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SECOND
THOUGHTS – THE HINDU Twitterature: What Next? How would the classics of literature work as
tweets? Wonder no more... Twitterature is here. If
this was all meant to be funny, it would be, well, funny. But the
scary thing is that this is for real... PHOTO: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT The Great Gatsby, often voted the last
century's best novel, reduced to 16 twitter posts, each well within
the 140 character limit, counting spaces... No, I'm not actually
making this up on the strength of too much Christmas rum cake and nor
is it some New Year gag. It has actually happened and that too in a
very respectable, pure orange and classy cream Penguin book called
Twitterature. And not to the Gatsby alone but to many other greats
too…Shakespeare, Homer, Kafka, Hemingway, Woolf, Pushkin... you name
them. So what does it sound like? Let's go back to
Gatsby, holding my broken heart. In the fourth tweet, Nick, the
elegant, understated, sensitive narrator has this to say: “Some dude
is standing on the bay with his arms up looking at a symbolic light.
The Midwest didn't have so many metaphors! What a CREEP!” And
somewhere towards the book's poignant end, he continues: “Gatsby is
so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast…IN THE
POOL?” Or turn to Shakespeare's Macbeth, whose
fabulous resounding soliloquies we committed to memory in school and
listen to how he describes his own end: “Shit. ‘C-Section' is not
‘of woman born'? What kind of King dies on a goddamn
technicality?” And here is Hamlet for you: “Gonna try to talk some
sense into Mom because boyfriend completely killed Dad. I sense this
is the moment of truth, the moment of candour and -” Old King Lear is not to be left out of this
mass murder of the great tragedies. He ruminates: “What, my
ungrateful girls are kicking me out? I'll be cold and homeless. This
sucketh. Very unexpected. Am I right?”
The Russian greats, who captured the tragic
nuances of the Russian soul in their tomes, do not escape the
onslaught of this great invention of social media. Gogol in his
Overcoat, from which Dostoevsky believed all subsequent Russian
literature was born, exclaims “OMG my coat is gone. Everything is
ruined. </3” (For the innocent OMG means Oh My God and that
mathematical looking icon is meant to signify annoyance, a broken
heart, super irony in twitter lingo). And ends the famous tale with
the tweet: “I suppose I have what I want now, it's time to rest. If
anyone sees my coat, tweet it.” Anna Karenina ends, after her
suicide, with the words: “This user's account has been
deactivated.” The classic duel scene in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin can
be summarised with: “Wanna hear something really funny? I try to
sleep with his wife, he challenges me to a duel, I shoot him and he
dies!” The central crime in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is
tweeted thus: “Casually off'd that old maid while typing this. Some
other bitch walked in …well, she's dead too. Bad timing, LOL. (That
last, incidentally, means Laughing Out Loud, one of the ways of
expressing emotion on social media.) If this was all meant to be funny, it would be,
well, funny. But the scary thing is that this is for real, an exercise
in pure earnest. The authors anticipate that their effort would be
criticised as a travesty of great works so they justify it in a
laboured introduction. They believe that the classics of literature
are inaccessible and outdated in their original form and set out to
remedy this much in the manner, according to their own opinion, as a
Martin Luther undertaking the Reformation and popularising the
Scripture. By reducing these classics to tweets, they hope to bring
not their “dull, dull words” but their “raw insight into
humanity” to the reading public in an “instant-publishing,
short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of
info-deluge.” They seriously believe that they “have liberated
poor Hamlet from the rigorous literary constraints of the sixteenth
century and made him- without losing an ounce of wisdom, beauty, wit
or angst- a happening youngster.” It is this seriousness of intent that makes the
entire thing so dangerous. My mind goes back to the 1960s and sees a
young boy cycling purposefully to a small shop in a lane off
Dehradun's Paltan bazaar. There a smiling old man in a loose
kurta-pyjama who seemed to have been separated at birth from P.G.
Wodehouse would sell him Classics Illustrated at 25 paise apiece. The
boy would bind them and treasure them and hungrily devour them in
curtained rooms during the long summer afternoons. Wuthering Heights,
Julius Caeser, Jane Eyre... Even if he went on to read some of them in
their full, original, daunting form, it was their illustrated versions
he would remember. Forever it would be the picture of Cleopatra
holding up a chalice, of lean Cassius with the blond curls, of Cyrano
de Bergerac jumping from a balcony, cape aflutter, rapier held aloft.
By the same token, I fear that 40 years on some reader may only recall
the classics through the twitter tweets. Forever he may remember
Frankenstein as “This killing thing is getting way out of control.
You know like a mistress you can't shut up?” Or Mrs. Dalloway as a
chirpy book that begins: “Ah! A party tonight! Should be a fine time
- fun, friends, nothing stressful, nothing awkward. Should be a
blast!” Or Conrad's Heart of Darkness as containing: “Keep hearing
about this ‘unorthodox' Kurtz guy. Sounds interesting. Probably
never overtweets about trivialities. My kind of man.” Or, worst of
all, John Milton as the poet who wrote in Paradise Lost: “OH MY GOD
I'M IN HELL.” BTW, am I glad that I was born when I was! (BTW
means By The Way). E-mail: navtej.sarna@gmail.com |
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