In Which I Discover Fannish Entitlement

[fulselden]

So, I guess I have a problem with schmoop? Also with narratives that dive for the heart-strings and start twanging? NOT ALWAYS BY ANY MEANS ... but to me, fics and non-fics that do this stuff often have the sniff of kitsch about them.

So, yep, this is the piece of grousing in which I prove my heart is as dry and withered as a mummified frog by moaning about the soppy film I'm roping in here as a strawman (WHICH IS PROBABLY STILL MORE PRUDENT THAN WHEN I USED THE ENTIRE GENRE OF EPIC FOR THE SAME PURPOSE), and then leaping bravely across a chasm of genre and medium and intent to moan about soppy fic. And also, to write about p0rn, again. Well, at least any most squee-harshing is corralled behind the cut.

One of my most uncomfortable film-watching experiences in recent years was being taken by a friend to see The Time Traveller’s Wife, which, for those who haven’t seen it ...

... is one of those lovingly crafted slices of Hollywood melodrama which are FOR THE LADIES and which drench everything in this sort of HONEY GLAZE. I don’t care, in principle, that it invoked a science fiction trope (time travel, yeah) as essentially a storytelling prop to enable the most hilariously literal sundering of lovers since Pullman left his Adam and Eve on either side of a slammed-shut door between worlds (not that I intend to drag Pullman into this, mind you). I do care, though, that it invoked this fascinating setup (a man essentially adrift in time), used it to generate angst and h/c, and then did the latter sloppily.

Seriously, I don’t care if your story circles around a magic rocket-ship mcguffin or whatever and then ends by firing it off into space! Just do something interesting while you’re there! Don’t just produce another beeswax-polished-to-a-deep-gloss tale of wistful, angora-wearing love between A LIBRARIAN and AN ARTIST. Seriously, how the hell did that dude even keep his job? He kept falling through time and ending up naked in the road! That is not professional behaviour.

And I know there was a book. And ... maybe it was better? Anyone reading this, feel free to proselytize! But, to be honest, I suspect it would annoy me in a lot of the same ways, unless the writing is exceptionally gorgeous. I can forgive a lot for gorgeous writing!

Ok, so. We’ve established that I can’t really be dealing with modern romance at its Hollywood we-will-now-cater-to-the-twinset-demographic schmoopiest. So bear in mind that a lot of this is a reflection of my personal impatience with finely tooled sappiness of this particular variety.

But, yes, fic. Because The Time Traveller's Wife, in its appropriation of a medium-hard science fiction trope to enable its wistful, polite, Sunday magazine love story, seems to be doing some rather ficcish things. Well, apart from the politeness.

And those things ... are things I wonder about.

Because I vastly enjoy the fact that fic is often involved in prying narratives away from a swords-and-battles (for instance) core to investigate their characters and their romances and their world. That it is, more often than not, FOR THE LADIES and indeed BY THE LADIES (not, of course, that ladies don't also tend to be fond of swords-and-battles). I’m fascinated by the mechanics of its conversion of screen into prose, where this is applicable; its playing with medium and genre, its devotion to outré varieties of porn. And I also enjoy its tendency to lovingly extrapolate emotional intricacies and plumb psychological depths and also, even, to ship n’ slash like never before has a man taken his burly canon-best-friend in his arms and said, baby, let’s go window-shop strollers. These are all awesome things that many canons do not provide, or do so ham-handedly.

I guess, in fact, what I’m partly railing about is the fact that, when I started trawling though fic (which, when I dipped my toe into Avatar fandom, meant FFN, as mediated by a couple of rather sub-par rec lists), I read so much ... well, not badfic. But ... averagefic. I was so thrilled that there was readable (and sometimes great) stuff out there that I just ... kept reading.

And this is hard to discuss, really, because I don’t want to name names, and lord knows I’m in no position to start throwing stones when it comes to proficiency in writing fic or indeed fiction.

But I read a fair amount of stuff which luxuriated in dwelling on poignant, shippy, emotional moments, which delighted in cosseting the woobie, that offered heart-warming reunions and exquisitely painful losses met with comfort and understanding. Sometimes they offered some of this stuff in the context of elaborate world building and careful characterisation. Sometimes ... it was just there. Yes, you say, THAT IS WHAT FANFIC IS FOR, DUDE. GET OVER IT. And, yeah, I know. I know! I can’t just barge in and demand that people stop writing their fulfilment fics! And, you know, I don’t even want to. Even though this is the kind of stuff I pretty much loathe when it’s done sloppily, as, I would suggest, it was in The Time Traveller’s Wife, this is often the sort of stuff I want to read in fandom, too! I just want to read it done really well. (And, ok, also in small doses. Otherwise, I get indigestion. World building and angst, however, I can apparently chug. Relatively speaking).

Yes, this is essentially the story of my run-in with Sturgeon’s Law. So I understand entirely if your response is, well, CRY MOAR.


... And I feel as though it might be useful, here, talking of indigestion, to invoke Sontag on camp, and her prodding at the idea of good-bad taste:

The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

[here I pause for imagined hilarity on the part of people who know me irl upon seeing me essentially positioning myself as Sontag's 'man of good taste' - AHEM, not something I am famous for.]
 

Sontag's essay actually refracts fandom in interesting ways, I think. Which isn't, I suppose, surprising: camp is a kind of fannish enterprise, a 'tender' (says Sontag) reappropriation and reshaping of its source. And fandom is often rather srs bznz in a way which lends itself to camp (yeah ... I guess it takes one to know one).

One distinction, I suppose, is that while fandom lends itself to defence of and deference to canon (or, at least, a constant consideration of it), camp is a top-down form of appropriation which tends to delight in its source material from above. And, to a greater extent even than fandom in general, it tends to isolate its targets, pry them from their immediate context, appreciate them as delightful relics of past eccentric devotion. Fandom, in contrast, tends to swing back repeatedly to the source - at the very least, it maintains an umblical relationship with canon. Eccentric devotion in the present tense.

But Sontag's mention of Genet makes me think again about kitsch, about faux or unearned emotion. Ok, I haven't actually read Our Lady of the Flowers (internet, any clue as to which bit Sontag is on about here?), and Sontag's view that the 'Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp' ties in with what I think camp is doing in the pieces of Genet I have read. But there's one bit of Genet which I wouldn't hesitate to characterise as kitsch (albeit with, uh, all the authority of rather fuzzy memory), much as it pains me to do so. This would be the soft focus sex-ish scenes in his 1950 film Un Chant d'Amour, which as I remember (and I may be getting it wrong here, mind you - I don't have a copy on hand to check) consist of pretty much literally bodies in space, twisting around rather vaguely. I remember the scenes as too insistent and sonorous to strike me as camp, especially. But they seemed to me to have a kind of basic hollowness, a flavour of simulacra, a sense of emotion replayed and overexposed, which pinged my (admittedly rather wonky) kitsch radar.

I suspect that the kind of thing this was meant to evoke was the soup-slow prison-time described by Genet in The Miracle of the Rose:

In the cell, gestures can be made with extreme slowness. You can stop in the middle of one. You are master of time and of your thinking. You are strong by dint of slowness. Each gesture is inflected in a flowing curve. You hesitate. You choose. That is what the luxury of cell time is composed of. But this slowness of gesture is a slowness that goes fast. It rushes. Eternity flows into the curve of a gesture. You possess your entire cell because you fill its space with your engrossed mind.

Genet, The Miracle of the Rose, trans Bernard Frechtmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 149-50.

Which passage (occupying, it now seems to me, a middle ground between The Talking Heads' 'The Great Curve' and 'Once in a Lifetime'. A middle ground of cell-bound-wanking, that is) was apparently memorable enough for it to come to mind years after I read the book, and despite the fact that the book (which, heh, I just typed as 'he book') itself was something I found rather undigestible. But, anyway, this aesthetic, or the more overtly porny version of it, was rather tedious on film - a half hearted answer to the surreal, brittle, symbolism-larded-UST that makes up the rest of the film, as I remember, which nevertheless managed to snap the tension entirely.

It's these scenes, also, which were, I think, cut for release, even in the seventies. That they exist at all is a victory for the kind of civilisation I want for the world, the civilisation I imagine most people in this corner of the internet would want to see. But in artistic terms, they flop. It's a not-quite sex scene that doesn't work.

And I think it's because Genet, here, is extending sex the same kind of mealy-mouthed, soft focus indulgence that fic often does to emotional scenes and heart-string tugging. He wanted to get his film shown, I presume (I mean, 1950!). And, absolutely, it is disgusting that he had to prevaricate - because those scenes do strike me as an unfortunate combination of Genet's pull towards the lushly symbolic and the need to forestall censorship (ineffectually, as it turned out).

... Wait, sorry. This kind of leapfrogging is apparently a hazard of writing in a browser window. Meta, THE GAME OF TAG EDITION. I apologise if I've been sloppy in invoking Genet and the weight of twentieth-century gay history here. But, well, there's a reason why fandom's queerness seems so precious, even if it's rather frequently a queerness which uses male gayness rather than starting from it, as Un Chant d'Amour certainly does.

And that's part of the reason why, much as fic should be a playground, I'd like it to be a playground which was a bit more conscious of (OF MY NEEDS, I may, actually, be saying, I know) the risk of unintended kitschiness. Because I'm not sure mainstream literature, in general, has quite worked out how to write sex, yet. But it does know a great deal about how to do poignant emotion. (and about how to do elaborate world building, careful plots, fully realized characters - they just don't annoy me as much when done badly as schmoop does, can you tell?) So do we really need to extend schmoop or fluff or what have you the same level of courtesy, as readers, when it's done badly?

I mean, when it comes to porn, there's really a very simple barometer of success: does it turn you on? And fandom seems to have developed a baroque system of kinks and counter-kinks and kink warnings and so forth. Rule 34. But it also means that porn comes with a built in evaluation procedure (um, yeah...) which dilutes the need to switch your reviewing engines to full burn. Or, at least, gives evaluating it a different flavour. There's always that basic qualification: a safety net, of sorts. If you don't like it, well. You're just not that into it. But fandom, by dint of sheer volume and through the power of careful kink-calibration and niche-catering, seems to be evolving a way to write more and better porn (though I presume there's a massive amount of bad!porn out there - I've just been fairly punctilious in avoiding it).

There's no need for Genet's rather second hand evocation of sex on the interwebs, basically. IN FACT, RATHER THE OPPOSITE.

But is the same thing happening for fandom genres which are more likely to be catered to in the mainstream? Maybe. Fandom can certainly act as a master class on world building, for instance. But the fluffy stuff? I'm not so sure.

So, I guess I am being puritanical here, in a rather middle class way. Learning to write sex well, learning to write it matter-of-factly, playing around with it, messing up, getting schooled, seems more innovative, at the very least, than learning how to write schmoopy love fests. Those have been getting written for a while - though, it's worth noting, they're probably mostly a product of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility and sentimentality - one era in which 'feminine' tastes massively reshaped what was expected and wanted out of mainstream fiction.

But that was a while ago, you know? So I think that the role of indulgence of this kind in fic really is worth considering. Both in terms of how fic is shaping itself, and how it coulda shoulda woulda impact mainstream fiction (not that this is any kind of glorious end-point for fic, of course). There are many wonderful scenarios in which writers learn from fic how to produce sex scenes that aren’t potential candidates for a Bad Sex Award, to be tricksy and metatextual in a very different way from the footnote school, so to speak, of modern novels (much as I love said school), to be bullish and unapologetic when it comes to, say, making their main character a queer non-neurotypical Québécoise with a penchant for crochet and a dragon in her cellar.

But a lot of fic is emotional comfort food. And this is really, really difficult to do well. Admittedly, fic could probably teach mainstream literature, let alone Hollywood, to do it better.

Or not.

It might result in more luscious trifles like The Time Traveller’s Wife, which invoke genre tropes only to use them as scaffolding for an average romance story. It’s not even a fear I feel very comfortable about having or voicing, because it’s clear that fic provides a lot of comfort food in flavours that just aren’t available elsewhere. And that’s something I certainly appreciate on a personal level, quite apart from its broader social implications.

And, after all, wish fulfilment may be the force which drives a lot of fic, but it seems ridiculously rarified to argue that this is a bad thing, per se. After all, people write fiction of any kind because they want it to get written. There’s always desire in there somewhere, even if it's just the desire to make the rent, though mainstream stuff is seldom as solicitous of the reader’s wishes as is fic.

Desire's naked visibility in fic makes it very different from mainstream literature, which tends to hedge and sublimate its most id-ish moments and in which critics often reward obliqueness – witness the Bad Sex Awards, which may be a fount of hilarity but which also strike me, seeing porn done well and done almost as a matter of course in fic, as one way in which the literary establishment polices itself, tells itself that sex is really a little off limits, old chap, and that anyone who tries to write it deserves a bit of ribbing.

But, talking of self-constraint, I wonder to what extent fic’s status as wish fulfilment acts as a drag on its quality. How much it means the reader is willing to handwave, how much it rewards adherence to a basic chicken-soup-for-the-id model and how much it serves to discourage innovation and even refinement.

And I guess domesticated, Vaseline-lensed, soft focus (often also soft core) versions of shippiness as peddled by The Time Traveller’s Wife got me thinking about this stuff because my own tolerance level for them is probably unusually low. But when I was first reading fic, I read this stuff. It wasn’t quite the wish-fulfilment recipe I wanted, and it tended to make me feel as though I’d swallowed several cake's worth of marzipan bridal couples, but I read it and, by virtue of page counts if nothing else, I asked for more.

So. I just hope fandom becomes a kitchen where writers can improve the recipe, not a production line for standard issue schmoop.

That fic, slowly, provisionally, works out a way to give readers what they want without feeding them pabulum.