michlindelivrance

[plunder-heaven-and-devour-god]

My emotional think piece whilst Notre Dame de Paris and crying and listening to the movie soundtrack

Not to be that absolute ASS BUT I HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING

I want to unearth Victor "biggest fuckboi in Paris" Hugo and beat him over the head with his own fucking shin bone for getting me so MELDRAMATICALLY IN LOVE WITH A BUILDING IVE NEVER EVEN BEEN TO.

I just finished the fifth part of Notre Dame de Paris and god I want to tell him

Even though you said :"this will kill that, the press will kill the edifice" you said that printing/press/writing killed architecture as the primary method for humanity to express/share/cement ideas for the masses and to enscribe themselves in history.

You said that the accessibility and the thousandfold architects in writers killed the edifice and in doing so became the second tower of Babel. Gutenberg's printing press became the second register of recording human thought.

Does he know that his book saved the edifice? His book instilled love for Notre Dame de Paris and restored it after centuries of mutilation and decay? HIS BOOK SAVED THE EDIFICE.

His supposed venom for architecture acted like an antidote in this one case and in this one case crippled his own argument.

Not to mention

I'd have to ask him what does he think about visual mass media becoming the third register of human thought? How would he feel if told that film and photography have killed Gutenberg? How would he feel if he know that writing had joined architecture in the grave he so cynically condemned it to.

How would he feel that visual mass media overtook the canon of his printed word. That his story has been superceded by context and reimagined several times on film? How would he feel if a a multi billion dollar American conglomerate rewrote and redistributed the story of Notre Dame de Paris and became the story in the public conscience? How would he feel knowing that Alan Menken's score is what first comes to mind first and not his words, or that of the actual edifice?

Yes all other arts are used to support architecture like masonry, sculpting, painting, and metalsmithing. But those he claims have become divorced from the edifice. They have done the same for the printing press. Being divorced from other arts those methods are no longer tethered to the recording of human thought in Hugo's mind. The author states that the exercise of architecture has become hollow without the weight of being the method with with humans record their world.

But

Unbeknownst to him they come back in other forms, in other methods, other arts to support and bolster the story and character of different facets of the story of human beings. He says architecture had died, but maybe it merely reincarnated. This new life is used to bolster another human register. If not the book of Notre Dame de Paris then the edifice, and if not the edifice than the 1939 film, if not that then the Disney version. They all congregate every now and again to support some core love and sentiment and continue to lay down the stones in a long winding and untoward present into the future.

Hugo both rails against and praises Gutenberg for the printing press. He also takes a seat amongst the writers committing this architectural murder.

But what would he say if I told him that the book exists in all it's different forms on the internet for free, and even more radical and enlightened version of free thinking. I got his book on the Gutenberg Project site where books entering the public domain are free. To quote Hugo's other french playwright counterweight "all for one and one for all". His work is up on the internet for free for all and more ironically carries the namesake of the man who he says enabled the murder of architecture.

More radical that the dogmatism of architecture, the accessible and far reaching appeal of writing, or even the new universality of the visual mass media. Is the internet the fourth tower of Babel? Or is it too early to tell if the web and social media count as just one more tier in an ever climbing skyscraper of visual mass media? What would he think of the way that we could consumed and recorded human thought when it is near effervescent in comparison to the stones that he praises? What about YouTube as a platform or Twitter? How will his story transform in this information age to bolster a cathedral bordering on eight hundred years? Where does that put us in his world view?

Although I do think these different iterations and transformations that his story has undergone would horrify him. The story's ability to stay relevant has these different methods of recording human thought to thank. Hunchback has gone through the story of the edifice, the printing press, and now visual mass media. (I'm also hardcore riffing off of Lindsay Ellis' great video that does a way better job than me expressing this.)

I think he'd be even more horrified to know that the Disney Version is so character centric that the focus if his original story has been relegated to support for the characters. In actuality, it should be the reverse, Hugo makes a whole book of a host of characters who exist to populate the cathedral. But in this day in age in the western world we are preoccupied with the power of individuals, not the towering and lofty mysticism of Catholic dogmas. The story now belongs to the characters and the individual instead of the edifice belonging to the people.

Architecture, in it's golden age according to him, was for the caste/the priest/history, and would the march of time it turned into the work of individuals and artists. And so has his own intellectual property, the public conscious does not remember ANANKE at the beginning of Notre Dame de Paris but they remember the inviduals, not the dogmas that the architecture so visibly preoccupied itself with, but with the individuals in it's story and the individuals who the story now belongs to.

What would he think?

Not once has a film adaptation, our modern human register as it were, accurately captured the story he made. Which is for better or worse, it's gone through the hands of American capitalists, movie monster buffs, and a German fleeing the Nazis.

What he would have wanted was what The Ark did for the Hermitage St-Petersburg. He wants an epic film made of one continuous shot of the arcades, cloisters, towers, and arches of Notre Dame in a succession of epochs with people milling in and out of frame in different period dress. That and a cacophony of music from the bells recorded straight from the bell towers.

Instead the dead guy got several movies about a melodrama between an ugly wretch, a Madonna whore, and a Catholic priest. And I wouldn't even say that Hugo likes his characters, more like populates the building with then. He tolerates them sometimes, sometimes he likes them, sometimes he hates them.

He writes about the burden and cruelty that Quasimodo endures but never gives him a happy conclusion, or any closure. He treats him as the public does.

His self insert character of Pierre Gringoire is infused with his dry wit, and often ridicules his own self absorbed poet's nature. He down right puts himself through the ringer and takes several too self aware jabs at himself.

He tries to make Clopin the king and noble but still puts forward this bigoted image of the Romani people. He makes him magnetic but does not feel back the thick veneer of discrimination. Why? Because Hugo makes it very clear it's about the cathedral and not the people.

Esmeralda gets the shortest end of the stick, balancing the whore/angel dichotomy equally throughout. She's made a vessel for want of the male characters and the reader. Not to mention she's not actually Romani but a poor stolen white girl who was made a part of Les Cours Des Miracles by an accident.

Frollo is strangely not as potent in this version, especially if you're coming off any of the film versions. He's austere, and the word 'learned' used over and over again, his quiet abuse masquerades as quiet charity but he is the front for a huge anti-clerical sentiment.

The individual is not Hugo's concern but the building. So I'd love to hear what he would say of what the building and the book have become.