Towards a New Usage of Canon in Doctor Who Fandom
One of the more amusing -- and slightly frustrating -- things that comes up in Doctor Who fandom is canon. Usually, canon comes up in the form of a question: "Is The Enemy Within considered canon?" or "Is there anything in canon that explains why the Doctor left Gallifrey?" What's being asked is fairly clear. It all comes down to a question of orthodoxy, a question of "does this fit into the official/real story of the Doctor?"
It's a fair question, but there's a problem. There is no official or real story of the Doctor. The BBC has never had anyone who was responsible for establishing an internally consistent time-line or back-story for the Doctor's universe. In fact, each of the executive producers in the shows history have been encouraged to place entertaining stories above coherent continuity. Each show-runner has picked their favorite bits from what has gone before, and ignored or ret-conned the rest. This is nowhere more blatant than in RTD's "Last Great Time War," which was (according to Davies himself) his excuse for any and all departures from "the facts" as portrayed in all previous Doctor Who media. Steven Moffat's invention of the "wibbly-wobbly ball of timey-wimey stuff" for the episode "Blink" could easily be seen as a corollary to be applied to apparent continuity gaffes in the new series.
In short, there is no one true story, no definitive canon for Doctor Who. The people who make the show, apparently, don't want there to be one, either. There are good reasons for this, primarily the fact that having a complex litany of established facts, dates, and events can be limiting to future storytellers. Consider the future-history of Earth as established, revised, and re-revised over in the Star Trek 'verse. Things that sounded futuristic to the shows original writers and audiences in the 1960s were already outdated (sometimes embarrassingly so) by the time of the making of ST:TNG. So the history of Earth was ret-conned to be more in line with what sounded exciting and futuristic to audiences of the 1980s. This occurred again with each new spin-off, each new movie, until the show has diverged so many times not just from real history, but from its own fictional history, that one wonders if they couldn't use a Time War of their own. (Oh, wait, wasn't that the point of the first several seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise? But I digress...)
Further, devotion to such a canon can create situations where the current story is incomprehensible to anyone who is not already familiar with the shows back-story. Some critics of Andrew Cartmel's tenure as Executive Producer on Doctor Who have leveled this complaint against certain stories of the Seventh Doctor. This is certainly true among comic books, where some stories seem to spend as many words on editorial notes of the "...as shown in issue #137" type as they do on dialog.
But if Doctor Who has no canon, and if maintenance of a canon is actually undesirable, then what's to keep the show from going entirely off the rails? More importantly, how are we, the fans, to judge if a particular piece of text (be it a novel, a comic, or fan fiction) really fits in to our favorite 'verse? After all, that's what it's really all about, yes? We want to be able to build a coherent meta-fiction into which all of the stories of the Doctor and his world (or at least the ones we like) fit together into a self-reinforcing whole. Once we have that, we have a rule by which we can include or exclude new offerings. We have a canon of orthodoxy.
The idea of a canon of orthodoxy comes to us from theology, specifically the idea of Biblical canon. Prior to the fourth century C.E., there was no established Bible among the various young Christian churches. Each local church used whatever gospels and other texts it had to hand, including or excluding new texts as the folks running that particular church saw fit. There were more than 30 gospels floating around at the time, after all, and no one was still alive who could say whether or not any of them were factually true. The basic list of "official" books of the Bible wasn't complete until councils led by St. Augustine gave the Roman church's official "this is it."
The point of all that wrangling was a desire to have an official set of "true texts" by which the various versions of Christianity and all the myriad religious texts could be judged. Anything that agreed with the established canon was probably OK, anything that disagreed with it was heresy. Which, judging by some of the arguments I've seen online, is the same way many fans want to treat fictional canon...
The use of the term "canon" to describe the official fictional back-story comes to us from Sherlock Homles fans. It was a game among them to speak of the Great Detective as if he were an actual historical figure, and as if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were merely the "literary agent" through which Dr. Watson published his tales of adventure. Many attempts to derrive a biography of Holmes from the stories were attempted, but they all ran aground on the same problem: the stories were not consistent. Between the original works of Doyle, the various pastiches, the plays, and the fan-works, the Great Detective's life was a hopeless muddle.
The simple solution was to declare the stories written by Doyle himself to be the canon (a term used as an intentional, and humorous, reference to Biblical canon). Anything which fit with the works of Doyle was at least potentially part of Holmes' biography, the rest was mere fantasy. (I am indebted to Paul Cornell for the information about Holmes fandom, and for inspiring the thoughts that led to this essay.) Of course, there were inconsistencies among Doyle's writings as well, but those were easier to pass over and more fun to debate.
This concept of canon works just fine for a body of work from a single author. Over in Harry Potter fandom, for instance, if you want to know what's cannon, there are just seven books you have to search through. This isn't to say that there aren't disagreements about whether or not things said by the J.K. Rowling in interviews and other writings should be included in the canon, just that there is a clear starting point. These books form the official, true story, and anything else is some kind of alternate universe.
Applying this to anything that is the work of multiple authors, over a long time, gets difficult, and leads to situations such as previously noted with Star Trek. This, despite the fact that Paramount Pictures (who own the franchise) hires folks to keep the Trek canon together.
There is, fortunately, another kind of canon, one which handles multiple-author works, and one which we could apply handily to Doctor Who. This is "canon" as used when referring to "The Western Canon" or "The Canon of English Literature." This canon is a list of the most influential works in the English language, the trope setters which have shaped the idiom of the language. It's actually a whole lot of lists, composed by various publishers and academics. Most of them agree that the King James Bible and the collected works of William Shakespeare belong on the list, but the rest of it is up for debate.
The Western Canon is not a canon of orthodoxy. No one argues that a story set at the end of the Roman Republic is somehow wrong because it contradicts Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. But to write a story about Caesar's assassination is to invite the comparison. No, the Western Canon is a canon of understanding.
The point of such a canon is that there are some works whose influence is so wide-spread, and so lasting, that one cannot claim a deep understanding of what's going on in English literature without some familiarity with them. The works of the Western Canon gave us much of the symbolic lexicon, the basic tropes and images which have informed almost all writing in the language. Shakespeare did not invent the idea of people falling in love against the wishes of their families and societies, but the way he wrote Romeo and Juliet has shaped the way people think about "star-cross'd lovers" ever since.
What I'm suggesting is that there are particular individual texts -- TV broadcasts, novels, whatever -- whose impact on Doctor Who as a whole has been so great that everything else has been shaped by their inclusion in the overall text of the series. These would be the definitive stories, not because the defined the facts of the 'verse, but because they defined the shape of the ideas which could be expressed through Doctor Who. "The War Games" introduced the Time Lords, and "The Three Doctors" explained something of how they invented time travel. "Genesis of the Daleks" introduced Davros. There are other examples, and doubtless there would be endless debate over which would be included in a canon such as I am proposing.
In essence, I am proposing that we'd get better results -- insofar as the fan fiction we write, or in explaining why we do or don't like particular ideas in the stories -- if we focused less on the details of exactly which years the UNIT stories take place, and more with whether or not new stories live up to or fit in with the best of the old. To do that, we have to have a best-of list based as much in thoughtful critique of the stories as in simply whether or not one thinks Jaimie looks hot in a kilt.
Cross-posted to doctorwho, new_who, and my personal journal.
It's a fair question, but there's a problem. There is no official or real story of the Doctor. The BBC has never had anyone who was responsible for establishing an internally consistent time-line or back-story for the Doctor's universe. In fact, each of the executive producers in the shows history have been encouraged to place entertaining stories above coherent continuity. Each show-runner has picked their favorite bits from what has gone before, and ignored or ret-conned the rest. This is nowhere more blatant than in RTD's "Last Great Time War," which was (according to Davies himself) his excuse for any and all departures from "the facts" as portrayed in all previous Doctor Who media. Steven Moffat's invention of the "wibbly-wobbly ball of timey-wimey stuff" for the episode "Blink" could easily be seen as a corollary to be applied to apparent continuity gaffes in the new series.
In short, there is no one true story, no definitive canon for Doctor Who. The people who make the show, apparently, don't want there to be one, either. There are good reasons for this, primarily the fact that having a complex litany of established facts, dates, and events can be limiting to future storytellers. Consider the future-history of Earth as established, revised, and re-revised over in the Star Trek 'verse. Things that sounded futuristic to the shows original writers and audiences in the 1960s were already outdated (sometimes embarrassingly so) by the time of the making of ST:TNG. So the history of Earth was ret-conned to be more in line with what sounded exciting and futuristic to audiences of the 1980s. This occurred again with each new spin-off, each new movie, until the show has diverged so many times not just from real history, but from its own fictional history, that one wonders if they couldn't use a Time War of their own. (Oh, wait, wasn't that the point of the first several seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise? But I digress...)
Further, devotion to such a canon can create situations where the current story is incomprehensible to anyone who is not already familiar with the shows back-story. Some critics of Andrew Cartmel's tenure as Executive Producer on Doctor Who have leveled this complaint against certain stories of the Seventh Doctor. This is certainly true among comic books, where some stories seem to spend as many words on editorial notes of the "...as shown in issue #137" type as they do on dialog.
But if Doctor Who has no canon, and if maintenance of a canon is actually undesirable, then what's to keep the show from going entirely off the rails? More importantly, how are we, the fans, to judge if a particular piece of text (be it a novel, a comic, or fan fiction) really fits in to our favorite 'verse? After all, that's what it's really all about, yes? We want to be able to build a coherent meta-fiction into which all of the stories of the Doctor and his world (or at least the ones we like) fit together into a self-reinforcing whole. Once we have that, we have a rule by which we can include or exclude new offerings. We have a canon of orthodoxy.
The idea of a canon of orthodoxy comes to us from theology, specifically the idea of Biblical canon. Prior to the fourth century C.E., there was no established Bible among the various young Christian churches. Each local church used whatever gospels and other texts it had to hand, including or excluding new texts as the folks running that particular church saw fit. There were more than 30 gospels floating around at the time, after all, and no one was still alive who could say whether or not any of them were factually true. The basic list of "official" books of the Bible wasn't complete until councils led by St. Augustine gave the Roman church's official "this is it."
The point of all that wrangling was a desire to have an official set of "true texts" by which the various versions of Christianity and all the myriad religious texts could be judged. Anything that agreed with the established canon was probably OK, anything that disagreed with it was heresy. Which, judging by some of the arguments I've seen online, is the same way many fans want to treat fictional canon...
The use of the term "canon" to describe the official fictional back-story comes to us from Sherlock Homles fans. It was a game among them to speak of the Great Detective as if he were an actual historical figure, and as if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were merely the "literary agent" through which Dr. Watson published his tales of adventure. Many attempts to derrive a biography of Holmes from the stories were attempted, but they all ran aground on the same problem: the stories were not consistent. Between the original works of Doyle, the various pastiches, the plays, and the fan-works, the Great Detective's life was a hopeless muddle.
The simple solution was to declare the stories written by Doyle himself to be the canon (a term used as an intentional, and humorous, reference to Biblical canon). Anything which fit with the works of Doyle was at least potentially part of Holmes' biography, the rest was mere fantasy. (I am indebted to Paul Cornell for the information about Holmes fandom, and for inspiring the thoughts that led to this essay.) Of course, there were inconsistencies among Doyle's writings as well, but those were easier to pass over and more fun to debate.
This concept of canon works just fine for a body of work from a single author. Over in Harry Potter fandom, for instance, if you want to know what's cannon, there are just seven books you have to search through. This isn't to say that there aren't disagreements about whether or not things said by the J.K. Rowling in interviews and other writings should be included in the canon, just that there is a clear starting point. These books form the official, true story, and anything else is some kind of alternate universe.
Applying this to anything that is the work of multiple authors, over a long time, gets difficult, and leads to situations such as previously noted with Star Trek. This, despite the fact that Paramount Pictures (who own the franchise) hires folks to keep the Trek canon together.
There is, fortunately, another kind of canon, one which handles multiple-author works, and one which we could apply handily to Doctor Who. This is "canon" as used when referring to "The Western Canon" or "The Canon of English Literature." This canon is a list of the most influential works in the English language, the trope setters which have shaped the idiom of the language. It's actually a whole lot of lists, composed by various publishers and academics. Most of them agree that the King James Bible and the collected works of William Shakespeare belong on the list, but the rest of it is up for debate.
The Western Canon is not a canon of orthodoxy. No one argues that a story set at the end of the Roman Republic is somehow wrong because it contradicts Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. But to write a story about Caesar's assassination is to invite the comparison. No, the Western Canon is a canon of understanding.
The point of such a canon is that there are some works whose influence is so wide-spread, and so lasting, that one cannot claim a deep understanding of what's going on in English literature without some familiarity with them. The works of the Western Canon gave us much of the symbolic lexicon, the basic tropes and images which have informed almost all writing in the language. Shakespeare did not invent the idea of people falling in love against the wishes of their families and societies, but the way he wrote Romeo and Juliet has shaped the way people think about "star-cross'd lovers" ever since.
What I'm suggesting is that there are particular individual texts -- TV broadcasts, novels, whatever -- whose impact on Doctor Who as a whole has been so great that everything else has been shaped by their inclusion in the overall text of the series. These would be the definitive stories, not because the defined the facts of the 'verse, but because they defined the shape of the ideas which could be expressed through Doctor Who. "The War Games" introduced the Time Lords, and "The Three Doctors" explained something of how they invented time travel. "Genesis of the Daleks" introduced Davros. There are other examples, and doubtless there would be endless debate over which would be included in a canon such as I am proposing.
In essence, I am proposing that we'd get better results -- insofar as the fan fiction we write, or in explaining why we do or don't like particular ideas in the stories -- if we focused less on the details of exactly which years the UNIT stories take place, and more with whether or not new stories live up to or fit in with the best of the old. To do that, we have to have a best-of list based as much in thoughtful critique of the stories as in simply whether or not one thinks Jaimie looks hot in a kilt.
Cross-posted to doctorwho, new_who, and my personal journal.