More of It

[malsperanza]

chresimos says:

So: all books are open if you make them open, because you can draw upon your own experience and your own perception and bring things into the text, and make interpretations, that weren't meant.



The reader, not the author, is all-powerful. Which is odd, because the reader usually feels helpless in the hands of the author, who has all the visible trappings of the puppet-master.

And some books lend themselves much more easily to this process than others. I often wonder about what makes works accessible to fanfictioning, and I've thought it might be a sense of completion and self-containment in the texts. But I can't pin it down, because by my standards the Dune series (with a large universe to play in and an easily-grasped world-building idea) generate very little fanfiction.

Some authors work pretty hard to fill in as many gaps as possible, so that the reader won't. Others delight in leaving spaces where the reader can go to work with bricks and mortar and build whole castles. Dune, for all its pleasures, is a book that fills in its own gaps, for the most part. Paul's relationships are interesting, but not especially mysterious--except maybe with his mother. I shall say nothing about the sequels, which deteriorate rapidly, IMO.

JKR seems to leave a lot of openings for fanfic in part because she writes rather simply. Her characters are defined mainly by what they do and say, not by what they leave out; their growth (and the development of their relationships) is defined by events, to which they react. As you say, that is fairly easy to imitate (though not necessarily well). It is a basic adventure-story framework, a picaresque novel. In such novels, the author often adds complexity (and closes gaps) by supplying commentary, philosophical speculations, interpretations of his or her own, in authorial voice. Tolstoy does this, and Cervantes.

But JKR is strict in giving us very little of her own interpretation. As she grows more adept as a writer, she is allowing more gaps to appear between events and scenes. E.g., Harry is allowed to have silences in which we don't know what he's thinking; he makes mistakes (as does Sirius) which we observe, but which are not pointed out to us. Because of these blank spaces in the delineation of those two characters, they both are much more interesting than other characters. Sirius is like this from his first appearance; Harry is growing more Sirius-like in the recent vols.

On the other hand, nobody writes, say, George Eliot fanfiction, because(from me limited readings of her) her stories are very much with the Get the Point Across, not built primarily on interesting characters or a specific world that others could pick up and use for themselves, but as a vehicle to communicate The Message, and meddling with The Message, seems, to me anyway, like stepping into a very wrong place and undermining the whole idea of the book.

Hm. This, I think, is a bit more difficult. Eliot writes pretty vivid characters, and I don't get the feeling meself that they exist only to serve the Message (though there is undoubtedly A Message). More daunting to fanficcers, perhaps, is the complexity of her language--more difficult than Austen, even, to imitate. More germane, maybe, is that fanfic is all about Teh Romance, and Eliot is pretty skeptical about romance--rather down on the whole idea, all in all. One could write a fanfic in which Dorothea Brooke has the brains not to marry Mr. Casaubon, and runs off with the dishy young artist Whatsisname. But since Muddlemuch is all about the fact that Dorothea makes the wrong marriage, it would be kind of beside the point. Like writing a fanfic in which Hamlet's mum almost marries Claudius, but thinks better of it, leaving Hamlet free to have a torrid love affair with Ophelia. I mean, it can be done, but why bother? Other than for the porn scenes of Hamlet and Ophelia in bed, I suppose.

*digression alert*

Ophelia [sings]:
To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

Hamlet [running a palm down her thigh]:
Window, eh? What window?

Ophelia [reaching across him for the cigarettes on the night table]:
A figure of speech.

Hamlet:
Oh, all right then. [His long fingers wander over her breast] You want me to get dressed, eh?

Ophelia:
Well, no, it was the "up he rose" bit that I liked. [She does something under the sheet with one hand, and he yelps]

Hamlet:
Vixen. Yourself, madam, should be pleased as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.

Ophelia:
Backward? Backward?

Hamlet:
A figure of speech.

Ophelia:
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do't, if they come to't;
By cock, they are to blame.

Hamlet:
Mm. If you say so.

Ophelia [voice growing faintly distracted]:
Quoth she ... before you tumbled me, ... um,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha' done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.

Hamlet [kicking away the sheet, and gently removing the cigarette from her fingers, where it is in danger of burning him in a veryveryawkward place]:
Then I live about your waist, or in the middle of your favours.

[His breath is growing uneven]

In the secret parts of fortune ... O, most true; she is a strumpet.

Ophelia:
Good night, baby! Good night, sweet baby!
Good night! Good night!

[Sings]
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?

Hamlet [panting, laughing]:
Don't be in such a hurry, sweeting...

*end digression*

This is chresimos again:

And this is only a little related, but now I'm thinking about how people like fairytales and myth, and since forever people have been rewriting them and putting their own meanings into them, fanfictioning away, and that has been literature: overlaying your own themes and messages over an original structure, using your own perspective to retell a bare-bones tale. It seems so wrong to go after a finished, fleshed-out work and meddle with it.

It seems like a) cheating, and b) theft. But is it, really? All art has thefts in it, borrowings, imitations, reworkings. Some are pretty close to piracy. And how can one define cheating in art?

If you ask me, aside from the legal issues, the only concern worth having about the propriety or impropriety of fanfic is this: Is it good? And the answer, 90% of the time is: No, it's dreadful. But then there is that 10%:

Copying

The Copy

Of the Copy

Note the figure at lower right

Not to mention this one

And this

I mean, there is no art without swiping.

Comments

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Dune does fill its own gaps - it has more of a potential for deleted scenes, perhaps, things that have happened but you never get to see. The plot seems inevitable, and the characters not so interesting to flesh out, backstory, or carry on with.

And I agree with you about JKR - the simple style is definitely what I think allows so much filling in, and the abcense of the authorial voice is also very useful in this respect.

I haven't read much Eliot, as I said, so I suppose it wasn't fair to generalize. I was thinking of the authorial voice that you say is absent in the HP books, and how it's very strong in the Victorian fiction I've read. I was also thinking of Hardy, who does a lot of, 'Hey! You there! Did you miss the point of this scene? Well, it's all about the agnosticism!'. Specifically, I was thinking of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. It would seem so very wrong to me to write Tess of the d'Urbervilles fanfiction, although it could be done, because you wouldn't be able to have it fit in with the original text properly, and if you diverged from the mood or overall sentiments of the text you would be destroying the very idea of the book, as far as I see it. Maybe it's just easier to write fanfiction on books that aren't theme based, or at least obscure the theme with unusual elements that you can run away with, which is why science fiction and fantasy generate so much of it.

It doesn't make sense to radically alter the plot of old Muddlemuch, or even Hamlet, since it also takes away the point. Whereas I suppose you could get away with radical AUs spinning from the plots of the HP books if you wrote it well enough, and it has something to do with the world-building, and the characters again, I think. I could see one writing fanfiction on Hamlet as a character-exploration type of attempt. AU Hamlet? Do works of fiction so old and so famous become impossible to really fanfiction? I mean, if you rewrote Hamlet with no Claudius/the Queen, surely it would be interpreted as a clever allusion and thematic concept? So Hamlet isn't a valid piece of fanfiction-fodder, but an idea in itself, and you warp the idea by toying with it into your own idea, therefore it can't be derivative in the sense of an ordinary fanfiction? I wrote what's technically Hamlet fanfiction when I was in middle school for an English assignment, you know, write-from-different-character-perspectives.

...and more...

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

But if anyone's going to write Hamlet fanfiction, they should do it with thy crazy skills. :D

I've been thinking about this, and I think one of the main differences between fanfic-as-art, which encompasses all kinds of derivative literature, and fanfic-as-fanfic, is that when myths and old stories are taken and reworked with the author's themes and perspectives it's done for that purpose and that purpose only. Whereas normal fanfic has, sort of, lesser motives - to explore one character, to explore one ship, not to make a statement of any kind. Of course there is overlap, and you can argue that you can't *not* present your own perspective when you take over another author's work. It's the difference between someone writing about Lancelot and Guenevere because their love was great and shiny and deserves, and TH White setting out to warp the Arthurian legends in order to push his themes and anti-war message. I'm not describing this as well as I should. But, say, you've got Person 1, who says, "I want to write about Death Eaters because we never get to see what they do" and Person 2 who says "I will write about Death Eaters because I resent the simplistic portrayal of evil and want to construct something more believable."

bochup was talking about the plagiarism/cheating thing the other day. It's a strange thing. Personally, I don't understand plagiarism, especially of fiction, because I really, really want to be original. I memorize interesting metaphors so that I don't duplicate them by mistake in my own writing. What's the point of showing that you can recycle what someone else already did? On the other hand, I don't have a problem at all with fanfiction, which I suppose is a type of cheating, because you can take the base elements of world or characters and put your own ideas into them. To truly plagiarise JKR you'd not only have to write exactly like her but also deal with only her themes and events. Even writing exactly like her, but making up your own scenes, doesn't seem to matter to me. If you changed the names and wrote a book with an identical plotline, for example, that would be much worse than taking the names and changing the plotline, because you've made something new out of the same material. Fanfiction is, for me, much more a kind of extrapolation, the original work inspiring and the fanfiction writer's mind running away with it, rather than stealing.

As for art - well, I just don't know about art. :D