Conceptual Analyses of Fanfiction, and Why They Don't Work

[alixtii]

So many of you, the ones who follow metafandom at least, will be familiar with the rough outline of the discussion: kradical--Keith R.A. DeCandido, the author of, among other things, the Serenity novelization (which I own but have yet to read)---made a post discussing the difference between fanfic and professional media tie-in fic in which he had the bad sense to call tie-ins "superior" (with the scare quotes) because they were a) legal and b) professionally edited. Discussion ensued, in which there was both much blowing what KRAD said wildly out of proportion and people who decided, much as they did during the SGA race discussion, that as long as the conversation was going on they might as well chime in. Which brings us to this post by liviapenn, who puts forth the challenge: "Let's make a list. Of awesome, legal, published fanfiction."

Now this post is wonderful just to see all the derivative works which have made their way into print, some which really boggle the mind, like Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So. But what I really find interesting are the places in the comments where fans question the criteria for inclusion into the list, by putting forth some defintion of their own of fanfic--their Theory of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, so to speak--and explaining how Professionally Published Work A doesn't fit into that definition of fanfic. What they're trying to do is put forth a conceptual analysis, the primary tool of "analytic philosophy," in which one attempts to sort out problematic cases. One of my professors from university (very much from the analytic tradition--he had a Ph.D. in math from Cambridge and one in Philosophy from the den of positivism known as M.I.T.) explained it like this: Everyone agrees that it is bad to boil babies and good to help old women across the street (although I must add that of course "everyone" agrees on no such thing), the trick is to tease out the essential qualities so as to address problematic cases and decide whether they fall under the concepts of "good" or "bad."

The goal is to "carve nature at the joints" which, of course, implicity assumes that nature (or at least language, as analytic philosophy has largely dumped metaphysics and epistemology in exchange for philosophy of language) has joints, that there's a clear cut place where something stops being fanfiction and starts being something else, even if no one else has managed to find it or quite agree on where it is.

The best way to point out that someone's analysis of goodness is faulty is to prove that it includes boiling babies or excludes helping old ladies across the street. (This is in contrast to, say, the deontological ethics of Kant, who would start with first principles and run with them irrespective of how ludicrous his conclusions ended up looking.) And with fanfiction, the best way to prove that a given Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not is faulty is to demonstrate that it excludes the latest McShep WIP.

The first Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not was provided in this thread, with the specific problematic case being Gregory Maguire's Wicked:

My problem, having read all of the Baum Oz books (and several but not all of his related fantasies), was twofold. I found inconsistencies in Maguire's borrowings -- I forget specifics now, but the subtleties of what he'd picked up and not picked up from the film and the first two Baum novels were decidedly odd. At the same time, I couldn't discern any sort of underlying, unifying thread in the book that used the Oz references for anything other than labeling. One could file off the serial numbers, publish the text of Wicked as an original work with original characters, and it would be the same story.

My counterexample would be Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz; that book I would indeed count as "Oz fanfic". I don't entirely agree with some of Farmer's creative choices, but it engaged the original stories in a way I don't think Wicked does.

[. . .]

Wicked, though -- reading it was a surreal experience. I remember stopping partway through, thinking to myself "something's funny here", and then specifically looking for some story element that would blow my theory and not finding it. I swear, it reads to me like a manuscript where the Oz serial numbers were filed on after he'd written the novel.

[. . .]

I'll note here that my comments are strictly limited to the novel; from the little I have seen and heard with respect to the stage musical, my sense is that the musical does engage with the Oz source material.

OTOH, I would be interested in reading any published comments Maguire may have made on the writing and publication of Wicked, and might revise my opinion based on such material.

Now to provide a functional definition of fanfic makes perfect sense to me (I don't agree with liviapenn when she accuses djonn of tying the definition of fanfic to issues of quality), but this definition seems particularly problematic. My problem with dividing fanfiction from "a manuscript where the [. . .] serial numbers were filed on" based on whether the work engages the source material isn't that I think the division is nonsensical, the way that I think a division between gen and het based on canonicity is nonsensical (although producing a workable account of what is and isn't "engaging with the source text" may well prove impossible). It's that it excludes a number of stories from being fanfic which aren't problematic cases--in this case, pretty much any PWP. Indeed, this type of story is so manifestly a part of fanfiction that we've coined a term for it: ATG, or "Any Two Guys/Girls." And the conclusion that these ATG PWP's aren't fanfic is a reductio ad absurdim which for me refutes djonn's entire Theory of What Fanfic Is and Isn't.

Another example can be found here, when azdak takes on the problematic case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead :

Whereas the driving impulse behind fanfic - and behind many of the works you cite, which definitely fall more squarely into the category - is love of the character(s) and/or the created world of the source text, Stoppard isn't interested in any of the Roz and Guil cast as characters. Actually, that's putting it terribly badly - he's precisely interested in them as characters, in their status as fictional beings, and in the relationship between fictional characters and actors, but he isn't interested in their internal lives at all. He isn't interested in Rosencrantz qua Rosencrantz (and one of his points is that Shaksespeare wasn't either, but unlike Shakespeare Stoppard isn't interested in Hamlet's internal life either.) Nor is he smitten by the world Hamlet inhabits, except insofar as Hamlet inhabits a theatre. Of course it's possible to come up with a broad definition of fanfic that encompasses any use of any character that also occurs outside the work in question, but then I think you run the risk of losing what is special about fanfic. It's not like one of Shakespeare's history plays and it's not like Nixon in China in ways that make it more interesting to me than the similarities do. The love, most frequently the shared love (because people do commit fanfic that never sees the light outside their underwear drawer), the obsessive love, is missing in the "derivative fic" definition.

First off, there's plenty of fanfiction which is written not out of an intense love for the source text, but out of a desire to play with it, to fix it, or just because one thought one could write it and put it down as such for yuletide. So azdak's Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not ignores the rich diversity of motives fanficcers might hold as they work their craft.

Secondly, the definition assumes that fanfic treats characters only as people and never as fictional characters. Some fics are more meta than others, but being a pretentious metafic doesn't make a fic not fanfic. Fic for Stoppard's play continues to treat Ros and Guil as fictional characters even as they slash them, because to remove that element would be to ignore sometime integral to the source text (one'd be writing Hamlet slash rather than Stoppard slash), but it's still fanfic. Most people on my flist are familiar with some of wisdomeagle's mind-blowing metafiction, and I've written a metafic or two myself.

Other Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not come off just as badly. Tying fanfic's status explicitly to copyright issue excludes not only the problematic cases but also half of yuletide as well. (OTOH, the Yuletide fics often don't rest as comfortably under our notions of fanfiction as other fics for 'thons might.) Notions of community can't unproblematically make a distinction between literary fiction and professional science fiction are also written in the context of a community (at times an overlapping one with fandom, at times not). cathexys' attempts to delineate a slash aesthetic haven't been as successful as she'd like.

I don't want to come off as claiming that Wicked or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead aren't problematic cases, or that it isn't problematic to lump Homer's The Oddessy and liz_marcs' Living History in the same category. liz_marcs' story is clearly and intuitively fanfiction in a way that Homer's isn't. But when the definition we construct to exclude Homer also ends up excluding Living History, that's a sign that the definition is fundamentally broken.

As a post-structuralist, I tend to view conceptual analyses as quaint holdovers from the days of Bertrand Russell, when it was thought that language could be made as wonderfully precise as mathematics. (It turns out mathematics ends up being as wonderfully imprecise as language.) But that isn't to deny that conceptual analyses can be great fun as logical puzzles, especially as one comes up with more and more convoluted examples to prove that under a given definition case A which intuitively falls on one side of the line in truth falls on the other. Indeed, that's why analytic philosophers are so much fun to spend time with--they always come up with the kookiest examples. (And then no one in the classroom laughs, and I'm looking around wondering if I was the only one in my Intro Phil class awake.)

Instead, I turn, as I did in the gen vs. ship debates, to the notion of genre, to the post-Wittgenstein idea that language is always-already fuzzy, and no matter how much you look you won't find uncomplicated joints in language or nature. In her defense, azdak recognizes (parenthetically) that what she puts forth may be if not "the defining quality" then "at least one of the central characteristics," but still she seems to think it to be defining enough to disqualify Stoppard's play without needing to refer to any of the other ways it is different from our core notion of what fanfiction is and does. In the end, all we have is partial truths and faulty definitions--and if you've ever looked inside a dictionary, you know that's all we ever have. Fanfiction is about engaging with the source text, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about treating characters as human beings, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about violating copyright, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about community, except when it's not. Fanfiction is written by women for women, except when it's not. Fanfiction is subversive, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about unleashing fantasies, except when it's not. Fanfiction "reads like fanfic" except when it doesn't. A fic that does many of these things will fit more comfortably under our intuitive notion of what fanfiction is then a fic which only does one of them. Some works are clearly fanfiction or clearly not fanfiction, being the fannish equivalent of baby-boiling, while some problematic cases rest in the grey areas between.

So keep on putting forth your Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, but expect me to be there, shooting holes in them, because that's my idea of a good time.

ETA: azdak continues the discussion with more on "Fanfic" as a fuzzy category.

Comments

[azdak.livejournal.com]

At the risk of getting tedious, I feel have to speak up against being lumped in with the academically backward conceptual analysts and point out that I ALSO said in liviapenn's journal:

"When it comes down to it, of course, fanfiction is a category with fuzzy boundaries and there is no list of necessary and sufficient characteristics that will identify fanfic and only fanfic. However, there are examples of the category that are more central and examples that are less central, and R&G is definitely an outlier. As is also, for instance, the stuff written for Anthropomorfic, that plays with identifiably fanficcy conventions without being based on any source text at all."



And on the issue of fictional characters I said:

"I don't think, however, that anything I said implies that fanfic *cannot* treat characters as fictional characters - there's a kind of sub-genre about fanfic characters reading fanfic about themselves, and another kind where the characters meet the actors who play them, but the way they treat those fictional characters is very different from Stoppard's treatment of R&G. I haven't read any Stoppardfic, so I can't comment on what that looks like, but the other metafics I've read have had an interest in the characters as individuals, so that even though they're acknowledged to be fictional, they are treatde as if they were real people."

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, it'd be more accurate to say that at the time this post was written, you would go on to say those things; I've been considering my reply since you've made your comment (I'll say most of the things I was planning to say here rather than there now). I'd like to think I was clear in the way your (initial) comment was different than conceptual analysis, but I'm glad you're here to speak for yourself if you feel the need.

I don't think R&G is much of an outlier as you paint it--and you did paint it as being clearly on the other side of some line in the sand, as much as you acknowledge it as complicated and arbitrary--but I'd agree that it's more of an outlier than anthropomorfic which shares a lot of the connections to the fanfiction community which R&G lacks (even as it utilizes several fanfic-y tropes).

I can't agree that Stoppard had absolutely no interest in his characters as real people with interior lives, although I'll agree he's less interested than the typical fic is. Although the actors who play Ros and Guil may be incredibly interested in their character's interior lives (since I can't agree they don't have any at all), and when one is responding to a performance (or an ideal performance) as a whole one has that to draw upon.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I wrote a reply to this, but it got very long and very general, so I've posted it over on my own journal. There are a couple of specific things I wanted to respond to, though. One is that anthropomorfic is an interesting case because it is, in fact, original fiction. I take your point that it has strong connections to the fanfic community, but nonetheless, it's a bit of a stumbling block (or not, depending on how one approaches the definition of fanfic - hence the over-length of my reply).

Although the actors who play Ros and Guil may be incredibly interested in their character's interior lives (since I can't agree they don't have any at all), and when one is responding to a performance (or an ideal performance) as a whole one has that to draw upon.

Actors are (nearly) always interested in the interior lives of their characters, since that's the material they use to create a credible character in the first place. However they can, and in German theatre often have to, create characters out of text that envisages no characters at all and is not even structured as dialogue. So the actors may be bringing something to R&G that isn't actually in the text at all. But leaving this point aside, do you really want to include *performances* of plays as fanfic? Because in that case you also have to include film, TV and adaptations.

And finally, I'm curious as to what you mean by an "ideal" performance? because my first repsonse would be that there can only be concrete, individual performances, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by ideal?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

No, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that performances are fanfic; I'm saying they're part of the source text. Now when we write as ficcers we may not be responding to any specific performance other than the one we see in the head when we read the script, or an amalgamation of several performances--that's what I mean by an "ideal" performance. But the play exists in fullness only when we consider it being performed.

So I'd resist the notion that what the actors bring to the performance isn't in the "text." It's not in the script, but theatre is always by its nature collaborative.

One is that anthropomorfic is an interesting case because it is, in fact, original fiction.

I think that, in the way that anthropomor_fic constructs its concept of OTP, it does have some sense of canon, so that today I'm writing math anthropomor_fic and tomorrow I'm writing philosophy anthropomor_fic, just like I'd otherwise write Buffy fanfic today and VMars fanfic tomorrow, so I wouldn't call it completely "original"--it's notion of canon are looser, as in RPF maybe, but they are there.

And, for that matter, it's not the only type of fanfic that bears similarities to original writing. A FPF fic with all original characters may exist in a fictional universe only because we are told so by the header; outside of the fannish context it'd be read as original fic. And there's RPF AU's, and....

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that performances are fanfic; I'm saying they're part of the source text.

Ah, but only if you've actually seen it being performed, surely?

But the play exists in fullness only when we consider it being performed.


Even then it doesn't exist in absolute fullness because there are always an infinite number of potential different performances - and the richer and more complex the play, the less possible it is for any single performance to dig out all the possible interpretations contained within the script.

So I'd resist the notion that what the actors bring to the performance isn't in the "text." It's not in the script, but theatre is always by its nature collaborative.


Yes, of course. On the contrary, what actors bring is essential to the text - you can do without everything else in theatre but not without the actors. However, I assumed when you referred to the "text" of R&G you meant the script, because when discussing it in the abstract, that's the only text there is - individual performances create such different texts that it's hard to make generalisations, especially as I don't suppose either of us has seen more than a fraction of those performances. And I don't think the "performance" constructed inside a reader's head is part of the text and more than the "peformance" constructed when they read a novel is - but I seem to remember a post of your where you differed on this view, so I don't know how productive it would be to pursue this further (on the grounds of irreconcilable differences of opinion).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I don't think only if one has seen it performed, although most powerfully to do so. We approach a script as a script, not only or even primarily as a written text, but as a blueprint for a performance, even if that performance is only the imagined one inside our head.

Even then it doesn't exist in absolute fullness because there are always an infinite number of potential different performances - and the richer and more complex the play, the less possible it is for any single performance to dig out all the possible interpretations contained within the script.

I said when we "consider it being performed"--not in any single performance, which would be as you say.

There might be irreconcible differences on a theory level. If one imagines Ros. wearing blue and the script says nothing, then it'd be idiosyncratic to consider that a feature of the text if you cannot share that interpretation with any interpretative community with a population greater than one (although online--you might be able to find one!)--which isn't to say the interpretation is wrong, per se. But when interpretative communities can agree on interpretations of the text, it is to those interpretations we refer to when we speak of the text, for the text itself is either squiggles on a page or pixels on a screen, in either case in need of interpretation to imbue them with meaning. (Cue Jubal Early here.)

[norah.livejournal.com]

If you're interested in reading R&G fanfiction, I have ... I think I have more recs for this fandom than anyone else, and they can be found from my LJ's sidebar under [recs]:rarelit:r & g are dead (I think). Most of them are written in something that approximates the Stoppard style, some of them are NC-17, you might want to take a look and see what you think.

I mean, then there's fanfic - at the risk of sounding like a self-aggrandizing berk - like my Moby Dick story, which was absolutely written as meta commentary on the text and the characters - it re-tells the first 18 chapters from Queequeg's point of view. And yes, there's relationship stuff in there, but primarily what I was looking at doing was teasing apart the cultural hodgepodge of "savage" characteristics that Melville had lumped together, and giving a voice to a silenced character - it was political and academic commentary on a fictional construction of race and identity as much as it was about Ishmael and Queequeg's love story - which is canon, in any case, so I'm not sure that focusing on it is making it about personalities in the way that you mean.

Just, you know, a voice from the fringes.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Oh, I absolutely don't think fanfic can't also function as a meta commentary - and indeed, in a way it always does, even if that commentary is really banal. But I'd be interested to know why you chose that particular text to examine, and why you put the "relationship stuff" in in the first place, if your primary interest was elsewhere? (I'm afraid I've never been able to get through more than the first few pages of Moby Dick, so forgive me if the answer's really obvious.) I do think that "giving voice to a silenced character" is common in fanfic (if for "silenced" you read "misunderstood/misrepresented by TPTB" - though it sounds as if what you decided to do with that voice was a lot more ambitious than simply character exploration.

Thank you for the R&G links - I shall definitely pursue them, although my Guilty Sekrit is that I always skip sex scenes. Still, I daresay there's some interesting stuff going on around the NC-17 bits?

[norah.livejournal.com]

Uh, I can't possibly explain Moby Dick to you in a comment! But suffice it to say that Queequeg is literally deprived of a voice (as well as any kind of real culture) in the novel - he has four or five lines, mostly along the lines of "Him hunt big fish ugh" - he's not "misunderstood" so much as he is an avatar of the benign Savage rather than a real character at all - indeed, he's completely written out of the novel from then on, save for a brief humorous anecdote.

Also, Ishmael and Queequeg are very clearly queer in canon, and are referred to as being like a married couple and they share a bed - you can't *not* put in relationship stuff, and part of what I was doing was making the queerness overt - I write for a slash audience, and that is important to all of us.

In any case, as with all fanfic, in some of the R&G stories there's more going on and in some not. I just thought that since you were holding it up as an exception you might be interested in seeing some of the fanfic for it yourself.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the R&G links - I shall definitely pursue them, although my Guilty Sekrit is that I always skip sex scenes.

Me too, a lot of the time. I like the stuff to read to have sex scenes due to their semiotic significance (most commonly as a metaphor for emotional intimacy) but I only sometimes need the actual details.

That's probably changing the more time I spend in fandom, though.