Meta about Meta, and John H. Watson, M.D.
My post the other night on person and tense was, admittedly, about equal parts tl;dr and navel-gazing (but then, that can describe most non-fiction posts in this journal), but its contents did also point towards a conclusion that I didn't draw then but will now: that our talk of "tenses" and "persons" in reference to fiction are oversimplifications, grammatical terms that just can't handle narrative. Is "Requiem at Reichenbach" (or "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Frankenstein or whatever) told in present tense or past tense? Is it in first-person or second-person? (I'd say the first, since it's Moriarty's rather Holmes' thoughts which we are privy to, but I've received plenty of comment discussing my use of the second-person.) One of my dreams is to write a novel told in alternating narratives, one in first-person and second-person, which finally culminates in "I" meeting "you" at the end.
Not to mention the possibilities like "first-person omniscient" or "third-person telepathic"--the latter being a POV I've written quite a bit, thanks to River and Drusilla.
Janet Burroughway in her textbook Writing Fiction (which I loved in high school because it was much more in-depth and complex than any creative writing work I've read before or since) provides as an alternative a series of questions, only two of which ("Who speaks?" and "To whom?") I remember off the top of my head, but my impulse when encountering a broken system isn't to create a newer, better, much-improved system but instead to ask whether it wasn't the systematizing impulse itself that was flawed in the first place.
Now I'm re-reading my post alongside Kristina Busse's blogpost on Speranza’s Written By the Victors as Exemplary Fantext and the resonances are striking. Victors, which is a novel-length SGA fic I have not read, is made of exactly the phenomena I was discussing on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning) a situation where the narrative itself exists diegetically within the fictional universe. Victors includes seemingly contradictory narratives which are nonetheless assumed to exist within the same fictional universe (i.e. the narratives themselves exist within the same fictional universe, but the events they describe cannot be reconciled and thus do not)--the situation "Requiem at Reichenbach" is in when read alongside the original canon narrated by Watson.
Requiem at Reichenbach: Moriarty's memories of Holme's first case <-- Moriarty's internal monologue as he falls at Reichenbach <-- Alixtii writing a fic for yuletide
Conan Doyle's canon: The adventures of Sherlock Holmes <-- Watson's chronicling of his friends' adventures <-- Sir Arthur writing stories in The Strand
It's the two events in green (and not the two events in red) which are assumed to exist within the same universe--since all of the events in red cannot even exist in the same universe with each other; at the very least, it would be necessary to choose between the Moriarty backstory we are given in "The Final Problem" (where Watson first hears of Moriarty when Holmes is already running for his life) and The Valley of Fear (in which both Watson and Scotland Yard are fully aware of Holmes' obsession well before the events of "The Final Problem" are assumed to take place), which cannot be (easily?) reconciled with each other. To preserve the illusion, we construct the interpretation such that it is Watson rather than Doyle who has made a mistake. (Cf. other works of Sherlockiana, the most famous of course being The Seven-Percent Solution.) And none of this even touches on the subject of Watson's war wound or the question of how Moriarty brothers there were and how many of them were named James. Or the fact that there are stories in Doyle's canon which are not narrated by Watson.
That Doyle's canon has these features is, of course, no surprise: it is the text which gave birth to fandom.
Moriarty in "Requiem" has read the Watsonian canon pre-"The Final Problem" (which is of course assumed to be identical to the corresponding Doylist canon); he even makes a direct reference to a line in A Study in Scarlet at one point, when he compares his own first impressions of Holmes with those of Watson. The sketch we get in canon leaves the status of these diegetic writings rather in doubt; fanon generally imports as much information from the actual world into the fictional world as possible, so that Watson's stories were published in The Strand under Doyle's name, etc. (This line of logic leaves us to assume that all of the people who searched out Holmes to solve their mysteries within the canon after reading Watson's accounts didn't understand the notion of fiction.)
For Kristina, this type of scenario "mirrors fannish and academic disputes in analysis and interpretation by asking the reader to weigh the different historical accounts and documents against one another. As [she has] argued before, fan fiction does not consist only of individual works of art but must be approached as a collectively written, highly intertextual, internally contradictory text which is continually being written through the use of various modes of interface."
This all so very postmodern.
Maybe?
While the use of texts within texts is a common postmodern trope, it also predates postmodernism by several thousand years, unless we are to consider Homer to have been a postmodern when s/he had Odysseus relate to the Phoenician king the story of his journey. OTOH, if one accepts (as I do) along with Umberto Eco that the postmodern is a mode of reading rather than a mode of writing, than The Odyssey is totally fair game. After all, I once wrote a fifteen-page paper in undergrad on Troilus and Criseyde as postmodern text. (Note that T&C also contains multiple contradictory texts-within-texts!)
Not to mention the possibilities like "first-person omniscient" or "third-person telepathic"--the latter being a POV I've written quite a bit, thanks to River and Drusilla.
Janet Burroughway in her textbook Writing Fiction (which I loved in high school because it was much more in-depth and complex than any creative writing work I've read before or since) provides as an alternative a series of questions, only two of which ("Who speaks?" and "To whom?") I remember off the top of my head, but my impulse when encountering a broken system isn't to create a newer, better, much-improved system but instead to ask whether it wasn't the systematizing impulse itself that was flawed in the first place.
Now I'm re-reading my post alongside Kristina Busse's blogpost on Speranza’s Written By the Victors as Exemplary Fantext and the resonances are striking. Victors, which is a novel-length SGA fic I have not read, is made of exactly the phenomena I was discussing on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning) a situation where the narrative itself exists diegetically within the fictional universe. Victors includes seemingly contradictory narratives which are nonetheless assumed to exist within the same fictional universe (i.e. the narratives themselves exist within the same fictional universe, but the events they describe cannot be reconciled and thus do not)--the situation "Requiem at Reichenbach" is in when read alongside the original canon narrated by Watson.
Requiem at Reichenbach: Moriarty's memories of Holme's first case <-- Moriarty's internal monologue as he falls at Reichenbach <-- Alixtii writing a fic for yuletide
Conan Doyle's canon: The adventures of Sherlock Holmes <-- Watson's chronicling of his friends' adventures <-- Sir Arthur writing stories in The Strand
It's the two events in green (and not the two events in red) which are assumed to exist within the same universe--since all of the events in red cannot even exist in the same universe with each other; at the very least, it would be necessary to choose between the Moriarty backstory we are given in "The Final Problem" (where Watson first hears of Moriarty when Holmes is already running for his life) and The Valley of Fear (in which both Watson and Scotland Yard are fully aware of Holmes' obsession well before the events of "The Final Problem" are assumed to take place), which cannot be (easily?) reconciled with each other. To preserve the illusion, we construct the interpretation such that it is Watson rather than Doyle who has made a mistake. (Cf. other works of Sherlockiana, the most famous of course being The Seven-Percent Solution.) And none of this even touches on the subject of Watson's war wound or the question of how Moriarty brothers there were and how many of them were named James. Or the fact that there are stories in Doyle's canon which are not narrated by Watson.
That Doyle's canon has these features is, of course, no surprise: it is the text which gave birth to fandom.
Moriarty in "Requiem" has read the Watsonian canon pre-"The Final Problem" (which is of course assumed to be identical to the corresponding Doylist canon); he even makes a direct reference to a line in A Study in Scarlet at one point, when he compares his own first impressions of Holmes with those of Watson. The sketch we get in canon leaves the status of these diegetic writings rather in doubt; fanon generally imports as much information from the actual world into the fictional world as possible, so that Watson's stories were published in The Strand under Doyle's name, etc. (This line of logic leaves us to assume that all of the people who searched out Holmes to solve their mysteries within the canon after reading Watson's accounts didn't understand the notion of fiction.)
For Kristina, this type of scenario "mirrors fannish and academic disputes in analysis and interpretation by asking the reader to weigh the different historical accounts and documents against one another. As [she has] argued before, fan fiction does not consist only of individual works of art but must be approached as a collectively written, highly intertextual, internally contradictory text which is continually being written through the use of various modes of interface."
This all so very postmodern.
Maybe?
While the use of texts within texts is a common postmodern trope, it also predates postmodernism by several thousand years, unless we are to consider Homer to have been a postmodern when s/he had Odysseus relate to the Phoenician king the story of his journey. OTOH, if one accepts (as I do) along with Umberto Eco that the postmodern is a mode of reading rather than a mode of writing, than The Odyssey is totally fair game. After all, I once wrote a fifteen-page paper in undergrad on Troilus and Criseyde as postmodern text. (Note that T&C also contains multiple contradictory texts-within-texts!)