Subtext slash

[malsperanza]

Wah. Want to continue this veryveryinteresting discussion, and respond to Sistermagpie and Chresimos, but am stuck at office in dead-end pointless job at the moment.

Will marshal thoughts to pursue the matter in question later. Meanwhile, thanks to Sistermagpie for the reference to Reenka's related comments on the problem of forcing a division between text and subtext into the act of reading (or writing, when the writing is fanfic that "subtextualizes" an existing text).

I am captivated by this comment from someone named Bonibaru:

"That's the point of slash - it grows out of subtext. ... If you don't have het combined with lots of homoerotic subtext, you don't have slash."

I am not sure just how, but I think Bonibaru is onto something extremely interesting here: she or he seems to be suggesting that slash relies for its existence--its definition--on being embedded in the subtext. If it is overt, it doesn't work. E.g., a story about two guys who have a love affair is not in itself slash. If the two guys are based on two characters from someone else's book, who are gay but don't have an affair in the original book, that is not slash. It is only slash if

a) The two guys are het in the original

OR

b) The sexual orientation and relationship of the two guys in the original is ambiguous

OR

c) b) The sexual orientation and relationship of the two guys in the original is completely unknown

The slashiness of slash resides in its ambiguity. Or rather, in the act of making the ambiguous overt. Academic theorists would say: Concretizing the ambiguous.

Well! I must say, that is veryveryintriguing. Because it touches on something I have felt, but not grasped til now: That what makes slashy stories so compelling is not the gayness of them, nor the transgressiveness of them (the shock value), but this very special quality of raising ambiguity to a palpable, material presence. It is, in the phrase of Arthur Danto, a "transfiguration of the commonplace."

For if it were the gayness alone that attracted, then we might have a hard time explaining why so many straight readers find the stuff compelling. (I do NOT want to hear any sub-Freudian blither about latency; nope.)

And if it were the transgressiveness, the shockingness, that attracted, we might wonder why we are not all equally fascinated by, say, gory explicit violence, or (even more transgressive) stories extolling the romantic and dramatic force of, say, the Republican party.

No, it is this quality of ambiguity, of uncertainty, that attracts most powerfully. As The Celluloid Closet suggests, gay subtexts are the quintessential subtexts. They are the stories of love that must be told by indirection, by implication, by subtext.

So what slash does is not simply to identify a pairing that doesn't exist in the original (e.g., Harry/Draco) and impose that pairing in a fanfic; no, what slash really does is to identify a possible but improbably pairing (e.g., Harry/Draco) and render it possible, explicitly, while maintaining its absolute ambiguity.

This, I think, is why Cassie Claire's Draco Trilogy works so well, when other, more explicitly romantic stories of the H/D pairing do not.

Which is not to say that explicit love stories involving gay lovers cannot be successful--that's a no-brainer. But perhaps it isn't slash.

Comments

[blackholly.livejournal.com]

What about primary texts in which sequels reveal a character as explicitly gay, like Flewelling's series (titles are slipping my mind at the moment)?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

*googles Flewelling*

Well, this is either Lynn Flewelling, author of sci-fi fantasy novels, or Douglas Flewelling, author of Computerized Delineation of Watersheds Using Digital Elevation Model Data and "Inferences from Combined Knowledge about Topology and Directions." in: M. Egenhofer and J. Herring (eds.), Advances in Spatial Databases Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Large Spatial Databases.

I'm bettin' on the former. I haven't read her books, so I'm sort of guessing here, because deciding how "explicit" a characterization is is pretty subjective. And it's the relative explicitness (vs. subtextualness) that matters. So let's consider an obvious example: Louis and Lestat in Anne Rice's novels.

For the record, I happen to think these are dreadful books (except the first half of the first one), but they are a useful example, maybe.

In the first book, Louis and Lestat have a passionate relationship in which sex (and sexual orientation) is entirely sublimated, disguised as vampiric bloodsuckin, which, in turn, is sexualized by the style in which it is presented.

In later books, though Louis and Lestat still don't have sex (AFAIK, I stopped trying to read them after a while), their relationship becomes more explicitly that of lovers, and their implied gayness becomes, well, ever more blatantly implied, so to speak.

I'd say that the first book was very slashy, and invited slash readings; the later books did the job for the reader, leaving the reader with nothing to contribute, nothing to bring to the reading. It's one of several ways in which Rice failed to follow through on the promise set up by the first book.

But I'd say that there are certainly books with explicitly gay characters in them that still permit (or invite) slash.

Let's take a book that IMO is much more successful than Anne Rice's sorry products.

Perhaps Tithe is such a book. The kid Corny is gay, but it is Roiben's ambiguous sexuality that drives the book, no? That is, we are interested in the relationship promised (or implied) between Roiben and Kaye; Roiben's attractiveness, like Gary Cooper's, is enhanced by being ambisexual. Corny, the character "marked" explicitly as gay, provides the baseline against which we measure Roiben's less clear sexual identity.

And because Kaye is the character marked as Roiben's natural partner, and Kaye is herself somewhat sexually ambiguous (though less, I think, than Roiben), Roiben's powerful presence triggers a rethinking, or realignment, of Kaye.

What's interesting about the way slash works is that it has a sort of domino effect: once you begin realigning the sexuality of characters, the whole book shifts--like a scene viewed through a mirror whose angle has been changed, ever so slightly.

But I'll go out on a limb and say this: if the sequel to Tithe nails down the sexuality of Roiben and Kaye, the books stand to lose something. That doesn't mean they can't a) have sex; and/or b) fall in love. But the moment they decide that there is no Other possibility--no other possible partner, male or female, the book is done. No? Not only because the UST is resolved, but because there is a kind of closure in the resolution of any major ambiguity.

Will try to think of some other examples that don't cut so near the bone, maybe.

And of course, if I were playing fair, I'd tell you more about my own writing project (I think I mentioned it once), which also wanders in this labyrinth--though amateur, amateur, by comparison. But over lunch some evening, not here.

PS

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I referred to Roiben/Kaye, but the same would hold true for, say, Roiben/Corny.

[thegraybook.livejournal.com]

Well, this is either Lynn Flewelling, author of sci-fi fantasy novels, or Douglas Flewelling, author of Computerized Delineation of Watersheds Using Digital Elevation Model Data and "Inferences from Combined Knowledge about Topology and Directions." in: M. Egenhofer and J. Herring (eds.), Advances in Spatial Databases Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Large Spatial Databases."

Actually, Holly meant the latter. There is a furiously popular RPS fandom centering around the slashing of Egenhofer and Herring (eds.) Theirloveisocomputerized!

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Foolish me, how could I not have known?? Egenhofer/Herring--I bet that's as good as Watson/Crick slash! Or Heisenberg/Bohr slash. Theirloveissononeuclidean!

Or Leibniz/Newton slash! Or, or ...

*brain explodes*

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

HAHA. It is completely creepy that you have said this, because one day not so long ago a friend and I were sitting around making physicsslash jokes. We came up with:

Einstein/Bohr: theirloveissorelative

and

Schroedinger/Cat: theirlovebothisandisn'twrong

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

*dies*

Was trying to figure out Heisenberg/Bohr: Theirloveissouncertain

But really, when you think about it, Watson/Crick is the OTP: Theirdnaissointertwined

My two cents

[anjali-organna.livejournal.com]

No, it is this quality of ambiguity, of uncertainty, that attracts most powerfully. As The Celluloid Closet suggests, gay subtexts are the quintessential subtexts. They are the stories of love that must be told by indirection, by implication, by subtext.

I think I agree with this. For me, the thrill of reading slash (when it's well done) is to take two characters not ordinarily percieved as gay and to trace their "awakening," if you will.

The actual act of sex is sort of irrevelant--it's all about the interactions, and the different interpretations that can lead to a conclusion. It is a thrill--the thrill of being on the verge of something huge and as a reader, being privy to emotions that you think are there and that any moment could threaten to spill over. For me, it's all about anticipation.

I think slash is inherently anticipatory in it's nature--once it crosses the line into an actual relationship (the relationship doesn't have to be healthy, mind you), for me it becomes more "gay" literature if you will rather than slash. Although I also think that it is silly to classify stories featuring gay relationships as solely "gay" stories, but that is another topic of conversation. However, I do tend to see slash as a genre in itself, whereas I think the so called "gay" stories should just be considered stories that happen to feature a gay relationship. I hope that was coherent.

Re: My two cents

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Word. Anticipation is a form of ambiguity, no? Once the story is consummated, it is no longer ambiguous, open to other possibilities, and so is less exciting. Also less enlightening.

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

I see what you're saying, and you do have a point. I was thinking about The Draco Trilogy yesterday after writing my comment, and that it does deliberately exploit those ambiguities, which is one of the reasons why it's so popular. There would be a great difference if it had, say, H/D emblazoned on it, from the start. Although partly that has to do with reader-bases.

To a great extent what you're saying is true about all fanfiction, really. Some people seem to write things because they logically proceed from canon, or as a kind of fictional back up, argument, presentation, or their own interpretations of the canon. And others because they have the desire to explore possibilities, or even go off the deep end all together, and try to make it plausible. Some do it because they have a ship that they think would be interesting, and I'm sure some do it because they have an idea that isn't even remotely possible but want to see if they have the ability to explore it. It's always the well-writtenness of the thing that matters, because an Umbridge/Hermione that's really persuasive and makes an effort to present plausibly, is going to be more interesting that a run-of-the-mill Harry/Ginny.

I'm beginning to think that another thing about slash(or, not to be broadly generalizing, the smatter of H/D I've read), is that it's pairing-driven, and driven by people who want the H/D and are moving towards the H/D. So I, not particularly wanting or needing to see the H/D, am often left feeling unpersuaded. At points in fics where I just know that most are going "Yay! They kissed!" I'll be thinking, this makes no sense, how did this happen, it's all too sudden.

This reminds of another thing - like cathexys said, there are two types of fanfiction, one written by people for fun and friends, and the other for a writing-practice-improvement-canon analysis purpose. A lot of slash is not driven by possibilities but by the two-hot-boys-together-yay factor. That doesn't mean it's bad or written by people who don't know how to write. I don't know if that relates to your definition of slash, because here we're going to get into word-meaning confusions. 'Slash' for me is simply a fanfiction categorizing term for fics involving same sex relationships. But I agree that the more interesting, thought-provoking slash, maybe the factor that moves people to slash, is the untapped possibility of het texts - I mean, I understand your point. However, if HP slash did become canon, it seems at least possible that there would be a raft of canon-based slash shippers of the H/Hr Hr/R H/G(depending on who I want to offend) type.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

All true. I don't really mean to get bogged down in definitions--slash is, as you say, a fanfiction categorizing term for fics involving same-sex relationships. The two-hot-boys-together-yay thing may be a motive for writing and reading in itself. That is porn, and porn has its place. (Porn, of course, doesn't need to have sex in it: Tom Clancy's macho right-wing techno-thrillers are porn; they provide pure satisfaction to the reader--a certain kind of reader--while providing nothing else at all.)

But let's start from the premise that the OTP is reader/book: that the relationship of book to reader is a seductive one, and unequal (like all romantic relationships). The book has all the power--it controls whether the ending will be happy or tragic, satisfying or frustrating, enlightening or depressing. Not for nothing do we speak of a "climax" in both sex and a story.

At some points in a book, though, the reader takes control; the reader says: regardless of what the author may have meant here, I am going to interpret this as meaning X. (Example: the reader gets to decide whether Natasha and Andrei were really in love or not in War and Peace, or, to take a clumsier example, whether Lestat and Louis were in love in Interview with the Vampire.

I like like Cathexys's distinction about the reasons for writing fanfic, though of course one may write for fun and canon analysis at the same time. But I think the underlying drive for fanfic is a more basic one: In the reader/book ship, the reader always gets dumped at the end, because the book ends. The book tosses some money on the bed, says to the reader, "Here, buy yourself a hat, Honey," and walks away whistling. And if we reallyreallylove a book, we don't want it to end. Ever. We are insatiable, addicted; we want more and more. At any price. The best books, like the best love affairs, are those that can sustain a lot of scrutiny, a lot of reuse.

Thus, fanfic is an extreme form of rereading. The focus of so much fanfic on pairings and ships, on sex and porn is not because we all really prefer porn, or only care about the nasty bits in books, but because we are mirroring our own desire for the book. All fanfic ships, therefore, are Mary Sues. And perhaps the presence of gay pairings in fanfic is so large (and so popular with otherwise het readers) not because we are pornographically and voyeuristically titillated by homosexuality, but because the reader/book ship is itself a transgressive pairing, a Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name. As The Celluloid Closet says, all audiences watch movies in hope, and no one sees the same movie.

I have to add one note to this: It may seem that I am arguing that gay pairings are all transgressive pairings, or that what appears to be gay-centric literature is really "OK" literature--i.e., normative, (het) literature that merely uses gayness as a symbol or trope or stand-in for Otherness, risk, impossible love. Naturally, such a reading is highly offensive: it erases the very idea that gay characters, or gayness itself, might exist as its own self, rather than as a het symbol of Otherness, tragedy, impossibility.

While there is some very good literature that uses gayness as a way of describing impossible, doomed love (Marlowe's Edward II comes to mind), I don't think that's what is going on in fanfic--either for readers or for writers. Rather, I think it's the other way round: in literature, all love is doomed love; all romance comes to an end; and fanfic attempts to resist that ending. In fanfic, very frequently, the "impossible" pairing triumphs, for example. Happy endings abound.

Even more important: a lot of fanfic never quite ends. Writers go on and on; chapters and sequels stream off the keyboards in floods. Fans read serially, as subscribers to Blackwood's magazine once read Dickens serially. And if they reallyreallylove a fic, they are OTOH dying to know if Harry and Draco end up together (or Umbridge and Hermione, or whatever), and on the other are hoping very much that they never arrive at The End.

Because, really, who wants to get out of bed when that beautiful body is still lying there, and might wake up if you poke it just a little?

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

This is just an amazingly provocative and fertile speculation on the nature of fanfic. I'm almost afraid to comment because I don't want to stop thinking about it; I don't want to freeze or consolidate my response to it. But I did just want to react, to spin off a few tangents from your argument and see where they go.

I'm captivated by your metaphor of the reader as hopeful and frustrated lover. The best books do open a new imaginative world to a reader, excite them with an expanded sense of possibilities, and this perhaps engenders a complicated reaction in the reader: first gratitude for the gift, a sympathetic racing of the imagination among the possibilities raised by the book. But that's followed, perhaps, by a wish to be co-creator, to hope that the characters and the plot will be shaped in a way that best reflects one's own initial reasons for being captivated by the book. And at that point there's a growing tension between the writer and the reader. The writer has the power to validate the reader's desires, or to astonish the reader by opening up even more compelling and unexpected possibilities, but also to close down options, to veer off in unwelcome directions, to humiliate the reader by the sheer reminder that we don't get a vote in how the story develops. Often enough, the writer doesn't even leave your proverbial fifty dollars on the bed.

I think you've made a brilliant case for locating the motivation for fanfiction in this tension -- in reader's desire to directly appropriate a story that has been important to them, to rebel against the haughtiness of the lover/author and insist on the validity of his or her own imaginative reaction to the materials. I'd like to think further about two of your points: first that the "transgressive" nature of this appropriation is responsible for the attraction of fanfiction to transgressive themes, and second that "open" readings are a legitimate subversion of the power position of the author.

In both cases, I think that rather than categorizing transgressive readings as "primary," I'd almost prefer to locate them as one point on a range of possible responses. Because there are romances that are life-enhancing even if they turn out to be impossible, that leave one with a sense of gratitude even for the difficulties and resistances that proved so instructive. And to extend the metaphor even further, even the desire to "transgress" is often accompanied by an over-the-shoulder glance that hopes for some kind of after-the-fact validation from the author. So I think it's legitimate to rewrite canon in a way that spites or defies or merely riffs on the original author, but it's also legitimate to look for canon validation of an original insight, and it's yet again legitimate to make canon at least provisionally normative, and try to work strictly within its bounds. Perhaps you could build a comprehensive typology of HP fanfiction based on the writer's degree of emotional and moral alignment with JKR, or lack thereof.

I respect your difficulty with using homosexuality as a marker for inherently "transgressive" relationships. Maybe one solution to the dilemma is to make a distinction between specific relationships. Yes, one wants to push for the social normalization of gay relationships, and celebrate it when it happens. But it would not offend me at all, for example, to hear you say that depending on the background of the characters, homosexual attraction, especially unexpected attraction, has a unique ability to code transgressiveness, to upend identity and call expected social roles into question. That's just true to experience, I think. Within such a framework, H/D would obviously be very high on the "transgressive" scale, as opposed to, say, Sirius/Remus, which always feels more domesticated to me (though I've read little enough of it.)

So let's work with H/D as a test case for your argument. Is there a correlation between being drawn to their "transgressiveness" and being deeply unsatisfied with JKR?

[continued . . . ]

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

[continued . . . ]

For all the sappy H/D romances that churn through the mill at ffnet, it's clear that virtually all the H/D "classics" -- IP, LUW, UL, PTG, and others -- insist on the massive difficulty of the relationship. IP starts with a powerful sense of H and D's revulsion for one another, and fascinates me with the question of when a feigned emotion quietly turns authentic. LUW perhaps starts with a growing infatuation, but then undermines it radically and recommences the search for a stronger grounding for the relationship. UL we don't know what the hell is going on, PTG presents the characters as so unstable and stressed that they can hardly bear to be honestly introspective about their feelings. All this tension and ambiguity and angst is the distinctive note of my Sicily, my home, my H/D! :)

How clearly is all this angst about the outrageousness of H/D associated with feelings of discontent with JKR? I think there's some suggestive evidence, but I'm honestly not sure whether it nails the case. I think H/D writers are more inclined than others to feel that Slytherins have gotten a raw deal in canon, to translate JKR's "cunning" as something more like "basic social competence, thank you," to complain about how cardboard Draco is in canon (though he's hardly unique in that.) JKR has described Ron as being based on one of her best-ever friends, but H/D-ers often subscribe to the "Ron-is-a-git" theory. So yeah, I guess there are some pointers that H/D writers tend to be unusually dissatisfied with canon, have unusually strong urges to reshape it. I guess I have reservations about the argument because in my own head, things are more on two separate tracks -- I find myself loving canon more and more, the deeper I engage with it, while my own interest in H/D is undiminished. And a dominant H/D voice like Maya, for instance, believes that her Draco is a homage to canon. So I would love to see further thoughts from people who could generalize this point among a wider range of ships and fanfic writers.

I wonder, really, if "transgressiveness" and an inclination to "open" reading are more highly correlated with each other than with any particular rejection of JKR's world. It may just be more about styles of reading and the independence of one's commitment to one's own obsessions. I guess my own perspective, which may be an evasion of the issue, is to try and ground a slash reading in JKR's own moral thinking and in explicit clues in the text that welcome it. To return to your metaphor of author and reader as OTP, JKR may be encouraging a relationship that is explicitly a sentimental education, that is meant to empower the "subordinate" lover's freedom to undertake future emotional adventures, in a no-regrets kind of way.

Eh, I'm starting to ramble. That's one of the dangers in starting a long comment without a thesis statement, out of a desire to just play with and open up some lines of thought. Please don't read any of this as a direct argument with your own points, which I find absolutely fascinating and haven't nearly finished thinking about -- I'm just thinking out loud, turning over stones. I'd be fascinated to know if any of this strikes sparks with you, and I'll probably come back for another round of engagement because I think your post was brilliant.

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Just to let you know that your rambling is very interesting to read, very interesting indeed. :) I have made an inept reply here, which will probably not be useful but will at least let you know that your ideas have run rampant around my head. In a good way.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Sorry for such a slow (and incomplete) reply, but I had thought I would have posted a big answer to your and mal's comments by now.

I was intrigued by your reservations about arguing from silences -- I guess I would agree that the silence must be somehow awkward or improbable to count as evidence. And I also want to elaborate a bit on the interpretation/appropriation distinction, because those are both very vague words and everyone is using them a bit differently. I may sit down and finally write that sucker over the holiday weekend that is now upon us.

In the mean time, I hope you don't mind that I have friended your journal, because I think it is extremely interesting and I want to read it more. Hope to meta with you more, here and there!