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Entry tags:
- book: the family,
- book: the godfather,
- ch: cordelia,
- drama: king lear,
- drama: king leir,
- drama: romeo and juliet,
- els borja,
- era: contemporary,
- era: early modern,
- fandom: fandom,
- fanfiction,
- genre: meta,
- person: edmund spenser,
- person: mario puzo,
- person: william shakespeare,
- poem: romeus and juliet,
- poem: the faerie queene,
- poem: the metamorphoses,
- rants,
- site: ao3,
- site: tumblr,
- wank
I guess we're doing Fanfic Discourse AGAIN
You know, the thing about the history of fanfiction is that I don't think (for instance) that Shakespeare's plays based on pre-existing narratives are actually fanfiction in the contemporary sense. But I certainly do not respect any take on fanfic and its relationship to its source materials that does not engage at all with the very, very, very long history of human beings responding to pre-existing stories by re-telling and re-imagining those specific* stories in a wide variety of ways, often within the same or a similar medium.
People have always done this. The laws and norms and expectations around it do change, the forms it takes change, but the practice of responding to stories by drawing directly on those stories to create other versions of them is not unique to modern fanfiction. If your argument about fanfic (especially if it's ones about the unique evils of fanfic) is contingent upon assumptions or assertions about that general practice rather than anything specific to modern fanfic in particular, your argument is short-sighted, painfully ahistorical, and poorly reasoned.
Like, here's a very obvious example. My favorite Shakespeare tragedy is King Lear. The story told in King Lear was drawn from the pre-existing narratives around the mythical King Leir. This had recently appeared in the anonymous play King Leir (which seems to date from the 1590s, while Shakespeare's Lear was written in the very early 1600s). A version of the story shows up in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in the 1590s as well). Shakespeare integrated other narratives into the core Leir story he took from the King Leir play written and performed just a few years earlier (most of the extra narratives in King Lear also have pretty obvious pre-existing sources). Famously, Shakespeare altered details of the traditional story in this process, and especially of the King Leir version, to suit his artistic preferences. In some versions, for instance, Cordelia survives the events of the main Leir story only to be killed years later. Shakespeare didn't even come up with the idea of Cordelia dying tragically after initially seeming triumphant (one of his main changes from King Leir). But he integrated her death into the main story in a more cohesive and streamlined way than it was generally done.
So Shakespeare didn't invent the essential narrative of Leir/Lear. He didn't invent most of the characters in it. He didn't even "file off the serial numbers" in the modern phrase; the characters are meant to be recognized as those familiar, pre-existing characters to a contemporary audience. Part of the power of the play for its original audience would come from their familiarity with other versions of the story and characters. In general, say, they would expect Cordelia's return to the story as an ally of Lear's, but not Cordelia and Lear's tragic defeat. Modern audiences unfamiliar with any other version of the story can still register the shock and horror and bleakness of Shakespeare's handling of it, but not usually in the way that an audience of the time would have registered it. The power of the conventional Leir narrative was such that in later years, Shakespeare's version would get "corrected" back to the established Leir story as appearing in things like King Leir. It was only much, much later that the King Lear of Shakespeare would be regularly performed as he wrote it, without making it more digestible to then-contemporary sensibilities or closer to the "canon" he was working off of.
The point of all this is that Lear is not lessened by what might be termed its lack of originality by modern standards. It's not that it's great despite its repurposing of this story, and can be fully appreciated on its own merits so OK. I mean, it can be, it's fantastic regardless, but it is not weaker because of its intertextuality. I really do feel that something of what Shakespeare is doing with this story, doing with King Leir the contemporary play in particular, the full power and brilliance of King Lear as he wrote it, is lost when we ignore its fundamental intertextuality. A work that responds to a different work or set of works by using the materials within those works is not necessarily poorer for doing so. Neither is it necessarily richer. Like, this can be done badly. Anything can be done badly. But this practice is not intrinsically inferior to the modern fetishization of originality, it is not intrinsically suspect, it is not intrinsically less artistic, less powerful, even less normal. There have been many times and places in human history where the re-purposing of pre-existing stories in a way that looks "fanficcy" by modern standards was extremely normalized.
That normalization is why I don't call these things "fanfic" even though they're engaging with existent texts in a roughly similar way to fanfic and nearly all condemnations of fanfic should logically apply to these older intertextual traditions. The accumulated baggage around fanfic is deeply caught up in capitalism, IPs, copyright law (especially in the USA), the media landscape, fandoms, and the priorities and values of contemporary cultures. Fanfic as we understand it has to maneuver around these things in a way that Shakespeare did not need to (though he certainly had to maneuver around other, probably worse things). And fanfic has been profoundly shaped by the contemporary structures it evades or uses. But the ways it's been shaped are not the inevitable result of re-purposing stories. The impact of AO3, say, and the norms it has imposed on large parts of fandom (particularly English-language fandom) are directly related to a history of legal threats to fanfic writers under US copyright law, along with corporate interference with and attempts to exploit and control the ways in which people re-purpose stories. And these things are tied up in the fetishization of originality I mentioned above, romanticization of trailblazing lone genius auteurs and so on.
The conditions of intertextual engagement for a playwright in Shakespeare's general situation (however skilled or unskilled that playwright) were radically different from ours. They also had things they could not do or say in the course of re-telling a story, but those things were largely different ones from (for instance) an AO3 user's. That's why I don't equate them. The difference is not about quality, it's about context. So if you're going to generalize about fanfic based not on the contexts that define fanfic as a thing distinct from the likes of King Lear, but on a basic conversational approach to storytelling that it has in common with things like King Lear, you just sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
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*By "specific stories" I mean that not every story that is inspired by another story is a direct re-telling or re-purposing of it. For instance, Romeo and Juliet was very likely influenced by Ovid's account of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses but it's not in direct dialogue with Ovid. Rather, it's a version of the poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," which seems to be a poetic translation of a story that was more or less originally in Italian but maybe passed through a French translation before being translated into English. Or you can look at something like the distinction between two of Mario Puzo's novels related to the Borgias. The Godfather is somewhat inspired by the historical Borgias and you can see the connections, but that is not the same approach as his (however fictionalized) account of the historical record of the Borgias in his novel The Family. The close intertextuality I'm talking about in this post—storytelling that responds to a previously established work or works by using specific material from that work—is closer to the latter. I'm being kind of pedantic about this because you do see arguments that loosely inspired things are "basically fanfic," but what I'm interested in and talking about here is a closer relationship between texts like we see with Leir and Lear.
People have always done this. The laws and norms and expectations around it do change, the forms it takes change, but the practice of responding to stories by drawing directly on those stories to create other versions of them is not unique to modern fanfiction. If your argument about fanfic (especially if it's ones about the unique evils of fanfic) is contingent upon assumptions or assertions about that general practice rather than anything specific to modern fanfic in particular, your argument is short-sighted, painfully ahistorical, and poorly reasoned.
Like, here's a very obvious example. My favorite Shakespeare tragedy is King Lear. The story told in King Lear was drawn from the pre-existing narratives around the mythical King Leir. This had recently appeared in the anonymous play King Leir (which seems to date from the 1590s, while Shakespeare's Lear was written in the very early 1600s). A version of the story shows up in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in the 1590s as well). Shakespeare integrated other narratives into the core Leir story he took from the King Leir play written and performed just a few years earlier (most of the extra narratives in King Lear also have pretty obvious pre-existing sources). Famously, Shakespeare altered details of the traditional story in this process, and especially of the King Leir version, to suit his artistic preferences. In some versions, for instance, Cordelia survives the events of the main Leir story only to be killed years later. Shakespeare didn't even come up with the idea of Cordelia dying tragically after initially seeming triumphant (one of his main changes from King Leir). But he integrated her death into the main story in a more cohesive and streamlined way than it was generally done.
So Shakespeare didn't invent the essential narrative of Leir/Lear. He didn't invent most of the characters in it. He didn't even "file off the serial numbers" in the modern phrase; the characters are meant to be recognized as those familiar, pre-existing characters to a contemporary audience. Part of the power of the play for its original audience would come from their familiarity with other versions of the story and characters. In general, say, they would expect Cordelia's return to the story as an ally of Lear's, but not Cordelia and Lear's tragic defeat. Modern audiences unfamiliar with any other version of the story can still register the shock and horror and bleakness of Shakespeare's handling of it, but not usually in the way that an audience of the time would have registered it. The power of the conventional Leir narrative was such that in later years, Shakespeare's version would get "corrected" back to the established Leir story as appearing in things like King Leir. It was only much, much later that the King Lear of Shakespeare would be regularly performed as he wrote it, without making it more digestible to then-contemporary sensibilities or closer to the "canon" he was working off of.
The point of all this is that Lear is not lessened by what might be termed its lack of originality by modern standards. It's not that it's great despite its repurposing of this story, and can be fully appreciated on its own merits so OK. I mean, it can be, it's fantastic regardless, but it is not weaker because of its intertextuality. I really do feel that something of what Shakespeare is doing with this story, doing with King Leir the contemporary play in particular, the full power and brilliance of King Lear as he wrote it, is lost when we ignore its fundamental intertextuality. A work that responds to a different work or set of works by using the materials within those works is not necessarily poorer for doing so. Neither is it necessarily richer. Like, this can be done badly. Anything can be done badly. But this practice is not intrinsically inferior to the modern fetishization of originality, it is not intrinsically suspect, it is not intrinsically less artistic, less powerful, even less normal. There have been many times and places in human history where the re-purposing of pre-existing stories in a way that looks "fanficcy" by modern standards was extremely normalized.
That normalization is why I don't call these things "fanfic" even though they're engaging with existent texts in a roughly similar way to fanfic and nearly all condemnations of fanfic should logically apply to these older intertextual traditions. The accumulated baggage around fanfic is deeply caught up in capitalism, IPs, copyright law (especially in the USA), the media landscape, fandoms, and the priorities and values of contemporary cultures. Fanfic as we understand it has to maneuver around these things in a way that Shakespeare did not need to (though he certainly had to maneuver around other, probably worse things). And fanfic has been profoundly shaped by the contemporary structures it evades or uses. But the ways it's been shaped are not the inevitable result of re-purposing stories. The impact of AO3, say, and the norms it has imposed on large parts of fandom (particularly English-language fandom) are directly related to a history of legal threats to fanfic writers under US copyright law, along with corporate interference with and attempts to exploit and control the ways in which people re-purpose stories. And these things are tied up in the fetishization of originality I mentioned above, romanticization of trailblazing lone genius auteurs and so on.
The conditions of intertextual engagement for a playwright in Shakespeare's general situation (however skilled or unskilled that playwright) were radically different from ours. They also had things they could not do or say in the course of re-telling a story, but those things were largely different ones from (for instance) an AO3 user's. That's why I don't equate them. The difference is not about quality, it's about context. So if you're going to generalize about fanfic based not on the contexts that define fanfic as a thing distinct from the likes of King Lear, but on a basic conversational approach to storytelling that it has in common with things like King Lear, you just sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
---
*By "specific stories" I mean that not every story that is inspired by another story is a direct re-telling or re-purposing of it. For instance, Romeo and Juliet was very likely influenced by Ovid's account of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses but it's not in direct dialogue with Ovid. Rather, it's a version of the poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," which seems to be a poetic translation of a story that was more or less originally in Italian but maybe passed through a French translation before being translated into English. Or you can look at something like the distinction between two of Mario Puzo's novels related to the Borgias. The Godfather is somewhat inspired by the historical Borgias and you can see the connections, but that is not the same approach as his (however fictionalized) account of the historical record of the Borgias in his novel The Family. The close intertextuality I'm talking about in this post—storytelling that responds to a previously established work or works by using specific material from that work—is closer to the latter. I'm being kind of pedantic about this because you do see arguments that loosely inspired things are "basically fanfic," but what I'm interested in and talking about here is a closer relationship between texts like we see with Leir and Lear.
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Certainly people such as Shakespeare did invent their own characters/storylines sometimes—my feeling, though I haven't done enough research to be 100% sure, is that people were warier about doing this earlier on in this period. You can find early "Renaissance" dramatists apologizing for writing original plays rather than re-telling something already respected—but IMO this was, in general, not a fundamental distinguishing feature in the early modern understanding of genre. The organizational schema of literature was far more likely to be based on comedy vs tragedy (vs history) for drama, and types of verse and subject for poetry (like, a "Shakespeare original" sonnet vs his poem "Venus and Adonis" would be distinguished as love sonnet vs narrative poem, not original work vs Ovid fanfic).
It was just a very different literary culture from ours, and most literary cultures are in fact very different from each other, which is why attempts to generalize about fanfic being fundamentally this or that by nature of being derived from other narratives (rather than looking at the impact of contemporary cultural norms and the outsized effect of US copyright law) is so blatantly ahistorical and annoying as I see it.
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