The Tradëscan Codex

This post by kattahj made me think about the intersection of racism and classism in deciding who gets written in fanfiction. Now, of course I think it is silly to say that "it is really just about class" or "it's really just about race"; the two work intersectionally in complicated ways. But if we agree with kattahj that CoC's are more likely to get written if they aren't coded as working class (and I've come to this conclusion about my own writing already long ago) then it'd be interesting to see if we tend not to write working-class white characters in the same way.

I'm not including the crew of Serenity at all in this analysis, since they exist within a completely constructed fictional socio-economic system created precisely for the purpose of making the main cast's lives seem interesting, but I think we certainly do respond differently to Simon than, say, Jayne (in my part, with identification with the former and almost complete disinterest with the latter). The Weasley family, were I even to know enough Harry Potter canon to speak intelligently about them, would probably be set apart under the same logic. Similarly, I'm not including vampires or other characters that are unable to participate in the normal socioeconomic structures because they are set apart as nonhuman.

I don't tend to watch shows with a lot of working-class characters, since they are less likely to provide me the type of wish-fulfillment I'm looking for in my entertainment (which is precisely the kind of dynamic I'm talking about here), so, um . . . it's a rather short list. Please help me add to it!

Notes
By "class" I mean the sociological something-or-other (I'm much less versed in class theory than I am in gender, queer, or even race theory) which is the cumulative result of economic status and a complex system of social markers (occupation, neighborhood of residence, accent, speech patterns, education, circle of friends, etc.). I'm assuming that fandom could[n't] care less what Rupert Giles' salary as a Watcher was, but that his education and breadth of knowledge make him attractive to write; Buffy's ability to quote Sartre and Arthur Miller seemingly without effort disqualifies her from being working-class. (And yes, this assumption is itself classist in fascinating and disturbing ways, ways which I wish I knew enough class theory to be able to problematize further.)

I'm taking it for granted that our source canons deal horribly with class issues (as they do with racial ones), but that there are objectively interesting working-class characters in our canons (in the way that there are interesting female characters and interesting characters of color).

Nonwhite racial cultures are (almost?) automatically coded as working-class. I feel this is important to mention despite the fact that since all of these characters are white, it doesn't apply to any of them. But this is a reason why even if classism seems a sufficient explanation for why working-class characters of color get written less, that classism would still in all probability be racially-motivated. The way we construct the class structure is itself racist.

Feel free to criticize any of my assumptions in the comments; I'm in over my head here.

Okay, now let's get to the list. . . .

Faith
It certainly cannot be argued that Faith does not get written in Buffy fandom, especially concerning her status as only being a recurring character to has nowhere near the screentime of an Anya or Tara. Now part of this just down to Eliza Dushku being Eliza Dushku. But if we look at her character, what do we see? A character whose working-class coding and Slayerness are so caught up in each other that they interact in interesting ways. While at the beginning of her arc Faith is living her life in a run-down motel, her Slaying provides her an outlet to escape from the very beginning, as she manifests the "want, take, have" mentality (she is effectively able to rely on her Slayer capabilities to produce cultural capital), and the overall structure of her story is ultimately one of upward mobility; by "Chosen" she is still coded as working-class in terms of social markers, but she is relatively free of economic concerns and so those social markers are able to be fetishized without playing any meaningful part in the actual life of the character.

Xander Harris
Like Faith, Xander gets a lot of fic. Not much written by me, but in m/m slash fandom I know he's commonly paired with Spike. Angel, and other men.

Now Xander's family is coded as poor and in some ways working-class (and this is uniformly portrayed as a negative), but I'd argue that while Xander is made to materially feel the effect of his family lower economic status, he is always coded as firmly middle-class in terms of social markers. As a geek figure, he is an easy and deliberate audience identification figure, and speaks a language which is coded in many ways as middle-class white male. Note also that like Faith he is upwardly mobile; by the end of the series he is, however implausible, solidly middle-class in terms of not only social but also economic indices.

Cindy Mackenzie
When Mac was introduced, her class issues dominated her character: she was the perpetrator of an elaborate con in an attempt to get back at the rich kids and to get money for a new car which she desperately needed. Then the show itself went on to seriously drop the ball on these issues, never bringing up money in regard to Mac again, focusing only on her solidly-coded-middle-class computer skills, having her date an 09er, and show up at college without a word as to how she was paying for it. Mac gets a decent amount of fic, being involved in several popular het and femslash pairings.

Veronica Mars
Everything above for Mac goes double for Veronica. Veronica was never meaningfully coded as lower-class, as she spent her childhood as a honorary 02er. As the eponymous character, she features in a large share of VMars fic.

Rose Tyler
Obviously, there is a whole lot of Rose fic, by virtue of her being the female lead of the first two seasons of new Who. Just as obviously, Rose is freed from the constraints of her working-class life when the Doctor rescues her from the shop where she works while retaining several of the relevant social markers (her accent being the most obvious, I believe? British culture is not my specialty).

Jackie Tyler
I don't know how the fic writers respond to Jackie, who unlike Rose maintains her class identification until the very very end (when she and alt!Pete get together). Obviously she is written less than Rose, but exactly how much so I have no clue.

Dean and Sam Winchester
I don't watch this show, and thus don't know anything about them (except that Sam makes a really hot girl--I do read the genderswap). I know, of course, that there's a massive amount of fic written about them.

Kendra, Normal, Sketchy, and Other Dark Angel Characters
Do these even get written at all? I'm not really familiar with the fandom, but my impression that the main white characters to get written were Logan--obviously not working-class--and Jensen's character (who probably falls under the nonhuman exemption). Lydeker's not exactly working-class either (although his coding is rather complicated).

Conclusion (tentative since the preliminary sample size is so small)
There does seem to be some interest in working with characters who still carry the social markers of a working-class identity, as in the cases of Faith and Rose Tyler. (How deep and accurate these social markers are, both in the source text and in fic, is a question I am not qualified to answer, although I think there are meaningful ways that both characters do begin to act in accord with a middle-class ideal as they become upwardly mobile economically.) Re-reading the comments to my March 2007 post linked above, it seems fandom is perfectly willing to play with characters who are coded as working-class in what heyiya calls a UK discourse of class, in which "class is experienced as written and performed in the body," but less eager to do so according to what she calls the American discourse in which class is more closely linked to cultural capacity and thus "is experienced as mobile: you get educated, you become middle class." (I'm condensing a lot of thought here; heyiya, is there something crucial I've missed or misrepresented?)

I do think that fandom is less likely to write working-class characters, in general, than middle-class (and upper-class) characters. My intellectual and emotional responses to how problematic this is are somewhat in contradiction.

Even if the true nature of their working-class status is in dispute, it does seem that enough working-class white characters do get written to be able to say that they get written more often than working-class characters of color, and thus classism in fandom is not a sufficient explanation for why working-class characters of color are not written as much as one would otherwise expect. This conclusion shocks approximately no one.

I came across a thoughtful metafandomed post here, on celebrities, constructs, and real people, that has me thinking. matociquala says:

The reason that works, of course, is because the celebrities (loosely so termed) that one knows on the internet are suddenly real people. They're not constructs anymore. Jonathan Coulton isn't a construct to me, the way Bono (to use the example quoted above) is. Jonathan Coulton is some guy on the internets, whose work I really like. Tom Smith (filkertom) used to be a construct to me: I only knew his work through recordings, and I was a big fan. And yanno, then I met him online and at Penguicon, and now he's just some super-talented guy I know, who is also funny. Wil Wheaton is the classic example of this: I keep forgetting he's also a talented actor, because I think of him as one of the best bloggers on my daily information rounds.

And you know what? I like that. I don't want to be a construct. I want to be some guy you know on the internets who tells stories.

But I have to admit that I don't see how the two can be mutually exclusive, how a guy one knows on the internet telling stories isn't always-already a construct too. I mean, ladyphoenixmage is my best friend, and I've known her at least since I was twelve. But I don't have knowledge of who she is, what she likes and dislikes, beamed into my head. (I sort of wish I did; it would make buying a Christmas present a lot easier.) Instead, I know things about her the same way I know things about Summer Glau; sense-data impresses itself upon my consciousness, and my mind tries to create a meaningful pattern out of that data. It constructs a friend-function, just like I construct an author-function when I read a literary text. And sometimes (frequently!) my construction of the friend-function proves to be inadequate; a new piece of canon comes along (i.e. she says or does something I don't expect) and I have re-construct the function to fit it. Yes, I'm saying that my interactions with my best friend are basically RPF canon.

matociquala  goes on to say that:

But fame, the kind of fame that separates famous people from the hoi polloi, as it were, is a funny thing. Not only does it turn the famous person into a construct, it turns them into a slate that the fan can project all sorts of things into. How often have you gotten disappointed at a celebrity because her political views weren't what you thought they should be? I know I have. And damn, you know. Why do I think I get to do that? I don't pay Claudia Black to have her politics match mine. I pay her to kick ass in tight pants. Let's be honest here.

I don't feel like I completely get the argument here, especially the part about politics. (I get to be disappointed in someone who holds views I think are damaging to the world society. Politics aren't like aesthetics; the claims are normative, and some people are wrong.) But I'm more interested in the way that being turned "into a slate that the fan can project all sorts of things into" is presented. Because it seems to me like it is being presented as a bad thing. Which is interesting not only because it assumes that we have a choice, that we can approach a human being other than in that that way, but also that if we have a choice, then the other way (whatever it would be) would be superior. And . . . I'm not sure what the logic is there.

I've most often seen this type of "Viewing people as constructs is bad" claim in RPF arguments, since the entire point of RPF is to treat the real person as a floating signifier and see how one can manipulate that. And I've seen the attitude that treating a real person like this is disrespectful or damaging or just plain wrong. Indeed this seems to be the subtext between most if not all anti-RPF arguments. "How would you feel if someone did it to you?"

And I don't get it. Life is a text; the processes we implement to interpret it are, on some level, literary analysis. We get to respond to it in the form of fanfiction as much as we do any other text, to create genderswap incest slavefic AUs.

I've had conversations with people who held views like this. Most often, they ended up retreating into metaphysics, into some notion of having "real knowledge" which couldn't be explained in terms of cognitive processes, as if being able to touch someone (these people tended to have a dim view of the reality of online relationships) or exchange words with them provided some mystical insight into who that person "really was." Which is hogwash. I don't have any access to who somebody "really is" any more than I have access to the Platonic form of justice sitting in its Platonic heaven. Rather, I have my experiences of my interactions with them, experiences for which I am grateful (since I tend to like most people I know).

I mean, I like Summer Glau. And one of the reasons I like Summer Glau is because I've watched interviews she's made on YouTube and listened to commentaries she's made and thus I know she's adorable. Before that, she was merely the actress who played River and I was actually attracted to River but not to Summer, because Summer wasn't River and I wasn't yet invested in Summer as Summer. She was, in a strange way, a floating signified; I knew there was a woman named Summer Glau existing in the world out there who played River, but I didn't have enough signifiers to manipulate in order to construct a Summer-function. And now I manipulate that Summer-function gleefully, imagining and re-imagining (say) her relationship with Joss Whedon, even though I know my Summer-function is a fictional character, a floating signifier, with tenuous connection to the "real" Summer, whoever or whatever she may be. (Maybe she's a robot! Or an alien!) 

But that's the thing: that's this weird psychological trick of displacement and transference, where you take somebody you don't know and you attach all this emotion to them. And it's harder to do that with somebody who's just this guy you know on the internets than somebody who is a princess in a tower.

I'm having a hard time making sense of this claim at all. It just seems demonstrably false; of course I have a lot more emotion invested in ladyphoenixmage than I do in Summer Glau, and it seems weird to argue that I wouldn't or that I couldn't or that I shouldn't.

The "plagiarism = use without attribution" meme is going around again, and whenever it does, it really, really bugs me because by that standard Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are both plagiarists--and any standard which results in that conclusion is for me a reductio ad absurdum. miriam_heddy has a good post discussing some of the issues here, but there are some things I want to say myself--mostly, I think, in parallel with her. She writes:

( plagiarism is judged by effect )

I'm not 100% sure whether she is writing in her own voice or merely summarizing a certain paradigm; her post is mostly descriptive, analyzing (quite well) the way "plagiarism" functions as a normative concept differently in academia and in fandom. But it doesn't really matter, because it's the paradigm cited above to which I'm going to respond in this moment as I make my extremely prescriptive argument as to what plagiarism is and is not. Under my view, the claim above isn't wrong so much as it is misleading, and (as miriam_heddy clearly recognizes) parallels issues of author intentionality in general. So I'd accept her use of Fish, but modify it with a use of Foucault (drawing on "What is an Author?").

It's not as simple as "what the author meant" or even "what the reader thinks," but a more complex hybrid: "what the reader thinks the author meant." The author's intentions are very much involved, but only insofar as constructed by the reader, as an author-function. Which was in my mind when I hazarded that perhaps ethics is about constructing a moral-agent function. I say in that post, parenthetically, regarding the then-recent "American President"/reel_sga wank (ETA: see here, courtesy of fairestcat), in which large portions of Sorkin dialogue were used in an SGA fusion:

( the most damning facts )

In other words, the problem wasn't that they used other texts in their own without citation, but that when people complimented on those specific passages, they didn't say, "Thanks! Eliot really could write couldn't he?" but instead accepted the praise for themselves. That is the dividing line between allusion and plagiarism, I continue to insist.

I've already made it clear I've posted in this issue before; most recently was here, when I linked to this languagelog post with commentary, which gave the following distinction between plagiarism and allusion (I quoted it even more extensively in my previous post):

( subtle line between plagiarism and allusion )

Note the reliance on (a readerly construct of?) authorial intent here; what matters is not whether something is noticed or not noticed but whether (we think) the alleged plagiarist wanted the plagiarism to be noticed. She could have misjudged her audience, and expected they would, say, recognize Buffy quotes in a Harry Potter fic, when it turns out they actually don't (what's wrong with them?). (I certainly don't recognize all of Pound's allusions in the Cantos, but that's why I have a trusty compendium--it's my fault for not living up to Pound's rather clear expectations, not his fault for having too high expectations.) I cited the Angel quotes in this XMM fic just to be safe, but I really feel like I shouldn't have had to do that--it was a virtual certainty that my flist would recognize the scene I was paying homage to. I could have been wrong (although judging by the response, I wouldn't have been), but it would still have been in good faith.

Of course, it's fairly easy to construct the intent of an author/moral agent who utilizes a passage from an obscure passage of which no one has ever heard; equally easy is it to construct that of one who uses an instantly recognizable line of Shakespeare. The problematic cases which lie in the grey area between are much harder to judge, but my inclination is always, in the name of increased artistic freedom, to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

miriam_heddy certainly seems to recognize all of this:

( fandom ethics generally dictate )

Yet miriam_heddy remains in the descriptivist mode; in the end, she seems happy to simply try to more clearly articulate what the fannish mores are which pervail at this socio-historical location:

( the vocabulary of fandom )

I'm not happy with that, because I'm afraid that if Eliot and Pound were in fandom, the fen would burn them in effigy right next to [insert accused plagiarist here], and I'm more than willing to take a normative stance on that as a very bad thing. If we're continuing the paralleling of ethics and literary criticism, my stance can be compared to feminist or post-colonial criticism: readings of a text given to multiple interpretations, but with a strong normative claim about the way we should be reading. There is something specifically deficient and detrimental about a definition of plagiarism as strictly equivalent to mere "use without attribution."

Note that I have no opinion on whether any specific individual is or is not a plagiarist by the standards I suggest (for one thing, I have no experience of their audiences, and thus what those audiences could reasonably be expected to know); I only want to ensure that all individuals are judged by the correct set of standards. The target of people's scorn may well deserve it; but when dishing it out, there's a very real danger in nonetheless painting with too wide a brush.

"Because the only thing that no straight man would do is be in a sexual relationship with another man."

Do I have to say I disagree with the above? If one's working definition of anything that is clear-cut and unproblematic, and one isn't doing math (and I'd have doubts even then), then chances are pretty good one's definition is wrong.  (Wait, am I being hostile? I linked to a public post.)

And then in the comments, Grace said "Yeah, I would word it as being attracted to the same sex, rather than simply having sex, makes you gay (or bi)," (I linked to a comment on a public post written by someone on my flist! OMG, I must have all kinds of hostility!) which in my IMHO is just as unidimensional and unsatisfying. For me (and I'm just repeating myself here, because I've said it plenty of times before in this journal), sexual orientation is a complicated interplay of behavior (of which both desire and sexual acts would be subsets, I suppose, although desire is really constructed in a way that sex as an act is not), self-identify, and social interpellation.

To ignore the socially constructed character of either homosexuality or heterosexuality (or bisexuality or . . .) is, IMHO, a mistake.

OTOH, "gay" is a much less fluid category than "queer" (as we saw in the most recent batch of "queer female space" discussions), so maybe it makes sense that a note of (biological?) essentialism might creep in. (And let's face it, there's a lot of sexual orientation essentialism in fandom, beginning but not ending with the seemingly uncritical use of the Kinsey scale and the "X isn't gay!" anti-slash arguments.) But embracing homonormativity isn't exactly something we want to do in any case, and should be resisted on those grounds, right?

Literal-Minded provides (in a post from 2004) some good examples to parallel the femslash:slash relationship, in particular rooster:chicken, thumb:finger, square:rectangle, rectangle:quadrilateral, lesbian:gay (which of course is the obvious one when we're comparing to femslash:slash), and senator:congressman. (And there's an interesting meditation in the comments on whether abusers are in "abusive relationships.") languagelog only gave me microwave:oven (whose dynamic is less perfectly parallel).

And apparently there's a name for the phenomenon: Q-based narrowing. Wikipedia explains:

In semantics, Q-based narrowing is narrowing (a reduction in a word's range of meanings) that is caused by Grice's Maxim of Quantity (see Gricean maxims). Q-based narrowing occurs when a word A is a hypernym of a word B — that is, when every instance of B is an example of A. It is then common for the use of A to imply not B. For example, consider the words finger and thumb. A thumb is a kind of finger (hence the phrase ten fingers), but the term finger is not ordinarily applied to it: someone who has hurt their thumb might technically be correct in saying "I hurt my finger", but it would be misleading; the ordinary thing to say is "I hurt my thumb."

The term Q-based narrowing is due to Yale linguist Laurence Horn.

I haven't yet seen an in-depth analysis of the political implications of this phenomenon (other than ruminations on woman:man in general, a la Luce Irigaray, or Derridean deconstructions of binary thinking), but I'd like to.

Discussions have got me thinking about how I define religion (I make a point of not defining religion, mostly, but relying on people's self-identifications). In these discussions--but not necessarily outside of them, I don't know--I seem to operating under something like

Religion = Cultural Forms + Ideology

Obviously that would include everything, since all cultural forms have an ideological character, but it seems to me that the stronger the bond between the cultural forms and the ideology, the more of a religious character it takes on. Is there anything obviously wrong with this?

And I'm still not sure if the problem is how to make the cultural forms accessible to people who don't share the ideology, or whether it's how to respect people who don't share the cultural forms (not necessarily for any ideological reason, but just because they're not theirs). The two questions seem to be complicating each other and making for a lot of confusion. [ETA: For example, the "conversation" (that is far too charitable a word) in Amy's journal when a flamer (that word is much more appropriate) claimed that religion was chosen. The ideology should be chosen after thoughtful reflection, but cultural forms are inherited.]

This post (on the "Non-Christian's Christmas") linked by metafandom (to be linked? I follow the del.icio.us account) is making me think, as posts so linked are liable to do. I'm on the record as being in favor of secular appropriation of religious holidays, while being uncomfortable with the Christocentricism at work in the way secular Western society actually works in appropriating religious holidays. (Which makes my thoughts about something like yuletide very complicated.) I am in favor of said appropriation for three main reasons:

1.) I do not believe that there is any such thing as a "core truth" to any religion, and thus the breaking apart of ritual from the oppressiveness of doctrine is viewed by me as an overall beneficial shift.

2.) I believe the secular forms of religious holidays are rich cultural forms that have merit in their own right.

3.) I believe, as a Christian, that the Holy Spirit works in complicated and mysterious ways. 

I know, however, that there are people on my flist who quite strongly dislike said appropriation, at least some from a sense that the resulting cultural forms are somehow inauthentic. Y/N?

I've just stopped by the Commuter Lounge after class, and we've done Frankenstein. Now the prof wanted to focus on the slippages and fallibilities inherent in the various levels of framing devices, but I'm actually more interested in the transparencies. We found plenty of examples of said slippages, places where the narrators may be less than reliable or at least have their reliability called into question, and I can think of more we did not discuss in class, but I almost want to argue that these are localized phenomena, not actually casting sustained doubt on any of the levels of narrative--as opposed to Victors, discussed previously, which problematizes the process of narrative itself, as argued by Kristina Busse in her blog.

( Fig. 1 ) Take the diagram I put forth in one of my previous posts. In Frankenstein the answer to "What is the story about?" exists on the level of what is called in the diagram the "Events of Story."


The answer to "What is Frankenstein about?" is not "An arctic explorer who writes letters to his sister" (as much as I might like to imagine the 'cesty possibilities thereof) but rather "A scientist who animates a creature." This is what I mean by "transparent."

But in, say, "The Tell-Tale Heart" the answer to "What is the story is about?" rests not on the "Events of Story" but rather the "Diegetic Act of Narration."


Here the answer to "What is the story about?" is not "A magical heart that continues to beat after death" but instead "A crazy man who commits murder and is driven by his hallucinations to confess." We would, under standard hermeneutic conditions, call a reading which placed the primacy on the events of the story as written rather than the diegetic act of narration suggested thereof a misreading. The story is, so to speak, "translucent."

There are narratives in which an ambiguity exists as to where the primacy lies. For example, in "Annabell Lee," the poem is either a lovely love poem (my mother's reading, although one founded on principle rather than ignorance--she refuses to read it any other way) or a poem about a crazy person who sleeps in sea-side mausoleums. My "On Her Knees" seems to be a dystopian AU futurefic, but I think it's "really" about the mindgames Lilah plays on Wes during season 4 of Angel.

And, if we accept Busse's argument, in Victors the primacy actually lies within the the act of reading itself. It is completely and utterly opaque.

My post the other night on person and tense was, admittedly, about equal parts tl;dr and navel-gazing (but then, that can describe most non-fiction posts in this journal), but its contents did also point towards a conclusion that I didn't draw then but will now: that our talk of "tenses" and "persons" in reference to fiction are oversimplifications, grammatical terms that just can't handle narrative. Is "Requiem at Reichenbach" (or "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Frankenstein or whatever) told in present tense or past tense? Is it in first-person or second-person? (I'd say the first, since it's Moriarty's rather Holmes' thoughts which we are privy to, but I've received plenty of comment discussing my use of the second-person.) One of my dreams is to write a novel told in alternating narratives, one in first-person and second-person, which finally culminates in "I" meeting "you" at the end.

Not to mention the possibilities like "first-person omniscient" or "third-person telepathic"--the latter being a POV I've written quite a bit, thanks to River and Drusilla.

Janet Burroughway in her textbook Writing Fiction (which I loved in high school because it was much more in-depth and complex than any creative writing work I've read before or since) provides as an alternative a series of questions, only two of which ("Who speaks?" and "To whom?") I remember off the top of my head, but my impulse when encountering a broken system isn't to create a newer, better, much-improved system but instead to ask whether it wasn't the systematizing impulse itself that was flawed in the first place.

Now I'm re-reading my post alongside Kristina Busse's blogpost on Speranza’s Written By the Victors as Exemplary Fantext and the resonances are striking. Victors, which is a novel-length SGA fic I have not read, is made of exactly the phenomena I was discussing on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning) a situation where the narrative itself exists diegetically within the fictional universe. Victors includes seemingly contradictory narratives which are nonetheless assumed to exist within the same fictional universe (i.e. the narratives themselves exist within the same fictional universe, but the events they describe cannot be reconciled and thus do not)--the situation "Requiem at Reichenbach" is in when read alongside the original canon narrated by Watson.

Requiem at Reichenbach: Moriarty's memories of Holme's first case <-- Moriarty's internal monologue as he falls at Reichenbach <-- Alixtii writing a fic for yuletide
Conan Doyle's canon: The adventures of Sherlock Holmes <-- Watson's chronicling of his friends' adventures <-- Sir Arthur writing stories in The Strand

It's the two events in green (and not the two events in red) which are assumed to exist within the same universe--since all of the events in red cannot even exist in the same universe with each other; at the very least, it would be necessary to choose between the Moriarty backstory we are given in "The Final Problem" (where Watson first hears of Moriarty when Holmes is already running for his life) and The Valley of Fear (in which both Watson and Scotland Yard are fully aware of Holmes' obsession well before the events of "The Final Problem" are assumed to take place), which cannot be (easily?) reconciled with each other. To preserve the illusion, we construct the interpretation such that it is Watson rather than Doyle who has made a mistake. (Cf. other works of Sherlockiana, the most famous of course being The Seven-Percent Solution.) And none of this even touches on the subject of Watson's war wound or the question of how Moriarty brothers there were and how many of them were named James. Or the fact that there are stories in Doyle's canon which are not narrated by Watson.

That Doyle's canon has these features is, of course, no surprise: it is the text which gave birth to fandom.

Moriarty in "Requiem" has read the Watsonian canon pre-"The Final Problem" (which is of course assumed to be identical to the corresponding Doylist canon); he even makes a direct reference to a line in A Study in Scarlet at one point, when he compares his own first impressions of Holmes with those of Watson. The sketch we get in canon leaves the status of these diegetic writings rather in doubt; fanon generally imports as much information from the actual world into the fictional world as possible, so that Watson's stories were published in The Strand under Doyle's name, etc. (This line of logic leaves us to assume that all of the people who searched out Holmes to solve their mysteries within the canon after reading Watson's accounts didn't understand the notion of fiction.)

For Kristina, this type of scenario "mirrors fannish and academic disputes in analysis and interpretation by asking the reader to weigh the different historical accounts and documents against one another. As [she has] argued before, fan fiction does not consist only of individual works of art but must be approached as a collectively written, highly intertextual, internally contradictory text which is continually being written through the use of various modes of interface."

This all so very postmodern.

Maybe?

While the use of texts within texts is a common postmodern trope, it also predates postmodernism by several thousand years, unless we are to consider Homer to have been a postmodern when s/he had Odysseus relate to the Phoenician king the story of his journey. OTOH, if one accepts (as I do) along with Umberto Eco that the postmodern is a mode of reading rather than a mode of writing, than The Odyssey is totally fair game. After all, I once wrote a fifteen-page paper in undergrad on Troilus and Criseyde as postmodern text. (Note that T&C also contains multiple contradictory texts-within-texts!)