Definitional Debate No. 361

[rhetoretician]

Here we go, philosophers, writers and curmudgeons:

1. I provide a link to Robert Reed's cute little story, A Woman's Best Friend, in Clarkesworld magazine.
    
2. Robert Reed is among most prolific and successful living writers of short-form science fiction. He publishes quite a lot.
    
3. Clarkesworld is a professional market by the standards of the Science

Comments

[rosathome]

Now you're mixing categories. Wicked and Wide Sargasso Sea are absolutely and indubitably fanfic. Good fanfic, obviously, but the only difference between them and the stuff you and I write is that these are printed on a page and people pay good money for them. There are actual characters belonging to someone else that they have used.

Versions of myths fall into quite a different category, imo. Who 'owns' the myth in the first place? Was there ever an 'original' version? By their very nature, myths belong to communities and are retold to each generation in the community. There's no borrowing, because the myth belongs to each teller as much as any other.

And literature which plays off myths isn't fanfic either. Characters and worlds are not imported, only universal themes and tropes. Plots, as you well know, don't belong to anyone. Nor does Cinderella. Or Theseus. Or the Minotaur, come to that.

Though, of course, one could write fanfic based on a particular version of any one of these stories. Someone has asked for Slipper and the Rose fanfic in Yuletide, for instance. But that is a completely different thing from writing your own telling of a Cinderella story.

[rhetoretician]

That's more like it. :)

If we push on the definition a bit, though, the analysis becomes foggier. Mark Twain once pointed out that there's very little writing that can be called truly "original;" it's all derived, at least in part, from antecedent sources and references. (Indeed, that's part of what makes some literature work. T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" derives much of its power from its deliberate referencing of other canonical works.)

We can say that some things, like very old myths, part of the collective consciousness, belonging, as you say, to communities. And I suppose, at the other extreme, that something that I write in my diary and don't show to anyone else is clearly not part of a community or a collective consciousness.

But there are newer myths, and there are pieces of individual authorship that have attained the collective significance of myths. Shakespeare borrowed from specific texts, some of which were not all that well-known at the time, but Shakespeare's own work has achieved the sort of near-universal recognition that allows it to be referenced as a shorthand for other things. (There's an episode of STNG in which Deanna Troi suggests that a person might say simply, "Juliet at her balcony" as a way of referring to a particular type of romantic love.) You might argue that Romeo and Juliet now belongs to the colective consciousness in such a way that works based on it are not "fan fiction" at all, but simply retellings of a shared text.

But if we go that far, then it looks like there's a continuum: as soon as the work is seen by one person, it becomes part of a wider consciousness. Eventually the work may be sufficiently popular that it has "fans," such that works based on it would be "fan fiction." After that the work takes on wider cultural significance, such that works based on it are no longer "fan fiction," but "retellings of myths." But are all these distinctions artificial?

[rosathome]

Twain's point is interesting. It's a bit like the classic distinction between plagiarism (stealing from one person) and research (stealing from 20 people). But I still think you can maintain a much clearer distinction than you seem to be pushing for. If your fiction contains characters and/or world building that are recognisably the same as someone else's, that's fanfic. If it contains similar character traits, ideas, plot elements, and allusions to one or more earlier sources, I really don't think that's fanfic - that's creative reimagination or something. It's usually not that hard to tell the difference, is it?

Let's take the Shakespeare example (which you're right, does have some mythical status but also still refers to specific literary texts). That source material can be used in a number of distinct ways: literary allusion (as in 'Juliet at her balcony'); reappropriating the myth (as in West Side Story); and fanfic (giving us Shakespeare's story from Juliet's POV, say, or filling in some missing moments). They strike me as quite easy to distinguish.

I don't know the source texts Shakespeare used so I couldn't say whether his work could be called fanfic or not. My guess is not. Because even where he's borrowed plots and names, those characters feel fresh and original and recognisably his. But I could be wrong about that.

In the It's a Wonderful Life story you linked to, the point is not 'here's another story which also looks at the possibilities of what might have been using a character who is feeling miserable at Christmas'. It's that it is George and Mary and she is a librarian and he was throwing himself off the bridge. Those are specific characters (not mere names or ciphers) who exist in a specific fictional universe which the reader recognises.

I think the myths are different. I don't believe that they ever belonged to one person or one form. I think they arose within communities and always had multiple ownership and multiple forms. I don't think that Shakespeare's work, say, will ever have the same mythic status as, for instance, fairy tales. Because what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is the specificity of the work: these words, this characterisation, this way of telling the story. Whereas myths can be told in a thousand different ways and still have their mythic quality.

[rhetoretician]

Ah, now, the question of how myths arise, and what myths even are, is even more fascinating.

Richard Slotkin has written a number of interesting books about American literary mythology. (His first book, Regerneration Through Violence, is a classic in the field of American Studies, and well worth reading.) Somewhere in there he defines a myth as a text that distills experiences that existed before it, and which is used as a way of explaining or understanding experiences that come after it. (So, e.g., the Prometheus myth provided a way of understanding how humans, who are so like animals, can possess and control something so apparently godlike as intelligence (i.e., fire). But it now serves serves as a metaphor for the inventor/transgressor, the person who risks self-destruction and condemnation to bring new things into the world and/or better the lives of others.)

In this sense, it seems to me that what is unique/special/important about a myth is not how the narrative came into existence, but how it functions within the culture once it does exist. (The American myth of which Slotkin speaks is the myth of the white frontiersman in a "savage" native world, a man with one foot in civilization and another foot in the "wild," who pushes back the frontier at the same time he cannot bear to live with his "own" kind." Natty Bumpo, Hawkeye, Han Solo.)

Although I agree that myths, by the time they reach the status of myths, have collective ownership and authorship, it seems to me that sometime, somewhere, there must have been one person who told the story the first time.

It is true that what makes Shakespeare special is his language. But the situations and narratives he imagines exist independent of the languge, even if it's the language that catpults them to that status. Hamlet stands for the emblem of the moral person faced with a morally impossible situation (you might say that he's just like Orestes in this sense, but I don't think so).