A Series of Unfortunate Events and ENG3178

If you are expecting a happy story of the book overcoming technology and prevailing as the dominant medium, then look away now.

Close this tab and move on with your life.

You will not find quite so pleasant a story here.

Since it’s the Easter holidays, and since I like to avoid thinking about all the work I have to do, I’ve been watching the second season of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.The books that I so loved as a child, I can now also love as a TV series.

This transition from pages to screen has seemingly become the new culture of media, and I’m sure many will argue that Netflix’s interpretation for television is now more important that the books that it stemmed from.

That’s a sentence that could pretty much sum up the entirety of Digital Textualities and the History of the Book.

The way in which this new media series feels familiar to me because I’ve read the books, epitomises the way in which modern technology has gradually made its way into the mainstream.

Unfortunately for all of us, I have succumbed to the temptation of reading, not just the books of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but also the TV series of A Series of Unfortunate Events, as an important literary come digital artefact.

Here I am, enjoying the overlap of old and new media, but hyperaware of how problematic an issue this can be thanks to ENG3178. Thanks Stephen.

So, in true English Literature student fashion, I shall hereby attempt to express all that I’ve learnt in this module through the framework of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

It’s still not too late to turn back…

The Bad Beginning

Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), is not subtle with his references. He knows exactly the can of worms that he opens.

Like Jorge Luis Borges, who we looked at in week two, and parodies the study of literature in The Library of Babel, Handler not only entices us, but blatantly screams at us, to analyse his work literarily.

It is interesting how I can only do this as an adult, and as an individual with a relatively widespread knowledge of literature. As a child, I had no idea what Handler was trying to do, I just read and enjoyed.

Was this a better way to read?

Maybe Handler, like Borges, has produced what I now know as a parody of hermeneutics — the art of interpretation and the pretence of knowledge. Maybe he’s making fun of people like me for feeling intelligent when I spot an Easter egg in the pages (or on the screen) of A Series.

It is no accident that Borges literally finds his way into Handler’s work (I would be surprised if he didn’t). There is a building in the Baudillere’s town called The Library of Babel; you don’t get more blatant than that.

If (and I assume he was) Handler was aware that Borges’s intertextual work was a precursor to the hyptertextual elements of online reading, he follows suit in his own work by doing exactly the same tenfold.

At the same time, Handler seems to set up his work as a piss take of over analysing, much too like Borges.

Unlike The Library of Babel, however, A Series of Unfortunate Events gains something when we engage with its hidden features, instead of leaving us utterly confused.

Whilst I am still wandering lost in The Garden of Forking Paths, it would be more difficult to end up in the same position with A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Having studied some Borges, I am now more aware of how authors often deliberately attempt to trick their readers into reading into the material more than it necessarily facilitates for.

Montgomery Montgomery

This playing with literature that Handler so enjoys aligns him yet another writer we’ve studied on the module, and one which I have already blogged about on occasion: Vladimir Nabovok.

It is no coincidence that the Baudelaires’ second guardian is named ‘Montgomery Montgomery’.

Handler admits that he ‘was a Nabokov freak’ as a child.

Not only does the narrator Lemony Snicket hark to Nabokovian themes as ‘an unreliable narrator…distracted by detail and digression until detail and digression become the point of the thing’, but also alludes to the protagonist of Nabovok’s work Lolita — Humbert Humbert (thankfully only in name and not in character).

Moreover, viewing this Nabokovian style in A Series of Unfortunate Events has helped me to more fully undertsand what we learnt in week four of this module. I could see how the ideas of Borges were worked out in Pale Fire, and can now understand how it applies to other self referential literature.

Moreover again, through Handler’s constant references to language, and by continually scattering the work with word definitions, I can see the far reaching influence of poststructuralism — a word which here means that language itself is a self referential form.

This series works on so many levels to reinforce teachings of this module that I may have struggled to understand otherwise. Whilst I appreciated its intertextuality, I was not aware of just how clever this could be, and how weighted it was with the struggles of the book as a thing.

‘There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.’

Lemony Snicket becomes the editor of the story that he tells. He relays to us the parts of the Baudelaires’ story that he considers to be most important.

Like the editor of a book, who imposes his or her own interpretation on the text, Handler gives us a narrator who does the same through his speech. This, as Handler himself has told us, renders him unreliable.

Whether he only speaks, as I see him do on my laptop screen, or his speech is written down as it is in the pages of the original A Series, Snicket it still an unreliable narrator.

Aural traditions and the written form are as prone to mistakes as each other, something which I have only fully considered through this module.

This undercuts the ideas of printing as a revolution, upheld by the likes of Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Einstein, and the arguments we looked at in week five.

I would never have considered the printing press as something to be contested, but that’s because I have never lived in a world without printed material.

Handler complicates all that editors like Lachmann and Donaldson claim about recovering the author’s voice, either by attempting to write in their style, or by other means. Snicket is both the author and the editor of A Series of Unfortunate Events, relaying to us what he wishes.

As this module progressed I discovered that there is a lot more to consider when thinking about the longevity of books, besides simply looking at their past as objects and their supposed future on screens. I failed to realise the monopoly that editors held on translating the meaning of a text.

There is a lot more involved in this study than ideals, preferences, and romanticism, it is a considered struggle that is becoming ever more complicated.

And I thought this module would be some light relief from my dissertation…

The Slippery Slope

Handler does not see the end of the book as a thing in light of technological advances, and neither do I.

He continually reinforces the importance of books in A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Just one instance of this is Klaus’s bookishness. He is obsessed with libraries and the knowledge that they offer. He is defined, like his siblings, by the objects that surround him: books.

He embodies what Ryan Perry claims; that ‘interactions with materials testify to who we are’. He is a reader, and the son of his intelligent, secret society parents, who ensured that there was a large library present in their home.

In episode two, season two of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (or book five), the library in Austere Academy is only open for ten minutes a day. This is contested on multiple occasions by the school librarian, and by the Baudelaires and their likeminded friends, the Quagmires.

It might be down to Handler’s romanticism (or his continual reinforcing of the idea of the book as a metphor for knowledge), but these five bookishly inclined children are the only children who stand out in the school.

The rest are mere clones of one another, who are blindly led by the sickenly sweet Carmelita; the tormenter of the educated.

She unsurprisingly hates the library and everything literary — ‘Only cake-sniffers care about poetic form’.

What stood out to me most in this episode was the interaction between technology and the books of the library. Being able to watch an onscreen struggle that engaged with this relatively abstract concept enabled me to more easily understand this argument.

Austere Academy creates an ‘advanced computer system’ to detect whether or not an individual is the evil Count Olaf, in an attempt to keep the Baudelaires out of danger.

Count Olaf is never known to be very clever, but when he says, ‘we don’t need newspapers now that we have our advanced computer system’, we know that Handler really doesn’t believe technology is all it’s cracked up to be.

It is a slippery slope (pardon the pun) to consider that the advance of technology is the end of the book as we know it.

When I consider the concerns of Piper, who we looked at in the final week of the module, who believes that ebooks create lazy readers, and ebooks only provide false senses of depth, I can more easily understand why the continuing development of technology could be so detremental to society.

Although, this was once thought about the book itself at a time…

Not everyone will read into the screen adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events what I have, as someone taught to do just that with books.

As Carr claims, and I believe, literary knowledge enhances the reading experience. Clicking on a piece of hypertext is just not the same as aquiring an understanding of intertextuality.

Ironically (yet not accidently on Handler’s behalf), the super-computer fails in season two, episode two, and Count Olaf all too easily infiltrates the school faculty disguised as the new gym teacher.

Maybe Handler, and these critics, are too scathing of technology, but they makes their point very clearly — it doesn’t always do what it promises. It does not necessarily make reading better, or provide a more reliable way to attain information.

Not The End

Like Handler, I believe that the physical book is still a thing, and will always be an important, even necessary, thing.

As Katherine Hayles asserts, literature is not simply ‘immaterial verbal constructions’.

Handler casts metaphoric importance onto the object of the book, like many who came before him. He ascribes the same idea of knowledge and power stemming from the book that was so attested by Plato.

Even though we enjoy our television series and our interactive literature, these things will not fully displace books. They are new transitional mediums, much like the book itself was at a time.

I believe in the importance of ‘thingyness’ — a word which here means physicality; a holdable object.

At the end this episode, the fight between Count Olaf and the Baudileres’ is settled by a good, old fashioned arm wrestle.

‘I’ll take on the bookworm’, says Count Olaf, and he loses.

At least the universe in A Series of Unfortunate Events will defy Forester’s dystopian idea of the future in The Machine Stops, even if our own does not.

In the words of Handler on the world, it appears to me that the book, ‘no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely.’

I believe that through this modul I have gained an understanding of solid critical arguments for what I came into this module believing — the twenty first century is not the end for the book, but it does bring with it change.

“Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard about too many things to do anything else.”

— The End, Lemony Snicket