literature and its canon. 

If we now move into the dynamics of that canon, we see a hierarchy not only of literature to digital medium, but among the digital mediums themselves.  Let us revert back to our Pride and Prejudice example.  When most people think of Pride and Prejudice not in direct reference to the book, they think of the five hour-long A&E movie adaptation, which is spoken about in and of the fact that it is so long.  In discussion, many Pride and Prejudice fans would swear by the A&E movie version.  No other movie adaptation is a valid depiction of the story.  The A&E movie with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle is Pride and Prejudice.  The Keira Knightly version, the Pink Bible version, Bride and Prejudice are all disregarded.  Many people get very passionate in their defense of that A&E version, but hold on a minute.  Is not even the A&E version secondary to the actual novel?  Critical discussion surrounds that movie as they compare medium to medium without reference to the novel whatsoever.  Does this alone not signify the validity of digital mediums as primary texts?

The situation is clear.  Digital media has changed the way we approach, experience, and study literature.   We have entered an age of multiple primary texts, where one is not and cannot be the dominant medium of experiencing a literary work.  We cannot read in isolation.  It is therefore essential to bring digital media into the classroom.  Incorporating digital media into the English classroom will help us study literature more effectively.  The other mediums bring many additional levels of information, expression, and emotion that add to the literary work.  By bringing the other mediums into the classroom such as Sparknotes, movie adaptations, audiobooks, etc. (mediums the students experience despite any classroom discussion) and incorporating them into the critical discussion around the novel itself would put those other mediums into the proper light as they relate to the book and to each other.  These are the primary mediums through which students will experience literature, and so together, they could all be studied as the primary texts which role they already play.  Not only does it bring more in discussion of the textual work, but exposing oneself to all the different mediums make the literary work more than just a book; it becomes an entire experience to be seen and felt.  It does not do in this digital age to limit oneself to the confines of Paris when one can experience the whole world.