Thesis D3 Part 1
Aug. 25th, 2011 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losI have to acknowledge here, as I will in the actual thesis, the work of Jon, Katy, Nadja, Jade and innocentsmith in helping me work through bits of this essay. The current state is choppy as fuck, and I haven't had time to make all of Jon and Nadja's smaller revisions yet as I was mostly interested in getting the structure hammered together, but I can do, now that I'm posting. My friends are fucking invaluable and brilliant.
I'm still plugging in footnotes and seeking/plugging in quotes, but this is D3 of the paper due at the end of next Friday. I'm still open for MAJOR revisions, but problematically, even w/out the quotes and footnotes all in place, it's already 2,000 over, so I'm going to have to majorly shave flab to win the ability to squeeze in anymore points. Already a long discussion of how stupid anti-Stratfordians sound and the X-Men films' discussion of 'mutant' status as homosexuality have been ditched, not to mention an illustrative point about the Eight audio "Living Legend" and the Eleven episode "The Lodger".
I figure I'll accommodate any comments form y'all, the quotes and footnotes, maybe some prose tidying from Katy, and the PhD student's comments when she gets back to me, and have D4 up in a few days, in time for Katy and the Intarwebz to vet it before it goes to my supervisor for a check (so D5 and D6/Final, I guess).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One: Coming to Terms
Chapter Two: Fanfiction in the Context of Literary Criticism
Chapter Three: Objection!
Conclusion
Betas and the evolution of editorship as collaborative
"Fan fiction is a good way to avoid learning how to be a writer. Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else’s world, characters, and plot. Coloring Barbie’s hair green in a coloring book is not a great act of creativity. Neither is putting lipstick on Ken. Fan fiction does exactly those kinds of things."1
Robin Hobb, fantasy novelist
Introduction
Fanfiction is defined by advocates in the nascent field as a major form of 'transformative work.' The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) describes the texts they are organized around as:
"creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, ''adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.''"2
For the purposes of this inquiry we'll be exclusively considering transformative fiction, or, more colloquially and comfortably, fanfiction or fic.
Robin Hobb's dismissal of fanfiction (see above) is grounded in a belief that the validity of literary work is the precipitate of a certain kind of originality: the singular author's creation of an idios kosmos, which that author can claim complete, uncontested intellectual paternity of. In this view of authorship, every conception is immaculate. Banished are considerations that trouble cultural studies theorists such as Maria Lind, who would draw our attention to the "many male artists who have been able to rely on more or less invisible support from surrounding women"3, and with them the dialogues of appropriation and influence that led the Renaissance thinker Petrarch to write "I ask you to pray to Virgil with me for forgiveness, asking him not to be annoyed if, just as he stole many things from Homer, Ennius, Lucretius, and others, I inadvertently took, but did not steal, a little something from him."4
Hobb claims that fanfiction is not a valid artistic and creative form, activity or mode of cultural interaction, and dismisses both the practice and the resulting work. A reason.com article by Cathy Young notes that "Hobb’s indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness."5 'The standard charges' indicates that her opinion is hardly extraordinary. Authors as diverse as Anne Rice, George R.R. Martin and Nora Roberts have voiced similar concerns6. In fact Hobb's opinions epitomize a predominating view of fanfiction presented both in the popular press and in the writing of many published authors. At worst, fanfiction is seen as a pathological, parasitic mockery of actual artistic creation, as Hobb describes it. The best reception it can usually expect in the court of public opinion is gentle condescension. Young comments that a reduction of the stigma attached to fanfiction may now lead it to be perceived as "a quaintly amusing hobby."7 Such sentiments are sometimes coupled with a wan hope that fanfiction might be a crutch or a stepping stone in the pursuit of 'true' authorship. "In other words, fan fiction is like training wheels for writers. It allows young authors to practice their craft without expending huge amounts of time and energy developing something "original." As they build their "writing muscles," their writing improves and they tend to stray farther and farther from the source material."8
Whether or not fanfiction's detractors are conscious of it, their anxiety and the terms of its expression derive from a long intellectual tradition. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar speak of "an implicitly or explicitly patriarchal theory of literature"9 which usefully illuminates the argument's context. "In Patriarichal Western culture, therefore, the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power..."10 Given this imagined relationship, the air of wounded horror or patronizing moralism that suffuses these public repudiations of 'illegitimate' creation becomes explicable. The tone suddenly seems reminiscent of Leonato's murderous reaction to rumors of his daughter Hero's infidelity in Much Ado About Nothing. These writers, immersed in a tradition that conditions them to think of literary production as a deeply patriarchal act, experience all the anxiety one should feel about one's patrimony if one's carefully reared daughter went around whelping bastards. It is not just the integrity of their own creations at stake. If authorship is an activity rather than a class, performable and, to a degree, masterable by anyone given practice and certain socioeconomic opportunities, then the Authority of Authorship and the patriarchal pride associated with creation are at risk.
Hobbs' discourse unselfconsciously naturalizes a culturally and temporally specific definition of authorship and originality. For Hobbs, not only does this definition of creativity and validity hold now, there is no sense of it ever not having existed: no mention of its genesis, and no analysis of its development or merits. This leaves us with no sense of alternative, or of competing narratives of quality and legitimacy. Hobbs' conclusion is silently supported by the lack of interest academia has expressed in fanfiction (a contention I will elucidate at length in Chapter 2), both as a social phenomenon and as a literary mode.
What is it to, as Hobbs says, "pretend to be creating a story"? Why isn't fanfiction popularly or academically believed to be literature, and what specifically about it does not cohere with our criteria for such validation? Is fanfiction by its nature incapable of achieving equality with its parent-canon or with other original work? What does it mean to support this position or to find it problematic? What do such stances reveal about our conception of the literary and legitimacy?
As I hope to demonstrate, fanfiction does all the work traditional literature does, and has all the claim traditional literature has on validity and artistic merit as process and product. Thus though it must include related elements in order to make its points, the matter of this paper is not a vindication of the rights of fanfiction. This has been capably achieved via refutals of Hobb's essay on fanfiction and similar pieces by people working within fandom11. I am instead primarily interested in an investigation of the arguments marshaled against the validity of fanfiction, both as artistic work and as a means of interacting with media, and an attempt to determine from whence they attain their motive forces.
To draw a parallel readily comprehensible to anyone working in English literature disciplines, consider Anti-Stratfordians, who contend that Shakespeare's work was written by anyone other than Shakespeare. This analogy was suggested to me by Katherine Hayles' work on style, possessive individualism, and copyright. "The prime example was the detachment of "Shakespeare" from the historical actor and playwright and the reassignment of his "face" to such august personages as Francis Bacon."12 Is the point of King Lear whether its writer knew how nobles behaved in court settings, or that he knew the behavior of fathers and daughters, understood the nature of people? Shakespeare-skeptics attempt to establish illustrious paternity for Shakespeare's work because they love it, and feel it would make more sense, and seem grander and more appropriate, coming from someone who was himself grand. Here as with fanfiction, we can learn much by examining not simply the letter of people's beliefs, but the unannounced substrates on which their beliefs depend, the underlying assumptions (about class, gender, professionalism and artistic value) which condition and unify their professions.
In Chapter One, 'Coming to Terms', we'll define the term fanfiction for those unfamiliar with it and deal with the troubled popular image of the practice. We'll briefly establish and defend the initial premise that fanfiction operates largely as traditional literature does, and that the difference between these forms of writing and the unequal value afforded to them is constructed rather than given--and perhaps constructed on insufficiently solid, unproductive grounds. This will entail a short history of fanfiction in which we'll ask whether all works are, to varying extents, fanfictional, and a brief review of the literature on this topic. In this context we'll address why related mobilizing terms such as 'zine' and 'hypertext' are not wholly adequate to a discussion of fanfiction. Chapter Two, Fanfiction in the Context of Literary Criticism, will investigate fanfiction's relationship with a body of critical theory.
Chapter Three, 'Objection!', covers three prominent impulses (just three of many intermediating causes) that serve to delegitimize fanfiction in the service of an unconscious resentment of the democratic, post-modernist, and feminist tendencies that mark fanfiction even as they mark the most innovative print literature. We'll examine examples fanfiction proper,and traditional literature that appropriates the strategies of fanfictional engagement with text in order to examine how 'fanfictionality' functions as a mode and as a technology, and observe how legitimacy is conditioned with regard to these categories. This leads us to a consideration of the 'fanfictionality' of a work as a flexible measure of the degree to which it actively engages in communal and democratic conversation with other readers and writers. Thus we must simultaneously view fanfictionality as a mode, a technology, and a measure of the degree to which writing is, as a process and product, communal. In this context, we'll introduce and examine a concept of originality fetishism before positing a progressive and artistically robust alternative in the form of the 'quality ecology'.
We'll conclude with a look at the current, evolving status of fanfiction and its potentialities.
Chapter One: Coming to Terms
According to Blanchot, when we establish words in language, we do violence to the particularity of actual individual instances of the given things. This violence is a necessary trade-off for the sake of having something like shared, general concepts we can speak of.13 So, knowing that I cannot help but somewhat violate the particularity of fanfiction in the attempt to render it generally understandable for broad discussion, I embark on establishing a shared definition of the field.
Fanfiction can include seemingly straight-forward fan-written sequels and missing scenes, but it can also stray further from the source text (canon). Fanfiction can be set in alternate universes (AUs). These vary in their divergence from the canon, prompted by questions ranging from 'what if the characters made a different decision at this specific plot point in the original story' to 'what if the characters were not alien-battling astronauts, but in fact denizens of the posh New England island of Nantucket14.' There is even a wide variety of fanfictional poetry, from the sort that's overly-reliant on rhyming-couplets and doesn't scan15 to intensely linguistically self-aware work: skaldic retellings of the Star Wars prequels in Old Icelandic16, Chaucer parodies in middle English17. We must also consider that there is a degree of 'fanfictionality' in working on shared canons such as long-running comic book and television franchise universes, and in writing 'pro' fic--the tie-in novel, the licensed sequel, etc.
It can support or subvert its canon, to the degree that it becomes difficult to draw a Bright Line18 between fanfiction and parody. Fanfiction can be the site of extraordinary whimsy and creativity: there is fic entirely written in binary code19 or in invented languages20, fic with sex scenes from the point of view of the table hosting the proceedings21, or where the canon characters are cast as Girl Scout cookies22. Fanfiction can be flash-fiction length or epic in scope. 'Drabbles', a form that originated within the genre23, are precisely 100 words. Whizzy's Black Helicopters project, still in progress, is currently 331,200 words24. This is roughly 1,324 standard novel pages, far longer than the 100,000 to 175,000 word count of the average published novel (longer even than War and Peace's 1215 pages)25.
Katherine Hayles paraphrases Loss Pequeño Glazier's definition of literary language as language which investigates its conditions of possibility, that has an engagement with its own formal qualities whether or not it serves other ends, and is self-reflexively interested in the conditions of its own making.26 This definition of the literary calls to mind the ways fandom recognizes its literary meta-textuality, as with the lively subgenre of fanfiction about characters writing fanfiction about another canon (often one which mirrors and comments on their own source canon)27. Such experiments use and question the workings of both fanfic writing as a process and the material internet structures that constitute these communities. "Pairing Pendragon/Merlin", in the Merlin fandom, incorporated the formats of popular fan-fiction development, publishing, community and commentary institutions (such as as google chat, Livejournal, fandom!secrets, conventions, and anon memes) to amusing effect, commenting on the politics, work division, and codes of behavior that give life to fandom communities operating across such platforms.
The Affair of the Asphyxiated Acafan, a BBC Sherlock fic, plays out the largely unexamined premise on which the program depends: a world (and thus a literary, academic and fandom landscape) where the original Sherlock Holmes stories never existed. This dramatically changes the mystery genre the fic's fandom-involved protagonist (in the program a minor romantic interest for Watson) enjoys, the value assigned to that literature, and the community formed around it. A world without Sherlockiana is especially interesting for fandom terms to the long history of 'The Game', i.e. fans pretending Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work was written by a real Watson, and writing criticism under that assumption. "Dorothy L. Sayers, herself known for writing the Peter Wimsey mysteries, set forth the rules of the Game. "It must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.""28 It could be argued that this willful dismissal of Doyle's claims to authorial determination was an important touch-stone for modern fandom, which might not exist quite as it does without it. Interestingly both these particular source canons are BBC reimaginings of earlier oral or literary canons.
The previously mentioned examples of Stargate: Atlantis fanfiction demonstrate a similarly creative approach to language use, including experimentation with the digital materiality of their online publishing medium via "NAME", written in binary code, the genre conventions of both their traditionalist science-fiction source text and their evolving, idiosyncratic fandom in "Nantucket AU", and "TABLE FIC"'s engaging rethinking of the relatively straightforward dynamics of a typical pornographic fanfiction. These stories, and fanfiction as a genre, demonstrate not merely a capacity for, but also a lively interest in, self-reflexively engaging with their formal qualities.
Fanfiction should, ideally, portray the source-canon's characters or world in a manner that is consistent with their portrayal in said canon, 'in character', unless the story has a good, sustained reason for doing otherwise. The fanfictional versions can of course reveal different aspects of the canon character, or further develop said character, provided this does not clash with the character's canon presentation. The fanfictional character can, of course, also evolve into more than the sum of its source, as in all good dynamic character arcs, provided the evolution is conveyed to the reader in an appreciable and narratively satisfying manner. These formal constraints of fanfiction are only as limiting as any other formal constraint, but those who are surprised that anyone would want to write within such structures would do well to remember QUOTE ABOUT STRUCTURE PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPRESSION AS WITH POETRY.
This taste for recognizability and compatibility isn't very different from an audiences' desire for an actor to create his version of a character while maintaining the integrity of the script. We seldom compare the fanfic writer's position to that of the director of a play, or of a musician playing a piece, but the challenges and interpretive possibilities are not wholly dissimilar. We want the fanfictional version of the canon character to be much like her so that we can maintain an effective dialogue with the source-text and explore the author's chosen material from that vantage point. A creditable interpretation of a character provides a through-line for readers and demonstrates technical skill. We can do more effective critical thinking about this text as a possibility of the source text, and about the character being used, if that likeness is maintained, and thus the work functions as a sound extrapolation in conversation with the original.
Fanfiction can be multi-authorial. Its readers and writers are sometimes writers of various stripes or academics (the aforementioned 'acafans') in their professional life, and sometimes hold jobs unrelated to their fandom activities. Fic writers and readers form a community characterized by a fluid interchangeability of roles. Fanfiction is a highly interactive literary mode. Even the 'voyeur' position of consuming fanfiction passively without commenting, communal involvement, or writing oneself is charged with potential agency. Due to the ease of producing fanfiction (compared to getting a novel published for wide commercial distribution or a film made), there is little practical separation between even a 'voyeur' reader and the person who has written the work they're reading. The reader could write, and both stand in the same relation to the source text.
According to Lev Grossman's recent article for Time Magazine:
"the fan-fiction scene is hyperdiverse. You'll find every race, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, age and sexual orientation represented there, both as writers and as characters. For people who don't recognize themselves in the media they watch, it's a way of taking those media into their own hands and correcting the picture."29
The OTW further calls attention to fanfiction's destabilization of the hierarchies which structure the production and reception of Western literature, citing "a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture...We value our identity as a predominantly female community with a rich history of creativity and commentary."30
Fanfiction can range from 'gen' adventures fit for the most Milquetoast-esque children to pornographic romps. A treatment of fanfiction such as Grossman's which attempts to gloss over the power and prevalence of 'smut' in fandom seems to be coyly downplaying the force of eroticism within the genre. Perhaps this marks an effort to render fanfiction less strange and thus less dismissible, to gentrify the genre so its qualities as a literary movement are appreciable to more prudish (relative to the original writers and readers) general audiences. Such motives are understandable, and may have led to fanfiction.net, the largest online story archive, banning 'NC-17' (18 Rated) content in 2002. Not all fanfiction engages with sexuality and relationships, just as not all romance novels describe a heterosexual pair's courtship and coupling. In both cases, however, many examples do. Whitewashing this in order to present the genre in its best (or most generally acceptable) light deprives fanfiction of some of its unique identity as a genre. Such analysis attempts to understand fanfiction via more traditional analytic models, under which the inclusion of sexual content intended to titillate is seen as _____QUOTE____, rather than on its own terms.
The most important thing I can say about fanfiction is that it resists generalization. It is vital to avoid collapsing that diversity down into any argument that presupposes that all work which can with some accuracy be described as 'fanfictional' has identical aims, strategies, content and effects. One can only speak of what fanfiction is or does in a general way with the same degree of specificity one can speak of the purposes and ends of literature.
***
In contrast to fanfictional writing, published source canons need to fulfill the storytelling needs of their 'primary' narrative(s) in a way that will be emotionally satisfying to a broad base of people, and thus be financially viable for the market forces engaged in the production of these works. Fanfic needs to articulate every possibility, but, in some ways, a canon needs to hold itself indeterminate. That may seem an oxymoron, when canons must choose a singular ending over the plurality of simultaneous non-contradictory potentialities open to fanfiction, and when an individual fanfiction can itself be used as a canon, but I mean to suggest that there is an appreciable 'open' or 'closed' quality to source canons. An 'open' canon engages with, and seems almost to illicit fanfictionality by not settling every question.
A good example is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which leaves much unsaid: we don't see the protagonists get engaged, much less hear what happens to Elizabeth's sister Mary. There's a lack of closure here, a refusal to foreclose possibility, and thus a structure that enables participation. Pride and Prejudice is perennially popular fanfiction fodder, with many published sequels. Perhaps it is so widely known and loved due to its accessibility for such treatments, and thus its prevalence in the public eye; its 'openness' to fanfictionality may have secured its status in the public mind as Austen's seminal work. Arguably an equal, perhaps better novel, Austen's Emma is a relatively closed work which generates fewer adaptations and sequels (CLUELESS), and less fanfiction (QUOTE). We see almost all the major action, we are told in detail what becomes of almost every character. There is, perhaps, a relationship between fanfictionality and lasting literary acclaim. An intermediated one, however, rather than a direct relationship of cause and effect: Dickens is still popular, and he is perhaps the exemplary 'closed' cannon writer. His work tied too tightly to have Pride and Prejudice's lacunae and loose ends. (Dickens QUOTE FROM HISTORY OF READING: voice, authoial presence) To return to our earlier metaphor of acting or directing a play, the closed canon would resemble a Wagnerial level of control over the production, complete with set designs, costume changes, and even a specific performance site ossified by tradition.
Davies, until recently the head writer for Doctor Who, was once approached by CBBC to write a 'Young Doctor Who' series31. Davies was "reluctant to diminish the mystery of the Doctor's character" (ibid.) in this manner. Such a series would have retrospectively foreclosed possibilities that should remain unarticulated and thus indeterminate in an evolving shared-canon series. I think this awareness of how source canon interacts with paracanon and fandom is a legacy of Davies' time as a fan writer.
***
In the context of this defense of fanfiction as literature, it seems appropriate to address why I consider this a valid Comparative Literature project rather than wholly a Cultural Studies endeavor. Judith Butler notes that strong distinctions between cultural studies and critical theory have broken down32, and according to Hayles "even a casual acquaintance with major movements in the literary studies in the last half-century will immediately confirm that the discipline, in embracing cultural studies, post-colonial studies, popular culture, and many other fields, has been moving towards a broader category of "the literary" for some time. Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are poised to extend the interrogations of the literary into the digital domain."33 I feel my project is well located within this movement to incorporate related fields and consider their content in relation to "the literary", and within this extension into the digital. I'm relying here on the rigor and the theory of literary practice. Most importantly, I'm seeking to locate fanfiction emphatically not as a freak cultural artifact, or even (far more correctly) exclusively as a social phenomenon, but also as a body of texts, to be considered in relation to other texts.
To further establish the paper's position in relation to earlier work, we must sbriefly review the literature, and consequently consider the ways 'zine' and 'hypertext' are awkward and imperfect terms for this inquiry, and why I have chosen the more effective 'transformative work.'
'Hypertext' is the term for electronic literature favored by digital scholars. It specifically denotes text with the capacity to 'link' in a network. 'Text in a network' seems an ideal way of speaking about the communal nature of fanfiction as electronic writing, but Bolter's use of the term is overly dependent on the technical structure of hyper-text. For Bolter, "if a writer chooses to display fixed, linear prose on a computer screen, she is working "against the grain" of the technology",34 never mind that linear prose is, in practice, almost always a dominant element of a link-rich article. Bolter's emphasis on the medium sidelines any consideration of the subversive possibilities available to online writing outside of the opportunities afforded by programing languages and html. He demonstrates an expert or early experimenter's fetishization of what the internet can do over what it does do. As a first generation scholar of digital texts, his interest is absorbed by the ruptures with the past that the internet presents. For Bolter digital hardware and software are evaluated within a rhetoric of "revolution or disaster"35 rather than of gradual change grounded in and contingent upon present and historical discourses and potentialities. As a second generation scholar of digital texts, who almost from the point of literacy has been accustomed to interacting with computers, I cannot help but see continuities. The internet may be 'emergent' in the sense of computer science, but it can only emerge from what exists, can only expand upon or re-negotiate what is.
A paradigm of dominance struggles between media forms, inherited from Marshall McLuhan, deeply informs Bolter's work. Hayles' 'robust media ecology' is more mature and nuanced on this point. Hayles dispenses with dramatic predictions about the imminent end of the alphabet in favor of intermediation, "the coproduction and coevolution of multiple causalities"36. In Hayles' view print is not doomed by the advent of digital technology. Instead various mediums will remediate their dynamic roles in a complex marketplace of cultural forms over the coming decades. Hayles also suffers from a fetishization of the 'revolutionary newness' of the internet akin to Bolter's, however. This causes her to fixate on breaks rather than continuities, and to focus on the subversive potential of the hypertext form to the exclusion of a consideration of other electronic writing such as fanfiction's own subversive potential and particular literary essence.
What's not evident in this celebration of hyper-text is recognition that there is more to literary transgression than a given work's hyper-textual materiality--a recognition that works can practice transgression through strategies based on their content or other aspects of their form, and that such strategies can be at least equally valid and effective. A work's hypertextual materiality can be profound or gimmicky, but it inevitably mobilizes a large portion of the energy of the work to itself. This energy is derived from the audience attention a work can catch and maintain (potentially somewhat built in, with fanfiction). A writer might frequently want to use this to address other, not predominantly hypertext-form-based literary issues. The degree to which a text is 'hyper' can say something about its formal and literary capacity to challenge and explore reader expectation, but it is hardly the single determining factor in gaging that capacity--despite these digital theorists' veneration of the staid structural possibilities rather than the vital, organic realities of electronic writing. This is an issue I'll discuss at length in Chapter Three, when we turn to the technological strategies of fanfiction as a mode.
Zine scholar Spencer similarly fails to see continuity where it abounds. Her DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture has a troubled, ambivalent relationship to the internet fan communities that have had grown out of zines. Spencer pursues a mythical a pan-subject 'zine ethos' of anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism. On the slim pretext of a shared form conditioning all of that forms' instantiations, Spencer smothers the idiosyncrasy and about-ness of particular zines and online fan-communities. She is quick to distance her idea of the zine from the activities of fandom, in the face of the zine's historical roots and much of its practice. "Many do not want to be restricted to this role of fan. ...they may not want those who are producing the culture that they are writing about to view them simply as consumers who then rave about them in print. ...writers create their zines as a conscious reaction against a consumerist society."37 This is a relatively simplistic, reductive dismissal of fandom based on an assessment that fandom activity is inherently fawning and uncritical. Given that:
1) fanfictionality will be established herein as a mode and impulse within the literary tradition predating the historical moment of its harnessing by science fiction fanzines in the 1930s38,
2) zines can range wildly in subject matter--while some are fanfictional, many are not, and thus to appropriate the term 'zine' and generalize a term for fanfiction from it would be to repeat Spencer's errors of totalization based on a shared medium, and
3) zine anthropologists such as Spencer are prone to disregard fannish production in their consideration of the zine as a form,
the use of the term 'zine', as suggested by some39, would seem inappropriate to our discussion.
***
Definition firmly established, we can see how fanfiction can be considered valid writing or literature, in that it does everything writing and literature can do for both writers and readers. To paraphrase Shakespeare, hath not fanfiction writers characters to explore, technique to refine, effects to achieve, language to question and play with, genre constraints and traditions to work through and against, worlds to build, plots to progress, a readership to enchant and satisfy, to be ignored by or run afoul of? Hath not that readership a relationship with these texts, whether positive or negative? Critical and unashamedly personal opinions of these works?
According to Jay David Bolter, "we write both to express, to discover, to share who we are"40. Kafka, Austen, and numerous fanfiction writers sometimes produced or produce work intended for themselves and friends. In such instances they did not seek the legitimization and financial remuneration attendant upon professional publication. I put it to you that creative writing, whether one produces it for a publishing house or for alternative distribution, cannot help but accomplish Bolter's vision of its mission. The immediacy and interactivity of fanfiction seem only to somewhat remediate the medium of literary production, rather than break from and pervert it.
It would be more difficult to set out the ways in which fanfiction differed from traditional literature in its crafting, end products and reception than to define the similarities. Trying to draw distinctions which initially seemed obvious between the Original and the Derivative becomes a balancing test. If a novel by one writer about characters in a virgin world untouched by others is original and legitimate, is that person more of a writer than someone working in a genre like romance or science fiction, which comes with preconceived literary tropes and expectations? Can we even say that writing about 'the real world', a world likewise not created by the writer, which entails accompanying preconceptions and audience expectations, is sufficiently solipsistic to satisfy originality purists? What if that person wrote an excellent, bold new story for an existing television show, comic book, themed anthology with pre-stated editorial expectations or shared fictional world like the Lovecraft universe? What if that person wrote fanfiction?
Originality as we typically conceive of it is not synonymous with quality, and what we honor as a writer's contribution to literature is not necessarily as tied up with their originality as we might suppose. Are Angela Carter's reworked fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber 'mere fanfiction'? Are Marlowe and then Goethe's Faust plays (both derived from a pre-existing German folktale)? For that matter, what of Shakespeare? Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet et al., are not just the product of influence, but represent reworkings of extant plot material. It is some other measure of skill than this definition of originality which separates Shakespeare from the copies produced of his popular plays with scripts bootlegged by his contemporaries.
***
It is interesting that for a general audience, and even for a specialized academic audience comprised of scholars of a discipline as voraciously wide-ranging as comparative literature, it is still probably necessary to define the term 'fanfiction.' After all, 'fanfiction' has had a fair amount of time to enter the lexicon, given the "mimeographed and xeroxed fanzines [which] ran original stories"41 based on television programs in the 1960s, which were themselves an outgrowth of fanzines' "beginnings in the sci-fi communities of the 1930s"42. But to say this tradition is the root of modern fanfiction is both correct and intensely misleading.
Fanfiction is by no means a new mode of storytelling, and in fact represents a resurgence of elements of storytelling repressed by the invention of Authorship. Hayles describes British legal struggles to formulate copyright, and thus Authorship, as predicated upon the economic realities and the philosophical worldview current in the West in the 18th century:
"...the discourse of possessive individualism is permeated through and through by market relations from the beginning. Only in a society where market relations were predominant would an argument defining the individual in terms of his ability to possess himself be found persuasive. The same kind of chicken and egg problem inheres in the notion of literary property. The author creates his literary property through the exercise of his original genius, yet it is clear that writing is always a matter of appropriation and transformation, from syntax to literary allusions and the structure of tropes. A literary tradition must precede an author's inscriptions for literature to be possible as such, yet this same appropriation and reworking of an existing tradition is said to produce "original" work. Arguments about literary property were persuasive in part because they fit together so well with prevailing notions of liberal subjectivity, but that some fit implied common blindness."43
Authorship succeeded as a technology in some respects, enabling certain developments at the expense of others, and has also had some lasting negative consequences. It served as a means of defining the figure of the Author as an embodiment of thoughtful creativity, and served as a means of generating motivating legitimacy and remunerative financial security for such individuals. Authorship was further developed as an intellectual technology to express, naturalize, and legalize copyright, in accordance with possession-centered "prevailing notions of liberal subjectivity."44 Authorship was used by writers and economic publishing interests to enshrine a worldview of legal patriarchal paternity over literary property45. Though it is a little unclear in Hayles' work whether she exclusively credits 19th century English corporate efforts and their successors with the development of Authorship, I prefer to think of these legal battles as the crystallization of a long trend of thought rather than the forging of it. Such discourses of Authorship draw upon the Renaissance figure of the Author as Genius46, and these in turn manifest latent metaphors of paternity inherent in print culture and the Western literary tradition.
In 1993, Susan Bassnett's Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction sought to incorporate the work of all Comparative Literature within the framework of Translation Studies, thus remediating the project of the discipline. This totalizing gesture did not ultimately bear out--Comparative Literature still exists as a discipline, while Translation Studies occupies a relatively modest portion of academic interest. The legacy of this rhetorical move lies in its ability to reframe the issue, simply by asking readers to rethink a dominant organizing hierarchy. In that spirit, rather than locating instances of 'early fanfic' in Dante's Divine Comedy, you could describe all literature as inherently 'fanfictional' to a greater or lesser extent. You could then refine your definition of fanfiction to consider it, like Sontag's 'Camp', as a mode rather than a genre. As Hayles' suggested, all texts within a literature work via allusion. All texts suggest other texts. QUOTE DERRIDA.47 Fanfictionality would then be expressed along a continuum. A work's placement along this continuum would not be determined by its degree of 'appropriation versus originality', per se, but more properly located within a spectrum of 'communal versus auteur' production conditions and resulting aesthetic.
The Doctor Who-based Big Finish Audio radio play "Jubilee" by Rob Shearman can be used to indicate just how complex and intermediated a work's placement on such a spectrum must be. It can also showcase some of the strategies of fanfiction, and what can be gained from their employment. Big Finish Audio (BFA) began as an unofficial and unpaid fan network producing radio plays about Doctor Who after the show was canceled. They eventually acquired licensing rights from the BBC and regular time-slots on BBC Radio (FACT CHECK). Their work remains, however, formally unconnected with the production of the current Doctor Who program, restricted to treating 'classic' (pre-cancellation and revival) Doctors and their companions, and para-canonical: it cannot claim to speak with authority as to whether it stories 'really happened' within the universe of 'canon' Doctor Who, and it cannot expect the current series to honor what it says has happened to the Doctor in the past.
I say Big Finish Audio is "formally unconnected with the production of the current Doctor Who program", but as is the case with many long-running shared canons, this is a difficult distinction to draw. There's always been an unusual degree of permeability between the roles of fan and writer in science fiction fandom. QUOTE LATHAM?48 In long-running Group Canons like Doctor Who, Star Trek, or any comic franchise, in which people who wrote fanfic moved on to write BFAs or tie-in novels, and then to write for the canon proper (as happened for 'New Who' writers Russel T. Davies, Rob Shearman, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat, etc.), there is an especially fluid relationship between being an engaged audience member, fanfiction, the paracanon and the canon.
For this discussion, it's most relevant to know that Doctor Who is a long-running British science fiction show whose alien protagonist, the Doctor, is a sort of folk-heroic protector of humanity, with a special interest in and love for this sceptered isle. The Doctor, despite being an alien, reads as culturally British much of the time, and is in the habit of taking British companions aboard his ship, the TARDIS, for platonic and relatively wholesome adventures in time and space. His most famous enemy, the Daleks, sometimes function as a stand-in for the Nazis, occupying a similar role in the national imaginary and facilitating the replaying and working out the traumas of that war. QUOTE In "Jubilee" the Doctor and Evelyn (an audio-only companion, a seasoned history professor) encounter a time paradox. They end up both traveling to 1903 to thwart a Dalek invasion of London and experiencing in 2003 (and without foreknowledge) the long-term after-effects of their earlier actions.
The story begins with an initially baffling Indiana Jones style film trailer, with a young action-hero 'Doctor' quipping "Daleks. I hate these guys." in an echo of the famous line from "The Last Crusade". A sexy young 'Evelyn Smythe' kisses him with audible wet smacks. Perhaps most importantly for the rest of the plot, the Daleks are neutered and rendered ridiculous, rolling around shrieking "SCARPER! SCARPER!!"49 at the mere mention of the Doctor's name in place of their trademark "EXTERMINATE!"50 This, we later discover, is a trailer for a compulsory propaganda film in the alternate 2003 the Doctor and Evelyn's intervention in history has produced.
Having cannibalized technology from the defeated Daleks, the Orwellian English Empire (emphatically not the more inclusive 'British Empire') became the sole hegemonic power on Earth. After repelling the Daleks, unwilling to lose the Doctor as a national symbol, the regime locked him in the Black Tower, gruesomely hobbling him when he tried to escape. He has become feeble and mad. The last Dalek on earth is about to be killed as the centerpiece of the eponymous Jubilee. 'Dalek mania', a harsh parody of the actual sixties rage for anything with a picture of a Dalek slapped on it and a commentary on the relationship of fiction, atrocity and time, mobilizes consumers to buy Dalek toys, Dalek squash, Dalek anything and everything. The worst horror the English have ever faced becomes a bumbling, nigh-lovable object of mockery. The English, now conquerers instead of victims, have internalized the annihilating hate for anything Other that characteristically animates the Daleks. The characters drip with performative Englishness, desperate to assert that they are not themselves Other. In the public imaginary the Doctor marched alongside the English Army as they took Europe and reclaimed America, storming the beaches of Normandy in a different context in a re-imagining of World War II. He's changed as a figure to suit their needs, dropping his ridiculous costume and taking on a jingoistic military virility.
Exchanging the nerdy, avuncular Doctor for the cool, sexualized Indiana Jones figure from the film trailer emphasizes a difference between American and English relationships with imperial power and the national epic. In "Jubilee" the interaction between England and a 'recolonialized' America populated by people who are sub-English and thus sub-Human interestingly remediates the historical reality of the shift in power between the countries, inverting and dramatically intensifying it in order to call the actual situation into consideration. This inversion is fleshed out by England having a President (the self-styling of revamped royals) and America a Prime Minister. If the mind is busy picking out the ways fanfictional work does not correlate with an individual's received understanding of how things are or should be, then that individual is forced to examine their notions of what is accurate or correct.
This exaggeration of the Doctor's role as a national icon has an unsettling kinship with the actual relationship Doctor Who has with the nation that produced and adores it. Doctor Who is unquestionably an English national epic, complete with a hero who, in "The Empty Child", draws blitz-thick air into his lungs and give a rousing speech about Brave Little Britain. A few series on, he meets Churchill, who is apparently his close friend. To be a beloved icon of national identity is to court the inherent jingoism of being such a symbol. Doctor Who has long been heralded as a subversive text, QUOTE ABOUT THATCHER ERA. But that presentation isn't monolithic, consistent, or the product of a simple, ever-more-progressive vision. For example it could be argued that seventh Doctor episode "The Curse of Fenric", with its sympathetic and devoted Russian communists and its English vicar who questions the justice of the Dresden Bombings and thus loses both his sense of national identity and his faith, handles the themes and tropes of World War II fiction in a much more nuanced fashion than "The Empty Child" managed in 2005. As it ages, becoming more of an institution, Doctor Who increasingly needs to, question the conditions of its own making, to interrogate the forces behind its popularity, examine and contest the way it functions, as Hayles' definition of the literary suggests and as Shearman's "Jubilee" executes .
"Jubilee" is a busy play that never feels over-crowded. In a fanfictional mode it works firmly within Doctor Who's universe. The alternate history never violates the structure of a typical Doctor and companion adventure. "Jubilee" makes the comfortable conventions of Doctor Who grotesque in order to shake out what they mean, what is excellent and terrible in them. It achieves a more thorough analysis and deconstruction of these conventions through playing with expectations than it could have by abandoning them. As with sabotage, it's possible to get a better look at how things work and effect more serious change from the inside of an organization than than from the outside. "Jubilee"'s meditations on the relationship between popular entertainment and power, on the way fiction appropriates history and how history and political reality appropriate fiction, are all the richer for being drawn from Doctor Who's giving framework.
If Doctor Who didn't exist, if Daleks didn't exist, Shearman would have had to invent all of this. Hobb suggests that, rather than commit the sin of fanfiction, writers who have strayed "QUOTE". This conceit of 'scraping off the serial numbers' so that a work can be publishable is common in fannish discourse, and, not coincidentally, drawn from the illicit vocabulary of car-jacking. On many occasions, simply changing characters' names and the like would not materially alter the extent to which the resulting work was drawn from and interlaced with the source-canon. Even if it did, the underlying influences would likely still be palpable. I am put in mind of Portia Da Costa's romance novel The Stranger. QUOTE Da Costa she admits the work is essentially about the Doctor, and that this was disguised to enable publication. Despite her modifications, her source is readily apparent if one knows the canon. Nothing is added by this cosmetic change. The Stranger remains (poor) fanfiction. Scraping off the serial numbers, while occasionally expedient if one wants to be published or if one feels one's story has developed in such a way that it would benefit from being set adrift from its source canon, is not necessarily going to improve the fanfictional work, and may even harm it.
To make this point I'd like to reconfigure the term "Attention Economy" (typically QUOTE) and use it in a more writerly and more Freudian sense. I'd like to create a parallel with Freud's GO INTO THIS--ECONOMIES. Along these lines, genre conditions readers to readily accept scenarios like 'ship in space' without a detailed hand-holding, as might have been necessary if people had never before imagined such a story. See the labored HG Well's explanation of Time Travel in The Time Machine QUOTE versus 'New' Doctor Who's quick introduction of the concept in "Rose" QUOTE. Literature, which is always fanfictional in its strategies to a degree, and genre, which can be especially so, always relies on QUOTE ABOUT SEMANTIC ELEMENTS AS SHORT HAND.
Given that Shearman's audience is already familiar with Doctor Who and invested in these characters, Shearman has a relatively high attention credit to work with, and thus he has the opportunity to tell a certain type of story that capitalizes on the audience's patience and relies on their knowledge of the world he's exploring, and the conventions he's subverting. If Shearman had taken the time to create a monster race which mirrored the threat of Fascism, a defender who defeated this threat, then managed to do the cultural work of instilling his readers with a strong national identification with his defender, and then embarked on conveying the content of "Jubilee", the emphasis would probably have been on the world-building, and his chosen commentary could not have been as immediate or successful as it is here. Even if he had possessed the necessary time and audience attention, and he'd successfully managed to replicate the resonant cultural associations of Doctor Who with his one work (unlikely), he'd still have been relying on people's familiarity with genre conventions. They would encounter and read this work according to the strategies of interpretation trained in them by Doctor Who, and if there had been no Doctor Who, then by the genre that birthed it.
Working within a shared canon has its own dynamic tensions between the expression and control of the individual and the demands of the co-created work, which are not synonymous with, but are akin to, the formal tensions of working to produce fanfiction. When people express frustration over shared canons being 'imperfect' or 'broken', rife with internal contradictions from incidences of writers prioritizing the needs of their singular script over the need for a coherent and consistent canon, part of what upsets them is the collaborative nature of these formations and their inherent polyvocality. You would be hard-pressed to create a shared canon without ruptures, some of them productive improvements and some of them careless and canon-degrading. Judging the value added or harm done by such inconsistencies is part of appreciating the dialogic nature of a shared canon work. In its destabilizing and democratizing impulses, fanfiction can also be said to restore the conventional unity of a shared canon. (QUOTE ABOUT PEOPLE BEING SCARED OF LOSING ALL SENSE OF CANON). While we no longer necessarily all feel the need to read Milton and like it or count ourselves uncultured illiterates, the centrifugal force ____ sees in modern interaction with literature is perhaps mediated by the centripetal forces of fanfictionality, in which people dwell on, talk about, rework, rethink and rewrite a mutually familiar body of work, accessing the benefits of familiarity with a shared canon (if sidestepping some prescriptive Bloomian notions about the sort of elite work said canon should consist of).
A head writer for the official Doctor Who program, like Davies or Moffat, can assume an Auteur role over the production, and, correspondingly, can attempt to subvert the polyvocality of the program to his singular vision. In "A Writers Tale", Davies claims to have QUOTE., This is especially interesting as he oversaw the transformation of "Jubilee" into the ninth Doctor episode "Dalek" which, while still strong, has nothing on the richness and complexity of "Jubilee." As with Authorship, the Auteur director is a technology that can have negative as well as positive effects. It can give a work a coherent sense of direction and tone, and it can smooth out patches of brilliance as well as rough spots in a series in an effort to reduce polyphony to a single voice. The Auteur director is, however, a figure with a high degree of legitimacy. Looser associations like the writes of Big Finish Audio, working without such a consistent or over-bearing editorial vision, are more marginalized, and produce work that is in turns banal or bad and as metatextualy challenging and rewarding as "Jubilee".
I'm still plugging in footnotes and seeking/plugging in quotes, but this is D3 of the paper due at the end of next Friday. I'm still open for MAJOR revisions, but problematically, even w/out the quotes and footnotes all in place, it's already 2,000 over, so I'm going to have to majorly shave flab to win the ability to squeeze in anymore points. Already a long discussion of how stupid anti-Stratfordians sound and the X-Men films' discussion of 'mutant' status as homosexuality have been ditched, not to mention an illustrative point about the Eight audio "Living Legend" and the Eleven episode "The Lodger".
I figure I'll accommodate any comments form y'all, the quotes and footnotes, maybe some prose tidying from Katy, and the PhD student's comments when she gets back to me, and have D4 up in a few days, in time for Katy and the Intarwebz to vet it before it goes to my supervisor for a check (so D5 and D6/Final, I guess).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One: Coming to Terms
Chapter Two: Fanfiction in the Context of Literary Criticism
Chapter Three: Objection!
Conclusion
Betas and the evolution of editorship as collaborative
"Fan fiction is a good way to avoid learning how to be a writer. Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else’s world, characters, and plot. Coloring Barbie’s hair green in a coloring book is not a great act of creativity. Neither is putting lipstick on Ken. Fan fiction does exactly those kinds of things."1
Robin Hobb, fantasy novelist
Introduction
Fanfiction is defined by advocates in the nascent field as a major form of 'transformative work.' The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) describes the texts they are organized around as:
"creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, ''adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.''"2
For the purposes of this inquiry we'll be exclusively considering transformative fiction, or, more colloquially and comfortably, fanfiction or fic.
Robin Hobb's dismissal of fanfiction (see above) is grounded in a belief that the validity of literary work is the precipitate of a certain kind of originality: the singular author's creation of an idios kosmos, which that author can claim complete, uncontested intellectual paternity of. In this view of authorship, every conception is immaculate. Banished are considerations that trouble cultural studies theorists such as Maria Lind, who would draw our attention to the "many male artists who have been able to rely on more or less invisible support from surrounding women"3, and with them the dialogues of appropriation and influence that led the Renaissance thinker Petrarch to write "I ask you to pray to Virgil with me for forgiveness, asking him not to be annoyed if, just as he stole many things from Homer, Ennius, Lucretius, and others, I inadvertently took, but did not steal, a little something from him."4
Hobb claims that fanfiction is not a valid artistic and creative form, activity or mode of cultural interaction, and dismisses both the practice and the resulting work. A reason.com article by Cathy Young notes that "Hobb’s indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness."5 'The standard charges' indicates that her opinion is hardly extraordinary. Authors as diverse as Anne Rice, George R.R. Martin and Nora Roberts have voiced similar concerns6. In fact Hobb's opinions epitomize a predominating view of fanfiction presented both in the popular press and in the writing of many published authors. At worst, fanfiction is seen as a pathological, parasitic mockery of actual artistic creation, as Hobb describes it. The best reception it can usually expect in the court of public opinion is gentle condescension. Young comments that a reduction of the stigma attached to fanfiction may now lead it to be perceived as "a quaintly amusing hobby."7 Such sentiments are sometimes coupled with a wan hope that fanfiction might be a crutch or a stepping stone in the pursuit of 'true' authorship. "In other words, fan fiction is like training wheels for writers. It allows young authors to practice their craft without expending huge amounts of time and energy developing something "original." As they build their "writing muscles," their writing improves and they tend to stray farther and farther from the source material."8
Whether or not fanfiction's detractors are conscious of it, their anxiety and the terms of its expression derive from a long intellectual tradition. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar speak of "an implicitly or explicitly patriarchal theory of literature"9 which usefully illuminates the argument's context. "In Patriarichal Western culture, therefore, the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power..."10 Given this imagined relationship, the air of wounded horror or patronizing moralism that suffuses these public repudiations of 'illegitimate' creation becomes explicable. The tone suddenly seems reminiscent of Leonato's murderous reaction to rumors of his daughter Hero's infidelity in Much Ado About Nothing. These writers, immersed in a tradition that conditions them to think of literary production as a deeply patriarchal act, experience all the anxiety one should feel about one's patrimony if one's carefully reared daughter went around whelping bastards. It is not just the integrity of their own creations at stake. If authorship is an activity rather than a class, performable and, to a degree, masterable by anyone given practice and certain socioeconomic opportunities, then the Authority of Authorship and the patriarchal pride associated with creation are at risk.
Hobbs' discourse unselfconsciously naturalizes a culturally and temporally specific definition of authorship and originality. For Hobbs, not only does this definition of creativity and validity hold now, there is no sense of it ever not having existed: no mention of its genesis, and no analysis of its development or merits. This leaves us with no sense of alternative, or of competing narratives of quality and legitimacy. Hobbs' conclusion is silently supported by the lack of interest academia has expressed in fanfiction (a contention I will elucidate at length in Chapter 2), both as a social phenomenon and as a literary mode.
What is it to, as Hobbs says, "pretend to be creating a story"? Why isn't fanfiction popularly or academically believed to be literature, and what specifically about it does not cohere with our criteria for such validation? Is fanfiction by its nature incapable of achieving equality with its parent-canon or with other original work? What does it mean to support this position or to find it problematic? What do such stances reveal about our conception of the literary and legitimacy?
As I hope to demonstrate, fanfiction does all the work traditional literature does, and has all the claim traditional literature has on validity and artistic merit as process and product. Thus though it must include related elements in order to make its points, the matter of this paper is not a vindication of the rights of fanfiction. This has been capably achieved via refutals of Hobb's essay on fanfiction and similar pieces by people working within fandom11. I am instead primarily interested in an investigation of the arguments marshaled against the validity of fanfiction, both as artistic work and as a means of interacting with media, and an attempt to determine from whence they attain their motive forces.
To draw a parallel readily comprehensible to anyone working in English literature disciplines, consider Anti-Stratfordians, who contend that Shakespeare's work was written by anyone other than Shakespeare. This analogy was suggested to me by Katherine Hayles' work on style, possessive individualism, and copyright. "The prime example was the detachment of "Shakespeare" from the historical actor and playwright and the reassignment of his "face" to such august personages as Francis Bacon."12 Is the point of King Lear whether its writer knew how nobles behaved in court settings, or that he knew the behavior of fathers and daughters, understood the nature of people? Shakespeare-skeptics attempt to establish illustrious paternity for Shakespeare's work because they love it, and feel it would make more sense, and seem grander and more appropriate, coming from someone who was himself grand. Here as with fanfiction, we can learn much by examining not simply the letter of people's beliefs, but the unannounced substrates on which their beliefs depend, the underlying assumptions (about class, gender, professionalism and artistic value) which condition and unify their professions.
In Chapter One, 'Coming to Terms', we'll define the term fanfiction for those unfamiliar with it and deal with the troubled popular image of the practice. We'll briefly establish and defend the initial premise that fanfiction operates largely as traditional literature does, and that the difference between these forms of writing and the unequal value afforded to them is constructed rather than given--and perhaps constructed on insufficiently solid, unproductive grounds. This will entail a short history of fanfiction in which we'll ask whether all works are, to varying extents, fanfictional, and a brief review of the literature on this topic. In this context we'll address why related mobilizing terms such as 'zine' and 'hypertext' are not wholly adequate to a discussion of fanfiction. Chapter Two, Fanfiction in the Context of Literary Criticism, will investigate fanfiction's relationship with a body of critical theory.
Chapter Three, 'Objection!', covers three prominent impulses (just three of many intermediating causes) that serve to delegitimize fanfiction in the service of an unconscious resentment of the democratic, post-modernist, and feminist tendencies that mark fanfiction even as they mark the most innovative print literature. We'll examine examples fanfiction proper,and traditional literature that appropriates the strategies of fanfictional engagement with text in order to examine how 'fanfictionality' functions as a mode and as a technology, and observe how legitimacy is conditioned with regard to these categories. This leads us to a consideration of the 'fanfictionality' of a work as a flexible measure of the degree to which it actively engages in communal and democratic conversation with other readers and writers. Thus we must simultaneously view fanfictionality as a mode, a technology, and a measure of the degree to which writing is, as a process and product, communal. In this context, we'll introduce and examine a concept of originality fetishism before positing a progressive and artistically robust alternative in the form of the 'quality ecology'.
We'll conclude with a look at the current, evolving status of fanfiction and its potentialities.
Chapter One: Coming to Terms
According to Blanchot, when we establish words in language, we do violence to the particularity of actual individual instances of the given things. This violence is a necessary trade-off for the sake of having something like shared, general concepts we can speak of.13 So, knowing that I cannot help but somewhat violate the particularity of fanfiction in the attempt to render it generally understandable for broad discussion, I embark on establishing a shared definition of the field.
Fanfiction can include seemingly straight-forward fan-written sequels and missing scenes, but it can also stray further from the source text (canon). Fanfiction can be set in alternate universes (AUs). These vary in their divergence from the canon, prompted by questions ranging from 'what if the characters made a different decision at this specific plot point in the original story' to 'what if the characters were not alien-battling astronauts, but in fact denizens of the posh New England island of Nantucket14.' There is even a wide variety of fanfictional poetry, from the sort that's overly-reliant on rhyming-couplets and doesn't scan15 to intensely linguistically self-aware work: skaldic retellings of the Star Wars prequels in Old Icelandic16, Chaucer parodies in middle English17. We must also consider that there is a degree of 'fanfictionality' in working on shared canons such as long-running comic book and television franchise universes, and in writing 'pro' fic--the tie-in novel, the licensed sequel, etc.
It can support or subvert its canon, to the degree that it becomes difficult to draw a Bright Line18 between fanfiction and parody. Fanfiction can be the site of extraordinary whimsy and creativity: there is fic entirely written in binary code19 or in invented languages20, fic with sex scenes from the point of view of the table hosting the proceedings21, or where the canon characters are cast as Girl Scout cookies22. Fanfiction can be flash-fiction length or epic in scope. 'Drabbles', a form that originated within the genre23, are precisely 100 words. Whizzy's Black Helicopters project, still in progress, is currently 331,200 words24. This is roughly 1,324 standard novel pages, far longer than the 100,000 to 175,000 word count of the average published novel (longer even than War and Peace's 1215 pages)25.
Katherine Hayles paraphrases Loss Pequeño Glazier's definition of literary language as language which investigates its conditions of possibility, that has an engagement with its own formal qualities whether or not it serves other ends, and is self-reflexively interested in the conditions of its own making.26 This definition of the literary calls to mind the ways fandom recognizes its literary meta-textuality, as with the lively subgenre of fanfiction about characters writing fanfiction about another canon (often one which mirrors and comments on their own source canon)27. Such experiments use and question the workings of both fanfic writing as a process and the material internet structures that constitute these communities. "Pairing Pendragon/Merlin", in the Merlin fandom, incorporated the formats of popular fan-fiction development, publishing, community and commentary institutions (such as as google chat, Livejournal, fandom!secrets, conventions, and anon memes) to amusing effect, commenting on the politics, work division, and codes of behavior that give life to fandom communities operating across such platforms.
The Affair of the Asphyxiated Acafan, a BBC Sherlock fic, plays out the largely unexamined premise on which the program depends: a world (and thus a literary, academic and fandom landscape) where the original Sherlock Holmes stories never existed. This dramatically changes the mystery genre the fic's fandom-involved protagonist (in the program a minor romantic interest for Watson) enjoys, the value assigned to that literature, and the community formed around it. A world without Sherlockiana is especially interesting for fandom terms to the long history of 'The Game', i.e. fans pretending Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work was written by a real Watson, and writing criticism under that assumption. "Dorothy L. Sayers, herself known for writing the Peter Wimsey mysteries, set forth the rules of the Game. "It must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.""28 It could be argued that this willful dismissal of Doyle's claims to authorial determination was an important touch-stone for modern fandom, which might not exist quite as it does without it. Interestingly both these particular source canons are BBC reimaginings of earlier oral or literary canons.
The previously mentioned examples of Stargate: Atlantis fanfiction demonstrate a similarly creative approach to language use, including experimentation with the digital materiality of their online publishing medium via "NAME", written in binary code, the genre conventions of both their traditionalist science-fiction source text and their evolving, idiosyncratic fandom in "Nantucket AU", and "TABLE FIC"'s engaging rethinking of the relatively straightforward dynamics of a typical pornographic fanfiction. These stories, and fanfiction as a genre, demonstrate not merely a capacity for, but also a lively interest in, self-reflexively engaging with their formal qualities.
Fanfiction should, ideally, portray the source-canon's characters or world in a manner that is consistent with their portrayal in said canon, 'in character', unless the story has a good, sustained reason for doing otherwise. The fanfictional versions can of course reveal different aspects of the canon character, or further develop said character, provided this does not clash with the character's canon presentation. The fanfictional character can, of course, also evolve into more than the sum of its source, as in all good dynamic character arcs, provided the evolution is conveyed to the reader in an appreciable and narratively satisfying manner. These formal constraints of fanfiction are only as limiting as any other formal constraint, but those who are surprised that anyone would want to write within such structures would do well to remember QUOTE ABOUT STRUCTURE PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPRESSION AS WITH POETRY.
This taste for recognizability and compatibility isn't very different from an audiences' desire for an actor to create his version of a character while maintaining the integrity of the script. We seldom compare the fanfic writer's position to that of the director of a play, or of a musician playing a piece, but the challenges and interpretive possibilities are not wholly dissimilar. We want the fanfictional version of the canon character to be much like her so that we can maintain an effective dialogue with the source-text and explore the author's chosen material from that vantage point. A creditable interpretation of a character provides a through-line for readers and demonstrates technical skill. We can do more effective critical thinking about this text as a possibility of the source text, and about the character being used, if that likeness is maintained, and thus the work functions as a sound extrapolation in conversation with the original.
Fanfiction can be multi-authorial. Its readers and writers are sometimes writers of various stripes or academics (the aforementioned 'acafans') in their professional life, and sometimes hold jobs unrelated to their fandom activities. Fic writers and readers form a community characterized by a fluid interchangeability of roles. Fanfiction is a highly interactive literary mode. Even the 'voyeur' position of consuming fanfiction passively without commenting, communal involvement, or writing oneself is charged with potential agency. Due to the ease of producing fanfiction (compared to getting a novel published for wide commercial distribution or a film made), there is little practical separation between even a 'voyeur' reader and the person who has written the work they're reading. The reader could write, and both stand in the same relation to the source text.
According to Lev Grossman's recent article for Time Magazine:
"the fan-fiction scene is hyperdiverse. You'll find every race, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, age and sexual orientation represented there, both as writers and as characters. For people who don't recognize themselves in the media they watch, it's a way of taking those media into their own hands and correcting the picture."29
The OTW further calls attention to fanfiction's destabilization of the hierarchies which structure the production and reception of Western literature, citing "a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture...We value our identity as a predominantly female community with a rich history of creativity and commentary."30
Fanfiction can range from 'gen' adventures fit for the most Milquetoast-esque children to pornographic romps. A treatment of fanfiction such as Grossman's which attempts to gloss over the power and prevalence of 'smut' in fandom seems to be coyly downplaying the force of eroticism within the genre. Perhaps this marks an effort to render fanfiction less strange and thus less dismissible, to gentrify the genre so its qualities as a literary movement are appreciable to more prudish (relative to the original writers and readers) general audiences. Such motives are understandable, and may have led to fanfiction.net, the largest online story archive, banning 'NC-17' (18 Rated) content in 2002. Not all fanfiction engages with sexuality and relationships, just as not all romance novels describe a heterosexual pair's courtship and coupling. In both cases, however, many examples do. Whitewashing this in order to present the genre in its best (or most generally acceptable) light deprives fanfiction of some of its unique identity as a genre. Such analysis attempts to understand fanfiction via more traditional analytic models, under which the inclusion of sexual content intended to titillate is seen as _____QUOTE____, rather than on its own terms.
The most important thing I can say about fanfiction is that it resists generalization. It is vital to avoid collapsing that diversity down into any argument that presupposes that all work which can with some accuracy be described as 'fanfictional' has identical aims, strategies, content and effects. One can only speak of what fanfiction is or does in a general way with the same degree of specificity one can speak of the purposes and ends of literature.
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In contrast to fanfictional writing, published source canons need to fulfill the storytelling needs of their 'primary' narrative(s) in a way that will be emotionally satisfying to a broad base of people, and thus be financially viable for the market forces engaged in the production of these works. Fanfic needs to articulate every possibility, but, in some ways, a canon needs to hold itself indeterminate. That may seem an oxymoron, when canons must choose a singular ending over the plurality of simultaneous non-contradictory potentialities open to fanfiction, and when an individual fanfiction can itself be used as a canon, but I mean to suggest that there is an appreciable 'open' or 'closed' quality to source canons. An 'open' canon engages with, and seems almost to illicit fanfictionality by not settling every question.
A good example is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which leaves much unsaid: we don't see the protagonists get engaged, much less hear what happens to Elizabeth's sister Mary. There's a lack of closure here, a refusal to foreclose possibility, and thus a structure that enables participation. Pride and Prejudice is perennially popular fanfiction fodder, with many published sequels. Perhaps it is so widely known and loved due to its accessibility for such treatments, and thus its prevalence in the public eye; its 'openness' to fanfictionality may have secured its status in the public mind as Austen's seminal work. Arguably an equal, perhaps better novel, Austen's Emma is a relatively closed work which generates fewer adaptations and sequels (CLUELESS), and less fanfiction (QUOTE). We see almost all the major action, we are told in detail what becomes of almost every character. There is, perhaps, a relationship between fanfictionality and lasting literary acclaim. An intermediated one, however, rather than a direct relationship of cause and effect: Dickens is still popular, and he is perhaps the exemplary 'closed' cannon writer. His work tied too tightly to have Pride and Prejudice's lacunae and loose ends. (Dickens QUOTE FROM HISTORY OF READING: voice, authoial presence) To return to our earlier metaphor of acting or directing a play, the closed canon would resemble a Wagnerial level of control over the production, complete with set designs, costume changes, and even a specific performance site ossified by tradition.
Davies, until recently the head writer for Doctor Who, was once approached by CBBC to write a 'Young Doctor Who' series31. Davies was "reluctant to diminish the mystery of the Doctor's character" (ibid.) in this manner. Such a series would have retrospectively foreclosed possibilities that should remain unarticulated and thus indeterminate in an evolving shared-canon series. I think this awareness of how source canon interacts with paracanon and fandom is a legacy of Davies' time as a fan writer.
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In the context of this defense of fanfiction as literature, it seems appropriate to address why I consider this a valid Comparative Literature project rather than wholly a Cultural Studies endeavor. Judith Butler notes that strong distinctions between cultural studies and critical theory have broken down32, and according to Hayles "even a casual acquaintance with major movements in the literary studies in the last half-century will immediately confirm that the discipline, in embracing cultural studies, post-colonial studies, popular culture, and many other fields, has been moving towards a broader category of "the literary" for some time. Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are poised to extend the interrogations of the literary into the digital domain."33 I feel my project is well located within this movement to incorporate related fields and consider their content in relation to "the literary", and within this extension into the digital. I'm relying here on the rigor and the theory of literary practice. Most importantly, I'm seeking to locate fanfiction emphatically not as a freak cultural artifact, or even (far more correctly) exclusively as a social phenomenon, but also as a body of texts, to be considered in relation to other texts.
To further establish the paper's position in relation to earlier work, we must sbriefly review the literature, and consequently consider the ways 'zine' and 'hypertext' are awkward and imperfect terms for this inquiry, and why I have chosen the more effective 'transformative work.'
'Hypertext' is the term for electronic literature favored by digital scholars. It specifically denotes text with the capacity to 'link' in a network. 'Text in a network' seems an ideal way of speaking about the communal nature of fanfiction as electronic writing, but Bolter's use of the term is overly dependent on the technical structure of hyper-text. For Bolter, "if a writer chooses to display fixed, linear prose on a computer screen, she is working "against the grain" of the technology",34 never mind that linear prose is, in practice, almost always a dominant element of a link-rich article. Bolter's emphasis on the medium sidelines any consideration of the subversive possibilities available to online writing outside of the opportunities afforded by programing languages and html. He demonstrates an expert or early experimenter's fetishization of what the internet can do over what it does do. As a first generation scholar of digital texts, his interest is absorbed by the ruptures with the past that the internet presents. For Bolter digital hardware and software are evaluated within a rhetoric of "revolution or disaster"35 rather than of gradual change grounded in and contingent upon present and historical discourses and potentialities. As a second generation scholar of digital texts, who almost from the point of literacy has been accustomed to interacting with computers, I cannot help but see continuities. The internet may be 'emergent' in the sense of computer science, but it can only emerge from what exists, can only expand upon or re-negotiate what is.
A paradigm of dominance struggles between media forms, inherited from Marshall McLuhan, deeply informs Bolter's work. Hayles' 'robust media ecology' is more mature and nuanced on this point. Hayles dispenses with dramatic predictions about the imminent end of the alphabet in favor of intermediation, "the coproduction and coevolution of multiple causalities"36. In Hayles' view print is not doomed by the advent of digital technology. Instead various mediums will remediate their dynamic roles in a complex marketplace of cultural forms over the coming decades. Hayles also suffers from a fetishization of the 'revolutionary newness' of the internet akin to Bolter's, however. This causes her to fixate on breaks rather than continuities, and to focus on the subversive potential of the hypertext form to the exclusion of a consideration of other electronic writing such as fanfiction's own subversive potential and particular literary essence.
What's not evident in this celebration of hyper-text is recognition that there is more to literary transgression than a given work's hyper-textual materiality--a recognition that works can practice transgression through strategies based on their content or other aspects of their form, and that such strategies can be at least equally valid and effective. A work's hypertextual materiality can be profound or gimmicky, but it inevitably mobilizes a large portion of the energy of the work to itself. This energy is derived from the audience attention a work can catch and maintain (potentially somewhat built in, with fanfiction). A writer might frequently want to use this to address other, not predominantly hypertext-form-based literary issues. The degree to which a text is 'hyper' can say something about its formal and literary capacity to challenge and explore reader expectation, but it is hardly the single determining factor in gaging that capacity--despite these digital theorists' veneration of the staid structural possibilities rather than the vital, organic realities of electronic writing. This is an issue I'll discuss at length in Chapter Three, when we turn to the technological strategies of fanfiction as a mode.
Zine scholar Spencer similarly fails to see continuity where it abounds. Her DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture has a troubled, ambivalent relationship to the internet fan communities that have had grown out of zines. Spencer pursues a mythical a pan-subject 'zine ethos' of anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism. On the slim pretext of a shared form conditioning all of that forms' instantiations, Spencer smothers the idiosyncrasy and about-ness of particular zines and online fan-communities. She is quick to distance her idea of the zine from the activities of fandom, in the face of the zine's historical roots and much of its practice. "Many do not want to be restricted to this role of fan. ...they may not want those who are producing the culture that they are writing about to view them simply as consumers who then rave about them in print. ...writers create their zines as a conscious reaction against a consumerist society."37 This is a relatively simplistic, reductive dismissal of fandom based on an assessment that fandom activity is inherently fawning and uncritical. Given that:
1) fanfictionality will be established herein as a mode and impulse within the literary tradition predating the historical moment of its harnessing by science fiction fanzines in the 1930s38,
2) zines can range wildly in subject matter--while some are fanfictional, many are not, and thus to appropriate the term 'zine' and generalize a term for fanfiction from it would be to repeat Spencer's errors of totalization based on a shared medium, and
3) zine anthropologists such as Spencer are prone to disregard fannish production in their consideration of the zine as a form,
the use of the term 'zine', as suggested by some39, would seem inappropriate to our discussion.
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Definition firmly established, we can see how fanfiction can be considered valid writing or literature, in that it does everything writing and literature can do for both writers and readers. To paraphrase Shakespeare, hath not fanfiction writers characters to explore, technique to refine, effects to achieve, language to question and play with, genre constraints and traditions to work through and against, worlds to build, plots to progress, a readership to enchant and satisfy, to be ignored by or run afoul of? Hath not that readership a relationship with these texts, whether positive or negative? Critical and unashamedly personal opinions of these works?
According to Jay David Bolter, "we write both to express, to discover, to share who we are"40. Kafka, Austen, and numerous fanfiction writers sometimes produced or produce work intended for themselves and friends. In such instances they did not seek the legitimization and financial remuneration attendant upon professional publication. I put it to you that creative writing, whether one produces it for a publishing house or for alternative distribution, cannot help but accomplish Bolter's vision of its mission. The immediacy and interactivity of fanfiction seem only to somewhat remediate the medium of literary production, rather than break from and pervert it.
It would be more difficult to set out the ways in which fanfiction differed from traditional literature in its crafting, end products and reception than to define the similarities. Trying to draw distinctions which initially seemed obvious between the Original and the Derivative becomes a balancing test. If a novel by one writer about characters in a virgin world untouched by others is original and legitimate, is that person more of a writer than someone working in a genre like romance or science fiction, which comes with preconceived literary tropes and expectations? Can we even say that writing about 'the real world', a world likewise not created by the writer, which entails accompanying preconceptions and audience expectations, is sufficiently solipsistic to satisfy originality purists? What if that person wrote an excellent, bold new story for an existing television show, comic book, themed anthology with pre-stated editorial expectations or shared fictional world like the Lovecraft universe? What if that person wrote fanfiction?
Originality as we typically conceive of it is not synonymous with quality, and what we honor as a writer's contribution to literature is not necessarily as tied up with their originality as we might suppose. Are Angela Carter's reworked fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber 'mere fanfiction'? Are Marlowe and then Goethe's Faust plays (both derived from a pre-existing German folktale)? For that matter, what of Shakespeare? Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet et al., are not just the product of influence, but represent reworkings of extant plot material. It is some other measure of skill than this definition of originality which separates Shakespeare from the copies produced of his popular plays with scripts bootlegged by his contemporaries.
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It is interesting that for a general audience, and even for a specialized academic audience comprised of scholars of a discipline as voraciously wide-ranging as comparative literature, it is still probably necessary to define the term 'fanfiction.' After all, 'fanfiction' has had a fair amount of time to enter the lexicon, given the "mimeographed and xeroxed fanzines [which] ran original stories"41 based on television programs in the 1960s, which were themselves an outgrowth of fanzines' "beginnings in the sci-fi communities of the 1930s"42. But to say this tradition is the root of modern fanfiction is both correct and intensely misleading.
Fanfiction is by no means a new mode of storytelling, and in fact represents a resurgence of elements of storytelling repressed by the invention of Authorship. Hayles describes British legal struggles to formulate copyright, and thus Authorship, as predicated upon the economic realities and the philosophical worldview current in the West in the 18th century:
"...the discourse of possessive individualism is permeated through and through by market relations from the beginning. Only in a society where market relations were predominant would an argument defining the individual in terms of his ability to possess himself be found persuasive. The same kind of chicken and egg problem inheres in the notion of literary property. The author creates his literary property through the exercise of his original genius, yet it is clear that writing is always a matter of appropriation and transformation, from syntax to literary allusions and the structure of tropes. A literary tradition must precede an author's inscriptions for literature to be possible as such, yet this same appropriation and reworking of an existing tradition is said to produce "original" work. Arguments about literary property were persuasive in part because they fit together so well with prevailing notions of liberal subjectivity, but that some fit implied common blindness."43
Authorship succeeded as a technology in some respects, enabling certain developments at the expense of others, and has also had some lasting negative consequences. It served as a means of defining the figure of the Author as an embodiment of thoughtful creativity, and served as a means of generating motivating legitimacy and remunerative financial security for such individuals. Authorship was further developed as an intellectual technology to express, naturalize, and legalize copyright, in accordance with possession-centered "prevailing notions of liberal subjectivity."44 Authorship was used by writers and economic publishing interests to enshrine a worldview of legal patriarchal paternity over literary property45. Though it is a little unclear in Hayles' work whether she exclusively credits 19th century English corporate efforts and their successors with the development of Authorship, I prefer to think of these legal battles as the crystallization of a long trend of thought rather than the forging of it. Such discourses of Authorship draw upon the Renaissance figure of the Author as Genius46, and these in turn manifest latent metaphors of paternity inherent in print culture and the Western literary tradition.
In 1993, Susan Bassnett's Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction sought to incorporate the work of all Comparative Literature within the framework of Translation Studies, thus remediating the project of the discipline. This totalizing gesture did not ultimately bear out--Comparative Literature still exists as a discipline, while Translation Studies occupies a relatively modest portion of academic interest. The legacy of this rhetorical move lies in its ability to reframe the issue, simply by asking readers to rethink a dominant organizing hierarchy. In that spirit, rather than locating instances of 'early fanfic' in Dante's Divine Comedy, you could describe all literature as inherently 'fanfictional' to a greater or lesser extent. You could then refine your definition of fanfiction to consider it, like Sontag's 'Camp', as a mode rather than a genre. As Hayles' suggested, all texts within a literature work via allusion. All texts suggest other texts. QUOTE DERRIDA.47 Fanfictionality would then be expressed along a continuum. A work's placement along this continuum would not be determined by its degree of 'appropriation versus originality', per se, but more properly located within a spectrum of 'communal versus auteur' production conditions and resulting aesthetic.
The Doctor Who-based Big Finish Audio radio play "Jubilee" by Rob Shearman can be used to indicate just how complex and intermediated a work's placement on such a spectrum must be. It can also showcase some of the strategies of fanfiction, and what can be gained from their employment. Big Finish Audio (BFA) began as an unofficial and unpaid fan network producing radio plays about Doctor Who after the show was canceled. They eventually acquired licensing rights from the BBC and regular time-slots on BBC Radio (FACT CHECK). Their work remains, however, formally unconnected with the production of the current Doctor Who program, restricted to treating 'classic' (pre-cancellation and revival) Doctors and their companions, and para-canonical: it cannot claim to speak with authority as to whether it stories 'really happened' within the universe of 'canon' Doctor Who, and it cannot expect the current series to honor what it says has happened to the Doctor in the past.
I say Big Finish Audio is "formally unconnected with the production of the current Doctor Who program", but as is the case with many long-running shared canons, this is a difficult distinction to draw. There's always been an unusual degree of permeability between the roles of fan and writer in science fiction fandom. QUOTE LATHAM?48 In long-running Group Canons like Doctor Who, Star Trek, or any comic franchise, in which people who wrote fanfic moved on to write BFAs or tie-in novels, and then to write for the canon proper (as happened for 'New Who' writers Russel T. Davies, Rob Shearman, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat, etc.), there is an especially fluid relationship between being an engaged audience member, fanfiction, the paracanon and the canon.
For this discussion, it's most relevant to know that Doctor Who is a long-running British science fiction show whose alien protagonist, the Doctor, is a sort of folk-heroic protector of humanity, with a special interest in and love for this sceptered isle. The Doctor, despite being an alien, reads as culturally British much of the time, and is in the habit of taking British companions aboard his ship, the TARDIS, for platonic and relatively wholesome adventures in time and space. His most famous enemy, the Daleks, sometimes function as a stand-in for the Nazis, occupying a similar role in the national imaginary and facilitating the replaying and working out the traumas of that war. QUOTE In "Jubilee" the Doctor and Evelyn (an audio-only companion, a seasoned history professor) encounter a time paradox. They end up both traveling to 1903 to thwart a Dalek invasion of London and experiencing in 2003 (and without foreknowledge) the long-term after-effects of their earlier actions.
The story begins with an initially baffling Indiana Jones style film trailer, with a young action-hero 'Doctor' quipping "Daleks. I hate these guys." in an echo of the famous line from "The Last Crusade". A sexy young 'Evelyn Smythe' kisses him with audible wet smacks. Perhaps most importantly for the rest of the plot, the Daleks are neutered and rendered ridiculous, rolling around shrieking "SCARPER! SCARPER!!"49 at the mere mention of the Doctor's name in place of their trademark "EXTERMINATE!"50 This, we later discover, is a trailer for a compulsory propaganda film in the alternate 2003 the Doctor and Evelyn's intervention in history has produced.
Having cannibalized technology from the defeated Daleks, the Orwellian English Empire (emphatically not the more inclusive 'British Empire') became the sole hegemonic power on Earth. After repelling the Daleks, unwilling to lose the Doctor as a national symbol, the regime locked him in the Black Tower, gruesomely hobbling him when he tried to escape. He has become feeble and mad. The last Dalek on earth is about to be killed as the centerpiece of the eponymous Jubilee. 'Dalek mania', a harsh parody of the actual sixties rage for anything with a picture of a Dalek slapped on it and a commentary on the relationship of fiction, atrocity and time, mobilizes consumers to buy Dalek toys, Dalek squash, Dalek anything and everything. The worst horror the English have ever faced becomes a bumbling, nigh-lovable object of mockery. The English, now conquerers instead of victims, have internalized the annihilating hate for anything Other that characteristically animates the Daleks. The characters drip with performative Englishness, desperate to assert that they are not themselves Other. In the public imaginary the Doctor marched alongside the English Army as they took Europe and reclaimed America, storming the beaches of Normandy in a different context in a re-imagining of World War II. He's changed as a figure to suit their needs, dropping his ridiculous costume and taking on a jingoistic military virility.
Exchanging the nerdy, avuncular Doctor for the cool, sexualized Indiana Jones figure from the film trailer emphasizes a difference between American and English relationships with imperial power and the national epic. In "Jubilee" the interaction between England and a 'recolonialized' America populated by people who are sub-English and thus sub-Human interestingly remediates the historical reality of the shift in power between the countries, inverting and dramatically intensifying it in order to call the actual situation into consideration. This inversion is fleshed out by England having a President (the self-styling of revamped royals) and America a Prime Minister. If the mind is busy picking out the ways fanfictional work does not correlate with an individual's received understanding of how things are or should be, then that individual is forced to examine their notions of what is accurate or correct.
This exaggeration of the Doctor's role as a national icon has an unsettling kinship with the actual relationship Doctor Who has with the nation that produced and adores it. Doctor Who is unquestionably an English national epic, complete with a hero who, in "The Empty Child", draws blitz-thick air into his lungs and give a rousing speech about Brave Little Britain. A few series on, he meets Churchill, who is apparently his close friend. To be a beloved icon of national identity is to court the inherent jingoism of being such a symbol. Doctor Who has long been heralded as a subversive text, QUOTE ABOUT THATCHER ERA. But that presentation isn't monolithic, consistent, or the product of a simple, ever-more-progressive vision. For example it could be argued that seventh Doctor episode "The Curse of Fenric", with its sympathetic and devoted Russian communists and its English vicar who questions the justice of the Dresden Bombings and thus loses both his sense of national identity and his faith, handles the themes and tropes of World War II fiction in a much more nuanced fashion than "The Empty Child" managed in 2005. As it ages, becoming more of an institution, Doctor Who increasingly needs to, question the conditions of its own making, to interrogate the forces behind its popularity, examine and contest the way it functions, as Hayles' definition of the literary suggests and as Shearman's "Jubilee" executes .
"Jubilee" is a busy play that never feels over-crowded. In a fanfictional mode it works firmly within Doctor Who's universe. The alternate history never violates the structure of a typical Doctor and companion adventure. "Jubilee" makes the comfortable conventions of Doctor Who grotesque in order to shake out what they mean, what is excellent and terrible in them. It achieves a more thorough analysis and deconstruction of these conventions through playing with expectations than it could have by abandoning them. As with sabotage, it's possible to get a better look at how things work and effect more serious change from the inside of an organization than than from the outside. "Jubilee"'s meditations on the relationship between popular entertainment and power, on the way fiction appropriates history and how history and political reality appropriate fiction, are all the richer for being drawn from Doctor Who's giving framework.
If Doctor Who didn't exist, if Daleks didn't exist, Shearman would have had to invent all of this. Hobb suggests that, rather than commit the sin of fanfiction, writers who have strayed "QUOTE". This conceit of 'scraping off the serial numbers' so that a work can be publishable is common in fannish discourse, and, not coincidentally, drawn from the illicit vocabulary of car-jacking. On many occasions, simply changing characters' names and the like would not materially alter the extent to which the resulting work was drawn from and interlaced with the source-canon. Even if it did, the underlying influences would likely still be palpable. I am put in mind of Portia Da Costa's romance novel The Stranger. QUOTE Da Costa she admits the work is essentially about the Doctor, and that this was disguised to enable publication. Despite her modifications, her source is readily apparent if one knows the canon. Nothing is added by this cosmetic change. The Stranger remains (poor) fanfiction. Scraping off the serial numbers, while occasionally expedient if one wants to be published or if one feels one's story has developed in such a way that it would benefit from being set adrift from its source canon, is not necessarily going to improve the fanfictional work, and may even harm it.
To make this point I'd like to reconfigure the term "Attention Economy" (typically QUOTE) and use it in a more writerly and more Freudian sense. I'd like to create a parallel with Freud's GO INTO THIS--ECONOMIES. Along these lines, genre conditions readers to readily accept scenarios like 'ship in space' without a detailed hand-holding, as might have been necessary if people had never before imagined such a story. See the labored HG Well's explanation of Time Travel in The Time Machine QUOTE versus 'New' Doctor Who's quick introduction of the concept in "Rose" QUOTE. Literature, which is always fanfictional in its strategies to a degree, and genre, which can be especially so, always relies on QUOTE ABOUT SEMANTIC ELEMENTS AS SHORT HAND.
Given that Shearman's audience is already familiar with Doctor Who and invested in these characters, Shearman has a relatively high attention credit to work with, and thus he has the opportunity to tell a certain type of story that capitalizes on the audience's patience and relies on their knowledge of the world he's exploring, and the conventions he's subverting. If Shearman had taken the time to create a monster race which mirrored the threat of Fascism, a defender who defeated this threat, then managed to do the cultural work of instilling his readers with a strong national identification with his defender, and then embarked on conveying the content of "Jubilee", the emphasis would probably have been on the world-building, and his chosen commentary could not have been as immediate or successful as it is here. Even if he had possessed the necessary time and audience attention, and he'd successfully managed to replicate the resonant cultural associations of Doctor Who with his one work (unlikely), he'd still have been relying on people's familiarity with genre conventions. They would encounter and read this work according to the strategies of interpretation trained in them by Doctor Who, and if there had been no Doctor Who, then by the genre that birthed it.
Working within a shared canon has its own dynamic tensions between the expression and control of the individual and the demands of the co-created work, which are not synonymous with, but are akin to, the formal tensions of working to produce fanfiction. When people express frustration over shared canons being 'imperfect' or 'broken', rife with internal contradictions from incidences of writers prioritizing the needs of their singular script over the need for a coherent and consistent canon, part of what upsets them is the collaborative nature of these formations and their inherent polyvocality. You would be hard-pressed to create a shared canon without ruptures, some of them productive improvements and some of them careless and canon-degrading. Judging the value added or harm done by such inconsistencies is part of appreciating the dialogic nature of a shared canon work. In its destabilizing and democratizing impulses, fanfiction can also be said to restore the conventional unity of a shared canon. (QUOTE ABOUT PEOPLE BEING SCARED OF LOSING ALL SENSE OF CANON). While we no longer necessarily all feel the need to read Milton and like it or count ourselves uncultured illiterates, the centrifugal force ____ sees in modern interaction with literature is perhaps mediated by the centripetal forces of fanfictionality, in which people dwell on, talk about, rework, rethink and rewrite a mutually familiar body of work, accessing the benefits of familiarity with a shared canon (if sidestepping some prescriptive Bloomian notions about the sort of elite work said canon should consist of).
A head writer for the official Doctor Who program, like Davies or Moffat, can assume an Auteur role over the production, and, correspondingly, can attempt to subvert the polyvocality of the program to his singular vision. In "A Writers Tale", Davies claims to have QUOTE., This is especially interesting as he oversaw the transformation of "Jubilee" into the ninth Doctor episode "Dalek" which, while still strong, has nothing on the richness and complexity of "Jubilee." As with Authorship, the Auteur director is a technology that can have negative as well as positive effects. It can give a work a coherent sense of direction and tone, and it can smooth out patches of brilliance as well as rough spots in a series in an effort to reduce polyphony to a single voice. The Auteur director is, however, a figure with a high degree of legitimacy. Looser associations like the writes of Big Finish Audio, working without such a consistent or over-bearing editorial vision, are more marginalized, and produce work that is in turns banal or bad and as metatextualy challenging and rewarding as "Jubilee".
