Meta: Canon, the text, and the AU

[alixtii]

babyofthegroup posted recently about something I've been thinking about for a long time. Namely: what makes an AU?

Now, I know that this basically is the same as asking what does or doesn't count as canon, and that in some circles this a big part of the slash wars, and is used in an excessively proscriptive fashion. While I've recently been accused of participating myself in said conflict, I am more interested because I like to think thinky thoughts, and it's fun to engage in the high level of abstraction that said debate requires. After all, this attempt to define what, exactly, an AU isn't all that far removed temporally from my previous post on why definitions are meaningless.

Also, perhaps more meaningfully, it is directly relevant to my main Buffy universe, in which Lydia lived through the Council explosion. Now, I adamantly maintain that my universe is not AU, because canon provides no indication that the Powers did not miraculously intervene to save her, a la "Amends."

Still, it is, and always will be, a somewhat "radical interpretation of the text" as Oz would put it.

And that, I think is the crux--a radical interpretation of the text. wemblee's recent post on authorial intent really made it clear to me that canon and the text are two different beasts:

And yet when I read/watch/devour a text, I privilege the author reflexively. [. . .] I always have this kneejerk, "But, but... the tone!" Or, if we're talking television, "But... but... the earnestly heroic background music!" [. . .] I think that my privileging of tone and of (often, my interpretation of ) authorial intent is related somehow to my earlier positions on canon and fanon and what it meant to write a character as "in-character.

I tend to think that what wemblee is doing isn't privileging authorial intent at all. Instead, s/he's looking to things like tone and soundtracks which exist within the text, guiding the reader in constructing a sort of idealized authorial intent, a process which I think is perfectly legitimate even in the wake of the death of the author. Thus, some themes/messages/morals are to be found within the text itself--not in the author (the intentional fallacy) or the reader (the affective fallacy).

These things are incredibly useful to litcrit people, who are more concerned about what a text means and how it functions and whatnot than what "really happened." These are normative questions and only a narrow range of possible answers qualify as "correct" (i.e. true to the text). In practice, no one ever ends up actually agreeing, but in theory it is possible to detect which way the "grain flows" in a text, what implications are made, how we are supposed to feel, &c.: i.e. we're not dealing with relativistic standards. A paper handed in to my Shakespeare professor about how Edmund and Cordelia were getting it on throughout King Lear (yes, karabair, this is a shout-out to you) will not get a passing grade (or at least shouldn't get a passing grade) no matter how fabulous a fic one could produce using that premise while staying within canon. Of course, queer and feminist studies sometimes deliberately introduce radical interpretations of texts which defy this hermeneutic, and many great texts are multivalued enough that I would maintain it's impossible to detect the grain, even when the author tells you what it is sypposed to be. Bernard Shaw is, I think, the best example of this type of work, although some would put Shakespeare into this category.

But as fanfic writers we are applying a different hermeneutic, are asking a completely different set of questions, more along the lines of "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" Id est, it all stems from the rather weird mode in which fanfic writers treat the text, as if it were describing a real universe which existed independently of the text. This frees the fanfic writer to more or less jettison those elements of the text--the tone, the implications, the subtext, assumptions about authorial intention, the obvious extrapolations of events--which do not constitute "facts" about said universe and which do not fit the artistic vision s/he has in mind.

So, to use this rather vivid example of mpoetess in the comments to this post on canon and sexuality by kattahj, a fic in which Giles has a functioning digestive system (and uses the toilet) is no more or less canonical than one where he doesn't. And, indeed, even as a proud member of the canon bordello, I'd have no problem with the latter story not being marked as an AU (as long as it was made clear when in continuity the relevation was revealed, of course), because even though I think we all assumed while watching the show that Giles had a digestive system, there's no actual continuity error involved in saying that he didn't.

What results is a rather radical freedom to do with the text what one wilt. That's the sum of the fanfic law. Angel never turned into Angelus; that was an illusion created by some evil mage who also happened to be a Spuffy ‘shipper. Tara is the reincarnation of Jenny Calendar. All the events of seasons 3 on are actually a massive conspiracy on the part of Xander and Giles, who are actually evil geniuses in disguise. In the last year, I’ve seen fics in which Andrew (in “Damage” and “The Girl in Question”) was evil, mistaken, a robot, a clone, under orders from Giles, and a whole host of other plot twists in order to make it so that the perceived “betrayal” of Angel by Buffy never happened. “As You Were” is also retconned quite often by those who insist that Spike couldn’t have performed the actions that canon seems to insist that he did. Most of these stories stay completely within canon.

All fics deviate from the implications of the text. This is both necessary and desirable, even as at the same time I as a canon whore favour staying within canon (as my own personal taste). After all, the point of fanfic is to expand the scope of the text while staying within (or deliberately leaving) canon. Deviations from textual "intent" however, should be for a reason, of course--don't make Willow a robot if the story isn't about Willow being a robot--but I think most of us could agree rather easily on that point. Regardless what standards I or anybody think aesthetics might require however, for fannish purposes I'd think any reason would be sufficient: pr0n, wish-fulfillment, plot idea, the desire to show a different perspective, to whitewash a beloved character, to character-bash a disliked one, whatever. But such choices are always motivated by some underlying agenda.

When these interpretations are put forward as theories rather than fics, though, I'm often left scratching my head. Surely it's more reasonable to apply Ockham's Razor and assume that the text means what it seems to mean (but to whom? aye, there's the rub, isn't it?) than construct a crazy (to me, anyway) theory to retrocon the events? dragonscholar has a post on fen and conspiracy theories over at fanthropology that describes the way that some fen allow the perfectly legitimate agenda-driven moves described above to become objective statements about the text itself. Of course, when two such contradicting interpretations of a text--not of canon, which is radically fluid, but of the text--meet, then it becomes difficult to see which interpretation is correct, or at least to convince anyone else that the interpretation which is so obvious to you is correct. (While I will gladly admit that my interpretation might be wrong, I do insist on this as an issue which is normative rather than relative and thus has, at least in theory, right and wrong answers.)

A last note on my personal tastes: As a canon whore, I prefer for fics I read to stay completely within canon, but don't care if they stay true to the text. The exception to this is when I feel somehow invested in the themes as well as the events/characters of the original text: e.g. I dislike post-NFA fic which saves too many of the final four characters, because for me it undoes everything Whedon was setting up that made NFA great art. But this is a completely separate issue from my canon whoredom.

And my very last comment: Canon whoredom is my personal state of attitudes to fics and is not proscriptive, except possibly aesthetically (and I have no wish to debate if this is so). Write your fic however you want; most of the fics I read are AU in some way or another. As if you would really stop writing if I didn't include this disclaimer, but the postmodern ethos of fandom seems to require instant qualification of anything resembling a normative statement (even when a normative statement might be called for).