The Canterbury Blogs: A Translation for the Twenty-First Century

 

By Jennifer Housel, The Canterbury Blogs Project 

            The concept of the book as a physical medium—its material pages, cover, and binding—is increasingly becoming challenged as electronic alternatives show the potential for new methods of reading literature not previously possible with print.  The theoretical complexities of cyberspace and the aesthetics of web design offer a new world of possibilities for the future of reading literature and the nature of human behavior in general.  In an investigation of these issues, the Canterbury Blogs Project presents an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the format of an online blog.  The project reveals some definite advantages to reading the Canterbury Tales in this new medium while serving as a loose model of contemporary internet behavior

            The Canterbury Blogs Project is essentially an extremely modern translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for both its contemporary content and electronic format.  Each team member adopted the identity of two characters from the Tales and created Livejournal.com accounts from the perspectives of these characters.  In this way the Canterbury characters experienced a sort of electronic reincarnation, in which they could re-tell their own tales in an updated, twenty-first century scenario.  The individuality of each character became the focus of the project, which strove to remain true to Chaucer’s original work while still allowing enough creative freedom to best utilize the modern features of internet blogging. 

            At the time it was written in the fourteenth century, the Canterbury Tales helped to popularize the use of vernacular English in literature.  The characters tell their tales in conversational speech and their language doesn’t gloss over the often crude nature of the tales.  The Canterbury Blogs Project tried to imitate this by adopting a very informal way method of typing and sticking to the crude, informal speech of the characters.  Most internet users type differently online than they would when typing a research report.  In fact, an entire language of “net speak” has become routine in all internet activity, including blogs.  Each team member provided their own translation of a character’s tale utilizing informal internet language, which included plenty of “LOLs” and overuse of exclamation points and periods.  This sought to remain true to typical online behavior, as well as allow for further creativity into the development of character personalities.

            Chaucer creates characters that are both diverse and extremely developed in the Canterbury Tales, and this afforded the project a great deal of creative freedom.  The extent to which the characters’ identities were nurtured through each colorfully told tale became the backbone of the Canterbury Blogs Project, as it provided enough understanding of each character for team members to be able to adapt their personalities to the invasive Livejournal format.  Livejournal.com, like most other social network-based websites, encourages the divulging and listing of as much personal trivia as possible from a user, an offer which is often met enthusiastically.  The trend of listing one’s interests, activities, favorite bands, favorite books, and so on is almost compulsory in social networking website circles.  All of these Livejournal features allowed team members to fill out the identity of their character.

            Out of the countless websites that support online blogging features, Livejournal.com was chosen to be the primary medium of the project for its ease of use and general popularity.  Livejournal allows users to recount their memories through text and pictures in what is essentially an electronic diary.  Unlike myspace.com which is first and foremost a social networking site with blogging features, livejournal.com is a blogging site with some social networking features.  These social networking features include the ability to comment on one another’s journal entries, as well as “friend” people and view others’ posts on a universal “friend’s page.”  Groups and communities centered on a particular area of focus are popular to connect people with similar interests and certain Livejournal users become very active in moderating and contributing to community discussions.  One of the biggest appeals of livejournal.com is the great amount of freedom it allows its users to personalize their journal and create their own online identity.  Livejournal encourages personal disclosure from its users through its “User Profile” page, which outlines age, hometown, birthday, and interests, and prompts users to supply their “current mood” or “current music” with each post.  The flexibility of the site design, too, helps contribute to its personalization—users can change the page design to be as plain or elaborate as desired, and html can be easily used in almost any text entry box to link to pictures, change the color of text, etc. 

            It was a combination of Livejournal features including page design and user interests that produced a new twenty-first century identity for the character of the Reeve.  In the original Canterbury Tales the Reeve, named Osewold, is the manager of a large estate and has generally high status and wealth.  He is also described as being skinny and bad-tempered, and thinks highly of himself. The Reeve had once been a carpenter, so when the Miller's Tale mocks the profession, the Reeve angrily responses with his own tale that takes a jab at the Miller.  The web design of the Reeve's Livejournal page (“osewoldz_estate”) is clean and simple with an Argyle print background, to try and reflect his "elevated" tastes.  Since it's not common to run into a "reeve" on the street in the twenty-first century, the new “Osewold'z” profession remains vague, and has something to do with public service in his town.  His “user pics” range from promotional photos to an old carpentry project to a picture of a Southern plantation.  Like the original text, Osewold becomes very angry with the Miller's blog posts mentioning carpenters, and responds with fury.  This modern adaptation of the Reeve invoked the image of a hot-tempered, egotistical moron--albeit with a good sense of humor.  In the same way a slew of personalization features brought to life a modern day interpretation of the Summoner.  In the Canterbury Tales the Summoner is not particularly qualified for his ecclesiastical job and loves above all to get drunk.  He enjoys crude humor and is known to spit out Latin phrases in attempt to sound educated.  The updated Summoner (“summ0n_me”) maintains his low-brow, inbred demeanor to reveal what is essentially a glamorized homeless person.  The simple web design, the dimwitted, all-caps speech and the reference of Jack Daniels all create the image of a drunken fool.  The Summoner's comments on other character's pages are also stupid, crude, and drunk.  The ability to write so freely and informally in capitals and “net lingo” and page design helped create the modern-day adaptation of these characters greatly.  The creation of character identities online was an opportunity to explore the modern and trendy options of online personalization through blogging content and page aesthetics.

The Canterbury Blogs Project initially started out as a Timeline Project that would investigate the intersections of time in the Canterbury Tales and time’s representation through an electronic medium.  Although the project evolved to become one focused more on the development of identity and modern adaptation of the text, the concept of time and how it can be represented and experienced differently in cyberspace is still a relevant issue.  Blogging maintains much of the linearity of analog time in its basic, chronological layout, but allows new flexibility to the movement and passage of time due to its situation in cyberspace.  Livejournal.com’s user-friendly format allows for incredible power to manipulate the representation of time with ease.  Simple editing tools enables users to change the time of past blog entries as many times as desired to any moment in the past or future.  The Canterbury Tales Project, in fact, is set in the future at April 2008, since the Canterbury characters make their pilgrimage in the Spring. 

The distinctive chronologically-ordered format of blogging, which gives prominence to the most recent post, posed an interesting problem for the story-telling aspect of the project.  It would be arduous and unusual of typical blogging behavior to tell a tale in one long post, so each tale was told in a series of posts.  Naturally, the “prologue” or introduction to the tale was written first and posted first, followed by three or four other posts which each told a part of a character’s tale.  In classic blog format, the post written last that told the very end of the tale sat at the top of all previous posts, hence suggesting it should be read first.  There was no clear way to correct this issue, as it seemed wrong to try to misrepresent the times of each post so the entries would be read in the correct order.  The incredibly hierarchical ordering of posts in blogging caused the greatest inconsistency in trying to create an accurate adaptation of the Canterbury Tales into this new format.

The timeline made for the project is an attempt at emphasizing the importance of the passage of time in blogging.  The Canterbury Tales was very much centered on time since the characters were all part of a pilgrimage, and the order in which each character told his/her tale was important for the interjections and disputes between characters.  The Reeve’s tale, for example, is a response to the Miller’s tale which had been told earlier.  A great deal of coordination was required of team members to properly simulate the interactions that occurred.  Windows of time were assigned to each team to post their blog entries, as well as opportunities to comment on other user pages and the community “CB_pilgrims”.  The Canterbury Blogs Project timeline is a representation of each user’s blogging activity as they steadily told their tales.  Interestingly, the information represented in the timeline can be completely derived from a character’s Livejournal “friend’s page,” which puts a user’s own posts in chronological context of their “friend’s” posts.  In this sense Livejournal already has a type of timeline established through this “friend’s page” feature.  Timelines such as these simply assists the reader’s understanding of a literary work or blog in general by placing it in chronological context.

Theoretically speaking, a unique fragmentation of time occurs in the digital reality of cyberspace—time is simply different on-line then it is in “real” life. For example, blog entries are representations of events that occurred in real time, but are presented in short, abrupt snippets.  The result is a highly condensed database of memories that are organized in such a way that days/events are tidily self-contained.  With a single click a reader may jump and to a blog entry describing an event or commentary written 30 days in the past, and then just as easily click to an entry completed yesterday.  It is in this way that blogs simulate a type of virtual time travel. 

Admittedly, the scenario that has been invented to place this project in twenty-first century context is a little farfetched.  It is unlikely that eight people would randomly join a community counting down to a springtime fair in Spain and then proceed to have a battle of story-telling, as the Canterbury Blogs Project has simulated.  However, the internet activity modeled in this project is not far off from actual on-line behavior.  Meeting people on-line as opposed to face-to-face is increasingly becoming a legitimate way to get to know people.  The typical Livejournal.com user earnestly provides information about themselves almost with a sense of duty—they seem aware that they are projecting an image of themselves for public viewing.  Especially in the case of public blogging, users create an online space to reflect themselves and then invite strangers to read and learn about their lives and personalities.  With so much personal disclosure, the assumption that we can adequately “know” someone else through Livejournal or other social networking sites becomes natural.  It is regularly forgotten that there is no guarantee that the projected character on a Livejournal or personality-based website is indeed a reflection of reality.  The entire Canterbury Blogs Project is a perfect example of this unfortunate problem of authentication.  The eight profiles were created for people who do not even exist, nor do they even remotely resemble the personalities of the team members who created them.  Although the La Feria de Abril is an actual fair, the entire premise of the “CB_pilgrims” community as a place to meet people and share tales is falsified. In this way the Canterbury Blogs Project takes the appearance of a reality in cyberspace, yet has no premise in the real, physical world. 

The invented characters of the Canterbury Blogs Project all adopted behavior that is common among Livejournal communities and treated the community space and their own blogs as a type of alternate reality.  The trend of creating websites to represent individual personalities, and the near obsessive upkeep of these internet identities, is an interesting topic of study.  In blogging websites in particular there is an unprecedented opportunity for the customization and management of memories online.  Blog entries by users are used largely as an opportunity to retell previous events in a manner that is incredibly modified to the user’s taste.  In other words, a blog entry allows a visual and textual look into how another person interpreted a past event.  An experience shared by many will certainly not be remembered in the same exact way by each person involved.  The egocentric blogging format of Livejournal and other serves to illustrate these personality and memory discrepancies. 

There have been many translations of the Canterbury Tales since its publication seven hundred years ago.  In fact, these continually updated translations are the reason Chaucer’s Tales are still relevant and widely read today, since the original text is incredibly difficult to read.  The Canterbury Blogs Project can be viewed as simply another translation of the work to make it make appropriate and digestible and for a generation whose learning preferences are changing at an unprecedented rate.  To students who have grown up with a personal computer and accessible Internet in the home, the blog/webpage format is more familiar and relatable than the original text of the Canterbury Tales.  While it would be premature to recommend students to throw out traditional texts in exchange for all electronic mediums, it is valuable to explore the benefits of reading and interpreting literature in a new way.