A literature reading at the ENS

To attend a reading of excerpts from Victor Hugo's extremely large and varied corpus at the ENS, you have to get there early. The theater is small, and can't hold everyone who would want to go! You may think I'm joking, but far from it. Last night, I got to the ENS half an hour early for this, and the line was already longer than the line for the women's bathroom at the Book of Mormon. After another half hour, the line was twice as long, winding precariously up the very long staircase (the theater is in the basement, just a bit past K-fêt, their crappy graduate student bar). Then, they had technical difficulties and made everyone wait on the staircase while they tried to get something prepared (God knows what...since all that was on stage besides the people speaking was a red sofa, a podium, and a little portable recording device)...another half hour!! 

Picture this, if you will. A possible American equivalent of this event. Instead of an actor from La Comédie Française reading Victor Hugo, explicated by Guy Rosa, famous university professor who has studied Victor Hugo extensively; how about, [insert famous stage actor here...unfortunately, aside from Broadway stars, I'm not sure there are any "famous" stage actors, since Broadway plays seem to make money by having film stars come act in their plays...anyway, we'll just say Meryl Streep] reading Emily Dickinson [no, this is not a good enough equivalent...but I don't know that there is an American author who was as universally well-known and prolific as Hugo] explicated by some Ivy League professor who has written a lot of books on Emily Dickinson, published new critical editions of her most famous works, and whose name people might actually know [and yes, I know that is impossible in the US, but French people know Guy Rosa's name]. Can you picture that? Really, try. It would be lovely if you could, don't you think? Then, if you actually succeeded in picturing that, picture 200 Americans lined up on a long staircase with nothing to keep them busy (the event being in a basement, there was no 3G service) during the hour-long wait to get into the theater, knowing all the while that there is a chance they could be turned away. 

Did you picture it? I can't. Maybe for a Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga concert, but even then, I think the lack of cell phone reception would be a remarkable deterrent from the whole thing. In any case, the event was marvelous! Enchanting! At least for a PhD student in French literature who is currently working on Victor Hugo. But the rest of the audience seemed as entranced as I was. Guy Rosa's comments were like a director, situating various excerpts of Hugo's most famous works to be read by the actor. The underlying theme tying these excerpts together was Hugo's voice, and therefore, all throughout, Rosa told anecdotes about Hugo's actual voice, the way he wrote, the way he read his works out loud. For instance, at one point, he made the comment that Hugo, unlike Flaubert, only read his works out loud to an audience, only read finished products out loud, and only read his own works out loud. It was something I was surprised to realize I had never thought about—Hugo's texts have such a strong narrative voice (or rather voices...there is always a plurality of narrators), that you don't find yourself wondering what his own voice would have sounded like. It's actually quite sad, that his voice is lost forever, even if his ideas can still speak through his texts. 

The line when I got there—it stretched into that room quite a bit. Behind me, when I took the picture, there were already at least 50 people stretching up that staircase.