Random thought of the day: is comic fanfic less interesting than angst?
There's a terrific children's book by James Thurber called The Thirteen Clocks, unfortunately now long out of print, which includes among its many wonders a character whose tears turn into jewels. A useful and valuable trait, and one that would make the production of angst fics such a vital contribution to the gross national product that fanfic writers could, after very little work, afford to retire in comfort to a remote tropical isle, where we would slurp sweet fizzy drinks while receiving pedicures from adoring young men.
Hmm, perhaps I should forget this post and go write some more angst fics.
Well, be that as it may (may it?), Thurber's book included another kind of tears, and the rest of this paragraph is a bit of a spoiler for those of you dead set on tracking the book down at a rare book shop somewhere. It turns out that the lucky font-of-jewels character can cry for two reasons: sorrow and laughter. The jewels produced from tears of sorrow are normal jewels that you might find at your local Diamond Den at the mall. No, they're not genuine zirconium: they're permanent. What you see is what you get; the diamonds and rubies and so on are indeed diamonds and rubies. The tears of laughter, though, are different: they produce jewels that last for a couple of weeks, and then turn back into tears.
Thurber uses this nifty concept to further his plot in ways I won't describe. It's a cool book; read it if you can dig up a copy. But like other good fairy tales, this one resonates because there's an Idea hiding in there; you're free to ignore it and just enjoy the story, but it's still lurking, peering out at you shyly from the underbrush of the plot. The idea, stated baldly, is this. Sorrow is more important than laughter. Something about sorrow is deep and lasting; comedy is the light froth on the surface of our minds -- not an insight, but a distraction.
Comedy, in this view, is something of the Impoverished and Slightly Dotty Cousin in the extended family of artistic forms. I think this suspicion of comedy is pretty wide spread. As the Harry Potter books have turned increasingly from comedy to angst, the respect accorded them by mainstream literary critics has shot up accordingly ("darker" and "more complex" seem to be favorite words in reviews of the latest entry). Tolkien was brilliant at comedy, but when it came time to construct the cosmology of Middle-earth, there's a Vala who weeps for the Sorrows of Arda, but no equivalent Vala who chuckles at the Pratfalls of Arda. Back in the real world, or at any rate in Hollywood, this preference for the Dark Side explains things like the Robin Williams phenomenon: actors who are absolute geniuses at comedy feel they have not proved themselves until they've starred in a movie in which they have a terminal disease or some other source of angst: Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and I suppose Jim Carey are cases in point.
I'm fascinated by this, among other reasons for the purely selfish one that I write both angst and comedy, though comedy is by far the most natural mode for me. But even for me, writing comedy feels -- hmmm. Okay. It feels cheap. WAIT! I'm not saying comedy IS cheap; I'm saying that for me, personally, as a writer, I just feel I've done less when I've written comedy than when I've dived into the Dark Pit of Angst and emerged trailing weeping readers in my wake. And I'm wondering why this should be the case.
Is it just me? Um, I'm not sure. Actually one purpose of this post is to ask, and as a mostly-comic writer I kind of dread the answers I'll get. Think of your favorite stories. Comedy is popular, sure; but is that really why people turn to fanfic? There may very well be a comic fic or two or three in your personal top five favorite fics -- there are in mine. However: I could be totally wrong (tell me if I am), but I think that if someone put you at the point of a gun and said: tell me the single fic that does the most for your understanding of canon / your OTP, the fic you picked wouldn't be comedy. I'm not talking about picking a desert island fic here, by the way -- look, if you were marooned on a desert island, you'd want something to cheer you up. At the moment I'm more interested in the way fanfic fits into the life you have. If most people had to choose between drama and comedy in their fanfic, would they go for something 'deeper'?
I suspect they would. In a way, this reaction seems wholly natural -- but I'm wondering WHY it feels natural. Angst and comedy actually have a lot in common. At a really basic level, both of them can make us cry. Tears of sorrow and tears of laughter are all about the relationship between our bodies and our minds. If a story makes us cry, then words on the page have kind of reached into our bodies and done something to them. Wow. Very cool that language can do that, and maybe it's the coolness of this trick that makes "oh, it made me cry!" such a coveted piece of feedback for an angst story. That kind of feedback is proof that the story works -- actually leaps off the screen and does something in the world.
I suppose I should say in passing that the third Big Fanfic Genre -- um, porn -- also leaps off the page and causes a physical reaction. But I'm only working on my second cup of coffee right now and can't quite contemplate this, so I'll just shut up. (Draco: Look at what Potter is doing to me NOW! I am such a sex god! Harry: [inarticulate remark with his mouth full] Teasel: Go AWAY, you two, I need caffeiiiiiiine!) Ahem. Suffice it to say that three big subdivisions of fanfic -- angst, comedy, and porn -- have a common job description, and it goes something like this. See that reader? Make something happen to her body.
But not all bodily reactions are created equal. Leaving porn aside, tossing and turning in its dark velvet-lined den of sin -- Thurbur may have been right to think that tears of laughter can't be transformed into something permanent and useful in the way that tears of sorrow can. Or at any rate that's the way fanfic sometimes behaves. Think of one of the most common ways fanfic uses canon -- as a kind of inverse parody of the source text. If parody latches onto serious elements from the original source and pokes fun at them, inverse parody does the opposite: it takes details that are comic throwaways in the source text, and it tries to imagine what would happen inside the heads of real, fully imagined characters if these details were truly a part of their world.
A lot of fic in both LotR and Harry Potter has to find a way to grapple with these comic details. LotR as a book, and the HP books as individual entries in a series, all start out with opening chapters that are essentially comic. In the first four HP books, the world of the Dursleys could have been taken out of Roald Dahl's or Lemony Snicket's comically exaggerated portrayals of Hideous Childhood Situations. If we knew of a real kid imprisoned under a stairwell, we'd call the police; in at least the first HP books, it's fodder for the kind of kid gross-out humor with which adults who have taken children on long car trips are intimately familiar. (Adult in the front seat: Damn, how far is it to the next gas station? Kid in the back seat: Booger booger booger booger booger! *chortle*)
In Tolkien, the comedy of the opening chapters is more donnish but still there. The Shire is many things, but one of them is funny. It's funny -- in a joyous, happy sort of way -- that there's this land full of little people, apparently innocent of sexuality, who spend much of their time eating and drinking and giving each other presents. From the perspective of twenty-first century readers, there's an uncomfortable side to this comedy, too: Sam is used for the purposes of comic relief one or two times too many, and it's always a shock to turn directly from the more complex Sam of RotK to the somewhat sketchier and funnier character from the earlier chapters of Fellowship.
If fanfic wants to take these early comic chapters into account when it explores the characters, it has to incorporate material that makes perfect sense in a comic universe but that can seem bizarre or heartless if we think of the characters as full-fledged people with ordinary feelings and reactions. HP writers have a tough job in this respect: the early books in particular are full of comic throwaways that become something quite different, if you leave the comic assumption of heartlessness behind and start thinking of the books as about real children. At one point Harry passes a classroom in which someone has turned his best friend into a badger. Harry is mildly curious and wants to stop and see what happens, but he hurries off on business of his own. It's funny in context (I have this theory that badgers are inherently funny), but if you're writing a fic in which you want to show what it would really feel like to live in a magical universe, what happens to this episode? I'd say it would get a lot darker, though hopefully NOT in a fic called "Claws" that explores the Horror of it All from the badger's point of view.
Similarly, in LotR, fic has to deal with all kinds of questions that receive only a light comic glossing treatment in the books themselves. If hobbits are so addicted to food, what does that say about their sexuality? If the question seems ridiculous, that's because you're thinking in the comic mode, a mode that asks us to laugh at minor vices and run along. I think that to some extent Tolkien is asking us to do that in these chapters. But a lot of fanfic doesn't have that luxury of laugh-and-run, because it's engaged in a project of world-building. Fanfic opens up questions like this: based on what we see of hobbit society in these these chapters, what else can we extrapolate about Shire culture and how it affects the characters? To answer these questions, you have to deal with details that in the original are comic. Comic throwaways can become social problems; a character's status as comic relief can morph into a serious exploration of class differences or the misery of social exclusion.
Hmmm. Looking back at what I've just written, I see that in my description of fanfic I seem to have replicated the distinction between comedy and angst that I've been trying to question. I've used words like "deep" to describe angst fics and "heartless" to describe comedy. But maybe this description, one that I've fallen into without really thinking, is an explanation, or the beginning of one, for why we tend to think more of angst than of comedy. Angst and comedy are polar opposites on what you might call the scale of empathy. A lot of comedy works only if we turn off our empathy for the characters. Angst, as a genre, is something that evokes in us a kind of hyper-empathy for the characters; we become Desdemonas who hear their sad tales and weep for them.
Embarrassing as it is for me as a comic writer to admit, maybe there's something good about our suspicion of comedy. Empathy is a good thing, right? And perhaps a genre that requires us to suspend our empathy for a while isn't so terrific after all.
I'm not saying comedy has nothing to say to us. First of all, sharing jokes with others is one of the most powerful forms of social glue I can think of -- though it's a glue that can be toxic to outsiders. If a community is formed or nurtured by laughing at something outside of itself, there's something inherently exclusionary about the laughter that (maybe) should give us pause. That issue aside, however, comedy might have another source of value: maybe it can poke us out of the excesses of our angsty empathy. It might be something that restores our perspective by making problems seem smaller, less important.
Perspective on our problems is a good thing to have. But at the end of the day, is a corrective for our empathy really what we need most? Should we, as people, be after bigger game -- connecting with each other instead of shutting each other out? As readers, are we more inspired by parody -- which turns characters into figures of fun -- or by the anti-parody of angst or drama -- which turns figures of fun into characters? Since jokes come to me more easily than tears, I'm not so sure I want to step out of my comic bubble and hear the answers to these questions.
Hmm, perhaps I should forget this post and go write some more angst fics.
Well, be that as it may (may it?), Thurber's book included another kind of tears, and the rest of this paragraph is a bit of a spoiler for those of you dead set on tracking the book down at a rare book shop somewhere. It turns out that the lucky font-of-jewels character can cry for two reasons: sorrow and laughter. The jewels produced from tears of sorrow are normal jewels that you might find at your local Diamond Den at the mall. No, they're not genuine zirconium: they're permanent. What you see is what you get; the diamonds and rubies and so on are indeed diamonds and rubies. The tears of laughter, though, are different: they produce jewels that last for a couple of weeks, and then turn back into tears.
Thurber uses this nifty concept to further his plot in ways I won't describe. It's a cool book; read it if you can dig up a copy. But like other good fairy tales, this one resonates because there's an Idea hiding in there; you're free to ignore it and just enjoy the story, but it's still lurking, peering out at you shyly from the underbrush of the plot. The idea, stated baldly, is this. Sorrow is more important than laughter. Something about sorrow is deep and lasting; comedy is the light froth on the surface of our minds -- not an insight, but a distraction.
Comedy, in this view, is something of the Impoverished and Slightly Dotty Cousin in the extended family of artistic forms. I think this suspicion of comedy is pretty wide spread. As the Harry Potter books have turned increasingly from comedy to angst, the respect accorded them by mainstream literary critics has shot up accordingly ("darker" and "more complex" seem to be favorite words in reviews of the latest entry). Tolkien was brilliant at comedy, but when it came time to construct the cosmology of Middle-earth, there's a Vala who weeps for the Sorrows of Arda, but no equivalent Vala who chuckles at the Pratfalls of Arda. Back in the real world, or at any rate in Hollywood, this preference for the Dark Side explains things like the Robin Williams phenomenon: actors who are absolute geniuses at comedy feel they have not proved themselves until they've starred in a movie in which they have a terminal disease or some other source of angst: Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and I suppose Jim Carey are cases in point.
I'm fascinated by this, among other reasons for the purely selfish one that I write both angst and comedy, though comedy is by far the most natural mode for me. But even for me, writing comedy feels -- hmmm. Okay. It feels cheap. WAIT! I'm not saying comedy IS cheap; I'm saying that for me, personally, as a writer, I just feel I've done less when I've written comedy than when I've dived into the Dark Pit of Angst and emerged trailing weeping readers in my wake. And I'm wondering why this should be the case.
Is it just me? Um, I'm not sure. Actually one purpose of this post is to ask, and as a mostly-comic writer I kind of dread the answers I'll get. Think of your favorite stories. Comedy is popular, sure; but is that really why people turn to fanfic? There may very well be a comic fic or two or three in your personal top five favorite fics -- there are in mine. However: I could be totally wrong (tell me if I am), but I think that if someone put you at the point of a gun and said: tell me the single fic that does the most for your understanding of canon / your OTP, the fic you picked wouldn't be comedy. I'm not talking about picking a desert island fic here, by the way -- look, if you were marooned on a desert island, you'd want something to cheer you up. At the moment I'm more interested in the way fanfic fits into the life you have. If most people had to choose between drama and comedy in their fanfic, would they go for something 'deeper'?
I suspect they would. In a way, this reaction seems wholly natural -- but I'm wondering WHY it feels natural. Angst and comedy actually have a lot in common. At a really basic level, both of them can make us cry. Tears of sorrow and tears of laughter are all about the relationship between our bodies and our minds. If a story makes us cry, then words on the page have kind of reached into our bodies and done something to them. Wow. Very cool that language can do that, and maybe it's the coolness of this trick that makes "oh, it made me cry!" such a coveted piece of feedback for an angst story. That kind of feedback is proof that the story works -- actually leaps off the screen and does something in the world.
I suppose I should say in passing that the third Big Fanfic Genre -- um, porn -- also leaps off the page and causes a physical reaction. But I'm only working on my second cup of coffee right now and can't quite contemplate this, so I'll just shut up. (Draco: Look at what Potter is doing to me NOW! I am such a sex god! Harry: [inarticulate remark with his mouth full] Teasel: Go AWAY, you two, I need caffeiiiiiiine!) Ahem. Suffice it to say that three big subdivisions of fanfic -- angst, comedy, and porn -- have a common job description, and it goes something like this. See that reader? Make something happen to her body.
But not all bodily reactions are created equal. Leaving porn aside, tossing and turning in its dark velvet-lined den of sin -- Thurbur may have been right to think that tears of laughter can't be transformed into something permanent and useful in the way that tears of sorrow can. Or at any rate that's the way fanfic sometimes behaves. Think of one of the most common ways fanfic uses canon -- as a kind of inverse parody of the source text. If parody latches onto serious elements from the original source and pokes fun at them, inverse parody does the opposite: it takes details that are comic throwaways in the source text, and it tries to imagine what would happen inside the heads of real, fully imagined characters if these details were truly a part of their world.
A lot of fic in both LotR and Harry Potter has to find a way to grapple with these comic details. LotR as a book, and the HP books as individual entries in a series, all start out with opening chapters that are essentially comic. In the first four HP books, the world of the Dursleys could have been taken out of Roald Dahl's or Lemony Snicket's comically exaggerated portrayals of Hideous Childhood Situations. If we knew of a real kid imprisoned under a stairwell, we'd call the police; in at least the first HP books, it's fodder for the kind of kid gross-out humor with which adults who have taken children on long car trips are intimately familiar. (Adult in the front seat: Damn, how far is it to the next gas station? Kid in the back seat: Booger booger booger booger booger! *chortle*)
In Tolkien, the comedy of the opening chapters is more donnish but still there. The Shire is many things, but one of them is funny. It's funny -- in a joyous, happy sort of way -- that there's this land full of little people, apparently innocent of sexuality, who spend much of their time eating and drinking and giving each other presents. From the perspective of twenty-first century readers, there's an uncomfortable side to this comedy, too: Sam is used for the purposes of comic relief one or two times too many, and it's always a shock to turn directly from the more complex Sam of RotK to the somewhat sketchier and funnier character from the earlier chapters of Fellowship.
If fanfic wants to take these early comic chapters into account when it explores the characters, it has to incorporate material that makes perfect sense in a comic universe but that can seem bizarre or heartless if we think of the characters as full-fledged people with ordinary feelings and reactions. HP writers have a tough job in this respect: the early books in particular are full of comic throwaways that become something quite different, if you leave the comic assumption of heartlessness behind and start thinking of the books as about real children. At one point Harry passes a classroom in which someone has turned his best friend into a badger. Harry is mildly curious and wants to stop and see what happens, but he hurries off on business of his own. It's funny in context (I have this theory that badgers are inherently funny), but if you're writing a fic in which you want to show what it would really feel like to live in a magical universe, what happens to this episode? I'd say it would get a lot darker, though hopefully NOT in a fic called "Claws" that explores the Horror of it All from the badger's point of view.
Similarly, in LotR, fic has to deal with all kinds of questions that receive only a light comic glossing treatment in the books themselves. If hobbits are so addicted to food, what does that say about their sexuality? If the question seems ridiculous, that's because you're thinking in the comic mode, a mode that asks us to laugh at minor vices and run along. I think that to some extent Tolkien is asking us to do that in these chapters. But a lot of fanfic doesn't have that luxury of laugh-and-run, because it's engaged in a project of world-building. Fanfic opens up questions like this: based on what we see of hobbit society in these these chapters, what else can we extrapolate about Shire culture and how it affects the characters? To answer these questions, you have to deal with details that in the original are comic. Comic throwaways can become social problems; a character's status as comic relief can morph into a serious exploration of class differences or the misery of social exclusion.
Hmmm. Looking back at what I've just written, I see that in my description of fanfic I seem to have replicated the distinction between comedy and angst that I've been trying to question. I've used words like "deep" to describe angst fics and "heartless" to describe comedy. But maybe this description, one that I've fallen into without really thinking, is an explanation, or the beginning of one, for why we tend to think more of angst than of comedy. Angst and comedy are polar opposites on what you might call the scale of empathy. A lot of comedy works only if we turn off our empathy for the characters. Angst, as a genre, is something that evokes in us a kind of hyper-empathy for the characters; we become Desdemonas who hear their sad tales and weep for them.
Embarrassing as it is for me as a comic writer to admit, maybe there's something good about our suspicion of comedy. Empathy is a good thing, right? And perhaps a genre that requires us to suspend our empathy for a while isn't so terrific after all.
I'm not saying comedy has nothing to say to us. First of all, sharing jokes with others is one of the most powerful forms of social glue I can think of -- though it's a glue that can be toxic to outsiders. If a community is formed or nurtured by laughing at something outside of itself, there's something inherently exclusionary about the laughter that (maybe) should give us pause. That issue aside, however, comedy might have another source of value: maybe it can poke us out of the excesses of our angsty empathy. It might be something that restores our perspective by making problems seem smaller, less important.
Perspective on our problems is a good thing to have. But at the end of the day, is a corrective for our empathy really what we need most? Should we, as people, be after bigger game -- connecting with each other instead of shutting each other out? As readers, are we more inspired by parody -- which turns characters into figures of fun -- or by the anti-parody of angst or drama -- which turns figures of fun into characters? Since jokes come to me more easily than tears, I'm not so sure I want to step out of my comic bubble and hear the answers to these questions.