Conclusion
Gabriela Cravo e Canela. This exhibition tells its story, the story of a narrative that could have been lost from the moment it was typed.
After censorships and banishes, there was a spread of this written novel through multiple media which helped transmit its narrative in a deep and meaningful way across the world. It was such a fast event that these same processes of transmission and the essence of its messages got lost in our present life where we normalize ideas and technologies in a blink of an eye.
This new media encounter looks to retain these processes. The intangible and tangible results of ideas that started in a Royal Quiet Deluxe and are now represented through other technology.
This exhibition brings a broader perspective by reporting the timeline of this narrative. Through it, we get a "global" idea of how people reacted to the narrative, and potentially a greater understanding of its symbology and how it came to be: where political contentions and historic events are lined up in a clear way. Suffices to say that the first edition of Gabriela would not account for all of this.
However, in it, we lose Gabriela's narrative in its pure form. Personal interpretations of the written novel are also lost since by reading this new media content one will not read it without being influenced by the ideas here transmitted. And the way these ideas are transmitted is also biased: how do we interpret an original work through the lenses of someone else? Through someone else's interpretation of its background and history?
The concept of the 1958 novel may not be endangered anymore, still, narratively it is since as other representations and media become popular, the “language” of the original story may get lost and topics may be interpreted differently according to the affordances of the technology, the new medium and its audience. It is very much like a puzzle that has been deconstructed and has pieces of different media left apart from its original work.
In a digital era where we generate more and more data based on a single narrative this deconstruction and simultaneous construction of new models using new media will not slow down and we will continuously piece narratives apart, creating new content in a matter of seconds. It is clear to see that, like the telenovela and the other media Gabriela was turned in, this new media encounter is an incomplete patchwork of its influence; it is only another one of those deconstructed pieces that compose the real narrative.
But we ought not to worry since this is but a natural result of transferring content and ideas to a new media, as Alan Liu (2008) would confirm. However, this medium -through which the 1958 book is presented - does not intend to tell that original story but to tell the story of that narrative's complex history, in a failed attempt to preserve the most complete story about the narrative by recurring to a historical continuum.
With that, this new media encounter is truly and “fully embedded in history” since it happens before and after the original - in a timeless manner. Rather than a narrative of the narrative, it is but an imagination of the narrative.
The best stories of new media encounter — emergent from messy, reversible entanglements with history, socio-politics, and subjectivity — do not go from beginning to end, and so are not really stories at all.
Alan Liu, "Imagining the New Media Encounter"
Sources
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Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter”, A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens, Oxford: Blackwell ( 2008), accessed 10th November, 2020, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/