For those of you who filled out my surveys that I posted on this board and were interested in seeing the finished product of the fanfiction essay I was working on for my popular narrative class, I thought I would post it here.
The surveys that I recieved ended up giving me an idea that took the essay in a completely different direction than what I thought it would be...so thank you very much everyone who sent me their answers.
Basically one of the predominant themes in our popular narrative class has been that of what is considered 'high culture' and 'low culture'. I was originally going to do something completely different talking about the conventions of fanfiction, but your answers prompted me to the direction of high and low culture.
Anyway, here goes:
"Shakespeare Wrote Fanfic?"
Fanfiction As High Culture
The idea of the ‘fan’ is largely a twentieth century one. It is a term often looked upon by others with scorn or derisiveness, due to its many social implications. Fans are not people with whom ‘normal’ people want to associate with. They are on the fringes of popular culture, taking their love of their particular fandom to new, and ridiculous levels. They’re freaks. Aren’t they? Well, maybe a little. Despite this, fan culture shows no sign of slowing down. Rather, as we’ve moved into the twenty-first century it has only gotten stronger. The internet, and media industry have taken fan culture to new heights. But what is it and why is it so prevalent? Television and film are certainly the easiest things to blame when it comes to the idea of the ‘fan’. In his book Fan Cultures, Matt Hills describes a fan as:
“Somebody who is obsessed with a particular star, celebrity, film, TV programme, band; somebody who can produce reams of information on their object of fandom, and can quote their favoured lines or lyrics, chapter and verse.”
They participate within the fandom, producing as well as consuming and engaging in communal activities with other fans to further the community. It is, as stated before, the internet that gives fans the ability to interface with one another as they have never previously been capable of. This effectively destroys the myth of the fan sitting in thier parents’ basement, never interacting with humanity. Fans do not sit passively by and consume the product they have an affinity for. They get out there and produce as well. They draw, film, and most predominantly, write. It is through these communities and the need to produce something within their fandom that ‘fanfiction’ is born. Fanfiction is exactly what it sounds like. It is fiction written about the characters of a particular show, film or book that the fan particularly adores. Its origins as an art form can be traced back to the science fiction television series Star Trek, which after being cancelled inspired various fans around the world to continue the series in whatever way their imaginations would allow, by producing material of their own. It is also where fans obtain the negative stereotype of ‘losers’, ‘freaks’ or people without a healthy grasp on reality. Why then, would someone spend all their time watching a television show and then writing further adventures outside the canonical series of the characters? What does it accomplish? Do they deserve the labels given to them by the ‘mainstream’ society which considers fanfiction to be an exercise in ‘low’ culture? The short answer is that it isn’t. Fandom, as with fanfiction, is simply the modern way of interacting with contemporary folk heroes and stories that one has become enamoured with. It is about public ownership of something that prior to this time and place was taken for granted. In short, fanfiction is the reclaiming of something that was previously looked upon as ‘high’ culture and giving it a twenty-first century make over by introducing new themes, concepts, structures and ideas into a previously fixed or rigid fandom. It is the borrowing of characters, plot lines or universes, re-tooling them and saying ‘what if?’ It is innovation, discovery and imagination. In light of, and because of this, fanfiction is ‘high’ culture in the best sense of the word.
In order to address the ideas of ‘high’ culture and ‘low’ culture within the concept of fandom, one must look at the current opinions regarding fans of any particular show, book or film. In today’s society fans are looked upon as people who are socially inept and isolated. They latch onto these particular shows or films as an attempt to live vicariously through the characters, stories or plots. According to Joli Jenson in her introduction to fandom in the book Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Jenson addresses the negative way fans are looked at:
“Fandom is conceived as a chronic attempt to compensate for a perceived personal lack of autonomy, absence of community, incomplete identity, lack of power and lack of recognition.”
Fandom then, according to this mode of thinking is definitely something to be identified and classified as ‘low’ culture. After all, they aren’t interacting with something worthy of scholarship or study. They are watching television and films and writing these stories as an attempt to escape the confines of their own limited existence. So what makes someone a ‘fan,’ as opposed to a ‘scholar’? Well, it has to do predominantly with the subject material. The object of interest to a ‘scholar’ must be something of ‘high’ culture for them to be given the title. One considers such things to be works of Shakespeare, Joyce, Mallory or Chaucer to be ‘high’ art and thus the affinity for them makes one a ‘scholar,’ something that definitely takes one out of ‘fandom’ territory and puts you smack dab within the realm of ‘high’ culture. A love of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the other hand makes you a ‘fan,’ as the show is most definitely ‘low’ culture and thus you cannot be a ‘scholar’. In this mode of thinking it is the object’s popularity to the lower or middle class, widespread availability and relative inexpensiveness that makes it an object of ‘low’ culture, whereas if it is difficult to understand, educated, expensive, or rare, it is automatically an object of ‘high’ culture. It is therefore an obvious leap to see why most regard fanfiction as an activity of ‘low’ culture and for those who engage in it to be producing objects of ‘low’ culture. It is not something they are basing on widely accepted literature of ‘high’ culture, nor are they creating any literature of ‘high’ culture of their own. Their ideas are not original and their activities within the fandom are not intended to produce anything of value to society as a whole, but rather to make up for something important that they lack within themselves. This theory however, is completely misguided. Fans are not participating in something of ‘low’ culture. Fanfiction by this way of thinking is actually an activity of ‘high’ culture that has thus been distorted by the current opinions of scholars on the entertainment industry and the content it produces. It is content that truly makes the difference here. For content is tied in very closely to ownership, an idea that has only become prominent in the twentieth century and it is what has managed to skew the idea of fanfiction to the ‘low’ culture end of the spectrum.
Prior to the twentieth century, mass culture did not exist. What did exist however, was folk culture and it produced much of the material one considers to be ‘high’ culture today. Shakespeare is a perfect example of this. Instead of coming up with completely new ideas, he borrowed his largely from external sources. Some of these sources were historical events and others were known folk tales, available for public consumption. To showcase this, one can look at his play Measure for Measure. According to Marie Rose Napierkowski, author of An Introduction to Measure for Measure:
“Two works have traditionally been regarded as the primary sources of Measure for Measure: a novella in a collection of tales entitled Hecatommithi (1565) by Giovanni Battista Giraldi (known as Cinthio) and George Whetstone's two-part play, The Right Excellent and Famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra (1578), which was based on Cinthio's novella. However, several critics have noticed significant parallels between Measure for Measure and Epitia (1583), a drama adapted by Cinthio from his novella. These discoveries have led to the generally accepted theory that Shakespeare derived the main aspects of his plot from both of Cinthio's works and used the structure of Whetstone's drama to organize the action, characterization, and themes of Measure for Measure.”
This is not the only example of this within Shakespeare’s work, nor is it the only instance of a famous author responsible for works of ‘high’ culture, to do so. Other examples include Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Mort D’Arthur and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. All of these borrowed sources were part of folk culture, dating as far back as the beginning of the written word. There was no boundary of ownership between commercial culture and folk culture. They borrowed from one another allowing for new works of art to be created from both. The twentieth century changed all of this, allowing for folk culture to be suddenly displaced and replaced by mass media. No more were the two cultures to be interlinked with one another, and borrowing from one another was completely out of the question. With mass media also came the concept of ownership. Copyright laws and trademark laws have become the norm, causing different stories, films and television to become the ‘property’ of their creators. In order for a television show to use a song by a specific singer, they must obtain (usually at great expense) permission from the creator to use their piece of music in a certain episode. If they want to use it more than once it is necessary to purchase the ‘rights’ to it all over again. Where once a writer could casually reference another’s work, they now must purchase permission from the author to do so. By this logic, Shakespeare would owe a fortune. And herein lies the problem for fans who, like Shakespeare, wish to add to the folk culture of their favourite television show or film by creating their own stories and ideas within the fandom. In other words, they want to write fanfiction…just like Shakespeare did.
So when did the concept of ownership impact the view of ‘high’ culture and ‘low’ culture? According to Henry Jenkins, director of media studies at MIT: “popular culture is what happens when mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture.” And, as has been stated previously, one knows that one cannot call a fan of anything popular and widespread to be a consumer of ‘high’ culture. It is for this reason that Jenkins terms fanfiction as: “a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations, instead of by the folk.” Here, Jenkins describes popular culture and the ideas of ownership as being a ‘damaged’ system. The view of mass media and popular (‘low’) culture is a distorted one. Ideas, characters and themes should not be ‘owned’ by corporations and nor should one be able to purchase them should they wish to use them to create something new. Prior to the twentieth century, when one was to do this (as Shakespeare did) it would be looked upon as an endeavor to create a work of ‘high’ culture. Now, because one is using objects obtained from popular (‘low’) culture, one is ‘stealing’ or ‘pirating’ to create something less original and less worthy. This is wrong, and completely misses the entire point. If one removes the ideas of ownership, copyright and trademark, then one loses the twentieth century stigma of ‘low’ culture being ‘popular’ culture and all one is left with is folk culture. And folk culture exists to be borrowed from. It is public, and it is the source of many works of ‘high’ culture. Fanfiction is simply a return to the system of old in which authors are taking back the contemporary myths available to them and reworking them to suit their own agendas, ideas, and imagination. The reasons for this are many and varied, but none of them are ‘uncreative’ or ‘unworthy’. Just as Shakespeare wished to use the skeletal outline of different writer’s universes to tell his own stories, so do the fanfiction authors who see something in a show, book or film and want to expand on it. Are all fanfiction authors as talented as Shakespeare? No, far from it. The fact that most of them have not ever heard of, much less used a spell check could also deter one from viewing fanfiction as an exercise in ‘high’ culture. The ability to call fanfiction ‘high’ culture then is partly because of its reason for existence (as defined by Jenkins) and also because of what the fanfiction itself hopes to accomplish. There are many different types of fanfictions and many different reasons for their being written. In the case of the first fanfictions written, Star Trek was the contemporary folk tale, and the author’s mission was to keep the universe alive, despite the ‘owner’ deciding it would end. The innovation here, is in the series existing at all beyond its televised life span. It was this creativity and inventiveness that inspired various fanzines to be written and swapped at science fiction conventions, causing other fans to do the same. It is now its own art form, with many varied functions, intentions and types of story existing within the title of ‘fanfiction’. The intention, like Shakespeare’s, was to take an idea, thought, or scene that had previously been written off and use it to create something wholly new, different and unique unto itself. Types of stories such as ‘slash’, ‘hurt/comfort’, ‘alternate universe’ and the ‘Mary Sue’ do just that. Authors wishing to write a ‘slash’ story are people who have seen a queer reading into their favourite series, book or film and wish to explore where the creators certainly wouldn’t. Authors of ‘hurt/comfort’ stories wish to further a bond between two main characters by injuring one and having the other tend to it, generally revealing previously undisclosed romantic feelings between them in the process. Authors of ‘alternate universe’ stories take the previously known universal conventions of the show, book or film and dispose of them in favour of creating new ones of their own design in order to see how the characters might react. And finally, authors choosing to insert a character into the story that contains an exaggerated and glorified version of themselves can do so when writing a ‘Mary Sue’ fanfiction.
All of these alternate views on the fandom are perfect examples of fanfiction reclaiming those folk myths, reworking them in a modern fashion and using their imagination to create something new, different and completely unique. If Shakespeare were here right now and in charge of his own television series, it is safe to assume that a multitude of fanfiction would be written about anything that he might put on the screen. Slash fic for Measure of Measure? It’s not impossible. Personally, I think Shakespeare would be proud.
