Monday Musing: Modern Myths

I’ve spent the last two months binge watching nearly every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6 sadly got sent to a different address, forcing me to wait and watch the series out of order. I’ve seen every episode at least a few times, so no surprise is ruined. (Since I’ve bought my DVD sets, I’ve watched a few episodes a few times.) There is a certain satisfaction to watching the series of out sync, something akin to looking through photo album and remembering your life out of order.

Watching these episodes, I find myself more caught up in the world of BtVS. I certainly need more that the 7 seasons. I’ve found myself reading though the whedonwiki (after Joss Whedon, the creator of BtVS and the series Angel), hyperlinked episode guides, but mostly a lot of fan fiction.

Fan fiction as a genre is fairly well examined, although there are plenty of debates about what counts as fan fiction. Satire or works such as The Wide Sargasso Sea don’t really seem to cut it. The earliest clear instance of fan fiction may be Sherlock Holmes related stories. Apparently after Conan Doyle killed Holmes off in 1893, fans of the detective wrote tales of the Baker Street Irregulars, the street urchins that Holmes and Watson would turn to for information. It’s at least a century old. Contemporary fan fiction seems to have really taken off with Star Trek.

The effect of a work of fan fiction is simple. The fan of a television show, comic book, movie, etc. becomes a producer of the stories set in these worlds and not merely a consumer of them. That’s pretty straightforward. Another effect is that the storylines spin out of control, series become inconsistent and characters’ personalities follow arcs that seem at odds with that of the originals.

Fan fiction is not the only genre to suffer from inconsistencies. The other genre with similar problems, perhaps virtues is comics. Apart from a few foundational moments, it’s impossible to tell the history of Batman, for example. Part of this stems from the fact that many stories are written by many writers over the decades since the Batman character first appeared.

Verification becomes a problem in these universes. Being works of fiction we can only look to the texts themselves, and inconsistencies become contradictions when we try to a sense of what happened in a story universe. Movies, cartoon, and video games only compound the problem.

In the case of comic books, there are attempts every so often to try to re-write the history of the hero’s universe. The fact of the contradictions are faced head-on, but with a multi-universe caveat, and some authoritative “smoothing” is carried out. The results seem more confusing than the problem. With fan fiction, the studio or the author declares a canon, with everything outside being non-canonical. Of course, the “canon” is not a legal category, and ultimately it’s left to the community of readers to “decide”, as it were.

Fan fiction and comic books point to two opposing tendencies, one associated with antiquity and the other with modern narratives. At least that was my impression when I started plowing through some of the Buffy fan fiction and was hit with the lists of story synopses that were incompatible with each other. I got that sense largely because of a passage from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which I’d been reading recently.

Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and death all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth. Abandoned in Naxos, Ariadne was shot dead by Artemis’s arrow; Dionysus ordered the killing and stood watching, motionless. Or: Ariadne hung herself in Naxos, after being left by Theseus. Or: pregnant by Theseus and shipwrecked in Cyprus, she died in childbirth. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, together with his band of followers; they celebrated a divine marriage, after which she rose into the sky, where we still see her today amid the northern constellations. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, after which she followed him around on his adventures. Sharing his bed and fighting with his soldiers; when Dionysus attacked Perseus in the country near Argos, Ariadne went with him, armed to fight amid the ranks of the crazed Bacchants, until Perseus shook the face of Medusa in front of her and Ariadne was turned to stone. And there she stayed, a stone in a field.

Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth. And if there’s a sign that Holmes, Batman, Kirk, Picard, Dax, Faith, Spike, the others all crossed the threshold of myth, it may be this in the structure of their narratives and the feeling of consistency between incompatibles that you find reading fan fiction.

Comments

[Jennifer Ouellette]

as a fellow BUFFY fan, I feel your pain at coming to the end of the canonical BUFFY cycle. I, too, have re-watched the entire series on DVD, along with the spinoff series, ANGEL. But fanfic is not the only remaining outlet. There are several excellent short story collections ("Tales of the Slayer" series), lots of spin-off novels (I've only read three, but two of those were quite good), and comic books, including a futuristic Slayer story called 'Frey". The latter, it must be said, conflicts with the series finale of BUFFY, but hey -- these are now mythological archetypes.

An excellent Monday Musing, although clearly, I am a biased reader. :)

[Maeve Adams]

As one of Robin's sidekicks in marathon Buffy-watching, I have to agree with him and Jennifer on BtVP inpsiring a somewhat melancholy reiteration of episodes--increasingly melancholic as I approach the end of another reviewing of a season, or now (since season six finally arrived), as I approach my/the end of the entire series.

The desire to consume more is something I've experienced with other texts and shows. As a Harry Potter fan, I have felt the same melancholy sense of loss approaching the end of the latest novel and have often returned to the first to temporarily, inadequately stave off the end, when I will have to wait 2-3 years for the next book.

But, there's something else interesting about fan fiction: consumers know that they want more partly because they become reproducers of the enchantement of these fictional places. It's not just that they leave behind consumption for production, its also something about the relationship between fiction, enchantment and reading in the modern world, starting in the eighteenth century. And by enchanted I don't mean magical (I had the same problem as a child with the Streatfeild 'shoes' books about children overcoming poverty, etc. by becoming skilled performers.). I mean the kind of enchantment that fiction enables by allowing the reader to exit reality and put faith in the operating laws of another universe. What's interesting about this is that we could say it about all fictional productions, but fan fiction--as an obsessive (and sometimes very disappointing) attempt at re-echantment--has, I believe, a pretty limited history, but maybe not as limited as we think.

It dates back much earlier than the Baker Street Irregulars. But, I don't think, by the definition of "fan fiction" it dates earlier than the eighteenth century. For example, Swift's _Gulliver's Travels_ inspired many fans to reproduce in additional fictions and pseudo-historical accounts the worlds into which Gulliver travelled. Lilliput was a popular choice. (anyone with access to OCLC worldcat can explore the many iterations). The production of fan fiction only increased in the nineteenth century for example with works inspired by the strange universe of _Cranford_, the fictional world of English amazons/old maids penned by Elizabeth Gaskell.

If I am right that "fan fiction" as a genre didn't really exist until the eighteenth century, the question is why? I think the answer has something to do with fiction becoming a source of enchantment in a disenchanted world and the development of particularly secular reading practices at this moment. It seems pretty logical to say that when religion stops offering all the answers and secularization in on the rise, people turn to other narratives about how their worlds work.

But, what's also worth noticing is that near the end of the eighteenth century, people started reading differently or they started doing different things with the books they read: many people have told this story differently, but one compelling story is how literary criticism emerged when readers began treating the bible as not a unique text--as one source of written truth--but as one text among many that could be subjected to evaluation and analysis. The bible was partly displaced as the only book in homes to one book surrounded by other literary texts (novels, poetry, pseudo-histories, etc). Increased literacy also accompanied this trend and continued through the nineteenth century. What's interesting too though is that with secularization of reading, readers were freed to *do* things with their texts: reading and writing was not strictly sanctified and it didn't require that someone dictate strictly how it was done (from a source of spiritual or political authority). Reading also became a critical activity: one that asked readers critically to examine fictional worlds and freed them to recreate them and relive the enchantment through rereading and rewriting--not just mimicry but interpretive recreation.