|
In
a discussion in
firesignwriter's journal I
described fanfiction as a conversation with and about the text, and that's
the still the best description I can come up with. Fanfiction is derivative
- it wouldn't or couldn't exist without the source text. That seems pretty
obvious. And for it to be fanfiction, I think it has to be written
not for profit, but for the sheer enjoyment of playing in someone else's
sandbox, without hope of monetary compensation. Beyond that, I'm not sure I
can draw a distinction between published derivative fiction (like Laurie
King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice) and fanfiction. For the purposes
of this essay, I'm going to consider professional derivative work (novels,
comics, and movies) and amateur fanwork (stories, art, and vids) to be the
same sort of thing. All of my specific examples have been drawn from
professional published/produced work, rather than amateur fanwork.
Obviously there are many reasons why someone chooses to write derivative
fiction rather than original fiction. Authorial intent is something that's
difficult to pinpoint, so in this post, I'm not going to examine motives,
but effects. Whatever the author's intent, derivative fiction always
functions as a comment on the original text. When multiple authors have
written derivative fiction based on a text (for example Sherlock Holmes
pastiches), then the various derivations "converse" not only with the
original text, but with each other as well.
I keep coming back to the idea of a playscript. When I see a performance of
Hamlet, the director has taken Shakespeare's script and given it a
spin that's unique to that production. But, as an audience member, I'm not
viewing the production fresh, without any preconceived notions. As I watch,
I'm also aware of other productions I've seen, famous productions I never
saw, but I've heard about, criticism and analysis I've read about the play,
etc. It's impossible to experience an older play that's been performed many
times as a new work.
Fanfiction is the same way. When I write a story based on Pirates of the
Caribbean, I'm responding to the movie and exploring the world, the
characters or the themes of the movie. And because I'm not writing fanfic
in a vacuum, I'm also responding to the professional reviews I've read, to
the meta posts people have written, and to the other stories I've read set
in that universe.
So, fanfiction is derivative fiction that responds to the source material
and to other derivative texts. In a way, it's the ultimate in media res
- not only is the reader pulled into the middle of the story (necessarily,
because no matter where the derivative story is set chronologically, the
reader is already familiar with the setting and/or the characters), but
she's also approaching the story with preformed ideas about the characters
and situations. Fanfic writers may be writing in spite of their readers'
expectations, or in keeping with them, but either way, fanfiction is written
with the knowledge that the reader will be approaching the text with a
familiarity with the source text, and probably some of the secondary
material (either criticism or derivative fiction). That, to me, is the
value of derivative fiction of any kind; the writer can assume that the
reader is familiar with what has gone before and proceed from that point.
Fanfiction responds to the original text in many different ways. The one
we're probably most familiar with is a story that covers events that are
missing in the original (either because they occurred before or after the
time period covered by the original text, or because they were "offstage"
and weren't described by the original author). Scarlet by Alexandra
Ripley is the authorized sequel to Gone With the Wind - it goes on to
tell the further adventures of Scarlet O'Hara, in the same way that much
fanfic takes the end of the original story as its point of departure, and
simply continues the story as the author would like to see it play out. For
some reason Jane Austen novels are particularly popular choices for this
treatment; there's a whole slew of them listed
here.
Another popular form of derivative fiction takes minor characters from the
original source and fleshes them out. The most famous example of this may
be Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which takes
two bit players from Hamlet and makes them the center of the play.
The events of both plays unfold in the exact same way, but we get an
entirely different perspective on them. A more extreme change of
perspective is presented in Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, which
confronts the racism inherent in Gone With the Wind by retelling the
story from the pov of the African American characters. Randall's book is
less faithful to the canon of GWTW, but it is still clearly
derivative - in fact the changes she's made to the canon are a deliberate
part of the project to reframe the text and reveal its racist
underpinnings. However it's handled, derivative fiction that uses minor
characters from the primary source is closer to original fiction, because
there's more opportunity for the writer to shape the characters to his or
her specifications rather than the original author's (a character like
Lieutenant Groves is very nearly a blank slate - there's so little canon
about him that a fanwriter can develop him into almost anyone she or he
likes).
Closer still to original fiction is what fanfic writers call Alternate
Universe or Alternate Reality stories - a story in which the original
characters and situations are placed in a new setting. For example, Helen
Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary is a loose, modernized adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice, and the Coen Brothers' film Oh Brother, Where
Art Thou is heavily influenced by Homer's "The Odyssey." Could these
stories have been told without using the references to earlier texts?
Absolutely. But those references enrich the texts and give them a resonance
that they otherwise would have lacked. I think this technique can come off
as gimmicky to some readers /audience members (especially when the
characterizations aren't handled very carefully), but it's still a
legitimate way of responding to the source text.
Sometimes derivative fiction is only interested in a character from the
source text, rather than recreating the original world or scenarios. Philip
Jose Farmer's Riverworld series is a huge crossover featuring famous
historical figures as well as characters from literature (Sir Richard
Francis Burton, Odysseus, and Cyrano de Bergerac, among others) in an
entirely new setting. Alan Moore did the same thing in his League of
Extraordinary Gentleman comic, in which he used various characters from
fiction, but created a new world in which they interact. Often in these
cases, the author may twist the characters or reshape them in some way, but
they are still recognizable as those from the original source. In a
somewhat more distant derivation, there's Warren Ellis' Planetary
comic, which uses characters obviously derived from other comic and literary
universes, although they've been recast and often renamed (for example "The
Four" are clearly based on the Fantastic Four, but Ellis has reinterpreted
them with a modern sensibility). The changes he's made set up an implicit
contrast between the (real) world that influenced the creators of the
original characters and the modern world.
In contrast, some derivative fiction is primarily concerned with the world
from the original text, and peoples it with new characters. Sena Jeter
Nasland's Ahab's Wife is explicitly set in the world of Herman
Melville's Moby Dick, but all the major characters are of her own
invention. She could easily have told the same story with no references to
Moby Dick at all, and yet her text functions as a mirror image of
Melville's account, expanding on the world he created and balancing the
masculine world view of Moby Dick with a more feminine perspective.
In my opinion, all of these various ways of responding to a source text are
equally valid and useful. Each variation illuminates a different aspect of
the source text - changing the characters' circumstances allows the author
to explore what aspects of their personalities were shaped by the canon
situations and what aspects are more intrinsic, removing the canon
characters and introducing new ones allows the author to explore the canon
world in ways that he or she might otherwise be able to, etc. Of course,
all derivative fiction should be based on the source text in some way
(otherwise it's not derivative), and the best derivative fiction makes it
clear to the reader how the author extrapolated his or her story from the
source. But for me, as a reader or a writer, it's not useful to categorize
some of these kinds of stories as fanfiction and others as something else.
I read fanfiction not only to get more of what I loved in canon (although
that's certainly an attraction, and is probably what the majority of
fanfiction offers), but also to explore the world, characters, and ideas
introduced by canon in less direct ways. Stories that deviate further from
canon, for example AUs or stories which significantly reinterpret canon
events, provide a legitimate and interesting commentary on the source text,
and, for myself, I'm not interested in a definition of fanfiction which
would exclude these sorts of stories.
|
|