On fanfiction and silence

[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.

 

 

Comments

[fulselden]

Thank you - I'm really glad you enjoyed. And yes, while the rest of this piece is very much cookie-dough stage, I do think I managed to pin down something useful in that sentence.