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

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.