Speculative reading
There's a huge thread at Making Light about the uses and abuses of fanfic. It made me think again about an idea I kicked around back when I read the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup. What struck me at the time was the sheer number of humungous threads that took a book or story and started speculating about the implications of the world-building, whether it was the artificial wombs of Bujold's Barrayar books or the personality-conditioning tapes in Cherryh's Cyteen or the military service requirement of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. As an English major, I had been taught that the job of literary criticism was explication of the text, but here were readers who left the text behind and tried to work out how the ideas expressed in the text could be elaborated further or in different directions and what other social implications they had that the author hadn't addressed. I came to think of this as speculative reading.
The discussion of fanfic makes me think that it does something similar, in that it's a form in which readers follow their own ideas about an established literary universe. It's another way of working out implications and further developments of a story or text. And this has got me thinking about Ioan Couliano's theory in The Tree of Gnosis that human religious beliefs can be seen as a systematic working out of binary variations on other beliefs, so that if one group believes that god is a benevolent figure, another group will believe that god is a malevolent figure, and if one group believes that god is a benevolent male, another will believe that god is a benevolent female, and another will believe god is a malevolent male and another that god is a malevolent female and so on, with the orthodoxies trying to stamp out the numberless "heretical" variations. Does fanfic work this way as well, with different readers finding aspects of the story to reverse and then explore along that axis? Certainly the smuttier fanfic seems to work through every sexual coupling possible in a given group of characters.
One thing all of this gets at is that we experience Story as malleable. A story is never finished or final, and so we seek the directors cut, the outtakes, the variant edits in movies as well. Criterion just released a DVD set with three variant cuts of Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin, one of which was made recently by fans scholars trying to recreate Welles' original intent. Text itself is variable, and so we have the variant versions of Shakespeare's plays and scholarly arguments about the best or original or most complete version. These are all different forms of speculative reading. Story is protean, changing from one form to another in our hands as we chase after a fleeting glimpse of what really happened, what's really there, what the meaning is, heading asymptotically toward the horizon of the possible and the dream of getting it on with the dream.
The discussion of fanfic makes me think that it does something similar, in that it's a form in which readers follow their own ideas about an established literary universe. It's another way of working out implications and further developments of a story or text. And this has got me thinking about Ioan Couliano's theory in The Tree of Gnosis that human religious beliefs can be seen as a systematic working out of binary variations on other beliefs, so that if one group believes that god is a benevolent figure, another group will believe that god is a malevolent figure, and if one group believes that god is a benevolent male, another will believe that god is a benevolent female, and another will believe god is a malevolent male and another that god is a malevolent female and so on, with the orthodoxies trying to stamp out the numberless "heretical" variations. Does fanfic work this way as well, with different readers finding aspects of the story to reverse and then explore along that axis? Certainly the smuttier fanfic seems to work through every sexual coupling possible in a given group of characters.
One thing all of this gets at is that we experience Story as malleable. A story is never finished or final, and so we seek the directors cut, the outtakes, the variant edits in movies as well. Criterion just released a DVD set with three variant cuts of Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin, one of which was made recently by fans scholars trying to recreate Welles' original intent. Text itself is variable, and so we have the variant versions of Shakespeare's plays and scholarly arguments about the best or original or most complete version. These are all different forms of speculative reading. Story is protean, changing from one form to another in our hands as we chase after a fleeting glimpse of what really happened, what's really there, what the meaning is, heading asymptotically toward the horizon of the possible and the dream of getting it on with the dream.