This “essay”:http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100824/ART/708239962/1200/REVIEW on Eric Rauchway’s _Banana Republican_ by Ben East is rather dim-witted. Not because it displays no evidence whatsoever of actually having read the book under discussion (instead being a review essay based on a couple of sentences in someone other’s review), although it does not. Nor because it makes a sweeping judgment that “critics” (the plural is a stretch, since the only critic mentioned is Joe Queenan of the New York Times) have dismissed the book as not well written (as it happens, Queenan’s “issue”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/review/Queenan-t.html is that the writing is _too_ good to plausibly reflect the thought processes of Tom Buchanan). Nor yet because elevates a purely personal crochet into a universal aesthetic principle, although it does that too. It’s because it completely misses the point.
bq. Without believable characters, novels are nothing. So it isn’t particularly surprising that sometimes, authors take the somewhat safer option. They “borrow” characters from other writers’ works – the more famous, the better – and place them in their own books. … So why do authors continue to use well-known characters? Is it a self-imposed challenge to carry on somebody else’s iconic work, or just an easy way to make a quick buck? … Banana Republican, gives Tom Buchanan – the racist, snobbish, despicable excuse for a human being in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – a second chance. … The New York Times called it a gimmick: “It’s as if Rauchway wrote a generic farce about a long-forgotten revolution and then decided the book might get more attention if he recast the narrator as a refugee from The Great Gatsby,” wrote Joe Queenan. … Perhaps, I suggest, the difficulty is that readers often feel authors are writing with somebody else’s characters because they know they have a ready-made audience. That, well, they’re being just a little lazy and unimaginative. … “
There’s a very obvious reason why Rauchway has “borrowed” the character of Tom Buchanan. He’s riffing on a famous “borrowing” that sought to do for nineteenth century British imperialism what Rauchway wants to do for the early twentieth century version – the exploits of “Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Paget_Flashman. Flashman was, of course, the bully who gets sent down from Rugby in Thomas Hughes’ _Tom Brown’s Schooldays._ McDonald Fraser appropriates this character from a novel that is in every way inferior to his own books, problematic though they are in some ways, and transforms him from a thick-headed boor into an intelligent, charming, selfish and completely cowardly representative of the British upper classes. Queenan notes the broad resemblance between _Banana Republican_ and the Flashman novels, but seems completely ignorant of the fact that Flashman is himself a borrowing from another novel, suggesting that he needs to pay a little more attention to the stuff that he’s reading. That East elevates this misreading into a fundamental principle of aesthetics (that those who use other’s characters in their own novels are lazy, unimaginative, and timorous and that their novels, with a tiny list of exceptions are failures), suggests that his problem is rather more fundamental. Indeed, if one wanted to apply adjectives to a critic who doesn’t seem to have actually _read_ the book he’s trying to take down (East makes _no_ independent judgments of the book in the course of the review-essay), lazy, unimaginative and timorous might be excellent ones to start out with. Matt Yglesias wrote somewhere that _the National_ pays remarkably well for book reviews. If I were them, I’d be asking for their money back.
[updated to clarify argument]
{ 78 comments }
dsquared 09.01.10 at 4:36 pm
I will just make a note of my personal hobbyhorse – that although Buchanan is (in the telling of Nick Whatisname, who might not be a very reliable narrator[1]) a racist and a boor, this isn’t really relevant to his treatment of Jay Gatsby. If an ex-boyfriend of my wife who was also a criminal were to suddenly show up and start stalking her, what the hell am I meant to do, welcome the guy into my social circle with open arms?
[1] first, he clearly dislikes Tom, second he is by his own admission drunk half the time, third he is a terrible judge of character, as evidenced by the fact that his best mate is a stalker and gangster.
Eric Rauchway 09.01.10 at 4:55 pm
Well, exactly: there is plenty of internal evidence in The Great Gatsby that we should not take Nick Carraway at his word. Which is why Queenan’s complaint that my version of Buchanan is not Fitzgerald’s is so frustrating; Gatsby‘s version of Buchanan isn’t Fitzgerald’s, either, it’s Carraway’s. (See any introductory literature textbook under “unreliable narrator.”)
On the other hand, Buchanan being careless, rich, and racist might make him an excellent lens through which to view US politics and policy of the era. In case someone wanted to do that.
This, by the way, is a perfectly disinterested and scholarly comment.
CJColucci 09.01.10 at 4:55 pm
A remarkably dim production by East. Of course using a pre-existing character is a “gimmick.” And as long as Sturgeon’s Law remains in effect, the gimmick will often fail. There’s actually plenty East could have said about Rauchway’s book in a critical way, and I say that as someone who liked it. Much of the charm of the Flashman series came from the many ways in which it was precisely Sir Harry’s bad qualities that led to his seeming triumphs and unwarranted reputation. Rauchway’s Buchanan is a boozing, womanizing racist, but those qualities are something of a sideshow, neither contributing to, nor detracting from, Buchanan’s apparent competence as an operative. In that respect, he’s more like James Bond than Sir Harry. Maybe that’s why I liked the first half of the book more than the second half. The first half sharply drew a deplorable character, but his deplorableness didn’t really figure into his getting into, or getting out of, various scrapes in the second half. It was something of a gimmick.
Stephen Stralka 09.01.10 at 5:17 pm
The argument becomes even more problematic when he starts talking about authors borrowing characters like Jesus and Penelope. I mean, whose character is Jesus? Was Aeschylus being lazy when he “borrowed” Agamemnon? And how can you talk about Tom Stoppard “borrowing” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when so many of Shakespeare’s plots and characters (like, you know, Hamlet), were themselves borrowed? What total nonsense.
dsquared 09.01.10 at 5:34 pm
how can you talk about Tom Stoppard “borrowing†Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when so many of Shakespeare’s plots and characters (like, you know, Hamlet), were themselves borrowed?
well, you could talk about Stoppard borrowing the idea of borrowing R&G from Hamlet and making them the lead characters, which was originally in WG Gilbert’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”
Lemuel Pitkin 09.01.10 at 6:35 pm
you could talk about Stoppard borrowing the idea of borrowing R&G from Hamlet and making them the lead characters, which was originally in WG Gilbert’s “Rosencrantz and Guildensternâ€
Huh. So it was. The things one learns from blogs.
Castorp 09.01.10 at 6:56 pm
Henry, I understand your main point, and I agree. I thought the idea, from what I read in the NY Times review, sounded interesting, but as you say, the reviewer had some criticisms in the execution. Have you read it? Would you recommend it?
cs 09.01.10 at 7:19 pm
To be fair, from reading the East essay I didn’t get impression that it was even pretending to be a review of the Rauchway book. But I think your other criticisms stand.
geo 09.01.10 at 8:08 pm
Indeed, if one wanted to apply adjectives to a critic who doesn’t seem to have actually read the book he’s trying to take down … lazy, unimaginative and timorous might be excellent ones to start out with
Au contraire! Do you have any idea how much effort, imagination, and daring it requires to take down a book you haven’t actually read?
Substance McGravitas 09.01.10 at 8:11 pm
Fofanna Republican.
Henry 09.01.10 at 10:57 pm
I liked the book, and blurbed it, although the publisher chose not to use my blurb (presumably b/c I’m not famous). I do think that there’s room for criticism along CJ Colucci’s lines – but I would have liked to have seen that in the NYT review. Getting upset that Tom Buchanan isn’t stupid enough to be Tom Buchanan, and devoting the larger part of your review to talking about that seems to me to be missing the point rather magnificently.
cs – fair enough – but even as a review of the reviews it seemed to me to be largely incompetent. I got the impression of someone who had thought that they spotted a hook that they thought they could hang an argument on, but who hadn’t either bothered to check that the hook worked, or to develop the argument in any serious way.
Helen 09.02.10 at 2:07 am
I’m surprised it’s even commented on – Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Mr Rochester’s wife Bertha), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (Magwitch from Great Expectations) – Maybe there’s a point at which this extrapolation from previous novels jumps the shark? Or on the other hand, maybe it’s become a genre in its own right so each one should just be taken on its merits?
(And what should be the name for that genre? Is there already one out there?)
Eric Rauchway 09.02.10 at 3:17 am
What the heck, I want to talk about what CJColucci and now Henry have suggested: I think Tom’s racism, womanizing, and general selfishness do contribute to his efficiency as an operative and pay off in the second half of the book. His racism makes his manipulation of Lawrence Dennis possible. His womanizing makes possible his safe handling when with the Sandinistas. And his general selfishness determines his strategy in the raid on the harbor.
Tom is not Flashman, but then US imperialism isn’t UK imperialism, either, and the differences should work along those lines.
I’ll just be over here, spoiling my own novel.
Chris J 09.02.10 at 3:41 am
To take a more recent example, Jon Clinch’s debut novel Finn, using the character of Huck Finn’s father, was enthusiastically received by critics — starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews, plus a slew of major newspapers. I suppose Ben East would disagree on principle.
Doctor Science 09.02.10 at 4:12 am
Helen:
We call it “fan fiction”. There’s rather a lot of it, and a good deal of scholarship, too.
As for the particular trope of making a secondary character from an existing work into your primary character, I’m not sure it has a separate name — partly because it’s so extremely common. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the suggestion that such alternative-POV [point of view] stories are one reason current fanfiction is much more commonly written by women and girls than by men and boys. Women are used to not being the central character in the story, to knowing that we’d be off to the side, not really central, not the hero. This is much more the case with movies and TV than with books, and fanfic for filmed sources is enormously more common than fanfic based on purely text sources — e.g. fanfic based on The Lord of the Rings was rare before the Peter Jackson movies started coming out.
ajay 09.02.10 at 8:58 am
fanfic based on The Lord of the Rings was rare before the Peter Jackson movies started coming out
Really? I find that surprising given that a) fanfic is so closely associated with the SFF fan community and b) Lord of the Rings is reasonably well liked in this community. I wonder why that should be.
And what should be the name for that genre? Is there already one out there?
Perhaps more interestingly: is there a useful distinction to be made between using a character from someone else’s novel as a character in your novel, and using someone else, ie a real person, as a character in your novel?
Is “War and Peace” Marshal Kutuzov fan fiction? Is “The Three Musketeers” Buckingham fan fiction?
Or, more to the point, is “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” (written during Edison’s lifetime, which must have been a bit weird for all concerned) Edison fan fiction? The author also wrote “To Mars with Tesla”, so wasn’t a partisan of one side or the other; nowadays he’d probably have taken the next logical step and slashed them.
Zamfir 09.02.10 at 9:11 am
I’d like to read the book while the debate still rages… Does anyone know how to get an ebook version here in Europe?
Zamfir 09.02.10 at 9:13 am
nowadays he’d probably have taken the next logical step and slashed them.
There must be loads of Great Gatsby slash already?
alex 09.02.10 at 10:01 am
I think it should be noted that, ahem, “if it’s published, it isn’t fanfic”, and that, while publication is not necessarily a key to distinguishing adolescent wish-fulfilment ramblings from meaningful literary creation, it can definitely play a role in making the determination…
Pete 09.02.10 at 10:28 am
Then there is Roman verse and fiction, filled with conventional mythic, Homeric and golden era stock characters.
Martin Wisse 09.02.10 at 11:34 am
I think it should be noted that, ahem, “if it’s published, it isn’t fanficâ€,
Wrong.
Elaine Shinbrot 09.02.10 at 11:43 am
Actually the appropriation of characters from previous narratives or novels has a long history, from Shakespeare’s expansion of the histories of royalties in Holinshed’s Chronicles to the earliest English novels: Fielding’s Shamela which takes off the protagonist in Richardson’s Pamela.
alex 09.02.10 at 12:06 pm
Same to you, mate, with brass knobs on. Otherwise we’re back where we started, and Ulysses is Homer fanfic.
Zamfir 09.02.10 at 12:33 pm
I’d say the Odyssee is itself Iliad-fanfic, probably even made up by a community of Iliad-readers.
MPAVictoria 09.02.10 at 1:40 pm
Just wanted to say Eric how much I enjoyed the novel. I purchased it off Amazon a few weeks ago and couldn’t put it down. Are you planning on doing a sequel?
Doctor Science 09.02.10 at 3:18 pm
ajay @16:
I’m sure it’s true, because I helped someone track down stories before the Fellowship movie came out and we could only find a few hundred. Later that summer, LOTR stories were being posted at fanfiction.net at the rate of a hundred *per hour*.
IMO, fanfiction for unfilmed books is rare because books (and stories) have a strong inner voice. In the case of LOTR, that voice — that style — is very distinctive and difficult to mimic, so people have rarely tried. Film — movies and TV — has no inner voice: all we see is the outside, we make up our sense that the characters have thoughts and feelings in a kind of enthymeme.
Also, film is very pretty. In the case of Orlando Bloom, *extremely* pretty.
alex @19:
Are you a fanfic writer or reader? If you aren’t, your definition is somewhere between idiosyncratic and worthless. Not to mention your definition of “published”.
Zamfir @23:
Not readers, remember, listeners — the Iliad and Odyssey come out of an oral tradition.
More generally, though, many fanfic writers/readers recognize that what we do is very like pre-copyright storytelling: sitting around the fire, each telling part of one story or different (or contradictory, mine-is-better-than-yours) versions of the same story or set of characters.
alex @22:
To me, it is obvious that it *is* Homer fanfic — not least because it was initially banned, even though not for the usual reasons fanfic is scorned, banned, or looked down upon. “You got sex in my Homer!” is not an argument that can be made with a straight face, though it’s amazing how many people will assure you that Achilles/Patroklus is a horrible perversion of the text, and you have a depraved mind to even think of such a thing.
Yet the first recorded slash discussion is in Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates and the fanboys are hangin’ out, drinkin’, and discussin’ “Achilles/Patroklus: who tops?”
ajay 09.02.10 at 3:27 pm
25: interesting. Your explanation of why there isn’t much book fanfic makes sense – hadn’t thought of it that way. I’d have expected Tolkien to be an exception simply because he produced so much more plot and landscape than he needed – vast chunks of the War of the Ring are dealt with only very briefly in appendices, for example.
dsquared 09.02.10 at 3:29 pm
The entire fantasy genre is basically Tolkien fanfic.
chris 09.02.10 at 3:33 pm
ISTM that what “is” or “isn’t” fanfic depends on how you define fanfic, and it’s pointless to argue about that as if it were a property of the stories themselves.
None of which undermines the point that appropriating characters from earlier works, history, mythology, and religion is a tradition approximately as old as fiction itself, and looking down your nose at it is therefore foolish, since it only reveals your own ignorance.
Is _Julius Caesar_ Plutarch fanfic? Or Caesar (the historical person) fanfic? Both? Neither? If _Julius Caesar_ and _Ulysses_ and _Le Morte d’Arthur_ are fanfic, then the category seems so broadly defined that there’s unlikely to be much you can say about it that isn’t an overgeneralization, but if they’re excluded *solely* because they’re important and well-respected works, then you’re defining the category specifically for the purpose of being snobbish toward what you define as in it, which seems to me to be unlikely to lead to any good end.
chris 09.02.10 at 3:41 pm
@25: I think first of all, films just reach a bigger audience. Even very popular books don’t reach as many people as a modestly successful TV show, and very popular books don’t usually remain unfilmed for long anyway.
But the difficulty of duplicating the original author’s style probably does enter into it, and Tolkien’s is particularly difficult.
Salient 09.02.10 at 3:58 pm
Is there a point to assigning a genre term to referential fiction?
There is no one named ‘Ulysses’ in Joyce’s Ulysses. It doesn’t the characters of Homeric fiction themselves, it contains people whose personalities and life experiences can be well-understood through comparison to the characters of Homeric fiction.
I thought ‘fanfic’ was fiction written by fans of the characters of a story. As in, the ‘fan’ describes the relationship of the author to the source material, and doesn’t describe anything about the story … other than that it’s probably either set in the same universe of discourse, or contains some of the same personalities.
So, uh, I guess under this alternative Doctor Science definition, Wicked is fan fiction, but Ulysses is not?
Of course, even this seems bothersome. Is a book in which the crew of the Enterprise engages with the populace of a new planet best characterized as Star Trek fan-fiction, or as Star Trek fiction? What use is the word ‘fan’ in that sentence? What if the author of Wicked actually hated Wizard of Oz? Etc etc etc.
The purpose of fan fiction seems to me to be “let’s celebrate how awesome ________ is by adding supplementary material to it” and I honestly don’t think that that was Eric Rauchway’s main intent, here…
ajay 09.02.10 at 3:59 pm
27:I do not think that word means what you think it means.
y81 09.02.10 at 4:04 pm
Obviously it’s silly to argue about what fanfic “is,” but it seems more useful to confine the word to unpublished work, generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication, written by aficionados of the underlying work. To expand the word to include every work that includes characters from another work is to make it less useful, unless you are the kind of person who genuinely cannot detect any difference in kind between the Odyssey and some online Hermione/Malfoy slash, in which case the word fanfic might as well mean whatever you want.
Ralph Hitchens 09.02.10 at 4:45 pm
Appropriation of this sort is perfectly legitimate, & Eric’s reinvention of Tom Buchanan will rise or fall on its own merits. This is reinforced (as Eric notes) by recalling that our view of Buchanan is solely through Nick Carraway’s eyes. In Fraser’s series he has Flashman encountering Tom Brown some years after their schooldays, and the portrayal of Brown through Flashman’s eyes is entertaining, to say the least.
roac 09.02.10 at 4:50 pm
ajay @ 26 observed that vast chunks of the War of the Ring are dealt with only very briefly in appendices
Tolkien himself, after the publication of LotR, found himself curious about what went on in the blank spaces, and went back and filled in some of them himself. We have, for example, an account of the battle of the fords of Isen, at which Theoden’s son Theodred was killed. These fragments were quarried from a vast heap of unpublished manuscript by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1980 as the latter half of Unfinished Tales. It turned out that there was an audience for this stuff, hence the mind-numbing core-dump History of Middle Earth in twelve volumes.
In the abstract, Tolkien welcomed the idea that other people might expand on the remoter reaches of his First Age mythology. But when asked to endorse actual examples of LotR fanfic, he swelled up and turned purple. (He himself did take a crack at a story, a sort of thriller, set in Gondor sometime after the death of Aragorn, but abandoned it as pointless. It’s in the last volume of the HoME series. He was right.)
Gregory 09.02.10 at 4:57 pm
The entire fantasy genre is basically Tolkien fanfic.
Or Robert E. Howard, who was publishing Conan before The Hobbit. Heck, he died the year before The Hobbit was published.
It gets even more complicated when other writers like L. Sprague de Camp use the primary character (Conan) of another writer (Robert E. Howard). Not that Howard would have minded; if memory serves me right, he rewrote some of his own heroic-adventure stories as Conan stories, and de Camp followed suit.
Then you have the Cthulhlu mythos, in which characters tend not to survive long enough to have other books written about them, but which a number of writers like Clark Ashton Smith swapped ideas and Elder Gods back and forth with H. P. Lovecraft in their stories.
CJColucci 09.02.10 at 5:16 pm
I think Tom’s racism, womanizing, and general selfishness do contribute to his efficiency as an operative
The problem is that they are not, unlike Flashy’s cowardice, for example, generally inconsistent with doing what has to be done. When Flashy succeeds, or is perceived to have succeeded, in some heroic adventure precisely because he is a poltroon just trying to get out of the affair with a whole skin, that’s funny. A racist can be an effective operative, but one doesn’t need to be a racist oneself to manipulate someone else’s racial anxieties. Maybe if a painfully PC operative were put in the position of having to play some racist bastard, that would be funny. Buchanan’s racism, by contrast, probably makes him good at it, but it’s not incongruous.
Maurice Meilleur 09.02.10 at 6:36 pm
Just to chime in OT on the ‘why is there so little Tolkien fan fiction?’ question:
Setting aside the response that the whole fantasy genre winds up filling that role (taking a crack at writing your own fantasy story is hardly the same as rewriting or expanding on someone else’s), I’d say a fair portion of the absence is due to the influence of fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and historical re-enactment clubs like the Society for Creative Anachronisms. Why write a story when you can act it out? (And those who styled themselves bards of their game-playing circles or SCA chapters could do both.)
Keith 09.02.10 at 10:47 pm
The entire fantasy genre is basically Tolkien fanfic.
I’ll give you the magical quest fantasy sub-genre, yes. But Fantasy as a genre is so broad a category as to make the statement as written mostly meaningless. Unless you think Perdidio Street Station, Gormanghast and the Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries are all somehow riffing on Tolkien.
sg 09.02.10 at 11:38 pm
For Tolkien fanfic you can’t really go past Middle Earth Role-Playing. As Maurice observes, role-playing games have filled the fanfic niche.
mregan 09.03.10 at 1:52 am
I like best Flann O’Brien’s take on the whole “borrowing” bit. The unnamed narrator of At-Swim-Two-Birds basically begins with the idea that there are already entirely too many fictional characters out there and any responsible author should merely use them, creating new ones only if no existing character can be found. Of course, the author must pay them a living wage, provide safe working conditions, and should ravage them only at his own peril.
roac 09.03.10 at 2:04 am
Early on in this thread, I was going to namecheck At Swim-Two-Birds; then I googled the title of the OP.
mregan 09.03.10 at 2:16 am
Perhaps we could all do with more self-evident sham.
Salient 09.03.10 at 2:29 am
The unnamed narrator of At-Swim-Two-Birds basically begins with the idea that there are already entirely too many fictional characters out there and any responsible author should merely use them, creating new ones only if no existing character can be found.
What I am really loving about this book (reading it for the first time over the past couple weeks) is how delightfully the characters he appropriates seem to resent or be perturbed by their appropriation (or be undermined by it). A story making fun of Finn Mac Cool in which Finn Mac Cool complains of the damn book-poet who dares to tell stories about him that make fun of him. That was fun.
mregan 09.03.10 at 3:31 am
Perhaps Sir Harry gets ignored by Mr. East because East may indeed be related to the infamous “Scuds” East, who shows to no great honor in several of the Flashman memoirs
ebenezer smooth 09.03.10 at 4:21 am
Bad artists borrow good artists steal.
And pastiche don’t cut it.
Not judging a book I haven’t read.
cofax 09.03.10 at 4:37 am
it seems more useful to confine the word to unpublished work, generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication, written by aficionados of the underlying work
You would be surprised at the quality of some of what is produced as fanfiction, often far out-classing the quality of the source it comments on. Likewise, you would be surprised at how many people producing such work are commenting on it critically. One can celebrate something while critiqueing it at the same time, after all.
alex 09.03.10 at 7:30 am
‘Scud’, not ‘Scuds’.
Doctor Science 09.03.10 at 2:34 pm
y81 @33:
Your statement is riddled with problems, which I’ll outline not to beat up on you, but because other people probably share them:
– “more useful”, “less useful” — to whom?
– “unpublished work” — what counts as published, in your mind? Back in the days when fans traded stories in mimeographed zines, perhaps you could say “unpublished” meant “not widely available.” These days, a story posted on the Internet for free is likely to be *more* widely-available than one published in a book or magazine. Or does it only count as “published” if you get money for it?
– “generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication” — otherwise known as *writing*. Most writing is of too low a literary quality to be published in the New Yorker, and even “published” writing generally conforms to Sturgeon’s Law.
Conversely, as cofax points out @47, the best fanfiction is fully as good as the best “published” fiction. Here’s an example: Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves is a brief Midsummer Night’s Dream fanfic about Hippolyta. As you can see, its style is just as literary as any story in the “literary fiction” genre, it’s based on a work emphatically in the public domain, and it’s widely-distributed.
– “the kind of person who genuinely cannot detect any difference in kind” — I submit that there *is* no difference in kind — that is, as texts — between “Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves” and the New Yorker’s literary fiction. They *are* the same sorts of things.
What makes them different is the communities in which they are written and read. As you may have deduced from its header, “Apple Blossoms” was written as part of an annual multifandom gift exchange of stories in fandoms (or for sources) where there aren’t many stories. Several thousand fanfic writers submit lists of “what I’d like to read” and “what I’m willing to write”, Computer Magic! occurs, and everyone ends up writing and receiving at least one story. And then we *all* get to read them.
IMO the lack of distance between writer and reader, the fact that no money is exchanged, the way tropes are passed from hand to hand, the tolerance for repetition, and the whole tight social context makes fanfiction *more* like the way The Odyssey was created than the way your “published” fiction has been created in the copyright era.
– “online Hermione/Malfoy slash” — Hermione/Malfoy would not be “slash” unless one of them has a sex change. “Slash” is used for same-sex pairings, especially male/male; the virgule in “Hermione/Malfoy” is not, technically speaking, a slash slash.
Doctor Science 09.03.10 at 2:37 pm
I’m reposting this bit, in the hopes that this time the line feeds will show up:
– “more useful”, “less useful” — to whom?
– “unpublished work” — what counts as published, in your mind? Back in the days when fans traded stories in mimeographed zines, perhaps you could say “unpublished” meant “not widely available.” These days, a story posted on the Internet for free is likely to be *more* widely-available than one published in a book or magazine. Or does it only count as “published” if you get money for it?
– “generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication” — otherwise known as *writing*. Most writing is of too low a literary quality to be published in the New Yorker, and even “published” writing generally conforms to Sturgeon’s Law.
Doctor Science 09.03.10 at 2:38 pm
arrgh, they don’t! It looked OK in the preview. Bad WordPress!
Salient 09.03.10 at 2:51 pm
Right, ok, Dr. Science, but why should we call it fan fiction?
Isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume that, just because Author X appropriates Character Y or Universe Z, Author X is a fan of Character Y or Universe Z?
Fan fiction is referential fiction written by people who self-identify as ‘fans’ of the source.
Doctor Science 09.03.10 at 2:56 pm
I’m quite startled by the fact that several of you think it obvious that the pre-movie LOTR fanfic “niche” was filled by role-playing games. To me, it seems obvious that RPGs and fiction are two very distinct art forms, as separate as painting and drama, and it would never occur to me to swap one for the other. How does that work, in your minds?
CJColucci 09.03.10 at 3:29 pm
A private communication from Eric Rauchway makes me think I may have made the elementary error of criticising someone for not writing a different book. If I understand Eric correctly, Tom Buchanan isn’t like Harry Flashman because he isn’t supposed to be. That Buchanan’s thuggish qualities are consistent with his being an effective agent of early 20th century American imperialism, rather than incongruous qualities that work out in his favor despite his intentions, is not a bug, but a feature. Eric’s Buchanan is just the sort of guy who’d deliberately do just the sort of thing he’s doing — given a sufficiently self-serving motive — and just the sort of guy who’d be good at it.
I stand corrected, but I think it still valid to say that Eric has thereby set himself a harder task when it comes to making us care about Buchanan.
chris 09.03.10 at 3:54 pm
To me, it seems obvious that RPGs and fiction are two very distinct art forms, as separate as painting and drama, and it would never occur to me to swap one for the other.
This, and also, there’s lots of RPGs that have little or nothing to do with Tolkien (many aren’t even in the fantasy genre, especially if you define it tightly enough to have a reasonable resemblance to Tolkien and don’t include things like superheroes or the X-Files) and may have quite a lot to do with other fictional works, yet they don’t crowd out fanfic based on the latter. For example, there are plenty of secret agent RPGs, both with and without supernatural weirdness, but they don’t stop people from writing either James Bond or X-Files fanfic. The RPG hypothesis is a terrible explanation if you know almost anything whatsoever about RPGs.
ajay 09.03.10 at 3:58 pm
55: true, but by far the most popular have been the Tolkienish ones, no?
roac 09.03.10 at 4:27 pm
For someone whose natural reaction to the whole idea of “fanfic” is dismissive, the defenses on this thread, particularly those of Dr. Science, are unsettling. Maybe on further consideration I will have something useful to say.
For now, I just want to put a big question mark by the suggestion, which seems to have originated with zamfir quite a ways upthread, that the Odyssey originated as “Iliad fanfic.” I thought the thesis advanced by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales about the origins of Homeric epic — that these were semimprovised performances by particularly gifted members of a class of professional bards, which somehow got recorded in writing — was generally accepted these days. There are trained classicists here, what do they have to say?
Doug K 09.03.10 at 4:56 pm
I read and enjoyed Banana Republican, but found as @54 that it was hard to reconcile the Buchanan poltroon with the Buchanan effective operative (hero). This as noted is not really present in the Flashman series, since the poltroonery is exactly the effective operation: though the effect is similar, the shading between the hero/anti-hero view is much sharper and more noticeable.
Nonetheless I look forward to the next Buchanan novel – will he live long enough to be at the Bay of Pigs ?
On fanfic, see Making Light for a good discussion, starting with
“In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights.”
Zamfir 09.03.10 at 6:38 pm
Roac, the process that turned the Iliad and Odyssey into long poems is not necessarily the process that generated the base stories. It could well be the case that the Iliad was already a well-known story, perhaps even with some amount of fixation, by the time the Odyssey appeared.
In that case, it is something like fanfic: taking a popular (side) character from the known story him his own story in a somewhat distinct style.
roac 09.03.10 at 8:12 pm
Well, of course. (It is known that lots of other epic poems about the Trojan War and its context once existed but did not survive.) The development of literature has always been a matter of reworking and expanding on and extrapolating from the stories and characters handed down from the ancestors, wherever and whenever you look. Tolkien called it “the Soup of Story.” Throw a dart at a list of 17th- and 18th-century operas, for another example, and you will most likely hit characters and incidents lifted from Ariosto. Modern concepts about copyright and “originality” obscure this the way street lighting obscures the Milky Way.
I think what bothers me about “fanfic” is that it is a diminishing kind of label. It seems to me that if you have the ambition to write creatively (I never have, so my perspective may be off) you ought to be trying to be a writer, period, and not a writer of stories covering an arbitrarily bounded territory. People like Ursula LeGuin are always complaining that the mainstream literary world won’t let them out of some genre box; why build your own little box and pull down the lid on yourself?
But there are obviously intelligent, and very likely talented, people here who don’t see it that way; I await correction.
em 09.03.10 at 8:49 pm
roac, I’ve read a pretty decent amount of fanfic and more importantly read the journals of people who write this genre of fiction. For most of these writers, writing is a hobby. Just like knitting or playing racket ball. There are a few who are professional writers, and there are some who are attempting to become professional writers. A lot of them also write “original” fiction. But they are all doing this particular type of writing for fun.
So what happens next is this. One of these writers reads a book, sees a movie, watches a TV program and has a reaction. A thought. A question. What if something was different? Who is that guy who only speaks three lines? What’s this character’s motivation? What happened next? What happened before?
So they think about it. Mull it over. Talk to their friends. They figure it out. And then they do what they like to do. They write about it.
chris 09.03.10 at 9:00 pm
I don’t think “fanfic” was intended as a way to close the lid on yourself, but as a way to close the lid on others by claiming that their work was, for example, incapable of receiving copyright protection, or “generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication”. Some people may have accepted that label or tried to reclaim it, but I don’t think that should obscure the fact that it was originally intended as a slur, and is still mainly used that way.
Indeed, I think that’s why some people on this thread are so startled and defensive about the idea that a well-respected work like _Ulysses_ might fall into that category, just as literary critics were once indignant if you suggested that _The Tempest_ was fantasy, because all right-thinking people look down on fantasy, but the respectability of Shakespeare is undeniable, therefore {sound of genre snob’s head exploding}.
The fanfic ghetto, like other genre ghettoes, was not built from the inside.
roac 09.03.10 at 11:32 pm
Well, everybody’s hobby is weird to everybody else. We birders probably come in for a greater volume of derision than anyone, so it is not for us to make fun of the people who go to monster truck rallies (if only because they could and might beat us up).
And lots of people write for a hobby, nothing strange about that at all — it’s the organized-social-circle aspect of it that I don’t get.
I do wonder though if some people don’t embrace the fanfic label as a defense against criticism. There is a certain kind of person who, called on to participate in any kind of performance, sends out a steady signal that says “It wouldn’t be fair to criticize me, because as you can see, I’m not trying!”
Martin Wisse 09.04.10 at 8:40 am
I think Ulysses is a bit problematic as an example of respectable fan fiction, as it doesn’t take the characters of the original into a new plot, but rather recreates the form of the plot in an entirely new setting; certainly not the most common form of fan fiction.
But take something like Kingsley Amis’ James Bond novel: now that’s fan fiction pur sang.
Doctor Science 09.06.10 at 1:03 am
Salient @52:
I’m not sure what distintion you’re trying to make. Was Virgil a “fan” of the Iliad? I’m not sure it’s reasonable to talk about being a “fan” of something that is non-optional in one’s own culture.
For James Joyce, it seems to me clearer that yes, he was a “fan” of The Odyssey: he thought about it a lot, he imagined the characters fully, he admired it and there were parts he didn’t care for.
roac @63:
Speaking as another birder, fanfic writers and readers are *much* more widely derided than birders. Birders are at worst silly; fanfic writers are frequently accused of being perverts who drag respectable stories through the muck (by which they mean, writing the sexy bits), and who threaten the livelihoods and emotional stability of innocent writers, actors, directors, etc.
Your attitude is unusual. What I’ve found is that most people have a lot of trouble getting their minds around *writing* for *fun*. Writing is homework!
Oddly, even many people who love reading fiction have trouble understanding why anyone would write it for fun, as a hobby — yet no-one has trouble believing that a basketball fan might also like to play hobby-level basketball.
Martin Wisse @64:
Not “certainly” by any means. Such stories are called “Alternate Universes” or AUs, and they are *extremely* common. Ulysses would be a modern-day AU insofar as the characters are felt to be the “same characters” as they are in the Odyssey.
Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, for instance, is perfectly respectable fanfic, a modern-day AU of King Lear.
alex 09.06.10 at 9:01 am
“perfectly respectable fanfic”. There you go again, with your oxymorons.
N.B. for the record, some of my favourite people are fen, but as far as writing in general goes, fanfic understood as such remains, with a fairly small error-bar, on the wrong side of Sturgeon’s Law. And that’s not even including the quantities of it that come under the generic label of “free porn”. I think most fen with a sense of humour would not dissent violently. Any with a sense of self-awareness certainly should not.
David Hillman 09.06.10 at 3:28 pm
Brecht wrote a good poem justifying borrowing characters, stories, lines from others. If only I could remember it. Of course Brecht used Gray, Kipling, the Bible, …
roac 09.06.10 at 9:42 pm
I don’t grasp the definition of “alternate universe” in use @ 65. Surely King Lear is feigned to have happened in pre-Roman Britain, on the same Earth in the same universe we live in. A Thousand Acres “happens” in Iowa in the late 20th century, same Earth, same universe. (They could be separate universes, I suppose, but Occam’s Razor counsels otherwise.)
Now Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, there’s an AU story. Earthsea is an AU. Middle-Earth is not.
ajay 09.07.10 at 1:21 pm
67: so did Kipling.
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/when_omer_smote.html
Ulysses would be a modern-day AU insofar as the characters are felt to be the “same characters†as they are in the Odyssey.
Really? I thought AU was more about altering the canon universe in some way and telling a story about that. “What would happen if Mr Bennett fought Wickham and killed him”. “What would have happened if Boromir had been captured instead of killed at Rauros”.
Ulysses is retelling the same story as the Odyssey (very loosely) in a completely different setting. An Odyssey AU, surely, would be more like “Odysseus decides to stay on the island with Calypso”.
chris 09.07.10 at 3:16 pm
N.B. for the record, some of my favourite people are fen, but as far as writing in general goes, fanfic understood as such remains, with a fairly small error-bar, on the wrong side of Sturgeon’s Law.
Sure — preserving this image is the whole reason for the “if it’s actually good, then it’s not *really* fanfic” rule. Fanfic is defined in order to look down on it, so the parts that don’t support that goal have to be defined away as something else. _P&P&Z_ isn’t fanfic, it’s a published work! _Ulysses_ isn’t fanfic, it’s by a famous author! Etc.
Also, the whole point of Sturgeon’s Law is that every category is on both sides of it. It’s about the fractal nature of cruddiness — no matter how you define your categories it will still creep in. And the usually-unspoken consequence is that complaining about the crud in X while defending the “pure” Y is always predicated on a double standard because, in fact, there is crud in Y too.
Categories are inevitably sloppy; that’s why categorical thinking is untrustworthy.
alex 09.07.10 at 3:25 pm
All generalisations are false, of course [saith the Cretan…]
Meanwhile, I think ajay is confusing an AU with Alternate History, where one defines a ‘point of departure’ from which the events peel off in a new direction to that depicted in the original. Though I suppose all AUs, defined however, exist as the consequence of a POD at some point in their past, [whether an actual ‘change’, or merely the positing of some differing set of initial conditions] since they have to be recognisably ‘parallel’ to the pre-existing timeline/story in order for the articulation of difference to be identifiable. Most don’t, however, take the POD route, preferring a liberal dose of handwavium.
Salient 09.07.10 at 7:49 pm
Was Virgil a “fan†of the Iliad? I’m not sure it’s reasonable to talk about being a “fan†of something that is non-optional in one’s own culture.
When it comes to works of fiction, I roughly define “I am a fan (fanatic) of X” as “I would be pleased to have an opportunity to dress up in a representative-of-X or referential-to-X costume for the purpose of attending a social gathering with other individuals in similar costumes.” (Change social gathering to sporting event, and this rough definition works for sports fans, too.) This isn’t a definition, I guess, so much as a good distinguishing approximation. Not everyone is a “fan” of something mandatory in their culture, and liking or even loving something doesn’t seem strong enough to identify oneself as a “fan” of it.
Salient 09.07.10 at 7:51 pm
…I’ve never run into a situation where a work was defined as “fan fiction” by someone other than the author. Or at least, I’ve never run into a situation where a work was identified as fan fiction, but where that distinction was not acknowledged and endorsed by the author.
What em said makes sense to me, and I hope my comments seem compatible with em’s…
ajay 09.08.10 at 10:04 am
73: good point. If you look at “stuff described as fan fiction by its authors” then Ulysses certainly isn’t included, and what you probably end up with is material that:
a) depends for its setting or characters on existing published material by another author
b) is not endorsed by that author – I don’t think “the book of the film” is fan fiction
c) is overwhelmingly not commercially published or commissioned – probably because of legal problems attending b) – and isn’t written for financial gain
Now if you want to produce another definition for fan fiction, go ahead, but you probably need to explain why it’s not “what people who say they are fans write and describe as fan fiction”.
chris 09.08.10 at 1:41 pm
@ajay 74: But Ulysses (and P&P&Z, and several other examples given on this thread) satisfies your (a) and (b), and (c) has a shorter word for it already: “amateur”. So now you’re just defining fan fiction to be amateur in order to say that only amateur writing is “really” fan fiction, which is circular.
But now I’m just repeating my post 29, basically. It’s divergent definitions all the way down.
chris 09.08.10 at 6:38 pm
Having thought of this pun, I am unable to refrain from posting it: if it prospers, none dare call it fanfiction.
ajay 09.09.10 at 1:26 pm
75: well, did the authors of Ulysses and PPZ and so on describe their work as fanfiction? Not to my knowledge. If there is a lot of published material out there that is described by its authors as fanfiction, then my description’s wrong; but I don’t think there is.
There are a lot of published books set in the Star Wars universe by various authors. All of these are endorsed – none of the authors would describe them as fanfic. Do you think they are?
Zamfir 09.09.10 at 2:09 pm
Ajay, there is clearly a strict definition of fanfic that includes the social context in which it is written, and in that strict definition endorsed Star Wars books are not fanfic.
For the rest, they are very similar. Some, perhaps even most official Star Wars writers probably do see themselves as fan, even they don’t call their work fanfic.
Doctor Who might give a more interesting case. When the show disappeared, there was still a range of secondary products: books, radio plays, magazines, and this included rather strong deviations from the original show.
Even among the officially endorsed products there was a definite “fan” ethos, with probably quite some people who were not making real money out of it.
When the TV show restarted, the new writers were to a large extent drawn from this pool of fanfic and secondary product writers. I am not sure if they literally call the current show fanfic, but the writers do explictly describe themselves as fans of the old show, and the current show deviates from the old show in a rather fanfic-like way, including erotic themes, as far as they can push them into a kids’ show.
Of course, Doctor Who is hardly accepted high canon literature itself, but a TV series is far more professional, in both the organized and the paid-for sense, than most actual writers of books,
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