On fanfiction and silence
Sep. 24th, 2010 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fulselden... Or, the opportunity to fade to black when it comes to stuff that isn’t sex.
Anecdote: something which annoys my younger brother consistently and entirely is the tendency my mother and I share for fading off midsentence. Because really, when we’re discussing for instance the way my grandmother would have absolutely slammed her way through the London social scene, if she hadn’t had a kid and gone to live in deepest Wales age twenty-five, well, what else is there to say but ‘...’
(My mother is that kid, yes.)
... And that of course, of course, is rubbish. There is a lot more to say! Responsible citizens have a duty to say it! And my brother, being a more combative person, for one, is frustrated that we’re leaving it unsaid. And he’s justifiably annoyed in that, as a conversational tactic, it’s a form of unthinking exclusion, for sure, just as much as when he and I chatter away about some geeky literary point in front of our-dad-the-scientist. But he’s also annoyed that we’re not just saying one thing. That we’re leaving our options open, fraying out. Is it laziness? Cliquishness? Complacency? What do we mean, he asks. What were we going to say?
Well. A lot of things. That’s the point.
And I use this rather personal example deliberately, because while my mum and I are equally likely to drive my brother distracted by fading off into MEANINGFUL SILENCE while talking about pasta sauce, I wonder if there’s something here about the dimensions of female experience in particular, about the way that, between my mother and I, even invoking my grandmother’s lost opportunities, bearing witness however briefly to this lack, brings with it a sense of taking care of business, of useful acknowledgement, which is enough for us, for a moment. As a start.
When it comes to restating our family history in feminist terms, just raising the question is pretty damn powerful, even if it does risk becoming a kind of talismanic acknowledgement of past woman’s-woe which doesn’t get much done in the present. My brother wants us to pick one thing and stick with it, or at least start with it. Especially when we’re not just talking about pasta sauce. It’s a matter of temperament. But it’s also, I think, a matter of gender.
And as I read more fanfiction (CAVEAT: AMOUNT OF SAID FIC CONSUMED SO FAR: NOT A WHOLE LOT) I’m reminded more and more of the sense of cosiness and feeling of power – both, probably, a little delusive, entitled, enclosed, lacking in agency – that comes with the shared silences between my mother and I.
Fic is so often a matter of filling in what gets left out in canon – queer history and agency, female history and agency, non-white or non-Western history and agency, the history and agency of disabled people, oh and also sex – while taking full advantage of working within an established world, of being able to cut off midstream, so to speak, and invoke the weight of canon, crashing down on the characters as they rise, sleepy and rumpled, from their bed of hot and exquisitely detailed guy-on-guy action.
I realise this isn’t exactly news to anyone who’s thought about fanfiction even a little bit. It isn’t even news to me! I mean, if you want to talk about reclaiming lived female experience or whatever, yeah, I read Wide Sargasso Sea back in school.
And if you want to talk about the weight of canon, well, I keep being reminded, for instance, of the close – or non-close – of Chaucer’s The House of Fame. This is Chaucer’s hilarious, rambling, tricksy take on Ovid and Virgil and Dante (among other things), where he has his bookworm-ish dreamer -
Thou sittest at another book
Tyl fully daswed ys thy look;
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,
Although thyn abstynence ys lyte.
- hoisted up by a long-suffering eagle (‘[...] Seynte Marye, / Thou art noyous for to carye!’) to a castle-in-the-sky version of the literary pantheon, where he meets fickle Fame herself.
But what gets me most particularly in relation to writing for the net is the close, where Chaucer’s dreamer leaves the elaborate, be-pinnacled castle of Fame for ‘An hous, that Domus Dedaly, / That Laboryntus cleped [called] is’, a spinning, murmuring nest of tidings and rumours, which is quite literally woven ‘of twigges’:
Ne never rest is in that place
That hit nys fild ful of tydynges,
Other loude or of whisprynges;
And over alle the houses angles
Ys ful of roundynges and of jangles
Of werres, of pes, of marriages,
Of reste, of labour, of viages
Of abood, of deeth, of lyf,
Of love, of lore, and of wynnynges
[...]
Of dyvers transmutacions
[...]
Of good or mys government,
Of fyr, and of dyvers accident.
[...]
That is the moder of tydynges
As the see of welles and of sprynges;
And hyt was shapen lyk a cage.
Woah, ok, sorry. I GOT CARRIED AWAY BY THE FACT THAT CHAUCER INVENTED THE INTERNET, SUCK ON THAT WILLIAM GIBSON. (oh, and if anyone reading this wants any ye olde words translated, just say – I figure the gist is clear, though). I mean, not that this is a stunningly original observation, either – I remember being struck by it the first time I read The House of Fame, back in the days when ‘podcasting’ was a new and thrilling development. And I am completely positive that plenty of people have already chucked Barthes at it liek woah. But what gets me especially, in this context, is that the poem breaks off as the dreamer explores this spinning, fantastic network:
Atte laste y saugh a man,
Which that y [nevene] nat ne kan;
But that he semed for to be
A man of gret auctoritie. ...
There are all sorts of theories about where Chaucer was going with this – Caxton even provides a little coda where the dreamer promises to go off and ‘study and rede alway’, because Chaucer should totally be an improving influence. And I actually have no idea if there’s any sort of consensus amongst medievalists about the whys and wherefores of this ending. THOUGH, I WOULD HAZARD A GUESS, PROBABLY NOT. But my instinct - or desire - is to imagine that this is the ending, as written, that Chaucer invokes this nebulous authority figure only to unceremoniously tip his reader out into the Western canon.
“Auctoritie?” I can imagine him saying. “Go get it yourself, fellow heremytes”.
... Yeah. Apparently my point here is that fanfiction has essentially reminded me of the POWER OF THE UNSPOKEN, which is not something that twentieth-century literature left exactly unexplored. In fact, a lot of high falutin literary novels tend to obsess about how it is totes hard to cross the bridge between us, man, with language. How difficult it is for a middle-aged professor to rekindle a marriage when words crumble from the tongue like leaves in Vallambrosa, dude. (Said professor is, of course, generally male).
And I’m certainly wary of the temptation, writing fic, to use canon as a crutch, to leach its emotional power or structural integrity in a fundamentally lazy way. The fact that I myself have so far never met a plot I could manage or be bothered to write probably doesn’t help, though one thing fic does do, quite often, is extrapolate intricate, sensical plots from canons which pinballed between emotional peaks without much explanation of how they got there.
But I’m interested by the way which, at least at an initial glance, this female-dominated literary world is so predicated on playing with putting the silences in a different place.
By the idea that, just as I'd want to defend the silences between my mother and I as not a matter of losing our voices or being silenced but of having - momentarily - too much to say, and knowing, between us, what it amounts to, I'd like to suggest that this is a dynamic which can be mapped onto interactions with fiction. That the background hum of canon is a silence, of a sort, which makes space for fic writers to work. That the cut-off, the gap, in fic writing can have a palpable, useful weight, turning back up the sound of the canon, but letting new voices in.
... Man, I'm making my parent's household sound like some kind of girls-only Pinter play, aren't I.
Not so, I promise! We do, y'know, talk amongst ourselves and extend our feminism into the wider world and all that good stuff! This is just one specific conversational quirk (which I suspect had something to do with my brother's past bubble-o-teenageriness, as well as the penchant for inarticulacy that I share with my mum on occasion) about which I apparently felt the need to inform the internet.
Though, returning to the silences of fanfiction, and my rambling attempt to root all this wacky Chaucerian postmodernism (what? I AM HAVING MY CAKE AND EATING IT HERE, THAT IS THE SPIRIT OF FANFIC) in some kind of female domesticity, this isn't something I have much more to say about, not yet – I should probably, y’know, read some more fic and think in considerably more detail about the gender politics I’m invoking here before shooting my mouth off.
But I’m very taken with the idea of fanfiction, entitled and frustrating and pedestrian and angst-ridden and very, very silly as it generally is (as mine certainly is), as a way of walking up to that man of great auctoritie and carrying right on by.
Oh, and don’t worry too much about my grandmother. She cut quite a swathe through provincial Welsh society. It could have been worse, I guess.
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Date: 2010-09-24 09:13 pm (UTC)I'm now trying to figure out if any of my fanfic uses silence...
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Date: 2010-09-25 04:01 am (UTC)Heh, this piece is in large part my attempt to persuade myself that my tendency to end every single fic I write with a *telling phrase* (well, ideally), then ... *sudden fade to black* isn't just me being lazy!
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Date: 2010-09-24 11:45 pm (UTC)I am definitely taken with this as well. I was having a think the other day about canons (in a more RL context), and I found myself thinking that, although people talk about fannish 'canon' as if it's a slightly cutesy metaphor about accepted books in the Bible, it really does work well to just think about it as being, well, canon. The only difference is that, instead of a slowly built-up collection of things in Mr. White Western Intellectual's drawing room, it is what Mr. White Western Intellectual's stand-in (who often looks, funnily enough, a lot like Mr. White Western Intellectual) has set up in fandom's collective drawing room. It's the stuff that 'everyone' has read, what 'everything' is based on, the pinnacle of creative energy, the source text of characters and situations (this was very much influenced, BTW, by Barbara Herrnstein Smith's 'Contingencies of Value' in Robert von Hallberg's Canons, 1983 - should you care!). In the microcosmos of fandom, what is fic if not people going 'stuff you, canon' in a very postmodern way?
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Date: 2010-09-25 04:38 am (UTC)Yeah, that was definitely one of the things I was toying with, here. Because as a complete newbie, it’s so refreshing to see people putting their money where their mouth is, I guess, when it comes to the rather vague ‘RIP author’ postmodernism that’s filtered out through pop culture in recent decades.
I mean, it seems to me that you can see the influence of fandom – now I know what to look for – bleeding out through, say YA literature and genres like urban fantasy (um, I guess – I haven’t read enough to be sure). I suspect that it’s tightening up and codifying a lot of tropes and sub-genres – ‘hurt/comfort’, for instance – that are designed to give a kind of instant hit to the hindbrain. Aaand ... that’s not even mentioning porn, which I think
But, yeah, I do wonder what all this is going to do to perceptions of literary value and ideas of canonicity in general.
It seems to me that at its best fanfic is rather like musicians just jamming for the hell of it – I remember reading a fun article by Zadie Smith which compared thoughtful, fluent reading to an amateur musician playing music as a hobby, and I think it is a useful way to think about both reading and fic writing (which are maybe closer in some ways than fic writing and writing original stuff???).
But while I think it would be awesome if fic writing got as broadly and casually accepted as learning to play guitar, I’ve got no real idea what that would do to literary culture in general. I mean, would we get a pop music equivalent? (Is that partly what YA/genre literature is turning into, nowadays?) Would it make readers more inclined to poke at the monoliths of Western literature, or maybe chip the barnacles off them? – Heh, um, I just randomly sank my monoliths because Byatt compares Shakespeare, somewhere or other, to a giant barnacle-encrusted hulk. To which I would say rather urgently ‘not necessarily’ – but, well, he’s certainly a very ficcy author himself (well, like just about everyone before the Romantic cult of originality got going) who might benefit by being approached through a fic lense rather than an omg Stratford one, I think – esp for young readers.
I guess fanfic just seems a potentially friendly – and specifically woman friendly – way of making people question Canon with a capital ‘C’, as you say. Giving people permission to ignore or kick against the taken-for-granted furnishings of canon, in whatever incarnation, and perhaps canonical literature as such.
Though – I just had a super quick scroll through the Critical Inquiry version of Herrnstein Smith’s piece and, oh man, heh, now I have a knee-jerk longing to stand up for universal objective VALUE (in capslock, no less, dude). But ... I’m not sure that urge is particularly alien to fanfic either, at its best? In that it is often about aiming to better the source, even if the bettering in question isn’t necessarily being defined by, say, a need to live up to Shakespeare-the-shibboleth.
I’m particularly intrigued by her description of folklore, children’s rhymes, etc, as ‘artifacts’ which manage to slip under the radar of the custodians of high culture – I often find myself thinking of stuff-what-I-find-on-the-internet as an ‘artefact’, despite the way the internet as a whole seems like omg neverending slippery Text.
[Oh, and thinking of slippery texts, and (vaguely) of the painful, painful racism Smith describes wrt comparisons of Langston Hughes with Eliot back in the day, if you’ve been away from the web for a couple of days you might have missed this brilliant co-opting of Prufrock for the internet, which is priceless. And mildly horrifying.]
I mean, (back to Smith) it’s fascinating and much needed stuff (esp in the early 80s, home of New Historicism...) and I’ll have to read through properly – ‘we do not move about in a raw universe’ is a great line, and I’m amused that she has a go at Frye for his ‘correlation of validity with silence’ when it comes to the assumption that no-one needs to point out how awesome Milton is – but if you claim that all value is subjective and contingent and part of a swirling Heraclitean discourse (which does sound v House of Fame-ish!), um, where do you go from there?
... dammit, sorry, this got tl;dr. This is what happens when I post when improperly caffeinated!
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Date: 2010-09-25 07:04 pm (UTC)Ooh, yes, I love that meta (though apparently I never commented on it at the time... I think Stulti knows - we've had chats sort of around this topic). And I'm with you on the way that fandom could lead us to really interesting places in terms of thinking about canonicity. The only problem I see is that some people, both inside and outside of fandom, can be very resistant to anything that erodes the idea of authorship as ownership (of interpretation), which copyright just compounds. I don't know if there's a generation gap somewhere (though I did once get very shirty with someone once who boiled down people arguing against the idea of authors being able to 'decide' whether fanfic can or cannot be written about them as 'young people whinging because they can't do what they want'), but, yes, for young readers it could be great.
Re Herrnstein Smith, oh yeah, it's very 80s in its extremity (don't know why you would have ever read it, but it reminds me a little of Eva Keul's 1985 book The Reign of the Phallus about classical Athens - mostly art - and how it was the most ev0l phallocracy in the world ever, where women were either prostitutes or not-prostitutes, etc. etc. - a necessary reaction to everything else, but, well, EXTREME). I do, however, quite like the idea of understanding all value as contingent on context, rather than seeing a Henry Moore or whatever as intrinsically valuable, even when you're starving to death in the middle of the desert or whatever. Taking that sort of view wouldn't mean that everything immediately loses its value, because so much of what we deal with is connected with a number of other things (frex: people share fanfic, perhaps, to reflect their own love of canon and invoke it in others (in one respect out of many), so some works can be more valuable than others when they succeed in that more fully by reflecting canon more accurately; similarly, people in it for the bodies in space/free porn will attribute more value to the decent porn). Maybe that observation doesn't take you anywhere in itself, but it lets you qualify other thoughts and observations, because it opens up the evaluative process to an understanding of different perspectives. A bit like what Stulti was saying in her meta.
Prufrock = HEE!
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Date: 2010-09-26 06:13 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely! And of course it seems to be a big phenomenon - ironically if unsurprisingly - within fandom itself, what with the 'big name fan' and ... um, whatever the hell went down , plagiarism-uproar-wise in the Harry Potter fandom a few years back, for one. I just hope that fandom doesn't throw up an ownership/copyright imbroglio which gets into deep enough trouble to muddy the water for everyone else - more than they're already muddied, that is.
I don't know if there's a generation gap somewhere
Heh! One objection I remember coming across somewhere was that fandom was a product of the over-entitled baby boomer generation. But, yes - quite apart from anything else, getting kids reading is hard enough; getting them writing for fun (even if it is godawful self-inserts) seems something devoutly to be wished.
Eva Keul's 1985 book The Reign of the Phallus
I haven't read it, no, BUT I FEEL AS IF I HAVE. As you say, entirely necessary and very understandable in its context etc, but ... EXTREME. And my reaction to Smith was very much a result of being faced with flavour-o-early-eighties pre-coffee: I do agree that it's important to open up the floor to other perspectives, and obviously fandom is one of the places where that kind of manouevring is taking place nowadays - which is fascinating.
And thank you for indulging me while I go on about this - I'm sure you've had this kind of conversation a fair few times! But while I've sorta skirted around the periphery of the fandom world - Making Light used to be quite a regular internet stop for me a couple of years ago - I really had no idea what kind of thing was going on in general, so it's been interesting.
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Date: 2010-09-26 07:06 pm (UTC)Mmm - there is certainly the idea that some people can simply have 'better' ideas than other people, which is a bit of a shame, and entitlement hierarchies that come with that. I'm not entirely sure how you'd work to break that down - there's definitely a good amount of demagoguery in fandom.
even if it is godawful self-inserts
Don't diss self-inserts! One of my great delights as a child was writing myself into the Sleepover Club, trufax. :P But yes, I remember having to write what amounted to A Streetcar Named Desire fanfic for AS English (don't know if you did the same?) and I don't see why that model couldn't be adapted lower down the key stages. I think Twelfth Night fanfic would have got me far more involved in Shakespeare than the Yr. 9 SATs did ('Malvolio is often mocked about his clothing: write about your experiences of when/why this happens, or why it doesn't, in your school' or something; IT WAS HORRIBLE).
And, yes, early 80s are not to be consumed before caffeine - especially Keuls (whom I very badly apostrophised; sorry about that), if only because she collects together some of the most upsetting vase images there are, so it's not exactly fun to flick through. :(
As for indulging, I think you're the one indulging me!! I could talk about this sort of thing all day and have only recently got into thinking about it with seriousness - my fandom reading (outside of fic) tends to be full of Chat for Social Justice and/or polemics in favour of/in condemnation of the Buffy Season 8 comics, both of which can, well, tend towards the early 80s in tone... This makes a nice change!
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Date: 2010-09-27 10:03 pm (UTC)Heh, I kid because I too have been there! A friend and I concocted reams of what I now realise would count as deeply dubious Narnia fic as kids. Thank god the internet wasn't really around at the time! Though I do realise fandom seems to go through cycles of rather aggressive 'Sue-shaming', talking of entitlement hierarchies, which just seems deeply distasteful and counter-productive in terms of getting people to keep on writing. And of course not all self-inserts are godawful in the least!
I don't see why that model couldn't be adapted lower down the key stages
Exactly - I mean, I have to admit I would have been deeply sniffy about something like that if it had been sprung on me as a teenager, but it seems like a really obvious tactic for engaging kids at younger ages. And yet I can't remember ever encountering any fic-type model myself, or indeed hearing about something similar - apart from your Streetcar experience, which, hm, sounds like a rather overwrought text to start people off with! I suppose it's not exactly an exam tailored exercise, but then UK schooling nowadays seems to vacillate weirdly between cramming for SATs etc and vague, touchy-feely, interactive stuff - so you'd think it would be defensible under the latter model at least! And, as you say, so much less traumatising than stuff like your Malvolio 'tell me what you did in your summer holidays' question - HORRIBLE indeed.
some of the most upsetting vase images there are
I CAN ONLY IMAGINE THAT THOSE MUST BE EXTREMELY UPSETTING. Oh, man.
both of which can, well, tend towards the early 80s in tone
If not indeed the seventies, judging from my journeying around Dreamwidth - which I'm actually finding really refreshing at the moment. But, yes, I feel as though there should be even MOAR META on fandom itself - not that I've even finished working through Stulti's recs list, mind you!
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Date: 2010-09-30 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-30 04:57 am (UTC)Except I don't even know the canon well enough, really, for me to be able to recriminate with myself properly as armageddon crawls out of the hellmouth wrt what unfortunate little tweaks I probably shouldn't, on balance, have made ...
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Date: 2010-09-30 02:34 am (UTC)But really, I think you have something here. In that the things we choose to say and not say, to dwell on and not dwell on, are qualitatively different that the things the larger literary culture says are important. Hmmmm.
I'd be careful about assertions of fandom gender -- because while we may be majority-female, we're not entirely-female, and forgetting this can lead to some problematic assertions. I do think we may have developed a sort of "feminine" sensibility, if you know what I mean? Like, if romance and feelings and care work and home and relationships are gendered as feminine and politics and adventure and science and war and Blowing Shit Up are gendered as masculine (<--not a dichotomy I buy into, but speaking in social-structured-stereotypical sense), then fandom leans toward the feminine and, moreover, when it uses the "masculine" parts of canon it always includes the ways the feminine parts influence them, comment on them, are affected by them.
And then if you extend that outward, the things the literary establishment have traditionally valued have been on the more "masculine" side of things; if I'm understanding you right, the silences of which you speak are about the un-speakable, unreachable, alien world of the feminine. And then fandom flips that around; by writing female-gaze porn and h/c and genderswap and holding Racebending Revenge and Where No Woman fests, we are focusing on and valuing the "feminine". Then, the silences in our work are about the alien/oppressive/unreachable supremacy of the "masculine" -- not that we or the characters we write about can't understand it, but that we can't change that assertion of supremacy.
Hmmm. I feel like, if I were writing an essay, this would be my freewriting/first draft, in that there is of course much more going on than what I wrote here; but I think I might have stumbled upon the interpretive question I want to explore. (Jesus, academia, how I love and loathe you.) So please excuse any logic!fail in the comment above, and take it as... hmmm. a jumping-off point rather than a claim to brilliance. :)
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Date: 2010-09-30 05:19 am (UTC)Heh, oh man! I wouldn’t call it academia, though – just vaaague recollections of my undergrad degree! And, well, skipping to your final caveat about jumping off points and freewriting (not that your comment is at all incoherent), this is very much what was going on in my piece, as I’m sure is evident. Though, I mean, designedly so, up to a point (AHEM): one of the things I’m enjoying about fandom is that it offers a kind of permission to be provisional and amateur to some degree, because fic is always secondary by some (pretty damn central) standards and meta is of course ideally a starting point for discussion. ... Man, I sound as though I’ve just discovered conversation, let alone the internet, don’t I? But ... I guess my experience of fandom thus far has just crystallised some of this stuff for me.
I'd be careful about assertions of fandom gender
You’re absolutely right; I’ve been feeling vaguely guilty about my blanket female!fandom gesturing ever since I posted this, because obviously it’s an oversimplification and also a pretty clear demonstration of the ways in which fandom is most cosy for me (white, cis-gendered female) rather than for the world at large. And yet. I think fandom is ‘feminine’ (with all the caveats you attach to the term) to a greater extent than it is, say, ‘queer’ or, certainly, ‘non white’. Dreamwidth certainly strikes me, on initial acquaintance, as a homosocial world of nerdy women. Which, well, THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH WORLDS LIKE THAT. But it is nerdy and female first and foremost, I think – not, say, queer and engaged in social activism.
I mean, to digress slightly: as a non-American, I sometimes find myself wrong-footed by posts which, while much more punctilious than I’ve managed to be above when it comes to not making unwarranted assumptions wrt the race or gender or orientation of the reader, are nevertheless implicitly and hilariously certain that said reader hails from the US of A. Which isn’t meant as a criticism, really – just a reminder that my in depth (NO NOT REALLY I HAVE BEEN HERE ONE MONTH) experience of my corner of dreamwidth has had a surprisingly ... uniform flavour. It’s a flavour I like! But for me it’s identifiably American, 20s-40s, West Coast, left wing, green, well educated ... and so on and so forth. Which, as someone who hadn’t even heard of, say, WisCon, before this month (oh, except peripherally after Racefail09...), it’s kinda new and exciting to find said flavour so concentrated in one internet hidey-hole. I guess you could call it the Le Guin demographic? Not so much in terms of age, obv, but in terms of influence. It’s actually the West Coast thing which surprised me the most, for some reason, though I guess it makes a lot of sense. But anyway!
So, obviously I’d agree with you that fandom leans toward the feminine, or rather “feminine”. And I was certainly playing with the idea that part of this tilt towards femininity is the way fandom very often explicitly sets out to fill in gaps or fuzzy patches in canonical treatments of gender (or race or sexuality or what have you, of course). As you say, bringing the un-speakable, unreachable, alien world of the feminine into the fold (heh. shades of O'Keefe in that last image...).
But ... I guess I was also prodding at the idea of fanfiction itself as a silence of a sort, at least as it takes place within the ‘safe space’ of say dreamwidth. Which, ok, first of all I should say that I myself don’t believe that any space can be or should be fully safe, and that fandom demonstrably isn’t. And I should also say that I absolutely don’t mean to say that fandom is complacent (it’s pretty much the opposite – witness the Goodnight Moon drama this last month) or that I myself am not being challenged and enlightened by some of the stuff I’m coming across here.
But ... as I said above, it does feel safe here, to a degree. It does feel a little enclosed. There is something of the same assumption of mutual understanding as there is between me and my mother when we peter off into MEANINGFUL SILENCE. Man. Now I kinda feel I’ve ended up by denying a voice to THE ENTIRETY OF DREAMWIDTH. OOPS. SORRY. I TAKE IT BACK!
I actually wonder if this isn’t a fairly specific result of the latest LJ privacy!fail, which hit about a fortnight after I’d got myself set up on LJ and sent me scurrying over here. I guess there’s a sense in which Dreamwidth has been actively promoting itself, recently, as a kind of refuge within a refuge.
So ... that was definitely in there.
As was the idea I was discussing with
Which I suppose begs the INFINITELY THORNIER question of why it is that striking out boldly into the unknown of original fiction is so easily gendered masculine by our society, whileas fanfic, dancing around canon, sometimes showing it careful deference, sometimes punching it in the teeth, always by definition conscious of its presence, is gendered female.
And that’s NOT EVEN MENTIONING COPYRIGHT, because I don’t feel remotely qualified to do so and haven’t sorted out my own thoughts on the issue.
And, quite apart from all that, I really was just trying for a rather limited structural point – that fanfic is to some extent founded on the occlusion or silencing of its canon, true, but it also gets a lot of its power, very frequently, from shutting the hell up and letting the reader pour canon back into the blanks. I mean, I was entirely sincere in my first comment when I said one of the places that this meta started out was with me fretting about my tendency, when writing my own fic, to close them by essentially going *smokebomb* and ninja-ing off into the distance. Which is lazy, yes ... but can be effective? Maybe?
But, sorry, returning to your comment, yes, I was definitely worrying about, hmm, the fact that fic is a rather peripheral way of changing the world, that fandom, with all its (very necessary) warnings and care with terminology (well, ideally – crap, mea culpa) is a rather cliquish space. As you say (and as I would agree, I think, though I didn’t say so at all explicitly above):
the silences in our work are about the alien/oppressive/unreachable supremacy of the "masculine" -- not that we or the characters we write about can't understand it, but that we can't change that assertion of supremacy.
Which is a rather bleak idea, but pretty much a statement of fact, at least I think in terms of fandom in its current incarnation. I mean, looking back at my little piece (which, heh, thanks for helping me unpack, oh man), I think I was trying for a kind of feminist-fandom version of Tanizaki’s 1933 In Praise of Shadows? Uh, not to set the bar sky-scrapingly high, or anything. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but it does what it says on the tin, defending dimness and shadows and traditional Japanese aesthetics against encroaching Western values. And it does so with immense elegance and poise and is obviously the work of a great writer (omg the stuff I've read by Tanizaki, so amazing) – but it also reads to me at least in small part like a archetypally 'post colonial' text – to an extent I wasn’t quite expecting to see from Japan, I guess (yeah, I’m really ignorant when it comes to Taisho/Showa Japan). Tanizaki’s defence of the power of darkness ends up defining the growing importance of all the things he associates with whiteness – electric light, modern technology, Western aesthetics and white Western skin. Which is an EXTREMELY ROUNDABOUT (and quite possibly unfair to Tanizaki) way of saying that, yes, my hymn to silence comes with a caveat. Silence needn’t be a way of dodging the issue entirely, of crumbling under the anxiety of influence and failing to get the words out. Gaps and silences and shadows have power too. But silence can only go so far.
from metafandom
Date: 2010-09-30 03:00 am (UTC)Re: from metafandom
Date: 2010-09-30 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-11 01:24 am (UTC)Me too, mayhaps.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-11 01:37 pm (UTC)And that little snippet of your undergrad piece is really interesting - I do think that one of the things Chaucer is doing in Troilus is fighting for the past as pastime, for the opportunity to see it as shifting and conditional - 'Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages, - / In sondry londes, sondry ben usages'. And of course Criseyde herself is a shifting and conditional character, far too human to be the all for one heroine that her story requires, or to end pinned down up in the eighth sphere like Troilus.
Or, well, at least she doesn't get REDEEMED THROUGH LEPROSY, Henryson I am looking at you (not that the Testament isn't fascinating, of course. But, leprosy).
And I'm pleased you weren't completely eye-rolly about my LOL CHAUCERIAN POSTMODERNISM moment. I'm very taken with that Eco quote about postmodernism as mannerism by any other name, though I'm not sure I buy it entirely. But to be honest it's the kind of thing I'm really sloppy about thinking through, which is why I only invoked it very flippantly!