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Narcissistic Apotheosis, Etc.

  
 
Cat Chant
21:06 / 02.10.02
Background (1): in this thread , JtB wrote:

writers of fanfic or slash... to me, that would seem to include an element of postmodern awareness of the idolatrous nature of cult artists and their work, and a desire to use that awareness to interact with the work, for one (or several) of a large variety of potential reasons. That would render the writer of fanfic and/or slash in seriously masculine colours - an aggressive penetration and reordering of the text, and resituation of the self, however temporarily, as author. Following my increasingly laboured 'cult/idolatry' figure, that moves the writer of fanfic/slash into my god was created by me to exist for my purpose. I will become like my god.

Is writing fanfic or slash a kind of attempt at a kind of narcisistic apotheosis in miniature? Honestly not trying to be wude or anything - this is really fascinating me...

Barthes - who writes about his identification with Proust in a way that I read as being pretty much "about" fanfiction - takes identifying with the author in a different direction, saying that beyond identifying with a character in a book, a reader can identify with the author insofar as the author wanted to write the book that gave/is giving the reader so much pleasure, and succeeded in doing so. He calls it "an identification of practice, not of value" - so that whilst the reader identifies with the author, she does so as a colleague, not as a narcissistic god-eater/god-becomer: rather, she is taking up the tools for thinking about the world that the author has left her, being inspired by the author's example that it is possible to make good work, and carrying on in her own vein.

I'm currently writing three B7 stories < preen, preen >, one of which is a rewrite of an A.L. Kennedy story. Now, in terms of copyright law I'll probably be safer with the A.L. Kennedy plagiarism - after all, the theme is a common one, and I'm not planning to steal any lines or characters outright: in fact, it might not be obvious even to someone who's read the original story that I've stolen it - whereas the Blake's 7 connection will be (a) obvious and (b) illegal. However, I feel (and I understand this isn't the last word on the subject) the "narcissistic apotheosis" operating much more towards ALK - a slight frisson that she had a brilliant idea and I can get away with reusing it, a feeling that I can take possession of that idea and bend it to my will, as well as a feeling that I'm cheating her out of something and actually behaving rather shoddily towards her (since the story will be enjoyed on the merits she gave it) - than with the B7 canon, where I just feel, as usual, a weighty/crushing yet breathtakingly exciting responsibility to render my boys and the politics of the universe truthfully and with respect and love.

So I thought that was interesting, in terms of fanfic as just one in a myriad of ways in which one can play off others' work.

Background information (2):

So I'm getting into Harry/Snape fanfic now, which is just wrong from every possible point of view: it's fanfic; it's slash; it's based on an ongoing series, which is also single-authored and in prose; and, just to top it all off, one of the characters is underage in canon (though I hereby give fair warning that I'm not going to discuss that in this thread). So all the factors that make fanfic dodgy are operating with big flashing neon lights here.

It's also a really interesting fandom to be in, because... well, because, for example, an H/S writer emailed me recently in annoyance that "the bloody woman has got over her block" and the fifth book is going to be published, probably before Christmas (I have to say this really pisses me off as well). Now that sort of feels like Nick's worst Fictive Body fantasies or this "narcissistic apotheosis" thing: we are all drawn to write in the Rowlingverse - because, whatever faults she has, JKR at least supplies points of resistance to the suffocatingly bourgeois-capitalist Yangiverse Harry inhabits, and we all want to expand on those. But at the same time, in writing (or thinking about writing) in that universe we are constantly brought up against its limitations, the problems with it that make us want to spit - which are probably things that JKR herself is working through as she gets through the series.

And it's - scary? - that she's going to write another book, partly because now, post-Goblet-of-Fire, is a wonderful Snape place to stop (all the HP writers I know are oldish [25-60yo] female Snape fans and think the non-Snape elements of the books/universe are pretty shoddy: I don't speak for the fandom as a whole), and I don't want her to fuck up my place to stand, and partly because, oddly enough, I don't trust her to do the right thing by the universe. Now that's self-apotheosis for you. But - even though she did leave a gap for Snape-identification - I can't help feeling that her universe is basically shoddy, unimaginative, and predictable, and that I'd rather read the fan stories and leave it at that.

Though, of course, to some extent, that's assuming that the original creation is the dull bit and that she will never be able to write Harry Potter fanfic - which, of course, she won't, because her relation to canon is different from anyone else's. But it is taking advantage of her labour whilst denigrating it at the same time, which is kind of wrong.

But now I must go to bed, so you lot can think about this for me.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
21:43 / 02.10.02
Too exhausted to engage properly with this, though I'm intrigued by Jack's construction, by your desire to possess the Snapespace and hold her back from it - from my old Body Fictive viewpoint, because your BF is now enmeshed in the work you've done, which is derived in part from hers.

That her next book may damage your identity prosthesis fascinates me - of course, it would be as intimate in many ways as your co-opting of hers would be, and that would be a danger of writing fanfic in an ongoing narrative. Tell me, do you feel that there's a risk that her next addition to the canon may make impossible or unworkable some of the things you've come to need in your extension? Or worse, that her iteration and exploration of the character may close off your desire or ability to identify with it? Does canon override? If she closes gaps you need, what happens then? Do you just write from a given temporal jumping off point?

Oh, and by the way, if you didn't already have my admiration, the title of this thread alone would have done it.
 
 
HCE
19:17 / 03.10.02
Deva writes:

However, I feel (and I understand this isn't the last word on the subject) the "narcissistic apotheosis" operating much more towards ALK - a slight frisson that she had a brilliant idea and I can get away with reusing it, a feeling that I can take possession of that idea and bend it to my will, as well as a feeling that I'm cheating her out of something and actually behaving rather shoddily towards her (since the story will be enjoyed on the merits she gave it) - than with the B7 canon, where I just feel, as usual, a weighty/crushing yet breathtakingly exciting responsibility to render my boys and the politics of the universe truthfully and with respect and love.


Why write in another person's world? Is the feeling of frisson arising from recognition of a good idea or from the thrill of theft? If from recognition, is this not because re-cognizing is thinking again (what one has already thought before) and thus no theft occurs? If from the thrill of theft, do you believe that literary conceits can be owned, or only the specific expressions of such conceits? I am somewhat hampered by not knowing Snape is or having read any Harry Potter (what I think you're talking about?).

I tend toward the belief that if you are bending the idea to your will then what you write is an expression of your will rather than of a (possibly stolen) idea.

There is a pertinent Simone Weil quote: "The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make. "
 
 
Cat Chant
10:48 / 04.10.02
I guess the thing with A. L. Kennedy is that in fanfic, there's a recognized vocabulary and methodological framework for interacting with other people's concepts, and the story is - or should be - strictly speaking illegible without a shared commitment to canon on the part of both reader & writer. Nicking an idea of ALK, on the other hand, does not involve such a contract and the story will have to be legible to readers who haven't read the AL Kennedy story: it's not developing the interface-with-the-world that ALK has devised in interaction with other people, it's theft plain and simple (hey, that also explains why I think avatar fiction - writing 'legal' fanfic 'with the serial numbers filed off' for publication, is much dodgier than actual fanfic).

So the theft makes me feel a little guilty and a little giddy, but also a little like I'm cheating, because what will/might be enjoyed in the reading of the story is not my transformation of a shared, well-known set of resources for thinking but an insight surreptitiously pilfered from ALK. But I love your thing about recognition, Fred - there is a specific pleasure in this case about something having been thought before, it's not just about taking credit for someone else's insight. (And a Simone Weil quote too! I'm overjoyed!)

Nick, I'm continuing to think about the JK Rowling stuff - yes, she is about to come and tear bits off my identity-prosthesis... and certainly her relationship to canon is different from mine. It's a bit more complex even than that, since the general consensus among the very small group of H/S writers I theorise this stuff with is that part of the appeal of Snape is that he rages against the universe that created him: so writing Snape is a risky habitation in the Potterverse which is constantly negating his existence and validity (the rules are so set up against him: he's been compared to Caliban or Frankenstein's monster as well as called 'the sin-eater of Hogwarts' - with some similarities to your Wrong Bastard figure, actually). So that identification, maybe, makes me fear the next instalment because it might have crushed that precarious balance where Snape exists outwith the suffocating identification of Absolute Morality with Albus Dumbledore with the Hogwarts House system with the exigencies of the Harry-coming-of-age plot: Snape is where all this stuff starts to come apart, loosen, and leave room for complication and excitement. So I guess partly the fear is that he will be assimilated more and more as the books go on... But I'm still thinking about this.
 
 
HCE
17:14 / 04.10.02
what will/might be enjoyed in the reading of the story is not my transformation of a shared, well-known set of resources for thinking but an insight surreptitiously pilfered

Thank you for this clarification. Is that transformation the only or most important source or site of pleasure? Do fans locate pleasure initially in such transformations, and afterward in a myriad of tangentially related sites such as identification with a community of similarly transformed thinkers, active play with elements of the resource set, and expression of ideas or emotions which come particularly convincingly alive in a certain 'verse: Kennedyverse, Rowlingverse, or Devaverse?

Or worse, that her iteration and exploration of the character may close off your desire or ability to identify with it? Does canon override?

Is "canon" what the original author wrote? How is it possible for a change in canon to reseal a desire that has been opened? Ziploc desire, with the original author's fingers on the seal? Is the distress at this possibility caused by the thought that it would create a breach in the fan community?

I don't understand.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:27 / 05.10.02
fred - Deva and I are on different - but, I believe increasingly, not diametrically opposed - sides of a running discussion about fanfic, authorship, copyright, identity, and a few other things.

Deva's article, which booted me into trying to figure a few things out, is here. My response - which is somewhat jumpy-aroundy - is here. There was a brief revisiting here, and the subject of the Body Fictive came up in my thread on the Wrong Bastard.

Crudely, it's not that the original author can lock a piece, but rather that no one can - Deva included - and that the rewriting of a text has consequences for the author of the original. The new twist in Deva's situation now, which I hadn't considered, is that in writing fanfic in an evolving universe, she may find herself being rewritten - or even overwritten - by what happens next in the continuation of the original work. And if you read the Body Fictive piece, you'll see just how literally I mean 'herself'.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:46 / 05.10.02
'Canon', yeah, is the term for the authorized texts which make up the universe - so the televised episodes of Blake's 7 are canon: the later radio plays technically should be, because they were released by the BBC as sequels, but no fen that I know consider them to be canon because they're so shit. Similarly, the four - so far, soon to be five - Rowling-authored novels would count as Harry Potter canon. I don't know about stuff like the 'Quidditch through the Ages' book etc.

As for ziploccing desire (lovely!) - well, I know what you mean about not being able to close Pandora's box, but... hmmm. My Snapedesire comes from his character as it is implicated in the HP universe. Once that pattern of character/universe implication changes, the desire/identification/fictive body is changed also. It's more like finding out that the person you love "isn't who you thought ze was" - though in this case maybe more literally...

I like your list of fanfic-related pleasures, & shall think further on this.
 
 
HCE
15:17 / 05.10.02
Nick writes: The new twist in Deva's situation now, which I hadn't considered, is that in writing fanfic in an evolving universe, she may find herself being rewritten - or even overwritten - by what happens next in the continuation of the original work.

and Deva writes: Once that pattern of character/universe implication changes, the desire/identification/fictive body is changed also. It's more like finding out that the person you love "isn't who you thought ze was" - though in this case maybe more literally...

Thoughts with terrifying implications for love.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:28 / 06.10.02
Fred - How so?

I would suggest that what's happening with Snape is, after a fashion, what happens to Avon all the time.

Or, to put it another way. Deva herself has observed that ze always needs a degree of convincing before she can accept Avon bursting into tears in Post-Gauda Prime stories, because it has been canonically established that Avon does not respond to heartbreak by bursting into tears, but rather by looking like a frog. In the same way, fanficced representations of Avon sometimes say "well now" as if it were a nervous tic, moving from the canonical fact that Avon sometimes begins sentences with "well now".

Of course, there are other situations where the relationship of canon and the individualproducer of fiction is more etiolated. F'r example, at least one writer of otherwise perfectly straight slash (if you take my meaning) insists on writing stories from the POV of Vila in what appears to be a Yorkshire dialect. This is, I think, an objection to the fact that everybody in B7 talked in RP, regardless of social class, and thus a rejection of the canonical position that they just did.

Soooo...the fanfic writer is in a constant process of reevaluation, and as I get older I become increasingly less convinced that *anything* is actually canon, but rather some things are accepted for the sake of a consensual universe, which is a different thing.

The problem with Rowling is that her voice is "canonical", but at the same time it is, in a very specific fashion, invalid, because she is creating a Snape who is not only not designed to have sex with Harry Potter, but actively constructed *not* to. Or, for that matter, to behave in an "adult" or nuanced fashion, both as a character in a children's book and as a supporting character in a children's book. So, Rowling is adding to continuity but at the same time closing down any number of outcroppings from the previous point of continuity, a problem further complicated by the fact that Snape's story will extend backwards as well. So, one can say "I am beginning this story at the end of HP and the Goblet of Fire, and am disregarding any future mapped out form there by JKR". But what if JKR then reveals something important about Snape's childhood or youth? Is that to be woven into the context of the story, or disregarded as an invasive piece of history, intended to act as a countermeasure to other readings of Snape's youth?

I can think of three possible approaches to this, in terms of the narcissistic apotheosis:

1) The Camp Follower, where stories are rewritten to take into account recent twists produced canonically. "Angel" might be seen, from a very specific viewpoint, as doing this, when it reacts to things like Buffy's death or Oz' arrival in LA.

2) The lockdown, where one simply says "I am disregarding every product created by JKR after this point. Her musings on Snape's choldhood will be no more relevant than those of another fanfic writer. A problem with this being that it means that parallel but different continuities will end up extending confusingly from a common root.

3) The recognition that this becomes not necessarily a terroristic or guerilla act, but does become a highly mobile one, inserting short, self-contained pieces into the existing continuity, attempting to make them as "retcon-proof" as the text itself.

Buffy fanfic is an interesting one for this, where all three approaches are attempted, with varying degrees of success, within a constantly (and, unlike JKR, regularly and regimentedly) advancing continuity.

(P.S. Have been watching Babylon 5 Series 1 lately, which is interesting because it reads like fanfic, and not very good fanfic at that - lots of "Susan, I disagreed with your decision to join the Earth Alliance military after your brother was killed in the Earth-Minbar war"...and of course B5 then has to deal with its won continuity when they sack the monkey at the end of the first series)
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
21:13 / 07.10.02
Y'know, Deva, you're pushing the boundaries of your own arguments about the rightness of fanfic with this one. The more I think about it, the less appetising it is on the most obvious of levels. What's the deal here?
 
 
Persephone
01:34 / 08.10.02
Sooo. This may be off-topic... but I sort of winged off a comment in bengali's Professions thread in Conversation, and that got me thinking. Because bengali was asking about crushes in academia, and does that happen in other professions? And that got me thinking that you could see academic literature as, sort of, fanfic. Which I think is where Deva was coming from anyway, initially, with the thing about Barthes and Proust. Particularly,

a reader can identify with the author insofar as the author wanted to write the book that gave/is giving the reader so much pleasure, and succeeded in doing so", and

the reader identifies with the author, she does so as a colleague, not as a narcissistic god-eater/god-becomer: rather, she is taking up the tools for thinking about the world that the author has left her, being inspired by the author's example that it is possible to make good work, and carrying on in her own vein.

See... I still haven't been able to let go of the original question from the Cult Writer as Exchange System thread, which originated this thread. I thought I had let it go, but here it is. The idea of what sort of mechanism makes l'homme into l'oeuvre... I think that we didn't get very far with the idea that it has to do with a limitation of critical language? But maybe it has to do with this author-identification --which can sometimes be a deluded identification, sometimes a valid identification. But it's when you intensely want to take part in the making of --whether including someone great in your article's bibliography, or fanfic, or making up your own rubber Klingon protheses.

But also all this enmeshing and possession of body fictives and the like does sort of go on in academia, which is such a hotbed sometimes...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:13 / 08.10.02
Weellll, academics are closer to all the theory stuff and get all excitable at the sight of a well-turned thesis or a full, rubious cerebellum. But writers do it, too, and artists. I'd like to say that I think it's because these are professions more intimately aware of the Body Fictive and therefore of its attractions, but I suspect it's more likely to do with these being groups with more time on their hands, closed environments of similar minds, and fewer intellectual restraints on behaviour.

So they get all John Major with each other.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:43 / 08.10.02
The deal is, in very much brief, Nick, that there are serious moral (hmm, do I mean moral?) risks - risks of violence - involved in writing fanfiction, and if my website were still up you could go & see that I have always said there were: one of the chapters of my MA thesis on slash in 1999/2000 was on fanfiction as torturing the 'body' of canon into ventriloquizing the fic writer's voice. But (a) I don't think that risk can be avoided by not writing fanfiction, since that possibility of violence inheres in methods of reading - and I still don't see how you can securely differentiate 'fanfic' from 'reviewing' or 'writing critical articles on' except, as Barthes says, that critical writing is more often arrogant and terrorist, attempting to force the reader to believe a particular reading - and (b) the problem I have with focussing on the writer's Fictive Body is that it bounds canon according to fantasies of the impermeability of 'the body', which of course is being transgressed all the time by bacteria and air and microbes and whatnot: the body is - aha, Persephone, I can see a synthesis coming on... an exchange system, precisely, with the world and the Other.

So, yeah. I have some problems with thinking about Rowling's future work as invasive of me-Snape, because it posits canon as precisely the most inert and predictable use of the material of the Rowlingverse, which doesn't seem very kind, though it does make a difference that JKR's relation to canon is different from anyone else's.

But if this is unappetizing, Nick, then how can you defend the original writer's sovereignty over hir fictive body?

Any Deleuzeans lurking? I think we need a fictive-body-without-organs here but I'm still not quite sure what that would entail. ('Transversalizing' I've had explained to me a couple of times and it sounds very like slashing to me...)

Oh, and Fred - yes, please expand on the scary implications for love - sounds interesting.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:53 / 12.10.02
This is a random example which might pull the discussion in another direction, but I've just written a Blake-POV story (set in their adolescent years) in which it's unclear how Avon feels about Blake. Obviously, I had to have some idea what was going on with Avon in order for Avon to be a character in the story at all, but there's a lot that I don't know: my beta reader asked me what I thought about Avon (with the necessary caveat that my opinions don't count for more than anyone else's, of course) and I said, among other things, that I was fairly sure he was being sexually abused, though it never comes up explicitly and isn't a conclusion the reader needs to draw in order to make sense of the story. Also, I'm only fairly sure: I really don't know for sure, because that part of the story is outside my area of knowledge. So that just made me think of the different levels of investment in different aspects of the same work... Hmmm, now I don't know if that's interesting. I think it has interesting implications, but I haven't got at them yet, so if anyone else can think of anything...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
10:44 / 12.10.02
To be honest, it was the early-teen/adult teacher sexuality I wasn't crash hot keen on, rather than the fanfic/canon clash.

Oh, and I think I browsed your site long, long ago, and I may well have seen the bit you're talking about.

I'm not positing an untransgressed body, of course (I think I may even have mentioned DeLillo's White Noise in the original article) - but there's a difference between transgression at the micro-level and traduction and/or surgery. The former is in some ways the purpose of the BF as I proposed it, the latter are acts of brigandage. Now that's politically interesting, because brigandage is the time-honoured resort of the disenfranchised towards the welathy passing through their hands and lands - in many ways a legitimate(d) act of revolution. Still doesn't obviate the violence done to the individual - and I'm becoming a reluctant pacifist in all areas of life.
 
 
Cat Chant
18:52 / 12.10.02
it was the early-teen/adult teacher sexuality I wasn't crash hot keen on

Yeah, there's problems there, but I'm not going to talk about them here. Sorry. I'll post more fully on the other stuff on this thread when I'm over this cold that has suddenly arrived.
 
 
Cat Chant
15:28 / 17.10.02
I feel like I'm being very scattered on this thread, and I'm sorry if that's frustrating. I guess I'm not really interested in weaving an impenetrable, defensible argument: I'm thinking of Barbelith more and more as a CR [consciousness-raising] group, and I'd be very interested in seeing more accounts of personal experiences on this thread (within reason, otherwise some bugger'll move it to the Conversation), a gathering of voices which are not subjected to some overall shape...

Which sort of brings me on to some of the points I wanted to make. Firstly, a selection of responses to the Body Fictive model. I wonder to what extent my theoretical background is playing into my response here: through the Benjamin/Barthes/Derrida stuff I've been trained to consider violence an inescapable part of reading - or at least an inescapable risk - and to valorise those "texts of bliss" that precisely work against any sense of a whole, bounded body.

I also work in a department where a bunch of the other PhDs are working on ideas around "matrixial subjectivity", ie a psychoanalysis which accepts the idea of two selves in one body). So I think there's a slight problem in a model of bodily identity as multiply and technologically engaged with the world which still seeks to protect the unified selfhood of that identity.

Though I do see that:

I'm not positing an untransgressed body, of course (I think I may even have mentioned DeLillo's White Noise in the original article) - but there's a difference between transgression at the micro-level and traduction and/or surgery.

But - and this might be my exposure to Deleuze & Guattari - I am more likely to see the Body Fictive as an assemblage made up of the author, the text, the world, and the reader. (Persephone, might this be some use in terms of what you were saying about l'homme/l'ouevre, desire, & author identification?) In some ways I would say that the text with which the author forms a prosthetic body-assemblage is the text the author wanted to write or thinks she has written, much as the text with which the reader forms an identification is the text the reader reads or operates. The text in the world is just the debris. There is - contrary to Derrida (shock! horror!) - something outside the text, and the text is its translation, as in Haus's example of the Yorkshire-accented Vila. But the thing that the text is translating is not the mind of the author, or some transcendental meaning, but the reader-text-world relation.

Certainly the author, as a reader of her own text, is in a unique position, and that needs more thinking about... though this comes in here:

The problem with Rowling is that her voice is "canonical", but at the same time it is, in a very specific fashion, invalid, because she is creating a Snape who is not only not designed to have sex with Harry Potter, but actively constructed *not* to.

There is an important difference in status between fanfiction and canon, which allows fanfiction to happen, but I can't quite figure it out... aargh.

Oh, and finally, a sort of metacomment, here, or a continuation of the "namedropping" problem: I consider it to be an act of bad faith and violence to wrench an idea out of its context and set it to use as if it were inert, a "tool": which is precisely why I both quote a lot here and write fanfic. I always want the original textual *constellation* with which I am working to be visible and accessible, rather than simply "using" parts of it as if they could be removed from their place in an assemblage without loss. Which is why I feel worse about the legally & morally unassailable action of using a theme from an AL Kennedy story - even if I credit it in a note - than about taking two characters from JKR and making them fuck.

PS: I'm going away for the weekend so I might not post here for a bit. Again.
 
 
HCE
23:15 / 17.10.02
Hope you're feeling better, Deva.

The comments I quoted earlier alarmed me (and I apologize for this brief digression from topic) because I think that in order to love somebody, they must have (or you must see in them) a somewhat coherent identity. Love here is analogous to the pleasure derived from a text. The mutability suggested by those two comments seemed all too familiar. Haven't I found myself overwritten by somebody I loved who considered herself or himself an original author? Haven't I resented being "merely" a reader, forced into passivity? Haven't I felt betrayed at finding that a second or third volume in a series bore at best a family resemblance to the one with which I fell in love? I'm deliberately conflating the real and the fictive because for most intense readers and writers I've known, the two are very much enmeshed. How much more so in fanfiction?

I don't know enough about it to call myself a Deleuzean, but insofar as the unconscious acts like a factory for desire-production, I think there will always be this problem of enmeshment, since what other materials are available in that factory but the ones we feed it with our painful and pleasurable reading?
 
 
Cat Chant
08:04 / 18.10.02
Haven't I found myself overwritten by somebody I loved who considered herself or himself an original author?

I love that idea, and it's interesting to me also because one of the things my writing of fanfiction comes from (or so I theorize my practice) is a persistent feeling of being a character in someone else's story. Which might be one of the other reasons why Nick's Body Fictive model is a bit counter-intuitive for me: because I keep thinking "Well, but having your identity overwritten? That's just - life!"
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:45 / 18.10.02
Which doesn't necessarily make it pleasant or positive...

Will engage properly next week - have to meet a deadline right now. But this is interesting, and of course you're developing the BF concept for me - I don't have the slightest problem, I don't think, with multiple identities within a body or self. I'd suggest to you that the universe in which the Body Fictive moves is a common space in which many people and ideas participate, and which is generated by them, composed of them. But the BF itself is a feeler sent into this space; the union of author, reader, world, takes place through the text, the Body Fictive - the union is what happens to the Body Fictive after it is made. The reader has no access to the author until they encounter via the BF in textual space.
 
 
Catjerome
15:09 / 24.10.02
Chiming in a bit - I'm in a similar boat with a half-finished fanfic piece of mine. I wrote a vignette based on Jack Hawksmoor as written in *StormWatch*. Along comes *The Authority* and does (in my opinion) a complete number on the character. I'd hoped to put the vignette on the web when it was done, but it doesn't jibe at all with AuthorityJack. I could put a huge clump of disclaimer above it, true, but it'd still be hard to go up against everyone's current interpretation of Jack and might end up seeming like a big cry of denial ("This story takes place back in Season Two, _before_ Detective Schanke was killed, bastard TPTB, how could you do that to us, etc.").

And I still deep down feel a bizarre teeny bit of disappointment (betrayal?) that says "How could you change his character like that, Warren? That's not how he should be!" although I know that I have no right to complain nor any grounds for it.
 
 
Cat Chant
06:57 / 25.10.02
I have no right to complain nor any grounds for it

But on the other hand, if we didn't invest in the characters, we wouldn't keep reading, right? It's also the case that when another fanfic writer gets a character completely wrong, it's a little easier to brush off because part of the experience of fanfic is living in the anthology effect and negotiating the coexistence of different readings in a very concrete & multiply-invested way... but when the canon writer does it, it's - different, somehow.

Though I've been thinking in re this thread about a fight that started over on the B7 slash list lately, where a bunch of SAD (Serious Angst Devotees) fans got cross with the HEXers (Happy Ending eXpediters) for writing happy endings onto the ends of SAD stories, claiming that it changed the original story fundamentally and in ways which seriously messed with (both readers' and writers - in fact the problem was first raised by a SAD reader, since stories are never HEXed without the original author's permission) identities. I'm still angsting over the ethics of the kinds of violence HEXing does with one of the HEXers, since in this case there isn't the get-out clause that canon is owned by large companies and fanfic is bricolage/brigandage yadda yadda...

Oh, and in terms of violence, one should always remember that a "bricole" was originally a war catapult, presumably for laying siege to walled towns.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
07:24 / 25.10.02
In other words, if someone engages with the financial apparat placed around creativity by making a living from writing, they forfeit their creative integrity or something and you can do whatever you want to their writing, but performing the same traductive operations on the writing of another slash writer is different and bad?

The fact that this debate takes place is somewhat telling, from my point of view.
 
 
Cat Chant
06:47 / 28.10.02
Yeah, it's interesting. I should point out that I've only seen this debate within B7 fandom, which has a widely tolerated (the script editor has given his blessing to various zines & Gareth Thomas has offered constructive criticism of some fan writing) 25-year fanfic tradition based on 4 13-episode seasons finishing in 1981 - circumstances which do make a difference, I think (and we are fully alive to the irony). It's really not just about the writer's position within the apparatus of capitalism (though, again, I do think that that factor has some significance).
 
 
Cat Chant
12:19 / 17.11.02
This keys back in to the Cult Author As Exchange System set of ideas, as well as starting to bring back both narcisssism and apotheosis.

I'm writing (literally as we speak, I'm interspersing paragraphs) a Chrestomanci fanfic, and listening to Tori Amos do a cover version of Losing My Religion, which has prompted this thinking.

There are, obviously, various ways of positioning oneself vis-a-vis an author, and I mean here especially the author of a series, but perhaps any author of multiple works will do. There's a certain pleasure in a rather passive relationship to the Name of the Author... and I think "branding" is simultaneously a very good way of understanding that passivity, in terms of the Cult Author's insertion into a capitalist framework as well as understanding a reader-consumer's attachment to something as that something is guaranteed by a name - and also a very bad way, in terms of the spuriousness and mechanicalness (is that a word?) of branding as opposed to the textured and complex processes that relate a partiular writer's (or collective of writers', since this also holds, though perhaps in a different way, for multi-authored things like Buffy) "style" onto a text.

Anyway, that pleasurably passive relationship is - very basically - the excitement of watching serial TV: not knowing what will happen next, but trusting that it will be satisfying in its relation to what has already happened. That kind of trust is specific to canon (as opposed to fanfic), really, since in reading fanfic

Is the Cult Author (conceived of as being, or worshipped as if he were) the essence of the brand, the incarnation of the brand? Where all the products are just translations and shadows of that objet a (as it were) of desire, that grainy kernel of bliss which is the essential DianaWynneJonesness that permeates her texts and conditions the specificity of the pleasure (and the wisdom) they offer?

In terms of fan writing, there is something behind or within the text - well, okay, there isn't really anything there, but it is as if there were something there which is what we try to recreate in our fan writing. To a reader of fan writing, that thing may or may not have been recreated successfully (there are moments in reading A/B slash, for example, where I feel a pleasurable shudder of recognition: that happened...) whereas to a reader of canon, the presence of that thing is guaranteed by the author's name/the brand. So that I have to convince my readers that if Cat did grow up gay and come out to Chrestomanci, their conversation would go the way I represent it, by tuning myself in to the specific, unexchangeable, grain of DianaWynneJonesness and allowing/disciplining my writing to have that texture. Which is maybe related to the idea of Narcissistic Apotheosis, except that it feels more like a possession: in the ideal, like a very disciplined set of practices which allow the fan writer to perceive/channel the cult author (or the "brand"/guarantee that is the essence of a multi-authored series).

As for Tori Amos: well, every now and again I get hold of a cover version by her of a song, and before I listen to it I think "Ooh, cool, I can't imagine what Tori Amos singing Losing My Religion would be like". And then I listen to it and I think "Oh, yeah, it sounds exactly like what Tori Amos singing Losing My Religion would sound like" - it's like one of those text generators that show up every now and again on the internet. If you got the parameters right you could feed a song into a Tori Amos machine and what you got out would be indistinguishable from what the actual cover version sounds like. It's programmatic: whereas one of the pleasures of reading an author-as-brand is submitting oneself to the unpredictability of something not-quite-formulable, that grain that is irreducible and unexchangeable about a specific author's writing: but trusting that "something" enough to submit to it. If you want to get the pleasure of reading, you have no choice but to trust what the author tells you... which doesn't work in the same way in fanfic, where you're always suspicious ("Why the hell is Snape suddenly talking like a Valley Girl?")

Obviously, as well, the Tori Amos example is JMO: that pleasure in the "brand" of a text, the specific irreducible unexchangeable a-factor (as I shall now call it) is always going to call to something unknowable in the reader, so that different authors will be the object of cult in this way to different readers. Some people might think (heretics!) that the DWJness of DWJ is programmable and formulable, whilst the ToriAmosness of Tori Amos is blissfully unpredictable.

This is also making me think that fanfic really does precede canon, logically if not chronologically: that it's the existence of non-guaranteed, "generic" (rather than "branded" - that's quite a telling pair of words, since one of the worst sins of fanfic is reducing the specificity of the characters to Generic Burly Rebel and Generic Dark-Haired Cynic) versions of the world & characters that really clarifies the mechanisms at work in reading/watching canon or realfic...

Oh, and Nick, in relation to the violence of overwriting: yes, I do see that the fact that it's unavoidable doesn't mean you can just launch in with gay (or slashy) abandon. But I do think that you have to be aware that any practice of writing that claims to be entirely free of violence, to bear no relation to the violence of overwriting, is probably lying.
 
  
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