Thesis D3 Part 2

[x_los]

Chapter Two: Fanfiction in the Context of Literary Theory



The lack of academic coverage of fanfiction might be a lacunae created by oversight, or result accidentally from academics favoring other subjects. In that case have to interrogate why so strong a preference exists. At what point do incidences of neglect amount, via the Parable of the Heap, to a meaningful absence? Consider the harmony of fanfiction's content with the work of various currently salient literary-theoretical perspectives. With its capacity to inhabit and deconstruct a text, to trouble and explore its possibilities, is not fanfiction closely related to the work of literary criticism, and thus especially apt for discussion under its purview? You could make a strong case for fanfiction as an instantiation of deconstructionist/post structuralist energies: its dwelling in the story after the work has officially 'closed', its multiple possible alternate endings, and its complex networks of interlaced narrative possibilities for each 'canon' could constitute an embrace of indeterminacy, open-ended reading, and an evolution of Bakhtin's dialogic novel, which QUOTE FROM DIALOGIC IMAGINATION TO EXPLAIN THIS TERM/ILLUSTRATE ITS RELEVANCE, fanfic as dialogic novel.

One dissertation argued51 that fanfiction is a postmodern mode of our literary time. Such an understanding of fanfiction figures it, in tune with its high-literary contemporaries, as interested in moving past the breakdown of grand narratives via an investment in the radically particular. In a world where the scientific discourse is populated with specters of quantum indeterminacy, a theory in which "measurement (or more generally, observation) determines the result, in effect collapsing the wave function [of all possible outcomes for any given event] so that it leads to a unitary reality that did not exist before the measurement"52, is it not as fitting as it is intellectually interesting that we embark on a popular mass literary project of infinite permutation, in which every possibility is played out?

In line with Barthes' 'Death of the Author', fanfiction refuses to acknowledge the supremacy of the 'creator' and that individual's intentions. People writing Harry Potter fanfiction in which Sirius Black and Remus Lupin are romantically involved are explicitly ignoring writer J.K. Rowling's foreclosure of the ambiguity of their relationship in favor of, respectively, death and o'er hasty marriage to a dull minor character While fanfiction is sometimes seen to stem from a fanatic love for the canon which prompts it (QUOTE TO ILLUSTRATE THIS VIEW), that seems a misapprehension--there is not necessarily any component of paint-by-numbers worship of the bibliographical author as Great Man involved in writing fanfiction, as such willful deviation indicates. Such sentiments as BLOOM QUOTE are more at home in an intentionalist line of traditional literary criticism than in the passionate deconstructions of fanfiction. Much fanfiction is explicitly not in accordance with the author's plans and wishes, to Hobbs' frustration:

"The intent of the author is ignored... If a particular scene doesn’t happen ‘on stage’ before the reader’s eyes, there is probably a reason for it.... It’s horribly frustrating to see all that work ignored and undone by someone else ‘fixing’ it."


This leads us to a consideration of fanfiction in light of reader-response criticism. What more active, engaged, participatory reader could there be than one who writes back to the text, becoming a writer herself, an explicit co-creator rather than simply a passive recipient of text? Surely writing fanfiction is a boldly explicit realization of the manner in which we all read texts subjectively, co-creating meaning with the writer, forging a personal reading which even then cannot be trusted to remain static, will never be staid and universal.

Fanfiction moves beyond blurring the line between High and Low culture, gleefully writing Low smut about Jane Austen novels53 and High poetry and epics about everything from the board game Settlers of Catan54 to REALITY SHOW55. It also juxtaposes tones and registers--NAME is a dark, linguistic-theory influenced treatment of a camp sci-fi family program56. Cultural Studies scholars should be having a field day. So should zine-anthropologists such as Amy Spencer, as fanfiction in its current state is in many ways the direct descendent of zine culture57. Autonomist Marxist critics like Tiziana Terranova and Olga Gorivnova, who have done intriguing work on, respectively, open source software movements in late capitalism58 and online art and participatory platforms and creativity59, could easily incorporate a discussion of the dynamics of online fanfiction as it is produced and consumed today within these inquiries.

Surely a literature written almost entirely by and for women, redolent with erotic content, which relies on digital performances of gender and selfhood to formulate both communities and art, is of interest to feminist scholars. As well as to queer studies, given both that (MELANNEN STAT) and that many of the portrayed relationships are not heterosexual. The popularity of same-sex 'slash' relationships outstrips the popularity of straight romance in many fandoms (STAT?), and those that are 'het' often problematize sex in interesting ways. Is, for example, the sex between an alien and a human not 'queer'? (QUOTE--what did I want to quote here, did I mean cite? Maybe I wanted an example. There's always that creepy Ten/Rose xenoporn.) Fanfiction that is not explicitly 'slash' often similarly affords writers and readers opportunities to examine sex as something other than given, than uncomplicatedly biologically 'naturalized.'

The postcolonial scholars behind "The Empire Writes Back" might take an interest in texts from the West being reworked by an audience that includes reader/writers from developing countries, or simply an audience critical of the imperial assumptions that lie untroubled in a source text like Stargate: Atlantis, but which provoke a great deal of useful exploratory fanfiction. The basic, rather colonial premise is of the program is that a contemporary, militarized group of mostly white, American people from developed nations move to the Pegasus and take up residence in Atlantis, the abandoned home of godlike aliens, who are worshipped as gods in many parts of the Pegasus galaxy. The Pegasus "natives", as the show calls them, are often less technologically developed than the Earthlings, and the two main representatives in the cast are both people of color. Their stylized behavior, such as (EXAMPLE), and tribal community structures suggest tribal North American or African corollaries.

The protagonists fight space vampires (the Wraith) and try to find ZPMs, the alien energy sources that can power Atlantis. These ZPMs are often possessed by native cultures who regard them as holy relics or need them to keep their own technology operational. The protagonists come into these societies to loot resources, with little canon awareness of the topical dodginess of portraying the wacky adventures of members of the American military as they raid underdeveloped nations for their priceless energy sources. Having destabilized these cultures, the Earthlings depart, often leaving some or all of the natives dead. The narrative of canon seldom engages with how questionable this is, and when it does, due to its reliance on this narrative structure to sustain the show and its unwillingness to characterize the actions of the protagonists as meaningless or ultimately harmful, the show proper cannot really commit to a searching examination of the narrative or a repudiation of its colonialist premises. In response, a strong thread of concern about colonialism runs through much of the better fanfiction. What you have is thus fanfiction as an emergent property in the sense of a computer simulation. As complex behaviors result from simple code, so complex fic can result from a simple canon.

For post-colonial thinkers fanfiction might function as an embodiment of the premise that one cannot act without being acted upon. The West cannot produce texts without these texts being appropriated and refashioned by their readers, even as their readers are refashioned by the cultural inputs they receive from the texts. Postcolonial, feminist and Marxist critics could also make cases for the value of people without easy access to traditional publishing structures or expensive educational programs such as post-graduate Writers Workshops having, via fanfiction, an opportunity to hone their skills and publish their writing. Digital textuality scholars have an obvious stake in the literature that now effectuates the theories of hypertext they developed around StorySpace, other early platforms, and their comparatively small user-bases61.

This is not to mention fanfictions' ripeness for less theoretical and more textual critiques. Fanfiction can be considered in relation to the source canon, to other fanfiction within those canons, across canons, and in terms of its period and themes as other literature is. It offers added dimensions for consideration and critique and sacrifices none of the traditional vectors for analysis.

It is difficult to prove a negative, to demonstrate absence. All I can do is highlight the many disciplines and theories which seem poised to consider fanfiction, and ask why so little related research is to be found. A simple JSTOR search for the keyword 'fanfiction' yields 38 results. 'Updike', a singular writer with a relatively limited span of time in which to be written on (his forty years of prominence are nothing to Shakespeare's centuries), has 5482.62 Given that the first Kirk/Spock story was published in a fanzine in 1974, and that 'John Updike' can be said to have become a household name roughly contemporaneously, the volumetric comparison is especially telling. Spencer is hesitant to draw connections between fanzines and their online successors. Open-source movement commentators like Terranova neglect to mention the similar dynamics of fanfiction. Gorivnova, in her discussion of art and participatory platforms, discusses Livejournal, which is perhaps the major online platform for the participatory art of fanfiction. It couples a mature, developed fandom community with a steady, vital output that is well-regarded in terms of quality. Still Terranova never names fanfiction.

Digital textuality and media theorists working specifically on electronic literature, such as Jay David Bolter and Katherine Hayles, writing in an era in which fanfiction was (and is) flourishing on the internet, and writing about highly related developments to which a discussion of fanfiction would be so apropos that its absence seems jarring, snub it completely. Perhaps they were unaware of it, but given their capability as researchers and its prevalence on the internet of that era63 that would greatly surprise me. I thus find it more probable that they chose to ignore fanfiction, either because they found it personally distasteful or because in making a case for the legitimacy of electronic literature in a climate of opinion entrenched against it in defense of the book, they felt they couldn't afford the dodgy associations of fanfiction. These scholars are willfully blind to the realities of the production of digital literature--the sort of examples they discuss64 have been riotously outstripped by the sheer mass of fanfiction. Fanfiction may be niche, but it's by no means a small phenomenon, or easily overlooked by specialists. "Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it's largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it's unbelievably massive."65

The concurrence between all of these critical streams of thought and fanfiction is so blatant that the almost total absence of fanfic from these discourses does not seems to be a chance omission, or a lack of academics' personal interest. The omissions accumulate, becoming a heap, becoming significant. In almost entirely neglecting fanfiction as a subject, despite the phenomenon's size and age (even when fanfiction is considered in a relatively artificial, exclusively modern context), academia, like Hobbs and like the general public (as represented by press accounts), silently announces that it believes that fanfiction is not valid or artistic work.

Having juxtaposed fanfiction with current critical theory in order to present it as functionally operative literature, we must ask why, when we have a solid theoretical background to embark on a serious discussion of fanfiction, and when we claim to be critical of the traditional division between elite and popular literature, we are willing to write 5000-odd papers about Updike before we write thirty about this mass literary movement, participated in by a huge, diverse body of women, sometimes with extraordinary creative results. We have the theoretical framework, and we certainly have the body of texts, yet we hold back from validating this literature with study. Given that fanfiction is evidently functioning as literature and engaged cultural practice, what becomes interesting and puzzling is 'Why do we talk the talk but not walk the walk?' How and why do we go about conditioning the illegitimacy of fanfiction?



Chapter Three: Objection!



We turn to some of the arguments marshaled against the legitimacy and artistic value of fanfiction, and to asking from whence they obtain their effective force. I would like to discuss three major arguments and their underlying motivation, though I know the situation is more complicated than my 'three prongs' might imply. Hayles' 'media ecology' (which describes the continuing vitality and value of print in a world where computers have a significant role to play in delivering text) provides a model for the many intermediating, multi-causal ways in which we find fanfiction problematic, and thus unpalatable, uncomfortable, and ridiculous, despite the solid grounds for theoretical support for its practice.

1) "QUOTE"

The lingering questions from the above section about the patriarchal and capitalist functions of the Author as a technology underlie an economic and hierarchical resistance to the truly participatory text, and to the democratic distribution of power that implies. We internalize these concerns when we worry that "QUOTE FROM HOBB ABOUT REPUTATION AND LIVLIHOOD BEING THREATENED".

This power of official publishing to legitimize work is considerable. QUOTE ABOUT THE LOW VALIDITY OF SELF PUBLISHING, and self-published works often have relatively traditional, unobjectionable content. QUOTE ABOUT PUBLISHING AS GATE-KEEPING, QUOTE ABOUT HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO BE PUBLISHED. We construct work that has not run this gauntlet as economically and culturally valueless, not taking into account the benefits of writing and sharing work for its own sake, or the many ways in which publishing's gate-keeping function works which are not directly tied to an editorial belief in the book's worth (though such arbitration of taste is itself problematic because continually having the literary establishment arbitrate merit cannot help but produce a relatively conservative definition of quality, tightly bound to the definitions of value which have preceded it).

But publishing is also an economic industry QUOTE, currently disinclined to take many great leaps of faith in new writers. They're bound by copyright law, and so the fanfictionality of their content is restricted. They're internally bound by what sort of publishing house they are, whether they think a particular title will sell at this particular time, length restrictions, and other considerations of the costs of the book's production. QUOTE JOHN SCALZI POETRY BOOK SITTUATION The hard science fiction writer John Scalzi, author of the popular Old Man's War series, wanted to produce an accompanying book of poetry from the hitherto narratively-absent female protagonist of the series' point of view. Despite the aggressive success of Old Man's War and Scalzi's position as president of Science Fiction Writers of America, he could not get Tor, his regular publisher, to support him and enable this venture. He had to go with a smaller independent press, aptly named Subterranean, which was prepared to accept relatively low returns and to deal with poetry.

A diverse ecology of different publishers prepared to handle different material is more convenient for writers and better at bringing a wide range of material to the reading public than having no such alternative avenues for expression, but you can see how the navigation of these avenues might prove challenging and discouraging for writers with fewer resources, less experience, or a less able agent than Scalzi's. Scalzi's book of poetry was not unsuitable for publication with Tor because he was not a competent writer, or because it was not valid work, but simply because it was not in the publishing company's financial interest to produce the volume. The intrinsic merit we assign to being recognized, published and paid, and the intrinsic shame we assign to failing to be (and being gauche enough to write outside of such legitimizing frameworks), will have to be weighed in light of a recognition of the very real, non-merit-based strictures that condition publishing.

"Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose"66, a Stargate: Atlantis fanfic by Synecdochic, exemplifies many of the freedoms and advantages inherent in fanfictional publishing, as well as effectively mobilizing the formal constraints and strategies of fanfiction to tell a story more effectively than it could have without reliance on said constraints. "Freedom" deals with the post-traumatic stress of a scientist named Rodney McKay, who, in canon, traveled though the eponymous Stargate, survived an extended war against the Wraith on the other side, and then returned to Earth. In Synecdochic's universe, McKay's lover was less fortunate, and eventually the Stargate project became so problematically militarized, their results so co-opted by weapons development, that McKay destroyed the bulk of the team's work as they were forced out of the city.

The story's corny old-school-fic song-lyric title dates it. This sort of play with the reflexivity between song covers, remixes and fanfiction was a popular source of fanfiction titles some years ago. Fanfiction has a whole evolving stylistics, and it's relatively easy to pick out trends and evolutions, to the point where identifying periods and trends is as easy for the seasoned reader as dating pot fragments is for an archeologist. This ability is further refined if you're at all familiar with the somewhat idiosyncratic dynamics of a particular fandom.

"Freedom" does something interesting by introducing early on, as a bit character, an Iraq campaign veteran being educated on the GI Bill who recognizes McKay's twitchiness as evidence of something more than personal eccentricity--as traces of the personal trauma and damage the fic circles like Wittgenstien approaches a question: "I shoot again and again past it, but always from a closer position"67. This caused me to question why Synectochic didn't choose to write this novella in a real-world context, about, say, a man like McKay who had been an Iraq veteran. After all, she might have gotten that published, and had her believable unfolding of life in the wake of trauma financially remunerated and recognized as a valid artistic creation. This is, again, the allure of 'filling off serial numbers.'

But if she had done so, and if "Freedom" had been set in the context of the modern American military-industrial complex, I could not have read it in the same way. I would have brought to the story everything I know and believe about the war in question, and the emphasis of the story would thus have shifted away from this singular character dealing with the denouement of his adventures. Because as much as "Freedom" is about PTSD and the entanglement of science and the military, it's more meta-textually about the human cost of the steady stream of 'adventures' we take for granted in serialized science fiction (amongst other genres), as that cost would be experienced by actual individuals. 'Dealing with Problems' is relegated, in these universes, to a tight story arc, or to stand-alone episodes – FOR EXAMPLE – PICARD IN ‘FAMILY’ (OR SOMETHING THAT KEEPS TO THE SAME FANDOM, ask Molly?), fobbed off onto minor characters or dismissed all together, because the narrative of the original universe cannot afford to get bogged down in the repetitive, gritty, unheroic aftermath of prolonged conflict as it actually affects humans. Stargate: Atlantis has an adventure-drive, real-world publishing commitments and a multiplicity of narrative threads to resolve. However if fanfiction chooses to investigate these questions it can devote years of narrative time exclusively to the problem. If "Freedom" were the resolution of Stargate: Atlantis, such an end would be strange and unsatisfying regardless of the story's quality. With fanfic, it's an expression of a permutation of possibility. To distance the work from the political implications of a modern setting, "Freedom" de-emphasizes sociocultural (and adventure-narrative) elements in order to tell a relatively personal story. This capacity to fade in and fade out is similar to what Hayles noted when she emphasized the capacity of programming languages to bring things under consideration to the fore and to background things that would, at the moment, be so much noise. QUOTE

Chinua Achebe has criticized the novel Heart of Darkness for similarly 'fading out' sociopolitical reality in order to prestige and focus on the psychological struggles of one privileged man. QUOTE. Is fanfiction, with its character-emphasis and its radical particularity, conservative pap, then, naively letting some white western man's psychic state overwhelm aforementioned questions about valorizing action heroes in the real-world context of the military-industrial complex?

As I flagged up earlier in the discussion of Stargate:Atlantis, its fanfiction and post-colonialism, this canon has provoked excellent fanfiction which demonstrates a strong thread of concern about colonialism. Perhaps this responsiveness stems from the fact that fanfiction writers have less at stake than script writers who have sunk a significant portion of their professional credibility into, and earn their livelihoods from, this program. The professional writers are of necessity interested in defending their own work rather than deconstructing it and pointing fingers at themselves and the co-workers who enabled the production of subtly racist content. Thus fanfiction can step in to complicate or redress these issues, and for practical and narrative reasons it is more likely to be aware of and to explore the show's problematic elements than the source canon.

Cesperanza's Written By the Victors68, written before the television series ended, anticipated the ultimate destination of the show's problematic narrative drive. At the end of Stargate: Atlantis, Atlantis is brought from the Pegasus Galaxy to Earth and used as a defensive weapon. This necessitates abandoning the people living there to be culled and consumed by the Wraith, and also stealing perhaps the Pegasus galaxy's most important religious, technical and historical artifact. The canon makes a hand-waving gesture to conveniently diminish the long-standing threat of the Wraith to the people of Pegasus, and thus to make this decision less destructively self-serving, but otherwise little attention is paid to a course of action which makes the British Museum's possession of the Rosetta stone and Parthenon friezes look completely unobjectionable  NOT NECESSARY TO PUT SIMILIES INTO YOUR ESSAY--as though both weren't current objects of publicized contention and public centers of post-colonial debate.

In "Written by the Victors" the protagonists respond to the order to fly Atlantis to Earth, leave the Pegasus galaxy forever and sever the ties they've forged with this place and its people with rebellion. The troubled imperialism of 'going native' does not go unnegotiated in "Written". Colonel Sheppard, protagonist of both the source canon and "Written", exhibits discomfort with his role as 'King of Atlantis.' His visible political narrative is undercut by the access the fic allows us into the actual governmental procedures involved in running the new city-state. Shepard's team is half comprised of people born on Earth and half of people native to Pegasus, and makes its decisions through non-hierarchical negotiation.

In order to formally invest power over the city-state in traditional structures and the native population, Sheppard marries his team member, Teyla, the leader of a major local tribe and the descendent of an old, formerly-powerful local monarchial line FACT CHECK. He cedes control over the city to her in the ceremony. This maneuver, explicitly designed to renounce the colonialism of his action in conquering the city, sealing it off from Earth, and opening it to an influx of citizens which he has control over, is personally problematic for him. While he and Teyla enjoy a strong friendship, his (fanfictional) male lover (the other Earth-native on his team) is as uncomfortable with being reduced to a shameful historical footnote as Sheppard is with putting them in this position, stuffing both men back into a closet they thought they had climbed out of.

Complicating this story, and making it much richer, is the meta-textuality of its style. In large part "Written", as the title would imply, is a compilation of histories, testaments, and biographies, constructed, not by the victors, but rather by the Earthlings who've lost Atlantis. These testimonies include everything from psychoanalytic feminist deconstructions of the military rhetoric used to compel Sheppard to return to the fold to first-hand reports and in-house military documentation involving the reactions of characters familiar to readers from the original Stargate film and the television series of which Atlantis is a spin-off. These documents do more than provide depth to the story--they convey it, in bold fashion. These accounts are the products of different slants, opinions, and points of view, and often reference each other in a believably academic fashion. The inclusion of the testimonies of members of the first Stargate team, with their widely differing opinions on why attempting to re-take the Atlantis station would be a mistake, use "Written"'s fanfictionality to expand the resonance of the piece. The whole world these testimonies originate from is predicated on the universe of the source canon, and enriched by it--institutional tensions between military branches established by or alluded to in other Stargate mediums play out in the differing military testimonies provided in "Written".

Patches of conventional narrative sometimes settle questions raised by the differing view points. Was the marriage a political gesture? Yes and no. Sheppard can be said to love Teyla intensely, and through her, to have an unconquerable and overriding fidelity to Pegasus. Perhaps it was not a true marriage in the modern Western romantic sense, but 'marriage', a social construction, has carried the weight of different needs in different cultures and eras, and by many of these alternate constructions, while (almost) entirely unsexual, Sheppard and Teyla's union is profoundly real.

The conventional narrative sections also sometimes stubbornly refuse to resolve the plurality into a single narrative stream, or stay silent on what should be major character points. Was Sheppard's lover McKay molested by the older scientist who mentored him as an adolescent? If the Professor who adopted McKay statutorily raped him, were his actions nominally consensual? The differing accounts refuse the easy answers coalescence might offer, forcing the reader to consider the degree to which such judgments and 'matters of fact' are always fluid, perception based, and difficult. Though the form of "Written" is reminiscent of House of Leaves, even that boldly experimental work essentially foreclosed the ambiguity it generated as to whether Karen Green was molested by her step-father as a child, and the novel's companion album by writer Mark Danielewski's sister Anne Danielewski further cemented this closure in the song "Control". In this regard Written is truer to the promise of its form and more searching in its interrogation of the construction of narratives of childhood sexual abuse than House of Leaves.

Written ends with Earthlings debating whether the station has been destroyed, and what it means if it has or hasn't. The Earthlings are now completely cut off from Atlantis, possibly for the millennia it may take them to develop alternate means of reaching the Pegasus galaxy that don't rely on piggy-backing off the Ancient alien technology they've now lost access to. We as readers do not know the answer as to the station's fate as we read these accounts. Then we begin to encounter, first as lyric poetry and historical ballads reminiscent of skaldic accounts, then as texts with increasing academic sophistication, accounts of the station's survival, written by Pergasus natives, in the many different styles and sometimes-indecipherable languages of the galaxy, over successive centuries. In the end, indeed, the victors do the writing. That is the citizens of Pegasus, who have survived due to our protagonists' actions, and now live without the constant over-hanging danger (and sociological development suppressant) of at any moment being culled by the Wraith. The lack of testimony from our protagonists or the Earth-natives who remained on Atlantis, the ability of the people of Pegasus to speak for themselves, is a touching and incredibly effective narrative decision. Scholars like Bloom sometimes present the interests of social justice as fundamentally in opposition to the demand of great writing for the particular, as though you could only have one or the other.69 But "Written" has both, and has one because it has the other. It's not a model for all writing, not capable of fulfilling all needs, but what it is is proof positive that these two aims are not fundamentally in opposition, and can in fact lead to one another.

"Written" is not simply notable for its duality and its co-presentation of the interests of social justice and writerly technique, it is also remarkable for the sheer number and variety of fanworks inspired by it. Like many other very popular fics, it has itself become a source-canon. Art, videos, fanfiction, 'Ars Atlantica'--further historical documents in the world of the story, from both Earth and the Pegasus Galaxy, in the style of those presented at the end, and a massive collaborative podfic with different voices for each of the historians, not to mention an immensely positive critical reception and subsequent author-reader interaction, or works inspired by "Written", enliven the world of the work and increase its communicative fanfictionaltiy.

These stories use the indeterminacy inherent in fanfiction, with its multiple writers possessed of diverse perspectives and concerns. "Written" harnesses fanfiction's ability to suppress the narratives of the characters in question for the moment and to highlight the colonialist concerns which trouble not only Stargate: Atlantis, but also most space opera. This is not a strategy the show proper could necessarily employ, for narrative and financial reasons, but fanfiction is able to fully mine it. As with "Jubilee", Synectochic and Cesperanza both could have reinvented the Stargate universe, but not only would that add nothing, they would run the risk of spending a great deal of time and audience attention on the work of establishment, and it would have shifted the focus too much onto the other, world-building story elements they'd reinvented just to get back where they started. The stories they wanted to tell would be lost in this rehashing unnecessary ground, and these stories would lose the resonance they gain from being written in the universe of the source canon. Thus the fanfictionality of these stories is not only not a detriment, it has enabled these writers to focus and exercise greater selection and control. Fanfictionality is a mode, and a technology, that can be employed to tell certain stories more effectively.

This situation also indicates the degree to which fanfiction, as a publishing technology, is appealing. If a major writer in a genre as innately interested in boundary-pushing experimentation as science fiction can't publish something as tamely experimental as "The Sagan Diary" with a relatively monied and secure genre publishing house, that illustrates a way in which the gate-keeping function of publishing is unwieldy. With online publishing an author looking to publish a poetry collection related to her work has only to frame the 'header', or brief, standardized advertisement and link to the material, and to perhaps choose different 'categories', 'tags' or 'groups' via which to advertise and categorize her work (according to her platform). The actual hosting and presentation of the material will still likely be within her web-domain, and thus under her control, to the extent the platform is malleable and she is skilled in its manipulation. Given how poorly paid and competitive traditional poetry publication is, she has little to lose.70

More importantly we should address the ways in which an impoverished and limited definition of Originality is fetishized in Freud's sense of the term--to the exclusion of all else and the crippling of normal evaluation--by this conception of Authorship. QUOTE FREUD. A side-effect of constructing the Author figure was a diminishing of our appreciation of other vectors of literary quality. Hayles recognizes the ways in which veneration of the "fetishized unique imagination"71 continues to silence those same

"aspects of textual production that were suppressed in the eighteenth century to make the literary work an immanent intellectual property--the materiality of the medium, the print technologies and economic networks that produced the work as a commodity, the collaborative nature of many literary works, the literary appropriations and transformations that were ignored or devalued in favor of 'originality'."72

Thus qualities we might value in a work are excluded from or reduced in our reckoning. And again, teasing out what constitutes 'originality' proves problematic in the context of an appropriative literary tradition, and the inherent fanfictionality in all work. Is Shakespeare's sophisticated reworking of the Amleth stories less original than his creation of an original character in 'Timon of Athens'? Surely there is a different and not valueless 'originality' to be found in reworking, subverting, and playing with existing material.

Hayles further contends, in her intriguing examination of what happens when narratives fail us, that narrative is a vital evolutionary technology, without which the world is incomprehensible and frightening, and our effective agency is diminished. "With their emphasis on causality, meaningful temporal sequence, and interrelation between behavior and environment, narratives allow us to construct models of how others may be feeling and acting, models that coevolve with out ongoing interior monologue, describing and interpreting to ourselves our own feelings and behaviors."73 Narrative is a means of constructing and maintaining our personhood and expanding our agency. Writing, then, serves as a technology by which we can hone the skills of narrative-craft on the page, in a manner that allows for self-reflexivity--one can scan the page to see what one has said, examine, rethink and revise one's earlier conclusions. One can use the paper or a word document as an external means of organizing and structuring one's thoughts.74 If narrative is fundamental to the development of our sense of self, and writing provides one means (practicing oral craft as the runners of the Incan messenger service did, or practicing rhetoric as in the Platonic oral dialogue school could accomplish comparable effects75) of honing an individual's use of narrative and thus developing their self-reflexivity and agency, surely writing and engaging with literature as an active reader, be that literature traditional or fanfictional, is a valuable developmental activity.

If, as Hayles suggests, narrative is a necessary function of the way we constitute subjectivity, then constructing authorship (while it has all the benefits of Renaissance humanism, and empowering the author economically and thus socially) as a class rather than as a process necessarily restricts the personhood of those without access to traditional publishing structures, who cannot Author with a similar resulting sense of validation and thus encouragement.


2) QUOTE


The second strand of resentment has to do with the fact that fanfiction is largely written for and by women, producing an 'insular' literature that does not necessarily speak to male readers. QUOTE ABOUT FEMALE RECLAMATION OF THE NARRATIVE AND SHAMING REACTION TO WOMEN WRITING PORNOGRAPHC MATERIAL FOR THEMSELVES/OTHERS.

Examining criticism of fanfiction as a literature full of women and things they want from stories (character development, a focus on relationships, etc.) calls to mind the similarities between fanfiction and highly legitimate professional literature that utilizes fanfictional strageties. We've already discussed that all literature is, to varying degrees, fanfictional, but such a contention invokes a consideration of professional, paid literary works that utilize or co-opt the strategies of fanfiction. Distinct from the paracanon, tie-in or the pro-fan writings, this category would include work like Updike's "Gertrude and Claudius", Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea", Stephen Fry's "The Star's Tennis Balls", Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" or J.M. Coetzee's "Foe". Several factors intermediate one another to determine these works' legitimacy, notably the age and respect afforded to the source canon they're adopting and whether they're writing in a highly traditional, non-fanfictional style, or a more fannish mode characterized by interactivity.

The quality of such work varies, but you could almost plot the degree to which a work is legitimized by these and other factors in accordance with a graph such as the (partly) facetious one below:

MOLLY'S GRAPH HERE, CITE AND ACKNOWLEDGE HER--illustrate the fanfictional continuum (degree of fanfictionality, payment belt, profic zone, awards!belt)

Vectors on which to plot: 'Are you privileged? A dude? White? Writing with an older canon? Writing in a non-ff style vs. 'is your writing characterized by fannish interactivity'? Is there no smut, or at least only unappetizing sexual content clearly for Legitimate Acceptable Literary Purposes?'

Data: spinoff/tie-in novels, evolving mutualistic canons, works like 'Foe' and 'Gertrude and Claudius', and actual fic on this graph

This graph could be a useful way of considering how successfully traditional authors appropriate the energies and strategies of fic and subordinate them. Questions of legitimacy, the communality of one's writing practice, and gender are thus shown to be closely intertwined.

What's striking, when considering some of the most successful examples of this breed, is how immature their investigation of their chosen source canons is in comparison to a great deal of fandom writing, which relies on an evolving, long-established system of strategies for working with source texts. CITE ANY CASUALLY FEMINIST YULETIDE CHALLENGE DRECK (Foe: let me blow your mind, okay guys, what if this was written form the point of view of a LADY? An Unreliable Narrator Lady?!! Fanfic: ...you mean like we did in (provide examples, but this is a LOT of stuff)), for example, like Foe, engages with a surpressed female narrative and dialogues of colonialism, in a way that makes Foe's musing on the same subjects seem relatively superficial. If the most basic ideas and strategies of fanfiction are revolutionary to a reader, how are they to know that a more nuanced engagement with text exists? I'm not sure whether Coetzee has read fanfiction or consciously appropriates its strategies. In fact, given the shallowness of his deconstruction of Robinson Crusoe, I suspect he hasn't. But with the wide recognition he's recieved for a relatively non-innovative work of fanfiction, one could see him as the Elvis to fanfiction's American black popular music. Coetzee is not necessarily intentionally co-opting this movement, but because no one's familiar with the other people following the same postmodern theoretical trends more aggressively, for longer, and ultimately with more success just because of that, effectively he has done so.

It's difficult to determine whether writing like Coetzee's is simply a parallel modern expression of the inherent fanfictionality of literature that looks rather like an equivalent fanfiction because both spring from the same cultural movement, or whether such establishment fanfiction functions as a ritualized summoning and taming of the subversive market energies of fanfiction in a manner Terranova, if she bothered to write about fanfiction, might call "endemic to late capitalism."76 The works resulting from professional authors using these strategies can be quite sophisticated, as with The Hours, but generally there's a stylistic difference that makes it immediately appreciable that the writer has not heavily read fanfiction, and thus is not building on that body of strategies with which to interact with established texts. They're reinventing the wheel rather than building on others' work, and don't seem to engage in conversation with the previous works and with readers. In fact the 'fanfictionality' of a work could be judged by the degree to which it actively engages in communal and democratic conversation with other readers and writers, with a work becoming 'less fanfictional' as the writers and readers' ongoing conversation about the piece (and later work written in conversation with it, in turn) ebbs, and if, for example, reading of it and its contemporary and related texts should peter off.

As in academia, and traditional fiction, not reading others' work before you write doesn't lead to startling originality. It just leads to examining things other people have already examined, and failing to realize that innovation comes from building on others' thoughts in a creative new way. People tend to think relatively similarly--a writer who fails to build on and work in context with the de- and reconstructive strategies others employ with regard to texts is probably not going to do fresh, amazing work.

3) QUOTE


The quality argument basically insists that fanfiction is poorly written and smutty. Often one or both of these claims is true. (QUOTE WEEPING COCKS SITE) Often one or neither is (QUOTE EXCELLENT GEN EPIC). If a lot of fanfiction is bad, well, so is a lot of published print literature. (QUOTE Romance novel, davinci code, twilight, pamela.) Fanfiction is sometimes of a higher quality than the original source canon, or works to tell other stories. QUOTE

What's needed here is not only a simple understanding that fanfiction and published writing both have high incidences of brilliant and atrocious content, but an effort to address the underlying elitist fallacies of extolling High Culture or Gate Keeper rhetoric in opposition to fanfiction. This rhetoric entails several strange and unsubstantiated assumptions. Why guard the gate? Is literature a city under siege by the plebs? It is as though the existence, or specific proportion, of poor writing to good were materially damaging the good writing available in either form. As though writing weren't a growth process in which poor writers evolved into better writers by writing, through the criticism and encouragement of their peers and mentors. As though writing were only valid in its ability to satisfy one need, class or taste.

Fanfiction is associated with genre literature, which is often criticized for being immersive and dampening the readers' critical faculty (or at least not critically engaging it). QUOTE But as we elucidated earlier, fanfiction is inherently 'literary' in its self-conscious meta-textuality, so that would be an especially unfair criticism of it.

The arguments quoted in the section titles function in a largely Freudian fashion. QUOTE. Whether or not those who make them are wholly aware of their motivations, such claims serve as masks for an unconscious resentment of the democratic, post-modernist, and feminist tendencies that mark fanfiction even as they mark the most innovative print literature.

'Originality' fetishism is the product of outmoded, highly-gendered capitalist dialogues of Genius. Moving past it, ___FREUD TERM_ our cultural originality issues, frees us to earnestly engage with literature in a way that moves beyond the stale repetition and shoring-up of these forces, beyond valuing a specific, limited, impoverished version of originality to the point of fetish. We can recognize that such valuations endorse and perpetuate crusty, uncomfortable dynamics of patriarchal/capitalist ownership in relation to texts. If we would think outside the parameters so thoroughly and earnestly discredited by theory, we need to do more. We need to redefine our definition of quality to embrace what this definition has excluded, the ____ (Virginia Woolf's lady poet, quote Woolf)s of the world. So either fanfiction needs a fresh poetics, or we need to mine its existing poetics.

Should this be the death of our traditional definitions of Quality, so grounded in Authorial originality, an avoidance of the female, and an elitist Gate Keeper definition of publishability? No, but it will, hopefully, radically redefine our understanding of literary value, creating a robust 'quality ecology' after Hayles' 'media ecology'. In the robust quality ecology, traditionally understood originality and the technical skills considered the hallmarks of literary quality will be intermediated by an appreciation for the way a work plays with a form, if it does so--the originality to be found there. These in turn will be intermediated by values derived from the contribution to feminist literature fanfiction represents. The genre sensibilities of fanfiction with be more broadly understood by those interested in appreciating and evaluating literature, and the way a work interacts with these will be seen as a possible site of quality. Legitimacy and artistic value will be a dynamic function or emergent property of this intermediation. As with the media ecology, there is no question of which factor will emerge as dominant and smother the others out of existence. Publishing and literature, and originality and quality as they are traditionally understood, have a long pedigree, and will undoubtedly continue to coexist with new or re-emergent pre-Authorial vectors of quality.


CONCLUSION



Perhaps the most salient thing we can distill from this discussion is a notion of where we can go from here. Many (of the relatively few) papers about fanfiction77 spend a great deal of time defining the field. Etymological inquiry can be searching and useful, but consider how comparatively few papers on Egyptology begin by telling their readers (here presumably 'archaeologists generally') what Egypt is, and clearing up the prevalent misassumptions they may have based on the information about Egypt that is available from popular sources--taking time to explain that its population is not mostly comprised of stalking undead mummies. It is is an important and necessary to establish what fanfiction is, that it is legitimate, and to interrogate why we question its legitimacy, but there is so much within the field that merits deeper discussion after we've reached some consensus on these points. It is my hope that, in the near future, one will be able to write a paper about or referencing fanfiction without a long introductory detour, even as I celebrate the way fanfiction writers can focus on what they wish to examine without the burden of re-inventing the source-canon.

The model of fanfiction we've arrived at understands it as not just a product and personal process, but also as an inherent component of the literary, a mode, a technology, and a measure of interactivity/communality, a means of moving beyond a reader/writer/text breakdown towards a communal practice. This understanding is predicated upon and involved with an understanding of fanfiction not as a freak fringe activity, but as literature, and, as literature, involved in and ripe for analysis in terms of the corpus of literary criticism, with special relevance for its contemporary discourses. This understanding rejects the prevalent arguments against fanfictions' legitimacy as unstable fronts concealing hierarchical tensions which are largely unconnected to questions of fanfictions' quality and legitimacy. We've examined originality fetishism and offered in its place the robust quality ecology as a valuing system. We've examined the fanfictional strategies and technologies brought into play in pro-fic, fanfiction proper, and traditional, legitimized literature that invokes these properties.

In a concluding word on why academia has hitherto failed to recognize the place of fanfiction within its discourse, PARAPHRASE THIS was reminded CITE of music critics in the 1920s who asked, "WHERE is the new, truly Authentically American music? Wherever will our great geniuses emerge?" (CITE, QUOTE) If you'd suggested they take the B train to Harlem any night of the week, they would "stare at you blankly or explain how that wasn't even MUSIC, just NOISE."78

Butler's work on the unthinkability of life outside of gender binaries, on the necessity of opening up those possibilities "foreclosed by certain habitual and violent presumptions"79, has show just how difficult it is to overcome one's own expectations--to see what exists in the face of what you expected to see. Perhaps digital theorists like Bolter and Hayles and scholars working along the aforementioned theoretical lines were expecting a praxis of their work to be revolutionary, but couth. Something avant-garde, but just in the way things had been avant-garde before. Such restraint hardly seems the point of literary innovation, or the probable result. Fanfiction is an emergent property of critical traditions, source canons, and an increasingly educated and technologically adept, responsive readership. We must learn to work with what we have, to know its value.

WHAT MUST CHANGE IS AN AUTHORIAL ATTITUDE THAT FANFICTION IS ABOUT THEM: IT REPRESENTS A FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING ABOUT WHAT WRITING DOES AND DOES NOT HELP

Fanfictionality is on the ascent in many respects. The popular news media is far less pejorative on the subject than it once was80 (CITE). Many fanfiction writers are becoming, in addition, pro-fic writers81, and polyvocal canons are becoming more recognized as deserving of BAFTAS and Hugos82, thus as capable of bearing literary value. Increased validation for fanfiction will, in all probability, result in fandom communities swelling, becoming more productive and more critically self-aware, and bringing the best of these works to a larger audience of lay people and critics, who may themselves appreciate and evaluate the material and/or become actively involved in its production. This could also lead more 'acafans' to publish on the communities they're involved in, combining their knowledge-bases to produce interesting new research, sprightly with their personal passion. Attitudes towards polyvocality and fanfictionality are thus demonstrably improving, implying a waning of the underlying motives which conditioned disdain for and repulsion by fanfiction. In Harlem they are playing jazz, in their bedrooms girls are writing stories to each other, infinitely postponing the end. It is noise and music, smut and literature, trivial dreck and the vital sublime.