Intermediality and imagetic representations in Takarhiro Arai’s Les Misérables

Abstract

Different adaptions of Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables, helped disseminate this landmark tale on social injustice, ignorance and misery to a very large public. The novel resonates not with Western audiences alone as Hugo’s pungent narrative attracts different publics in the East. Through transmediation, Takahiro Arai artfully recreates Hugo’s masterpiece in manga language. This paper analyses the new mediatic product, manga, to examine the ways a reading of Les Misérables from within an Eastern culture resignifies Hugo’s narrative. By using Elleström’s concept of transmediation (2017/2021), this paper suggests that the representation re-elaborates meanings in the new media by drawing on its imagetic and symbolic references. Hugo’s novel appears as plural and heterogeneous when recast in a different mediatic product. Arai’s art recreates for an Eastern audience Hugo’s powerful story of about those suffering in the West and thus launches anew the dialogue between cultures.