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malsperanzaMuahaha. Here's
So, appropriation and interpretation are not the same thing,although appropriation is (at least in part) a form of interpretation.
And writing a fanfic is not simply a form of interpretive reading of the text, though it can only occur when the reader interprets the text and then transforms it (or elements of it) into something new.
Here are the debates I am going to skip:
*Who is the owner of the new text?
*Who is the owner of the original text?
Not answered because: These two questions are dead ends; arguing about ownership leads to no new insights.
*Is there a scale of appropriation, so that a fanfic that sticks very close to canon has a different status from one that departs radically from canon?
Not answered because: While fandom sometimes assigns greater or lesser moral or ethical value to one or the other, it is essentially a crapshoot: Sometimes a departure from canon is seen as cheating; sometimes too-close adherence to canon is seen as plagiarism or lack of inventiveness.
But the success or failure of a fanfic depends on a) its quality in its own terms (persuasive characters, compelling plot, rich underlying ideas, skilful prose); and b) how it reuses the original text, with what insight and wit. A good fanfic can meet the standards of both a) and b) while being close to canon or far from it. Degrees of appropriation are not, therefore, in themselves, a significant measure of what fanfic does.
However, this leads us nicely to the question I do want to ask:
*In what quality does fanfic differ from mere interpretive reading? What does fanfic do?
Fanfic adds a new work of art to the world, but does so through a more open "borrowing" from another work of art than is usually considered reasonable. In order to justify its blatant theft of, and dependence upon, another artist's creative work, it has to contribute something new and wonderful of its own and provide some valuable insight into the original.
Here's an example drawn from the world of Serious Fiction (and therefore not suffering the stigma of being "mere fanfluff," or "merely pop fiction"):
Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, retells Jane Eyre from the pov of Rochester's mad first wife. It's a good book; in fact, I like it a lot more than Jane Eyre, which is a dead bore (if you ask me). It shares with Jane Eyre a theme of anger at injustices, especially against the weak and vulnerable, but it has an additional anger toward the assumptions embedded in Jane Eyre itself (that Rochester is essentially good; that the solution to a woman's problems in the world is to be in lurve and marry the boss, &c.).
Though it's a fine book on its own, Wide Sargasso Sea is a much better book (IMO) if you can read it against Jane Eyre. It's a conscious dialogue with, and critique of, one of the warhorses of (so-called) Women's Literature. As a result, it is not quite an independent work of art all on its own.
And yet, does that diminish it? Is Rhys "cheating" because she didn't come up with her own idea? Of course not; because there is no cheating in art, only bad art. If Rhys had written a clumsy ripoff or a cheap parody, then the work would have been diminished. Quality, skill, the infusion of whole new ideas and perspectives are what give her book its own identity. And even better: she illuminates Bronte's book; and Bronte's book is the better for having hers nearby--more interesting, more problematic.
More worth rereading.
In any case, no work of art is entirely independent; artists steal from one another at every level; filmmakers use the term "rubato," stolen, or "hommage" for such citations (which are often unacknowledged). A delightful example in film is O Brother, Where Art Thou, which swipes repeatedly and consistently from both The Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz, two stories about adventurers who wander in magical realms while just trying to get home. When I realized that the Coen Bros. were telling me that The Wizard of Oz is America's very own Odyssey, I fell over laughing. Just think of all the ways that idea illuminates America. Not to mention children's lit.
So fanfic both adds a new work of art to the world and illuminates the original work, breaks it open, compels rereading and comparison.
In short, whether the main purpose of the fanfic is to appropriate the original text for its own pleasure, or to interpret the original text for ours, the best ones do both.
So what happens to the battle for meaning when the four elements of Author, Text, Reader, and World are enlarged to six, adding Second Author and Second Text?
The complexities increase exponentially, and everyone wins.
OK, I'm going back to bed now.
*Eyes kitchen floor, which is filthy*
So, appropriation and interpretation are not the same thing,although appropriation is (at least in part) a form of interpretation.
And writing a fanfic is not simply a form of interpretive reading of the text, though it can only occur when the reader interprets the text and then transforms it (or elements of it) into something new.
Here are the debates I am going to skip:
*Who is the owner of the new text?
*Who is the owner of the original text?
Not answered because: These two questions are dead ends; arguing about ownership leads to no new insights.
*Is there a scale of appropriation, so that a fanfic that sticks very close to canon has a different status from one that departs radically from canon?
Not answered because: While fandom sometimes assigns greater or lesser moral or ethical value to one or the other, it is essentially a crapshoot: Sometimes a departure from canon is seen as cheating; sometimes too-close adherence to canon is seen as plagiarism or lack of inventiveness.
But the success or failure of a fanfic depends on a) its quality in its own terms (persuasive characters, compelling plot, rich underlying ideas, skilful prose); and b) how it reuses the original text, with what insight and wit. A good fanfic can meet the standards of both a) and b) while being close to canon or far from it. Degrees of appropriation are not, therefore, in themselves, a significant measure of what fanfic does.
However, this leads us nicely to the question I do want to ask:
*In what quality does fanfic differ from mere interpretive reading? What does fanfic do?
Fanfic adds a new work of art to the world, but does so through a more open "borrowing" from another work of art than is usually considered reasonable. In order to justify its blatant theft of, and dependence upon, another artist's creative work, it has to contribute something new and wonderful of its own and provide some valuable insight into the original.
Here's an example drawn from the world of Serious Fiction (and therefore not suffering the stigma of being "mere fanfluff," or "merely pop fiction"):
Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, retells Jane Eyre from the pov of Rochester's mad first wife. It's a good book; in fact, I like it a lot more than Jane Eyre, which is a dead bore (if you ask me). It shares with Jane Eyre a theme of anger at injustices, especially against the weak and vulnerable, but it has an additional anger toward the assumptions embedded in Jane Eyre itself (that Rochester is essentially good; that the solution to a woman's problems in the world is to be in lurve and marry the boss, &c.).
Though it's a fine book on its own, Wide Sargasso Sea is a much better book (IMO) if you can read it against Jane Eyre. It's a conscious dialogue with, and critique of, one of the warhorses of (so-called) Women's Literature. As a result, it is not quite an independent work of art all on its own.
And yet, does that diminish it? Is Rhys "cheating" because she didn't come up with her own idea? Of course not; because there is no cheating in art, only bad art. If Rhys had written a clumsy ripoff or a cheap parody, then the work would have been diminished. Quality, skill, the infusion of whole new ideas and perspectives are what give her book its own identity. And even better: she illuminates Bronte's book; and Bronte's book is the better for having hers nearby--more interesting, more problematic.
More worth rereading.
In any case, no work of art is entirely independent; artists steal from one another at every level; filmmakers use the term "rubato," stolen, or "hommage" for such citations (which are often unacknowledged). A delightful example in film is O Brother, Where Art Thou, which swipes repeatedly and consistently from both The Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz, two stories about adventurers who wander in magical realms while just trying to get home. When I realized that the Coen Bros. were telling me that The Wizard of Oz is America's very own Odyssey, I fell over laughing. Just think of all the ways that idea illuminates America. Not to mention children's lit.
So fanfic both adds a new work of art to the world and illuminates the original work, breaks it open, compels rereading and comparison.
In short, whether the main purpose of the fanfic is to appropriate the original text for its own pleasure, or to interpret the original text for ours, the best ones do both.
So what happens to the battle for meaning when the four elements of Author, Text, Reader, and World are enlarged to six, adding Second Author and Second Text?
The complexities increase exponentially, and everyone wins.
OK, I'm going back to bed now.
*Eyes kitchen floor, which is filthy*
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-22 03:53 pm (UTC)It is Saturday, so I have to go out and buy kitchen spigots and things, so here's a response just to some of it (while I mull over the larger questions).
I am not sure about the silences in the text implying slash theory, although it is a very interesting idea.
That comes from here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/black_dog/3766.html#cutid1/) A debate well worth reading. I'm not sure where I fall in terms of HP canon; I tend to agree with you that the important point is that slash does not need the spaces or the silent permission of the author--in fact, a lot of slashers take delight in slashing against the author's original intent.
But I really like black_dog's point that looking for those spaces of silent permission is a way of giving one's self over to the author's sensibility, rather than imposing one's own. A complicated argument, but persuasive, and somehow very humanist.
‘interpretation’ loose enough to cover everything from an active analysis of canon to a very few elements of canon refiltered through the perspective and world view of the new author
Yep. I'm willing to do that. I prefer not to set up strict rules for what constitutes "legitimate forms of interpretation." Some terms (interpretation, appropriation, creation) suffer if one tries to define them. The only aspect of these terms that can be defined sharply, I think, is plagiarism, which the Supreme Court has defined surprisingly well, as an appropriation that lacks any transformative or newly creative original element. An appropriation artist like Sherrie Levine aims to test the limits of that definition. (I find her aims and her results boring in equal measure.)
If you lift the names and settings and then write fanfiction that has nothing else to do with canon at all? It’s barely interpretation, in the narrow, it’s running away with someone else’s things and aligning them according to what you want to see. Appropriation then?
Excellent point. I think so. Consider, for example, Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." It appropriates all the main characters from "Hamlet" and a couple of the play's key issues and themes, inverts them, plays with them, and adds numerous other themes to create something utterly original (in all the important ways). Yet this wonderful play is even more enjoyable if one has Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in mind when seeing it.
Or consider your friends the Pre-Raphaelites, who borrowed the figures of Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Elaine, and so on, to paint paintings whose program has almost nothing to do with the themes and aims of the original medieval authors, and everything to do with a Victorian interest in "reinventing" a romanticized form of history, and an anglicized, secularized image of Christianity. Or Wagner, who reused the bare bones of the legend to create a story of Germanic destiny that more or less jettisons Christianity entirely.
I mean, it's handy to be able to use a previous work of art as a shorthand. If I write a novel about a young advertising executive in 1990s New York who falls in love, marries, has an affair, and then dies of cancer, consider how radically I can alter the meaning (or at least the resonance) of the story if I happen to name the guy Hamlet. Or Jesus. Or Julien Sorel.
Maybe yet another distinction should be made between interpretation that arises from the text (or aims to discover authorial intent) and interpretation that pushes one’s own agenda?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-22 03:54 pm (UTC)Maybe yet another distinction should be made between interpretation that arises from the text (or aims to discover authorial intent) and interpretation that pushes one’s own agenda?
I like the distinction, but I suspect that very early in the process, the two get blended in the interpreter's mind. I'm especially interested in this mechanism in the act of rereading (the purposes of rereading, the reasons one is compelled to reread). There, I think, one's curiosity to discover what the author really had in mind (her secret agenda) is itself driven by one's own secret agenda of acquiring and possessing the book. Taking command of it.
RE "There is no cheating in art, only bad art": Yes, you and
Here again, there is safety in refusing to constrain the idea of "good" and "bad" art within a particular set of standards. That refusal, of course, leads to the merry dance of subjectivism ("Hey, you may not think Stephen King merited the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, rather than, say, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Caro, or Toni Morrison, but 'The Shining' changed my life!" The danger of a democratic approach to critiquing art is that one ends up not wanting to say any work of art is "bad," as long as there is one person out there who likes it.
So I fall back upon that great literary critic the Supreme Court, and cite Mr. Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said of pornography, "I shall not attempt to define the kinds of material [that are pornography]...but I know it when I see it."
It doesn’t matter if your interpretation is witty and well-expressed, if the reader is fundamentally opposed to it. Although you could always argue that the supreme skill is making your reader agree with you
Must chew on this more. Does the author ever know what the reader's perspective is? There's an inequality of power here: the reader knows the author's stance (or at least has some big clues), but the author does not. Unless the author is deliberately taking a very obviously unpopular stance (e.g., in favor of child rape by making the romantic hero a child rapist).
Also: Roland Benjamin Malsperanza?
Roland Barthes + Walter Benjamin + me. 2 literary theorists who in various ways (and mostly utterly unreadably) question the stability, originality, and/or objective reality of the text. I don't really have much in common with them except that they tend to believe that the Reader has some role in "creating" the text--is collaborating with the author, in some sense.
Off to the hardware store.