printed word
is starting to lose ground to make way for other older and brand new words. We are witnessing the rebirth of a
plural orality
and, at the same time, the seismic eruption of the
electronic word
is altering the way we create, conceive, publish and distribute literature. [The festival] is a sensor of these new cartographies generated by the revision of the western cannon, the transformation of genres and formats, the assault on the categories of fiction, the emergence of transmedia narratives, the diversification of reading devices, the appearance of new species of readers and writers, group authorship that is opened up by means of social networks and the explosion of literary creativity that is taking place inside and outside Internet. Faced with all the crises we are proposing a solar festival with a highly intense program. A claim for amplified literature in permanent interaction with the arts and the sciences, in an open, mixed and changing world. Let’s celebrate the unstoppable journey: the adventure of knowledge, the excitement and the surprise of creating in an open, mixed and changing world.
Chris Tolworthy doesn’t defend amateurism in the name of the right to one’s voice, or in the name of flight from reality. Chris’s campaign affirms something completely different. Chris Tolworthy is fighting for “better stories,” for the “accessibility of the classics,” for “authenticity,” against “greed,” for “deeper ideas,” for “diversity,” for “creativity,” for “ending global poverty,” and all this by way of computer games based on literary classics. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is already on the market and Dante’s The Divine Comedy is in the works. You can watch the trailer on YouTube. First impressions suggest that it’s actually a fantasy game about transformers. Les Misérables seems more sophisticated and features a certain Peri Laris, a kind of Tinkerbell and Wellek-Warren adapted for a one-year-old baby. Chris Tolworthy has plans to expand production and adapt Shakespeare’s complete works, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Einstein’s theory of relativity, The Count of Monte Cristo, The World of Miracles, and many others. Worried that his current and future products might be declared trivial, in a section of his webpage entitled “Deeper Themes” Tolworthy offers the following:
Every story covers a major theme. It might not be obvious — you can ignore it if you like. But if you want to dig deeper there are people in the story who love to talk about deep topics and answer questions. They show how the ideas behind the stories all fit together.
Les Misérables: the theme is
justice
.
The Divine Comedy: the theme is
faith
.
The Nature of the Universe: the theme is the nature of
reality
.
Julius Caesar: the theme is
government
.
And so on. Don’t worry if this sounds boring, you can ignore those parts. But if you hunger for a story with a little more substance, a little more ambition, this game will deliver.
The last time I stumbled across this kind of language, and this kind of “thinking about literature,” was about thirty years ago when I bought a slim volume entitled How to Become a Writer at a local bookstore. It was written by Petar Mitić, an amateur, a wannabe, a literary instructor whose little book was the Yugoslav precursor of all those “how to” manuals (how to write a novel, how to turn one’s life into a story, how to succeed in the literary world) I would later indifferently peruse in American bookstores. I bought a copy of Petar Mitić’s little book, and what’s more, I even wrote a parody in which I inserted Mitić’s pearls of literary wisdom. At the time I had just graduated as a major in Comparative Literature and had published a couple of books. In the ocean of hardcore literary theory, Mitić’s amateur effort was like finding sunken treasure. I could play around, invent a Petar Mitić theoretical school, ridicule or praise him, reinvent, integrate — in short, I could do whatever I wanted. I belonged to the literary “elite,” Mitić to the literary “proletariat.” He went about his business with no literary or theoretical “undies”; he was just a beggar who had dared raise his commoner’s voice.
What is the difference between Chris Tolworthy and Petar Mitić? In essence, there isn’t any. The difference is in the wires: it’s in the reach of the ideas, the speed of dissemination, the penetration, and the visibility. Thanks to the Internet, Chris Tolworthy is visible. In the absence of the Internet, Peter Mitić was invisible. The difference is in me. Yesterday’s Mitić made me laugh, today’s Tolworthy I don’t find funny. Mitić was just a “vagrant” hanging around outside “my house.” Today I’m hanging around outside my former house. In that house — in literature — other people live there now.
[1]This is the contemporary literary context in which Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, Tree of Codes, finds itself. The title is “cut” from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz being Jonathan Safran Foer’s favorite writer. By cutting pieces (literally) from Schulz’s book, Foer has created a “new” book, a visual and aesthetic object, from what remained. It remains to be seen how readers and critics will appraise Foer’s “intervention” or “adaption” at a time in which — Foer’s literary reputation to one side — there is no cultural context in which his gesture might be placed and read (postmodernism, for example, provided such a context), and therefore, how the undoubted differences between the two kinds of adaptions — between the “androidization” of Anna Karenina and the “dislocated” authorial reading of Bruno Schulz — will be articulated. Born of love, both acts of “vandalism” are homage to classics. The unknown Ben H. Winters put Leo Tolstoy down as his co-author. Jonathan Safran Foer neglected to do the same with Bruno Schulz.
[2]Sometimes the opposite happens: fans write for their authors, although they might not know who their author is. Lolita has found her place in the rich world of Japanese subculture — actually, she’s a Gothic Lolita known as “GothLoli.” As a symbol of young female sexuality GothLoli has little to do with Nabokov’s novel and much more to do with Japanese teenagers’ love of Victorian-era children’s fashion. As such, GothLoli look like Alices in Wonderland who like playing vampire dress-up. The GothLoli fashion hysteria emerged from manga and anime television series, computer games, and other phenomena of Japanese subculture. The fashion has been embraced by teen magazines (Gothic & Lolita Bible), goth clubs, pop music, and the film industry (Kamikaze Girls). The fashion industry has developed a number of sub styles, including Sweet Lolita (ama-loli), Classic Lolita, Punk Lolita, Wa Lolita (Lolita style combined with the traditional Japanese kimono), Boystyle Lolita (Lolita style combined with Victorian boys clothing), Hime Lolita (a combination of Marie Antoinette and Brigitte Bardot), and Guro Lolita (or “broken doll style,” which features wound-looking make-up and bandages etc.). A boutique selling clothes for Dutch Gothic Lolitas recently opened in Amsterdam. The end result of the hysteric fusion of cultural codes is best portrayed in Shion Sono’s film Love Exposure (Ai no mukisdashi, 2008).