Subtext slash
Nov. 11th, 2003 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaWah. 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 12:15 am (UTC)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
Date: 2003-11-12 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 02:14 am (UTC)Actually, Holly meant the latter. There is a furiously popular RPS fandom centering around the slashing of Egenhofer and Herring (eds.) Theirloveisocomputerized!
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 03:24 am (UTC)Or Leibniz/Newton slash! Or, or ...
*brain explodes*
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 11:28 am (UTC)Einstein/Bohr: theirloveissorelative
and
Schroedinger/Cat: theirlovebothisandisn'twrong
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 01:31 pm (UTC)Was trying to figure out Heisenberg/Bohr: Theirloveissouncertain
But really, when you think about it, Watson/Crick is the OTP: Theirdnaissointertwined