Fanfiction and the pre-copyright aesthetic
2 Comments Published by ginny on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 at 5:04 PM.
In further proof that I can only write about things that aren't exactly my papers:
So I've become re-obsessed (or re-re-re-obsessed) with fanfiction. I've been, I guess, undergoing a process of gradual "outing" of myself as a fanfic-reader for a few years now. And it is something that has to be outed, not just told. Fanfic is, in many senses, shameful. Especially – oh, here's the real outing – the slashfic that I like to read. (I would like it to be known, however, that I do not write fanfiction. At least not explicitly. I do write fancriticism, but that's ever so slightly different.) I wonder if slash fanfiction is in a way the last border of shameful reading, actually? Even romance novels have a kind of cache now, although you ("you" being a highly educated feminist person, since the imagined "you" is apparently someone just like "me") wouldn't want to be mistaken for a reader who's too serious about it.
(And there's another thing – the assumption that readers/viewers of denigrated forms of fiction can't tell the difference between fiction and real life – romance novels are bad for readers because they set up unrealistic expectations; fanfiction is bad for readers because it allows them to abstract themselves from consideration of real relationships involving real men and women – is part of the shame attached to fanfic its deviance from either hetero or homonormativity? Since most of the writers are women, but most slash fiction is about male-male couples, the figured triangulation is outside of any accepted desire frameworks.)
Anyway. I'm coming out about it. Periodically, I really like to read slash fanfiction. Particularly (god, this is way harder than I thought it would be. I feel kind of dizzy.)…particularly about Harry Potter. In fact, my engagement with the Potterverse is almost exclusively through fanfiction – I like the books, and I like Alan Rickman in the movies, but I like the really good fanfic better.
So. My personal confessional done with, what I really wanted to get to, what I've been thinking about this morning, is this: does fanfiction represent a return (or return-with-a-difference) to pre-copyright modes of authorial engagement? One of the conventions of fanfic is the disclaimer at the beginning – something like "I don't own these characters. HarperCollins and JK Rowling do" or something. It's a nod to copyright protection, but it is just that – a nod. The entire premise of the genre is not that this is an original fiction only using the names of characters created by someone else, but that it is in fact a continuation or skewed rewriting of the existing work. The fanfic is not separate from the original, or canon, work, it's adjacent to it.
And that's a huge part of its pleasure, right? The enjoyment of a really good fanfiction isn't just enjoyment of it as an autonomous object, but enjoyment of it in conjunction with or even in opposition to its parent work. (I'm a little nervous about the genealogical metaphor there, but I can't find a better one right this second.) Taken completely out of its relationship to the canon, a fanfic may seem confusing or impoverished – say you haven't read Harry Potter, for instance, but you attempt to read Mirabella's intensely wonderful The Shadow of His Wings anyway. Now, I really think the story is is an excellent piece of writing, but say you came to this sentence, from the first chapter, without having read the books: "Whatever gods had thrown Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy into the world together to begin with were clearly not going to rest until Harry was on a back ward at St. Mungo's playing exploding snap with Gilderoy Lockhart when their lucid moments coincided."
The reference to Lockhart would seem pointless or extraneous to a reader unfamiliar with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. But to a reader versed in the canon stories, there's an immediate frisson produced by knowledge of the entire story arc involving Gilderoy Lockhart: Harry's connection to Draco is being equated to a story revolving around sexual ambiguity, narcissism, and eventual insanity which takes the form of self-forgetting. And that's only a small part of it. There's also the pleasure produced by reading against-text -- both retroactively against-text in terms of the canon and currently against-text (or with sub-text) in this story -- in order to deduce that Harry's anxiety surrounding Draco may suggest romantic interest.
To put it another way: the pleasure of the fanfiction depends largely upon its relationship to the canon. When you read the fanfic, you are simultaneously re-reading your experience with the maintext on which it depends.
Which is, I'd like to maintain, remarkably similar (though notably not identical) to the experience of an early modern theater-goer seeing a production of The Comedy of Errors. The play bears a very large resemblance (noted in at least one contemporary viewer's account) to Plautus's The Menaechmi. We usually speak about this by noting that Menaechmi is the source text for Comedy of Errors. As we all know, almost none (or perhaps none, flat) of Shakespeare's plots are "original" in the sense that we in the twenty-first century conceive of originality. They are re-writings and re-shapings of existing and already-popular stories, like Plautus's comedies or Greene and Lodge's romances or Holinshed's Chronicles. That doesn't decrease our appreciation for them now because they're already canon themselves (and, in fact, a twenty-first century reader coming to Lodge's Rosalynde is more likely to read Lodge as somehow retroactively cribbing from Shakespeare than the other way around, since we do attach so much emotional value to originality, and also to Shakespeare).
But contemporaneously, the plays were enjoyable in conjunction with their sources for a different reason: because there wasn't the kind of need for authorial individualism, and thus "originality" in the same way we experience it. A viewer who knew Plautus's play and went to see Shakespeare's wouldn't say to himself, disgustedly, "This Shakespeare guy just totally stole Plautus's story" – instead, he would (presuming he enjoyed the play) consider the two stories simultaneously in his sort of (to paraphrase Beowulf) story-hoard. Some of the enjoyment of The Comedy of Errors might come precisely from its interaction with the remembered Menaechmi, in a similar way to how the enjoyment of The Shadow of His Wings comes from its interaction with the remembered Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Why is this possible? Because in both systems of enjoyment, authorial individualism either isn't present or takes a back seat. Menaechmi, in my Renaissance example, isn't Plautus's, per se. It doesn't belong to Plautus in the way an intellectual copyright belongs to someone now. Instead, it "belongs" to a whole host of people and communities: it belongs to the Romans and the classical past; it belongs to Auctoritee (Humanist auctoritee, anyway); it belongs to the theatrical companies that produced it; it belongs to the audiences of it both past and present; it belongs to the printers who printed the copies Shakespeare and his audience member read – in other words, it is dissociated from the personal and made archetypal or referential. It is not individual, but communal intellectual property (if it's property at all, which actually I think it isn't).
In a similar way, when a fanfiction writer engages with Harry Potter, she isn't engaging with it as a piece of individual expression relating to JK Rowling. She isn't engaging with the intellectual, authorial, individual property Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Instead, she's engaging with the shared experience of Harry Potter, with the community and communal engagement with a story, not a work. Fanfiction bypasses the notion of copyright. It asserts that though an individual person, an author, may have copyright on the particular words of a story, its ramifications in the reading public, the "verse" of the story or stories, belongs to a host of people – readers, publishers, movie-makers, movie-goers, etc. And the fanfic itself is also uncopyrightable, see? Because again – the words themselves may belong to the writer herself, but the idea, being as it exists only by virtue of viewing the story as un-ownable, can't be asserted to be individual property. It's also, as the disclaimers assert, on slightly dubious legal ground – although fanfic may assert that authors can't own stories, that's not what the law usually says. So – as Dryden can perfectly easily take Antony and Cleopatra as written by Shakespeare (itself a remaking of Thomas North's translation/rewriting of Plutarch) and turn it into All for Love – and there is nothing disreputable about any of this – another fanfic writer, or maybe a fanfic artist, can decide she really likes the way Mirabella's Harry talks and acts and write a story or make a drawing that in turn re-represents the representation.
It's a different take on authorship. A de-individualizing take on authorship, or a de-romanticizing take on authorship. Both forms of enjoyment depend on an understanding of story as not individually but communally held, and both posit reader engagement as an ongoing process of addition and revision to the existing story-set. Not Plautus's Menaechmi, not Rowling's Potter, but everyone's Menaechmi, everyone's Potter – not fixed texts (dead texts, commodified texts, reified texts), but living ones (gifted texts, maybe? If we oppose or put gift-exchange in conjunction with commodity exchange? I'm not sure this is right, and I don't know enough about it to say).
So what ramifications does thinking about fanfiction this way have? Well, for one thing, it asserts for fanfic a kind of new-old way of looking at the community of readers or the reading of communities. I guess this probably has a lot to do with Barthes and the "death of the author" – although I haven't read Barthes, so probably that indicates that a) my reading is influenced by the mainstreaming of deconstructionism and b) fanfiction itself may be influenced by the mainstreaming of deconstructionism – or deconstructionism may be influenced by fanfiction.
I also think, though, that seeing fanfiction and fan-conscious fiction (in this I include American Idol and Star Trek) as in some ways a return to pre-copyright modes of fictional production may help us understand reading or viewing pleasure in an age that's experiencing considerable social upheaval over the idea of intellectual property and copyright. Over, that is, the question of whether some things are unavailable for commodification, or whether there are some qualities that go beyond "trademark" – who "owns" the celebrity's "aura," for instance. Does anybody? Can an aura be un-owned? I'm not sure that's quite the question I want to ask, but it's getting kind of close. I, however, am also getting close to doing myself in by rambling about things I can't put in my papers. So I need to stop. Now.
So I've become re-obsessed (or re-re-re-obsessed) with fanfiction. I've been, I guess, undergoing a process of gradual "outing" of myself as a fanfic-reader for a few years now. And it is something that has to be outed, not just told. Fanfic is, in many senses, shameful. Especially – oh, here's the real outing – the slashfic that I like to read. (I would like it to be known, however, that I do not write fanfiction. At least not explicitly. I do write fancriticism, but that's ever so slightly different.) I wonder if slash fanfiction is in a way the last border of shameful reading, actually? Even romance novels have a kind of cache now, although you ("you" being a highly educated feminist person, since the imagined "you" is apparently someone just like "me") wouldn't want to be mistaken for a reader who's too serious about it.
(And there's another thing – the assumption that readers/viewers of denigrated forms of fiction can't tell the difference between fiction and real life – romance novels are bad for readers because they set up unrealistic expectations; fanfiction is bad for readers because it allows them to abstract themselves from consideration of real relationships involving real men and women – is part of the shame attached to fanfic its deviance from either hetero or homonormativity? Since most of the writers are women, but most slash fiction is about male-male couples, the figured triangulation is outside of any accepted desire frameworks.)
Anyway. I'm coming out about it. Periodically, I really like to read slash fanfiction. Particularly (god, this is way harder than I thought it would be. I feel kind of dizzy.)…particularly about Harry Potter. In fact, my engagement with the Potterverse is almost exclusively through fanfiction – I like the books, and I like Alan Rickman in the movies, but I like the really good fanfic better.
So. My personal confessional done with, what I really wanted to get to, what I've been thinking about this morning, is this: does fanfiction represent a return (or return-with-a-difference) to pre-copyright modes of authorial engagement? One of the conventions of fanfic is the disclaimer at the beginning – something like "I don't own these characters. HarperCollins and JK Rowling do" or something. It's a nod to copyright protection, but it is just that – a nod. The entire premise of the genre is not that this is an original fiction only using the names of characters created by someone else, but that it is in fact a continuation or skewed rewriting of the existing work. The fanfic is not separate from the original, or canon, work, it's adjacent to it.
And that's a huge part of its pleasure, right? The enjoyment of a really good fanfiction isn't just enjoyment of it as an autonomous object, but enjoyment of it in conjunction with or even in opposition to its parent work. (I'm a little nervous about the genealogical metaphor there, but I can't find a better one right this second.) Taken completely out of its relationship to the canon, a fanfic may seem confusing or impoverished – say you haven't read Harry Potter, for instance, but you attempt to read Mirabella's intensely wonderful The Shadow of His Wings anyway. Now, I really think the story is is an excellent piece of writing, but say you came to this sentence, from the first chapter, without having read the books: "Whatever gods had thrown Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy into the world together to begin with were clearly not going to rest until Harry was on a back ward at St. Mungo's playing exploding snap with Gilderoy Lockhart when their lucid moments coincided."
The reference to Lockhart would seem pointless or extraneous to a reader unfamiliar with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. But to a reader versed in the canon stories, there's an immediate frisson produced by knowledge of the entire story arc involving Gilderoy Lockhart: Harry's connection to Draco is being equated to a story revolving around sexual ambiguity, narcissism, and eventual insanity which takes the form of self-forgetting. And that's only a small part of it. There's also the pleasure produced by reading against-text -- both retroactively against-text in terms of the canon and currently against-text (or with sub-text) in this story -- in order to deduce that Harry's anxiety surrounding Draco may suggest romantic interest.
To put it another way: the pleasure of the fanfiction depends largely upon its relationship to the canon. When you read the fanfic, you are simultaneously re-reading your experience with the maintext on which it depends.
Which is, I'd like to maintain, remarkably similar (though notably not identical) to the experience of an early modern theater-goer seeing a production of The Comedy of Errors. The play bears a very large resemblance (noted in at least one contemporary viewer's account) to Plautus's The Menaechmi. We usually speak about this by noting that Menaechmi is the source text for Comedy of Errors. As we all know, almost none (or perhaps none, flat) of Shakespeare's plots are "original" in the sense that we in the twenty-first century conceive of originality. They are re-writings and re-shapings of existing and already-popular stories, like Plautus's comedies or Greene and Lodge's romances or Holinshed's Chronicles. That doesn't decrease our appreciation for them now because they're already canon themselves (and, in fact, a twenty-first century reader coming to Lodge's Rosalynde is more likely to read Lodge as somehow retroactively cribbing from Shakespeare than the other way around, since we do attach so much emotional value to originality, and also to Shakespeare).
But contemporaneously, the plays were enjoyable in conjunction with their sources for a different reason: because there wasn't the kind of need for authorial individualism, and thus "originality" in the same way we experience it. A viewer who knew Plautus's play and went to see Shakespeare's wouldn't say to himself, disgustedly, "This Shakespeare guy just totally stole Plautus's story" – instead, he would (presuming he enjoyed the play) consider the two stories simultaneously in his sort of (to paraphrase Beowulf) story-hoard. Some of the enjoyment of The Comedy of Errors might come precisely from its interaction with the remembered Menaechmi, in a similar way to how the enjoyment of The Shadow of His Wings comes from its interaction with the remembered Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Why is this possible? Because in both systems of enjoyment, authorial individualism either isn't present or takes a back seat. Menaechmi, in my Renaissance example, isn't Plautus's, per se. It doesn't belong to Plautus in the way an intellectual copyright belongs to someone now. Instead, it "belongs" to a whole host of people and communities: it belongs to the Romans and the classical past; it belongs to Auctoritee (Humanist auctoritee, anyway); it belongs to the theatrical companies that produced it; it belongs to the audiences of it both past and present; it belongs to the printers who printed the copies Shakespeare and his audience member read – in other words, it is dissociated from the personal and made archetypal or referential. It is not individual, but communal intellectual property (if it's property at all, which actually I think it isn't).
In a similar way, when a fanfiction writer engages with Harry Potter, she isn't engaging with it as a piece of individual expression relating to JK Rowling. She isn't engaging with the intellectual, authorial, individual property Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Instead, she's engaging with the shared experience of Harry Potter, with the community and communal engagement with a story, not a work. Fanfiction bypasses the notion of copyright. It asserts that though an individual person, an author, may have copyright on the particular words of a story, its ramifications in the reading public, the "verse" of the story or stories, belongs to a host of people – readers, publishers, movie-makers, movie-goers, etc. And the fanfic itself is also uncopyrightable, see? Because again – the words themselves may belong to the writer herself, but the idea, being as it exists only by virtue of viewing the story as un-ownable, can't be asserted to be individual property. It's also, as the disclaimers assert, on slightly dubious legal ground – although fanfic may assert that authors can't own stories, that's not what the law usually says. So – as Dryden can perfectly easily take Antony and Cleopatra as written by Shakespeare (itself a remaking of Thomas North's translation/rewriting of Plutarch) and turn it into All for Love – and there is nothing disreputable about any of this – another fanfic writer, or maybe a fanfic artist, can decide she really likes the way Mirabella's Harry talks and acts and write a story or make a drawing that in turn re-represents the representation.
It's a different take on authorship. A de-individualizing take on authorship, or a de-romanticizing take on authorship. Both forms of enjoyment depend on an understanding of story as not individually but communally held, and both posit reader engagement as an ongoing process of addition and revision to the existing story-set. Not Plautus's Menaechmi, not Rowling's Potter, but everyone's Menaechmi, everyone's Potter – not fixed texts (dead texts, commodified texts, reified texts), but living ones (gifted texts, maybe? If we oppose or put gift-exchange in conjunction with commodity exchange? I'm not sure this is right, and I don't know enough about it to say).
So what ramifications does thinking about fanfiction this way have? Well, for one thing, it asserts for fanfic a kind of new-old way of looking at the community of readers or the reading of communities. I guess this probably has a lot to do with Barthes and the "death of the author" – although I haven't read Barthes, so probably that indicates that a) my reading is influenced by the mainstreaming of deconstructionism and b) fanfiction itself may be influenced by the mainstreaming of deconstructionism – or deconstructionism may be influenced by fanfiction.
I also think, though, that seeing fanfiction and fan-conscious fiction (in this I include American Idol and Star Trek) as in some ways a return to pre-copyright modes of fictional production may help us understand reading or viewing pleasure in an age that's experiencing considerable social upheaval over the idea of intellectual property and copyright. Over, that is, the question of whether some things are unavailable for commodification, or whether there are some qualities that go beyond "trademark" – who "owns" the celebrity's "aura," for instance. Does anybody? Can an aura be un-owned? I'm not sure that's quite the question I want to ask, but it's getting kind of close. I, however, am also getting close to doing myself in by rambling about things I can't put in my papers. So I need to stop. Now.
Labels: audience, idolatry, reading, representation, writing
This was really interesting, even for a person who doesn't study literature. It sounds like a dissertation waiting to happen (seriously).
thanks, Katie! I think it might be a mass-market book, rather than a dissertation. My dissertation has to be on purely renaissance, I think. But in the intervening years I can publish on fan-interactive entertainment for the larger press, if I want! And...er....if I manage to write something good enough.