On fandom, contingent narratives and reinterpretation
This is a contribution to the March Month of Meta. I originally started writing this when Supernatural 4.18 aired (The Monster at the End of This Book, the episode where Sam and Dean discover the Supernatural book series in-canon) but it is by no means SPN-specific. Recently (so nearly three years after I wrote the first draft of the thoughts below) I went to a lecture by a noted computer scientist who’s working with a team to develop a history of computing throughout the whole of human existence, and he used the term transmedia to indicate a project that simultaneously exists in multiple mediums and methods of access and depth of engagement. The existence of transmedia projects raises the question of what a narrative is, and if there is anything like a final or definitive narrative of a story anymore (or if there ever truly was). I think that those of us who have been in fandom are perhaps more comfortable with transmedia and reinterpreting narratives than most, but that increasingly it’s becoming the new normal to see stories as contingent and adaptable. Does this change how we tell stories or how we expect stories to be told?
So the reactions to fandom being mentioned in Supernatural 4.18 have started an interesting conversation about the nature of fandom and fanfic and why so many of us prefer that the PTB stay out of fandom entirely (or at least not tell us they’re infiltrating us). I’m sympathetic to the Room of Our Own argument myself, although I think that in our increasingly networked, all-access world, we’re all going to have to figure out how to deal with these ‘world collisions’ more and more often. But that’s another conversation. One thing argued in some of the conversations Is that the *aim* of fanfic is different than the aim of published fiction or of TV shows or movies. Stultiloquentia has an interesting post on this, discussing different kinds of fanfic: fics that seek to satisfy the id, fics that are perhaps more like ‘literature,’ and those rare few that manage to be both. “[This is] why I love some fanfic stories with all my heart, but the thought of holding them aloft in front of the Literary Establishment as paragons of the genre still makes me cringey with embarrassment. . . . I am adamant and smug in my belief that the best fanfic is as meritorious as much published lit, complete with profound insight and beautiful prose, despite the fact that you can't read the two things as if they're the same.”
I tried once to explain the brilliance of dsudis’s due South AU Hawks & Hands to a non-fannish friend, someone with a BA in English working on a PhD in American Studies, perfectly comfortable with investigating narratives. My explanations sounded stupid no matter what I tried - “It remixes all the plots and conventions of the series in an unexpected and novel way” was the best I could come up with, but that made it sound like a lighthearted mashup, something without substance. And H&H is all about substance, about loneliness and loss and reaffirming your own agency and preferences. But it’s not the type of AU that is an original story with characters’ names pasted on heads; knowing the canon it’s based on gives the experience of reading the story depth that it doesn’t have otherwise.
In Lim’s discussion of the ‘language’ of vids and vidding [post deleted or locked, link included for reference], s/he said the following: “When I finish something it's never really a completion, it's a capitulation. But I think that in fandom that's less of a... thing than in some other creative communities because we're actually tuned to look for the Ideal, we look through art to the story, the idea or truth it represents.” This brings up the transmedia angle; my question after that lecture was, if everything becomes transmedia, there is no final narrative. If so, there’s increased emphasis on interpretation, and we know that interpretations vary widely - do we create a group consensus about ‘canon’ for everything, not just in fandom?
In From Where You Dream, a collection of his lectures on the writing process, novelist Robert Olen Butler talks about getting the yearning of your characters on the page, writing: “writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction - entertainment fiction, let’s call it, genre fiction - have never forgotten this necessity of the character’s yearning…. You cannot find a book on the bestseller list without a central character who clearly wants something, is driving for something, has a clear objective….The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level.”
But then he goes on to distinguish between genre literature and art and say that the difference is that genre fic uses intellectual, rote language that is made passionate by what the reader brings to it, while ‘art’ is sense-based and descriptive, and creates emotion on its own merits:
“Nonart, genre writing, entertainment writing, is typically filled with abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation. .. It is not art, because [the reader’s] emotional response is a result of her filling in the blanks left by that abstraction. The direct, visceral response to the text results from her filling in from her own fantasies, her own past, and her own aspirations. Abstract, summarizing, generalizing, and analytic language will induce the reader to fill in the blanks and thereby distance her from the work and the characters.”
Not what you were expecting, was it? It does seem to ring true for some fanfic, although I’m not sure it’s a completely valid way to distinguish between genre and literary fiction. (I tend to subscribe to Ursula K Le Guin’s view that the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction is at base a distinction of status, not of merit or of particular story features.)
As Butler correctly points out, one of the features of genre fiction is that it reuses tropes and plot devices. Much of the pleasure of a mystery or a romance is what happens within the confines of the plot structure. It’s a lot like listening to a favorite song for the fifty zillionth time or participating in a religious service. It’s not novel to you (whoops, pun); it derives much of its meaning through repetition and the emotion you bring to that repetition. Ditto fanfiction, and perhaps even more so - we retell, reimagine, recapitulate the characters, plot points, settings and tropes in countless ways, and do it *over and over*. Fanfiction gets much of its power by this process, and I think it’s one reason why that it can’t be explained completely to those who haven’t been through the collective experience of experiencing and re-experiencing a fandom. It is an emotional process, a process that has to do with wanting, although not just the wanting of the characters; it’s also about the wanting of the readers and writers, the desire of us all to fully inhabit and explore these ideas otherwise known as a TV show or a movie or a comic book.
That said, I don’t think literary fiction is free from that effect either. In fact, everything we read is filtered through our own experience, whether it be a literary novel, a romance or a box of cereal. Keeping your writing immediate and sense-based will not keep your readers from going places you didn’t intend with your writing, or from filling in the blanks that you left open. I would agree, however, that much fanfic and genre fiction intentionally leaves blanks open, or perhaps more accurately assumes that they will be filled in with the inside knowledge of the readers. (Personally, I tend to find this kind of reading, the ‘looking for the Ideal,’ more enjoyable than drowning in picayune details that are supposed to somehow make me forget that I’m reading at all, and take me on an entirely unknown un-signposted journey.)
I agree with Lim and Butler that part of the thing that makes genre fiction and fanfic work is that readers ‘look through’ the piece to see the larger idea or emotional arc that was intended. Is there any difference between this and a transmedia project, or is it just a matter of degree and of framing?
Side note on Butler’s book, less specifically to do with fanfic: I also question Butler’s statement that writing is uniquely challenging because it uses the intellect to effect the emotions. He conceives of, for example, music as an entirely sense-based art. As an audience member, you may find it such, but I don’t think musicians do. (I never did, in my totally non-professional experiences singing in choirs.) Both repetitive practice and structure are required before performance. Even jazz musicians don’t scat all the time. I would make a similar argument about architecture and indeed most art forms, whether seen as applied or not. Everything still exists in a physical world. The realities of space, physics, chemistry, human perception, still have to be factored into how you create artwork and what effect it will have on your audience. We all have to eventually capitulate to the limitations of our own skills and the physical world if we want to produce art. Isn’t it great that fandom is a place where we honor both the work and the intent behind it?
I’d love to hear your reactions, thoughts, and counter-examples.
[From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, by Robert Olen Butler, pp. 41-46. Grove Press, 2005.]
This entry was originally posted at http://bonspiel.dreamwidth.org/27381.html.
So the reactions to fandom being mentioned in Supernatural 4.18 have started an interesting conversation about the nature of fandom and fanfic and why so many of us prefer that the PTB stay out of fandom entirely (or at least not tell us they’re infiltrating us). I’m sympathetic to the Room of Our Own argument myself, although I think that in our increasingly networked, all-access world, we’re all going to have to figure out how to deal with these ‘world collisions’ more and more often. But that’s another conversation. One thing argued in some of the conversations Is that the *aim* of fanfic is different than the aim of published fiction or of TV shows or movies. Stultiloquentia has an interesting post on this, discussing different kinds of fanfic: fics that seek to satisfy the id, fics that are perhaps more like ‘literature,’ and those rare few that manage to be both. “[This is] why I love some fanfic stories with all my heart, but the thought of holding them aloft in front of the Literary Establishment as paragons of the genre still makes me cringey with embarrassment. . . . I am adamant and smug in my belief that the best fanfic is as meritorious as much published lit, complete with profound insight and beautiful prose, despite the fact that you can't read the two things as if they're the same.”
I tried once to explain the brilliance of dsudis’s due South AU Hawks & Hands to a non-fannish friend, someone with a BA in English working on a PhD in American Studies, perfectly comfortable with investigating narratives. My explanations sounded stupid no matter what I tried - “It remixes all the plots and conventions of the series in an unexpected and novel way” was the best I could come up with, but that made it sound like a lighthearted mashup, something without substance. And H&H is all about substance, about loneliness and loss and reaffirming your own agency and preferences. But it’s not the type of AU that is an original story with characters’ names pasted on heads; knowing the canon it’s based on gives the experience of reading the story depth that it doesn’t have otherwise.
In Lim’s discussion of the ‘language’ of vids and vidding [post deleted or locked, link included for reference], s/he said the following: “When I finish something it's never really a completion, it's a capitulation. But I think that in fandom that's less of a... thing than in some other creative communities because we're actually tuned to look for the Ideal, we look through art to the story, the idea or truth it represents.” This brings up the transmedia angle; my question after that lecture was, if everything becomes transmedia, there is no final narrative. If so, there’s increased emphasis on interpretation, and we know that interpretations vary widely - do we create a group consensus about ‘canon’ for everything, not just in fandom?
In From Where You Dream, a collection of his lectures on the writing process, novelist Robert Olen Butler talks about getting the yearning of your characters on the page, writing: “writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction - entertainment fiction, let’s call it, genre fiction - have never forgotten this necessity of the character’s yearning…. You cannot find a book on the bestseller list without a central character who clearly wants something, is driving for something, has a clear objective….The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level.”
But then he goes on to distinguish between genre literature and art and say that the difference is that genre fic uses intellectual, rote language that is made passionate by what the reader brings to it, while ‘art’ is sense-based and descriptive, and creates emotion on its own merits:
“Nonart, genre writing, entertainment writing, is typically filled with abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation. .. It is not art, because [the reader’s] emotional response is a result of her filling in the blanks left by that abstraction. The direct, visceral response to the text results from her filling in from her own fantasies, her own past, and her own aspirations. Abstract, summarizing, generalizing, and analytic language will induce the reader to fill in the blanks and thereby distance her from the work and the characters.”
Not what you were expecting, was it? It does seem to ring true for some fanfic, although I’m not sure it’s a completely valid way to distinguish between genre and literary fiction. (I tend to subscribe to Ursula K Le Guin’s view that the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction is at base a distinction of status, not of merit or of particular story features.)
As Butler correctly points out, one of the features of genre fiction is that it reuses tropes and plot devices. Much of the pleasure of a mystery or a romance is what happens within the confines of the plot structure. It’s a lot like listening to a favorite song for the fifty zillionth time or participating in a religious service. It’s not novel to you (whoops, pun); it derives much of its meaning through repetition and the emotion you bring to that repetition. Ditto fanfiction, and perhaps even more so - we retell, reimagine, recapitulate the characters, plot points, settings and tropes in countless ways, and do it *over and over*. Fanfiction gets much of its power by this process, and I think it’s one reason why that it can’t be explained completely to those who haven’t been through the collective experience of experiencing and re-experiencing a fandom. It is an emotional process, a process that has to do with wanting, although not just the wanting of the characters; it’s also about the wanting of the readers and writers, the desire of us all to fully inhabit and explore these ideas otherwise known as a TV show or a movie or a comic book.
That said, I don’t think literary fiction is free from that effect either. In fact, everything we read is filtered through our own experience, whether it be a literary novel, a romance or a box of cereal. Keeping your writing immediate and sense-based will not keep your readers from going places you didn’t intend with your writing, or from filling in the blanks that you left open. I would agree, however, that much fanfic and genre fiction intentionally leaves blanks open, or perhaps more accurately assumes that they will be filled in with the inside knowledge of the readers. (Personally, I tend to find this kind of reading, the ‘looking for the Ideal,’ more enjoyable than drowning in picayune details that are supposed to somehow make me forget that I’m reading at all, and take me on an entirely unknown un-signposted journey.)
I agree with Lim and Butler that part of the thing that makes genre fiction and fanfic work is that readers ‘look through’ the piece to see the larger idea or emotional arc that was intended. Is there any difference between this and a transmedia project, or is it just a matter of degree and of framing?
Side note on Butler’s book, less specifically to do with fanfic: I also question Butler’s statement that writing is uniquely challenging because it uses the intellect to effect the emotions. He conceives of, for example, music as an entirely sense-based art. As an audience member, you may find it such, but I don’t think musicians do. (I never did, in my totally non-professional experiences singing in choirs.) Both repetitive practice and structure are required before performance. Even jazz musicians don’t scat all the time. I would make a similar argument about architecture and indeed most art forms, whether seen as applied or not. Everything still exists in a physical world. The realities of space, physics, chemistry, human perception, still have to be factored into how you create artwork and what effect it will have on your audience. We all have to eventually capitulate to the limitations of our own skills and the physical world if we want to produce art. Isn’t it great that fandom is a place where we honor both the work and the intent behind it?
I’d love to hear your reactions, thoughts, and counter-examples.
[From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, by Robert Olen Butler, pp. 41-46. Grove Press, 2005.]
This entry was originally posted at http://bonspiel.dreamwidth.org/27381.html.