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lobelia321Part 2 of 2
A narratological analysis of fanfiction
by Lobelia
continued
Url of this page: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257458.html#cutid1
Url of part 1: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257093.html#cutid
Beyond Genette
During the course of this analysis, I came upon a number of important aspects that do not feature in Genette's discussion. The additional issues that occurred to me in particular are: genre, character, setting, narrative causality and some structural peculiarities of slash. I will discuss these now.
Genre
These fics cannot be understood fully without placing them into the context of fanfic. Fanfic is above all a particular textual genre, and slash is a particular sub-genre of fanfic. (I am tempted to argue this the other way round: fanfic is a sub-genre of slash. But that discussion must await another essay.) When we interpret texts in the light of genre, we look for similarities across different texts (see Todorov). In a genre text (or a genre film, for that matter), each narrative component has a prior significance as part of a genre: it is not unique but is understood as an element in a generic formula (see Schatz; quoted in Neale, p.208). The formula is established by repetition and, I would argue, each individual text in turn influences the formula overall. In the words of the film historian John Cawelti, genres are a form of 'collective artistic behaviour' (p.2).
For me, genre is all about audience or reader expectation. A genre sets up particular generic expectations (I use the word 'generic' here as the adjective of 'genre'), and readers interpret each individual text in the light of those expectations. Texts can exploit generic expectations in various ways.
Both Border Town and In the Name of Research are generic examples of slash and fanfic, and even more specifically of Lord of the Rings real-person slash. A number of generic expectations are set up as a result, including the inclusion of non-original characters previously known to the reader, and the positing of a homosexual or at least a homoerotic relationship between at least two characters in what is generically known as a 'pairing'. The concept of pairing is absolutely crucial to all slash, and both Border Town and Research thrive on it.
Border Town exploits the generic expectation of a slashy pairing in a number of ways. I have already discussed the implications of the sentence His hand closes over your own above (section on perspective). The sentence, and its position at the beginning of the final asterisked ellipsis, depends for its meaning on generic reader expectations. Readers familiar with the generic conventions of slash will, I suspect, easily fill in the ellipsis with an imagined sex act (at least, I did). This is a speculation based entirely on extra-narrative knowledge to do with the genre of this fic. Slashfic sets up generic expectations of sex. Hence, even a non-committal statement such as His hand closes over your own can be read as a suggestion of sex to come.
More essentially, at no point in the fic is the 'you'-character identified as male yet, I would speculate, every single reader of this fic (excepting blow-ins from the world of google) understood the 'you' to be a man. Also, the entire fic becomes 'about' the pairing, 'about' the relationship of 'you' and 'him'. The 'you'-character's internal focalisation on landscape, weather, Spanish and a leafless tree strung with a frayed loop of pink chilli-pepper bulbs becomes the outward projection of inward emotions to do with his relationship with this 'him'. Indeed, the very first time the focalisor 'you' appears in the fic, he is mentioned in one breath, as it were, with his paired partner: At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea, you, and him, and a rental car...
One of the effects of Border Town is the fact that the 'you' and the 'he' are never identified by name. This is unusual, though not unknown, in fanfic (or origfic, for that matter). However, generic pairing expectations operate so strongly in slash that I, for one, filled in the anonymous characters with my own identifications: I named them for myself. My impression of this fic was shaped by the fact that I read it at the webpage cited above (see introduction); on this page, the fic appears without a Header. However, if you click your way back to the Table of Contents, you will find the pairing named in a mini-Header:
border town
melancholy and car aerials.
(ob/vm, PG-13)
It must make a great difference for readers, knowing or not knowing the pairing in advance, though for me one of the delights of reading this fic for the first time was the working out of the pairing myself. The 'you' and the 'he' are characterised so effectively within fanon expectations that I did not need their names.
By contrast, In the Name of Research identifies its characters very clearly by name throughout. Moreover, the characters are named before the story even starts: their names appear in the Header.
Headers are an example of paratexts. Paratexts are texts that are situated outside narratives or texts proper, such as blurbs or title pages (see Genette 1997). Headers are the quintessential generic paratexts of fanfic. They follow rigid conventions. Research includes most of the formulaic rubrics found in a typical Header (title, author, rating, summary, disclaimer, notes). Because the formula is so rigid, authors often play around with it, and Brenda has here changed the formulaic 'Pairing' to 'Non-Pairing':
Non-Pairing: Karl.Ur.ban & Harry.Sin.clair
This sets up two expectations: the expectation of Karl and Harry (named, identified, paired) and the expectation of something a little unusual, i.e. something foiling generic pairing expectations (Non-Pairing, reinforced by the use of an ampersand instead of the more usual forward slash). As we know after having read the fic, this foiling consists of the affirmation of Karl's and Harry's heterosexuality; this is a transgression only within the context of the genre and unintelligible outside the expectations of slash.
Genres depend for their meaning on what the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called addressivity, the quality of turning to someone without which the utterance cannot exist. I would argue that this someone is the reader (or viewer) with genre competence. Addressivity or, in our context, fandom, is, of course, absolutely crucial to the entire enterprise of fanfic. Much of what is included in slash narratives is addressed specifically to members of the fandom and makes little sense outside the context of that particular readership. Fans, or more precisely: fanfic fans, develop a special generic competence. I suspect it is my own genre competence that keeps me coming back to Lotr-rps: I 'get' more of the insider allusions and that generates a feeling of belonging to a particular reading-and-writing community.
The category of genre is related to the fanfic-specific concept of fanon which I will discuss below (section on peculiarities of slash).
Character
Character is central to fanfic. Readers and writers of fanfic have an emotionally charged relationship with the characters in fanfic. This is magnified in the case of slash where each character becomes eroticised. To wordnap the concepts of Sigmund Freud: slash characters are cathected sites. Cathexis is a psychosexual charge of energy, the concentration of emotional energy on an object or idea. Cathected sites or objects are those upon which this libidinous charge fixes. I am German so I am not afraid of Freud's original German word for this affect (besetzt which means occupied, in the sense that toilets can be occupied). In English, the word suddenly looks alien and scary (also gratifyingly pretentious); it is, however, the very best way I have yet hit upon to describe slashers' relationship with their slashees.
It is no accident that the concept of 'characterisation' is one of the most discussed notions among fanfic writers (alongside the related concept of 'point of view'). Genette has not much to say about character. I therefore turned elsewhere for ideas.
Aristotle argued that in tragedy, character is made manifest through actions: 'Character [in a play] is included along with and on account of the actions.' (p.11) The exclusive emphasis on action is relevant for drama and film but prose narrative has recourse to other modes of characterisation as well.
The Israeli narratologist Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan asserts that there are two basic types of indicators for character; she labels them somewhat awkwardly direct definition and indirect presentation (pp.59-70). Direct definition names a character trait by an adjective, a noun or a part of speech. An example would be Jane Austen's 'Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich'. In fanfic, I am reminded of Jenn Abiding's wonderful opening line to No Soft Goodbye:
Orli is so in love with Sean he doesn't know what to do.
Indirect presentation doesn't mention the trait but displays and exemplifies it, in the form of action and speech (the Aristotelian modes of characterisation) as well as external appearance and/or environment. When confronted with indirect presentation, readers have to infer the character trait implied by the presentation. (Bal calls these types explicit qualification and qualification by function or implicit qualification, p.130.)
In the two fics analysed here, indirect presentation seems to outweigh direct definition.
In the Name of Research:
(a) Harry spit his beer across the table. (indirect presentation through action)
(b) "Ha fucking ha." (indirect presentation through speech)
(c) "I'll have you know my technique with women is foolproof, thank you," Karl replied with a haughty stare. (indirect presentation through speech and external appearance; however, embedded within the speech is an instance of direct self-definition)
Border Town:
(d) "Well then, maybe I didn't listen quite as hard." (indirect presentation through speech) The aerial zips and whines through the air as you slash at your insubstantial foe, lunge, parry, riposte; (indirect presentation through action) he watches you critically. (indirect presentation through external appearance / action)
I initially hazarded that the preponderance of indirect presentation over direct presentation is the case for fanfic as a whole (but changed my mind during the course of this analysis, as will become clear). Rimmon-Kenan argues that the favouring of direct definition is an aspect of twentieth-century fiction in general. These are her views:
'The economical character of definition and its capacity to guide the reader's response recommended it to traditional novelists [she means, 19th century and earlier]. On the other hand, in an individualistic and relativistic period like our own [she wrote this in 1983], generalization and classification are less easily tolerated, and the economy of definition is grasped as reductive. Moreover, in the present day, when suggestiveness and indeterminacy are preferred to closure and definitiveness and when emphasis is put on the active role of the reader, the explicitness and guiding capacity of direct definition are often considered drawbacks rather than advantages.' (p.61)
Fanfic would seem to in line with overall developments in literature. Border Town certainly falls within the bounds of 'suggestiveness and indeterminacy'. In the Name of Research is less indeterminate but characterises its characters mostly by indirect presentation as well. I therefore suspect that Rimmon-Kenan's speculation as to the reasons for the predominance of indirect presentation are somewhat limited. The love of indirect presentation goes beyond the love of the suggestive, and I would argue that indirect presentation can be quite as precise as direct definition.
Interestingly, one of the instances of direct definition I could find in the two fics occurred in the more 'suggestive' Border Town: ...he likes to drive, and you don't,... The 'he'-character's trait is defined directly (he likes to drive), and immediately afterwards, the 'you'-character's trait is defined directly (and you don't) but the 'you'-character's characterisation spills over into indirect presentation within the very same sentence:
He starts the car; he likes to drive (direct definition of a character by the character-bound narrator), and you don't (direct self-definition by the character-bound narrator), or at least not over here in unfamiliar towns, where the whole wrong-side-of-the-road thing bothers you more and every junction brings on a flutter of minor panic (indirect presentation).
(On the corresponding move from iterative-descriptive to iterative-specific in this passage, see above in the section on frequency.)
I found a few instances of direct definition in Research.
(a) "... I mean, I'm over 30 and a father..." (direct self-definition with respect to Karl's age and status, embedded within indirect presentation through speech)
(b) "Yeah, I'm a nice 'un like that." (direct self-definition of Karl, with reference to a particular act but also indirect presentation, revealing irony as a character trait of Karl's)
(c) Harry was too old for a white knight anyway. (direct definition with respect to age)
All of these examples of direct definition are focalised through the directly-defined character. In (a) and (b), Karl is defining himself, and in (a) the words I mean turn his self-definition (embedded in speech) into something more than description; he is in fact advancing his age and status as a reason for kissing a guy. The direct definition of Harry in (c) is part of a passage of free indirect discourse, focalised through Harry himself and hence an example of indirect presentation; the overall effect of the passage is humorous and serves to remind readers of the manly status of this character:
"Uh..." Harry looked around their usual corner booth, hoping to see a familiar face. Rescue of some sort. But, of course there weren’t any. Harry was too old for a white knight anyway. Would probably look rather silly in glass slippers. "Yeah,” he finally answered, deciding to brazen it out. "Hasn’t everyone?"
Ultimately, I am not sure how useful the alleged dichotomy of direct definition vs. indirect presentation actually is. In practice, I found it quite difficult to tell the two apart in every case. As the above examples show, the two categories frequently merge. Also, Rimmon-Kenan's duality is reminiscent yet again of the whole wretched show-not-tell debate, and one of the reasons for the alleged preponderance of indirect definition in modern (fan)fiction may be that this mode is more closely identified with so-called showing. I started out by thinking, along with Rimmon-Kenan, that fanfic prefers indirect presentation but the more I looked at these two fics, the more instances of direct definition and merged forms did I find, so I suspect that Rimmon-Kenan's claim may be over-simplifying matters.
Another oft-cited way to think about character goes back to the writer E. M. Forster. Forster divided characters into flat and round. Flat characters are 'constructed round a single idea or quality'; they are easily recognised and easily remembered, and they are not changed by circumstances (pp.73-4). The test of a round character is 'whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way' (p.81).
I have two points to make about Forster's differentiation. Firstly, it seems to me to be very difficult to establish objectively where the difference between flat and round lies; in some cases it is clear-cut (Susan the waitress is a flat character) but often the dividing line seems to be murky.
Secondly, fanfic presents a special case. On one level, all characters in fanfic (certainly the most popular characters) are round, in the sense that each one comes predetermined with its own characterisation attached to it. As soon as the proper name Karl appears in Research, readers familiar with Lotr-rps will bring to the fic a whole array of possible character traits for Karl. Indeed, this aspect of fan writing is one of the most discussed among fanfic writers and readers, and is frequently opposed to the writing of original characters: in fanfic, you can rely on your readers having some knowledge of your characters; characters do not need to be invented from scratch. The cumulative characterisation of slashees within a fandom is part of what is known as fanon (as opposed to canon, the books, films, TV-series or real-live actors upon which fanfic is based). Fanon is, on one level, the fanfic-specific term for generic conventions. However, I think that most debates around fanon actually come down to debates about characterisation; reader expectations are less strictly defined with respect to story or setting. At least, this is the case within Lotr-rps; other fandoms, such as Harry Potter, also have fanonical plot elements but I suspect that even there, a greater tolerance prevails with regard to the twisting of the story-world than with regard to the twisting of character. (It is no accident that the acronym OOC or 'out-of-character' is an established ingredient in Headers.)
Part of the humour in Research stems from Brenda's characterisation of Karl and Harry as going against the grain of Karl/Harry fanon (as I mentioned above, their heterosexuality is not part of fanon -- although it is very much part of canon: both men are known to be heterosexual in real life.) Border Town also relies on readers' predetermined knowledge of fanon character. This is what enables readers to slot the 'you' and the 'he' into two character-shaped bubbles (I owe this wonderful term to Calico). Fanon and generic competence in the form of fanon knowledge is what enabled me to slot the 'you' into an 'Orlando' bubble and the 'he' into a 'Viggo' bubble. Even those readers armed with fore-knowledge of the Header (ob/vm) would still need to have fanon knowledge in order to enable them to de-code which one of the two characters is ob and which is vm (although the order ob/vm, rather than vm/ob, helps -- but knowing that the first-mentioned character in a pairing is often the focalisor is in itself part of fanon competence).
In one sense, all characters in fanfic are round (barring the very rare ones). Even if a character is not characterised in much depth in any one fic, the reader brings in-depth fanon knowledge about that character to the reading of that fic, anyway. In Research, for example, the character of Viggo is merely mentioned a few times; he is not characterised beyond his name. But that name alone is enough to conjure up a fairly rounded character in readers' minds if those readers know their Viggo-fanon. (I would suspect that no fanfic fan is surprised that it was Viggo who lured Karl into sexual experimentation, and not, e.g., Elijah.) And when Karl says, "...he's Vig, y'know", fanfic readers can nod their heads and say: "Yes, we do know!"
On the other hand, one could also say that characters in fanfic are peculiarly flat. This is because many authors, relying on readers' fanon knowledge, do not furnish their characters with much complexity. In many ways, the characters in both Border Town and Research are relatively flat: Border Town presents characterisations that operate within the generic expectations of an Orlando/Viggo pairing; Research sketches in just enough character traits to propel the kissing plot forwards. The problem with Forster's duo flat/round becomes apparent here: his terms are too value-laden to be of much analytic use (with round having a higher value than flat), and his terms are also too woolly to allow for precise analysis, especially within the context of fanfic.
Bal argues that the duality of flat/round only works for psychological narrative; genres such as fairy tales or detective fiction operate with flat characters only, and modernist narratives (e.g. by Proust) often mock the concepts (p.117). Fanfic occupies a peculiar spot between psychological narrative (with its valuation of complex characters) and non-literary genre (with its restricted stable of non-orig characters and its fanon).
Not only does fanfic rely on readers' generic expectations of characters, but also on readers' expectations of pairing. Indeed, in slash, pairings tend to have generic characterisations of their own. This is indicated by fanfic fans' development of short-hand notations for particular popular pairings, e.g. Viggorli, Dorli, Domlijah. The simple knowledge of Viggorli fanon already sets into motion particular expectations of a fic featuring this pairing, such as Border Town. It is this fanonical pairing knowledge that enabled me definitively to identify the 'you' with Orlando. It even coloured my perception of the imagined sex scene suggested by the asterisked ellipsis after His hand closes over your own. This makes sense in the context of Viggorli fanon which nearly always features Viggo as top and Orlando as bottom: His hand is here in effect topping your own. Similarly, particular expectations exist with respect to the Karl/Harry pairing; it is, e.g., nearly always a 'manly' pairing (while Viggorli is mostly a 'manly man/pretty boy' pairing). The fanonic associations of 'manly' and 'pretty' generate their own narrative expectations.
I have yet to come across a theory that is helpful in analysing the precise relationships between canon, fanon and narrative in fanfic.
Setting
Setting is not discussed very much by narratologists yet it is, for me, one of the principal ingredients in narrative. I remember settings as vividly as I remember characters, so I decided to devote a section to the topic here.
I have already mentioned setting a few times in the context of discussing other aspects of the two fics. I talked about the usual corner booth as a rare example of description in Research, and I discussed the way the landscape is focalised through the 'you'-character in Border Town.
Border Town makes a great deal of use of setting for narrative purposes. As we have seen, the setting is consistently focalised through the 'you'-character. For Bal, focalisation is the way a generic space becomes a particular place (p.133). Partly because of this character-bound focalisation, the setting also functions in a metaphoric way. Wind, rain, crap floating on the water -- these are not only parts of the landscape; they are also ingredients of the 'you'-character's mind. The setting is not an idyll; it is a mirror of the 'you'-character's emotional confusion.
Setting has its own fanon. In Lotr-rps, the most common locations may be summarised as: bar, flat, set, premiere, toilet cubicle. The setting of Border Town is outside these parameters but sets up its own. In the wake of rl information about the location-shooting of Master & Commander, a small sub-set of 'Mexico' fics emerged. Border Town is a take with a twist on the Mexico theme. (Usually, 'Mexico' involves Billy somehow.)
Setting entails description, and description entails a narrative pause. The descriptions of setting in Border Town contribute to that fic's relatively unhurried pace and dreamy mood. However, the slow pace is counterbalanced by the movement of the characters through this setting. Their journey makes the setting dynamic. The actual journey is also a metaphor for an emotional journey. The resigned mood of the first scene (you could go on, or you could go back) has changed into one of slightly more optimism by the last scene (it does get better, that it will get better -- admittedly it is not the 'you' who says this, as we have seen, but still), and this is echoed by an aspect of the setting: the dust. In the first paragraph, the rain, when it falls, dries dusty on the windowpanes; in the last paragraph, this image has transmuted into sweet bread dusted with sugar. A thematic link is set up between the dust at the beginning and the dusted at the end. The possibilities of emotional change are couched in the terms of a journey: the further on you go.
Mieke Bal argues that there are two kinds of space, frame-space (which stays in the background and provides a place for the action) and thematised space (which is an 'acting place' and influences the story; p.136). The setting of Border Town is a thematised, dynamic space.
By contrast, the setting of In the Name of Research is a fixed frame-space. It is also one of the most popular fanon locations: a bar. Perhaps because the setting of bar or pub generates a host of generic expectations and associations, not much description is needed. Readers will fill in the details of the setting from minimal clues (usual corner booth, wooden table). These clues are not given until seven paragraphs into the text (compare Border Town which starts with setting). Research propels us into the story via dialogue and free indirect discourse. Because the narrative in Research does not need to stop for any descriptive pauses, it is quite fast-paced, told through the back-and-forth of dialogue and action. Indeed, most of the descriptions that do occur are descriptions-in-action: Harry looked around their usual corner booth... Karl said, leaning forward, forearms resting on the wooden table... "Back booth, no one can see much." (See also my point on adverbs above, in section on frequency.)
Narrative causality
The simplest building blocks of a narrative are events, succeeding each other in time: x happens; then y happens. Many narratologists believe that there also needs to be some causal connection between the events happening: x happens, as a result, y happens. The drive towards tight narrative causality is especially strong in Hollywood cinema. Hollywood narratives proceed along a chain of causes and effects until all dangling causes are tied up at the ending and narrative closure is achieved (see Bordwell and Thompson; Thompson). Fanfic is not quite as tightly plotted along causal lines as are Hollywood scripts but causality nevertheless plays an important part, if only in the breach.
Border Town leaves a number of events and emotional effects unexplained by any explicit cause. As we have seen, not all analepses and ellipses are filled in; the precise relationship between 'you' and 'he' is not spelled out nor is their past history described. However, we do know that the 'you'-character's emotions are caused by some emotional trauma, that this emotional trauma has to do with the 'he'-character in some way, and that the motoring trip is a kind of therapeutic journey to deal with this trauma: safer, he tells you. As I discovered during my analysis, there are also other causalities at work: they buy bottled water because the water in the taps is rusty; because they are away in the supermarket, hoodlums are able to snap off the aerial; the broken-off aerial causes the mock swordplay in the guesthouse.
Causality operates strongly in Research. Very little is left unexplained and unmotivated in this fic. Harry is not really listening: this is because of his stupid allergy medication. Karl gets his idea of kissing from Viggo on some wild adventure, and he wishes to follow this idea through because he thinks he ought to have experimented a bit more at his age and if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--
Rimmon-Kenan argues that readers do not need explicit causality. We tend to construct causality from simple temporal succession (p.18). So if we read x happens; then y happens we will infer from this that y happens because x has happened. I tend to agree with this view. Causal expectations of narratives are very strong; we will always look for motivations, reasons, connections and meaning in narrative, unlike in real life.
Structural peculiarities of slash
The Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp proposed that folktales are structured using a small number of components in different combinations, e.g. 'return', 'pursuit', and a small number of roles, e.g. 'hero', 'villain'. We can also think about fanfic in terms of a finite number of story structures underlying all individual fics. The most common of these is the boy-meet-boy, boy-wants-to-have-sex-with-boy model. (By 'boy', I also mean 'man'; and by 'sex', I mean anything from kissing to buggery.) This plays out in a number of ways:
(A) boy meets boy, boy wants to have sex with boy
(1) boy has sex with boy
(2) boy is shy / reluctant; obstacles and embarrassing situations intervene; a final revelation of mutual desire ends in boy having sex with boy
(3) boy angsts about his sexual proclivities
(3a) after obstacles and embarrassments, boy has sex with boy
(3b) boy does not have sex with boy
(4) boy wants to have sex with boy but other boy has sex with someone else; boy angsts
(I have probably missed out some scenarios but these are the main ones that come to mind.)
What is, of course, crucial to all slash is (A): there is a predetermined expectation that boy will meet boy, and that this meeting will result in the desire to have sex. No origfic, with the exception perhaps of gay porn, has this plot expectation built into it as such an absolutely integral component. If a slashfic features a number of boys, it usually becomes apparent at some point which particular boy will want to have sex with which other particular boy -- this is also where the 'pairings' rubric in the Header plays its part.
In the Name of Research is based on my model (2): 'boy is shy / reluctant; obstacles and embarrassing situations intervene; a final revelation of mutual desire ends in boy having sex with boy'. 'Sex' here comes in the form of kissing. The humour of the fic arises from the twist to this pattern. Readers expect the final revelation of mutual desire; what they get instead is the final revelation of mutual sexual indifference. The humorous twist can, however, only be appreciated (and the meaning of the fic understood) if the predetermined pattern exists in readers' minds.
Border Town is a type of plot that involves an aftermath of events that took place before the beginning of the fic. All the analepses in this fic are crucial to our understanding of the narrative as an aftermath-plot. Readers may deduce (at least, that's what I deduced) that the 'you' and the 'he' were, at one point in the past, involved in plot model (2) or (3a), perhaps even (4). This kind of aftermath-plot is not rare in fanficdom. It might even merit its own plot model:
(B) after having sex with boy, boy angsts about it.
Plot model (B) needs plots (1) to (3), however. It can only exist if readers assume that either (1), (2) or (3) (and indeed, [A]) have already taken place. In a way, all of my plot models could be rewritten as:
(i) sex takes place, boy is happy
(ii) sex takes place, boy angsts
Using this simplified model, Border Town follows plot (ii), and Research follows plot (i).
One could complicate the above patterns by inserting the component of romance. Indeed, after devising my plot patterns, it occurred to me that 'having sex' in fanfic is actually mostly subservient to 'falling in love'. One of the key structures in slash involves the various interweavings and criss-crossings of the 'sex' component with the 'romance' component. Much of the angsting in slash arises from some form of mismatch between these two components in the mind of the focalisor. In fact, coming to the end of this analysis makes me realise how crucial both of the components of 'sex' and 'love' are to the underlying narrative structures of slash. They are so crucial that I may have to write another essay specifically about this aspect (I know! stop me now). For this, my first analysis, I deliberately chose two fics that do not feature explicit sex of the NC-17 type. I think I did this because subliminally I already suspected that the inclusion of sex would explode my narratological analysis beyond the limits of this one essay. And isn't that always the way with sex...?
Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed reading this narratological analysis of fanfic even a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing it. I don't know of any similar analysis, and I suspect this is because academics (who tend to indulge in this sort of analysis) have so far not taken fanfic seriously enough. A handful of scholars have written on fandom and slash but they tend to discuss fanfic as a sociological phenomenon and remain frustratingly superficial about the actual nitty-gritty of the fics themselves (see Alexander and Harris, ChristineCGB, Jenkins, Penley). I wanted to write something that does justice to the actual texts of fanfic.
In the process, I have learned an great deal about narratology (I finally understand all those concepts!), and I have also learned a great deal about the two fics I analysed and about fanfic in general. I've been delighted to discover that fanfic holds up under the scrutiny of Genette, Aristotle et al., and conversely, that Genette, Aristotle et al. hold up under the scrutiny of fanfic! One final point about all narratologists, though: much as I love them, they tend to write exclusively from the point of view of the reader and the finished product. They don't take the writer and the creative writerly process into account. Some even state explicitly that there is no point in discovering how authors work.
From the point of view of writers, this is a limitation of narratology as it has been practised so far. On the other hand, a liberating side-effect of the narratologists' bias towards reception (not production) is the blissful absence of any kind of 'advice to writers' or guidelines on 'how to write a novel'. This reminds us yet again that there are no hard and fast rules for fic-writing. Every narrative device can be used to good or bad effect but no single narrative device as such is inferior to any other. All of the possibilities are there for the taking, and it's up to each writer to discover them for herself.
Texts cited
Primary sources
Arabian Nights, The, translated by Husain Haddawy, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990 (first written down c.1250-c.1300).
Austen, Jane, Emma, London: Penguin, 2001 (first published in 1815).
Brenda, In the Name of Research, 2003,
http://www.livejournal.com/users/azewewish/126223.html
Dee, Ring Pull, 2002,
http://www.viscerate.com/manflesh/ringpull.html
Gabby Hope, Saturday Night, 2002,
http://gabbyhope.afinepoint.com/fics/satnight.html
Homer, The Iliad, translated by E. V. Rieu, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1950 (probably written c. 750 BC).
Jenn Abiding, No Soft Goodbye, Part Two of the Wrong To Love You series, 2002,
http://secret-panel.net/softgoodbye1.html
Nova, Border Town, 2003, http://www.dombillijah.com/users/nova/fic/bordertown.html
Nova, Real Person Slash: RPS Fic (Table of Contents),
http://www.dombillijah.com/users/nova/rps.html
Secondary literature
Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Malcolm Heath, London: Penguin, 1996 (Greek original c.360-347 BC).
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 'The Problem of Speech Genres', reprinted in David Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, Harlow: Longman, 2000 (Russian original: 1952-3).
Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd edition, Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Barthes, Roland, 'The Reality Effect', reprinted in Lilian R. Furst (ed.), Realism, London: Longman, 1992 (French original: 1968).
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.
Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
ChristineCGB, 'Coming Out as a Fanfiction Writer', Zendom: A Webzine and Mailing List About the Fandom Within, posted 2002,
http://zendom.diaryland.com/020404_18.html
Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974 (first published: 1927).
Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980 (French original: 1972).
Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 (French original: 1987).
Harris, Cheryl and Alexander, Alison, Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1998.
Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge, 1992.
Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction, London: Jonathan Cape, 1954 (first published: 1921).
Penley, Constance, NASA / Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, New York: Verso, 1995.
Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, Austin, Texas: Texas University Press, 1968 (Russian original: 1928).
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London/New York: Methuen, 1983.
Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System, New York: Random House, 1981; cited in Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge, 2000.
Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975 (French original: 1970).
Filmography
Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, USA, 1942
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© Lobelia. All rights reserved.
22 March 2004
All manner of feedback is welcome, including examples that reinforce my own ideas but also comments that are counter-arguments to mine and, of course, simple expressions of interest. In short: I would love to hear from you!
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Email me: lobelia40@yahoo.com
Or leave a comment here: LiveJournal post
Please do not quote without citing one of the urls below.
This essay is available here:
http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/narrfic.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257093.html#cutid1 (part 1)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257458.html#cutid (part 2)
Back to Part 1.
A narratological analysis of fanfiction
by Lobelia
continued
Url of this page: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257458.html#cutid1
Url of part 1: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257093.html#cutid
Beyond Genette
During the course of this analysis, I came upon a number of important aspects that do not feature in Genette's discussion. The additional issues that occurred to me in particular are: genre, character, setting, narrative causality and some structural peculiarities of slash. I will discuss these now.
Genre
These fics cannot be understood fully without placing them into the context of fanfic. Fanfic is above all a particular textual genre, and slash is a particular sub-genre of fanfic. (I am tempted to argue this the other way round: fanfic is a sub-genre of slash. But that discussion must await another essay.) When we interpret texts in the light of genre, we look for similarities across different texts (see Todorov). In a genre text (or a genre film, for that matter), each narrative component has a prior significance as part of a genre: it is not unique but is understood as an element in a generic formula (see Schatz; quoted in Neale, p.208). The formula is established by repetition and, I would argue, each individual text in turn influences the formula overall. In the words of the film historian John Cawelti, genres are a form of 'collective artistic behaviour' (p.2).
For me, genre is all about audience or reader expectation. A genre sets up particular generic expectations (I use the word 'generic' here as the adjective of 'genre'), and readers interpret each individual text in the light of those expectations. Texts can exploit generic expectations in various ways.
Both Border Town and In the Name of Research are generic examples of slash and fanfic, and even more specifically of Lord of the Rings real-person slash. A number of generic expectations are set up as a result, including the inclusion of non-original characters previously known to the reader, and the positing of a homosexual or at least a homoerotic relationship between at least two characters in what is generically known as a 'pairing'. The concept of pairing is absolutely crucial to all slash, and both Border Town and Research thrive on it.
Border Town exploits the generic expectation of a slashy pairing in a number of ways. I have already discussed the implications of the sentence His hand closes over your own above (section on perspective). The sentence, and its position at the beginning of the final asterisked ellipsis, depends for its meaning on generic reader expectations. Readers familiar with the generic conventions of slash will, I suspect, easily fill in the ellipsis with an imagined sex act (at least, I did). This is a speculation based entirely on extra-narrative knowledge to do with the genre of this fic. Slashfic sets up generic expectations of sex. Hence, even a non-committal statement such as His hand closes over your own can be read as a suggestion of sex to come.
More essentially, at no point in the fic is the 'you'-character identified as male yet, I would speculate, every single reader of this fic (excepting blow-ins from the world of google) understood the 'you' to be a man. Also, the entire fic becomes 'about' the pairing, 'about' the relationship of 'you' and 'him'. The 'you'-character's internal focalisation on landscape, weather, Spanish and a leafless tree strung with a frayed loop of pink chilli-pepper bulbs becomes the outward projection of inward emotions to do with his relationship with this 'him'. Indeed, the very first time the focalisor 'you' appears in the fic, he is mentioned in one breath, as it were, with his paired partner: At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea, you, and him, and a rental car...
One of the effects of Border Town is the fact that the 'you' and the 'he' are never identified by name. This is unusual, though not unknown, in fanfic (or origfic, for that matter). However, generic pairing expectations operate so strongly in slash that I, for one, filled in the anonymous characters with my own identifications: I named them for myself. My impression of this fic was shaped by the fact that I read it at the webpage cited above (see introduction); on this page, the fic appears without a Header. However, if you click your way back to the Table of Contents, you will find the pairing named in a mini-Header:
border town
melancholy and car aerials.
(ob/vm, PG-13)
It must make a great difference for readers, knowing or not knowing the pairing in advance, though for me one of the delights of reading this fic for the first time was the working out of the pairing myself. The 'you' and the 'he' are characterised so effectively within fanon expectations that I did not need their names.
By contrast, In the Name of Research identifies its characters very clearly by name throughout. Moreover, the characters are named before the story even starts: their names appear in the Header.
Headers are an example of paratexts. Paratexts are texts that are situated outside narratives or texts proper, such as blurbs or title pages (see Genette 1997). Headers are the quintessential generic paratexts of fanfic. They follow rigid conventions. Research includes most of the formulaic rubrics found in a typical Header (title, author, rating, summary, disclaimer, notes). Because the formula is so rigid, authors often play around with it, and Brenda has here changed the formulaic 'Pairing' to 'Non-Pairing':
Non-Pairing: Karl.Ur.ban & Harry.Sin.clair
This sets up two expectations: the expectation of Karl and Harry (named, identified, paired) and the expectation of something a little unusual, i.e. something foiling generic pairing expectations (Non-Pairing, reinforced by the use of an ampersand instead of the more usual forward slash). As we know after having read the fic, this foiling consists of the affirmation of Karl's and Harry's heterosexuality; this is a transgression only within the context of the genre and unintelligible outside the expectations of slash.
Genres depend for their meaning on what the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called addressivity, the quality of turning to someone without which the utterance cannot exist. I would argue that this someone is the reader (or viewer) with genre competence. Addressivity or, in our context, fandom, is, of course, absolutely crucial to the entire enterprise of fanfic. Much of what is included in slash narratives is addressed specifically to members of the fandom and makes little sense outside the context of that particular readership. Fans, or more precisely: fanfic fans, develop a special generic competence. I suspect it is my own genre competence that keeps me coming back to Lotr-rps: I 'get' more of the insider allusions and that generates a feeling of belonging to a particular reading-and-writing community.
The category of genre is related to the fanfic-specific concept of fanon which I will discuss below (section on peculiarities of slash).
Character
Character is central to fanfic. Readers and writers of fanfic have an emotionally charged relationship with the characters in fanfic. This is magnified in the case of slash where each character becomes eroticised. To wordnap the concepts of Sigmund Freud: slash characters are cathected sites. Cathexis is a psychosexual charge of energy, the concentration of emotional energy on an object or idea. Cathected sites or objects are those upon which this libidinous charge fixes. I am German so I am not afraid of Freud's original German word for this affect (besetzt which means occupied, in the sense that toilets can be occupied). In English, the word suddenly looks alien and scary (also gratifyingly pretentious); it is, however, the very best way I have yet hit upon to describe slashers' relationship with their slashees.
It is no accident that the concept of 'characterisation' is one of the most discussed notions among fanfic writers (alongside the related concept of 'point of view'). Genette has not much to say about character. I therefore turned elsewhere for ideas.
Aristotle argued that in tragedy, character is made manifest through actions: 'Character [in a play] is included along with and on account of the actions.' (p.11) The exclusive emphasis on action is relevant for drama and film but prose narrative has recourse to other modes of characterisation as well.
The Israeli narratologist Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan asserts that there are two basic types of indicators for character; she labels them somewhat awkwardly direct definition and indirect presentation (pp.59-70). Direct definition names a character trait by an adjective, a noun or a part of speech. An example would be Jane Austen's 'Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich'. In fanfic, I am reminded of Jenn Abiding's wonderful opening line to No Soft Goodbye:
Orli is so in love with Sean he doesn't know what to do.
Indirect presentation doesn't mention the trait but displays and exemplifies it, in the form of action and speech (the Aristotelian modes of characterisation) as well as external appearance and/or environment. When confronted with indirect presentation, readers have to infer the character trait implied by the presentation. (Bal calls these types explicit qualification and qualification by function or implicit qualification, p.130.)
In the two fics analysed here, indirect presentation seems to outweigh direct definition.
In the Name of Research:
(a) Harry spit his beer across the table. (indirect presentation through action)
(b) "Ha fucking ha." (indirect presentation through speech)
(c) "I'll have you know my technique with women is foolproof, thank you," Karl replied with a haughty stare. (indirect presentation through speech and external appearance; however, embedded within the speech is an instance of direct self-definition)
Border Town:
(d) "Well then, maybe I didn't listen quite as hard." (indirect presentation through speech) The aerial zips and whines through the air as you slash at your insubstantial foe, lunge, parry, riposte; (indirect presentation through action) he watches you critically. (indirect presentation through external appearance / action)
I initially hazarded that the preponderance of indirect presentation over direct presentation is the case for fanfic as a whole (but changed my mind during the course of this analysis, as will become clear). Rimmon-Kenan argues that the favouring of direct definition is an aspect of twentieth-century fiction in general. These are her views:
'The economical character of definition and its capacity to guide the reader's response recommended it to traditional novelists [she means, 19th century and earlier]. On the other hand, in an individualistic and relativistic period like our own [she wrote this in 1983], generalization and classification are less easily tolerated, and the economy of definition is grasped as reductive. Moreover, in the present day, when suggestiveness and indeterminacy are preferred to closure and definitiveness and when emphasis is put on the active role of the reader, the explicitness and guiding capacity of direct definition are often considered drawbacks rather than advantages.' (p.61)
Fanfic would seem to in line with overall developments in literature. Border Town certainly falls within the bounds of 'suggestiveness and indeterminacy'. In the Name of Research is less indeterminate but characterises its characters mostly by indirect presentation as well. I therefore suspect that Rimmon-Kenan's speculation as to the reasons for the predominance of indirect presentation are somewhat limited. The love of indirect presentation goes beyond the love of the suggestive, and I would argue that indirect presentation can be quite as precise as direct definition.
Interestingly, one of the instances of direct definition I could find in the two fics occurred in the more 'suggestive' Border Town: ...he likes to drive, and you don't,... The 'he'-character's trait is defined directly (he likes to drive), and immediately afterwards, the 'you'-character's trait is defined directly (and you don't) but the 'you'-character's characterisation spills over into indirect presentation within the very same sentence:
He starts the car; he likes to drive (direct definition of a character by the character-bound narrator), and you don't (direct self-definition by the character-bound narrator), or at least not over here in unfamiliar towns, where the whole wrong-side-of-the-road thing bothers you more and every junction brings on a flutter of minor panic (indirect presentation).
(On the corresponding move from iterative-descriptive to iterative-specific in this passage, see above in the section on frequency.)
I found a few instances of direct definition in Research.
(a) "... I mean, I'm over 30 and a father..." (direct self-definition with respect to Karl's age and status, embedded within indirect presentation through speech)
(b) "Yeah, I'm a nice 'un like that." (direct self-definition of Karl, with reference to a particular act but also indirect presentation, revealing irony as a character trait of Karl's)
(c) Harry was too old for a white knight anyway. (direct definition with respect to age)
All of these examples of direct definition are focalised through the directly-defined character. In (a) and (b), Karl is defining himself, and in (a) the words I mean turn his self-definition (embedded in speech) into something more than description; he is in fact advancing his age and status as a reason for kissing a guy. The direct definition of Harry in (c) is part of a passage of free indirect discourse, focalised through Harry himself and hence an example of indirect presentation; the overall effect of the passage is humorous and serves to remind readers of the manly status of this character:
"Uh..." Harry looked around their usual corner booth, hoping to see a familiar face. Rescue of some sort. But, of course there weren’t any. Harry was too old for a white knight anyway. Would probably look rather silly in glass slippers. "Yeah,” he finally answered, deciding to brazen it out. "Hasn’t everyone?"
Ultimately, I am not sure how useful the alleged dichotomy of direct definition vs. indirect presentation actually is. In practice, I found it quite difficult to tell the two apart in every case. As the above examples show, the two categories frequently merge. Also, Rimmon-Kenan's duality is reminiscent yet again of the whole wretched show-not-tell debate, and one of the reasons for the alleged preponderance of indirect definition in modern (fan)fiction may be that this mode is more closely identified with so-called showing. I started out by thinking, along with Rimmon-Kenan, that fanfic prefers indirect presentation but the more I looked at these two fics, the more instances of direct definition and merged forms did I find, so I suspect that Rimmon-Kenan's claim may be over-simplifying matters.
Another oft-cited way to think about character goes back to the writer E. M. Forster. Forster divided characters into flat and round. Flat characters are 'constructed round a single idea or quality'; they are easily recognised and easily remembered, and they are not changed by circumstances (pp.73-4). The test of a round character is 'whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way' (p.81).
I have two points to make about Forster's differentiation. Firstly, it seems to me to be very difficult to establish objectively where the difference between flat and round lies; in some cases it is clear-cut (Susan the waitress is a flat character) but often the dividing line seems to be murky.
Secondly, fanfic presents a special case. On one level, all characters in fanfic (certainly the most popular characters) are round, in the sense that each one comes predetermined with its own characterisation attached to it. As soon as the proper name Karl appears in Research, readers familiar with Lotr-rps will bring to the fic a whole array of possible character traits for Karl. Indeed, this aspect of fan writing is one of the most discussed among fanfic writers and readers, and is frequently opposed to the writing of original characters: in fanfic, you can rely on your readers having some knowledge of your characters; characters do not need to be invented from scratch. The cumulative characterisation of slashees within a fandom is part of what is known as fanon (as opposed to canon, the books, films, TV-series or real-live actors upon which fanfic is based). Fanon is, on one level, the fanfic-specific term for generic conventions. However, I think that most debates around fanon actually come down to debates about characterisation; reader expectations are less strictly defined with respect to story or setting. At least, this is the case within Lotr-rps; other fandoms, such as Harry Potter, also have fanonical plot elements but I suspect that even there, a greater tolerance prevails with regard to the twisting of the story-world than with regard to the twisting of character. (It is no accident that the acronym OOC or 'out-of-character' is an established ingredient in Headers.)
Part of the humour in Research stems from Brenda's characterisation of Karl and Harry as going against the grain of Karl/Harry fanon (as I mentioned above, their heterosexuality is not part of fanon -- although it is very much part of canon: both men are known to be heterosexual in real life.) Border Town also relies on readers' predetermined knowledge of fanon character. This is what enables readers to slot the 'you' and the 'he' into two character-shaped bubbles (I owe this wonderful term to Calico). Fanon and generic competence in the form of fanon knowledge is what enabled me to slot the 'you' into an 'Orlando' bubble and the 'he' into a 'Viggo' bubble. Even those readers armed with fore-knowledge of the Header (ob/vm) would still need to have fanon knowledge in order to enable them to de-code which one of the two characters is ob and which is vm (although the order ob/vm, rather than vm/ob, helps -- but knowing that the first-mentioned character in a pairing is often the focalisor is in itself part of fanon competence).
In one sense, all characters in fanfic are round (barring the very rare ones). Even if a character is not characterised in much depth in any one fic, the reader brings in-depth fanon knowledge about that character to the reading of that fic, anyway. In Research, for example, the character of Viggo is merely mentioned a few times; he is not characterised beyond his name. But that name alone is enough to conjure up a fairly rounded character in readers' minds if those readers know their Viggo-fanon. (I would suspect that no fanfic fan is surprised that it was Viggo who lured Karl into sexual experimentation, and not, e.g., Elijah.) And when Karl says, "...he's Vig, y'know", fanfic readers can nod their heads and say: "Yes, we do know!"
On the other hand, one could also say that characters in fanfic are peculiarly flat. This is because many authors, relying on readers' fanon knowledge, do not furnish their characters with much complexity. In many ways, the characters in both Border Town and Research are relatively flat: Border Town presents characterisations that operate within the generic expectations of an Orlando/Viggo pairing; Research sketches in just enough character traits to propel the kissing plot forwards. The problem with Forster's duo flat/round becomes apparent here: his terms are too value-laden to be of much analytic use (with round having a higher value than flat), and his terms are also too woolly to allow for precise analysis, especially within the context of fanfic.
Bal argues that the duality of flat/round only works for psychological narrative; genres such as fairy tales or detective fiction operate with flat characters only, and modernist narratives (e.g. by Proust) often mock the concepts (p.117). Fanfic occupies a peculiar spot between psychological narrative (with its valuation of complex characters) and non-literary genre (with its restricted stable of non-orig characters and its fanon).
Not only does fanfic rely on readers' generic expectations of characters, but also on readers' expectations of pairing. Indeed, in slash, pairings tend to have generic characterisations of their own. This is indicated by fanfic fans' development of short-hand notations for particular popular pairings, e.g. Viggorli, Dorli, Domlijah. The simple knowledge of Viggorli fanon already sets into motion particular expectations of a fic featuring this pairing, such as Border Town. It is this fanonical pairing knowledge that enabled me definitively to identify the 'you' with Orlando. It even coloured my perception of the imagined sex scene suggested by the asterisked ellipsis after His hand closes over your own. This makes sense in the context of Viggorli fanon which nearly always features Viggo as top and Orlando as bottom: His hand is here in effect topping your own. Similarly, particular expectations exist with respect to the Karl/Harry pairing; it is, e.g., nearly always a 'manly' pairing (while Viggorli is mostly a 'manly man/pretty boy' pairing). The fanonic associations of 'manly' and 'pretty' generate their own narrative expectations.
I have yet to come across a theory that is helpful in analysing the precise relationships between canon, fanon and narrative in fanfic.
Setting
Setting is not discussed very much by narratologists yet it is, for me, one of the principal ingredients in narrative. I remember settings as vividly as I remember characters, so I decided to devote a section to the topic here.
I have already mentioned setting a few times in the context of discussing other aspects of the two fics. I talked about the usual corner booth as a rare example of description in Research, and I discussed the way the landscape is focalised through the 'you'-character in Border Town.
Border Town makes a great deal of use of setting for narrative purposes. As we have seen, the setting is consistently focalised through the 'you'-character. For Bal, focalisation is the way a generic space becomes a particular place (p.133). Partly because of this character-bound focalisation, the setting also functions in a metaphoric way. Wind, rain, crap floating on the water -- these are not only parts of the landscape; they are also ingredients of the 'you'-character's mind. The setting is not an idyll; it is a mirror of the 'you'-character's emotional confusion.
Setting has its own fanon. In Lotr-rps, the most common locations may be summarised as: bar, flat, set, premiere, toilet cubicle. The setting of Border Town is outside these parameters but sets up its own. In the wake of rl information about the location-shooting of Master & Commander, a small sub-set of 'Mexico' fics emerged. Border Town is a take with a twist on the Mexico theme. (Usually, 'Mexico' involves Billy somehow.)
Setting entails description, and description entails a narrative pause. The descriptions of setting in Border Town contribute to that fic's relatively unhurried pace and dreamy mood. However, the slow pace is counterbalanced by the movement of the characters through this setting. Their journey makes the setting dynamic. The actual journey is also a metaphor for an emotional journey. The resigned mood of the first scene (you could go on, or you could go back) has changed into one of slightly more optimism by the last scene (it does get better, that it will get better -- admittedly it is not the 'you' who says this, as we have seen, but still), and this is echoed by an aspect of the setting: the dust. In the first paragraph, the rain, when it falls, dries dusty on the windowpanes; in the last paragraph, this image has transmuted into sweet bread dusted with sugar. A thematic link is set up between the dust at the beginning and the dusted at the end. The possibilities of emotional change are couched in the terms of a journey: the further on you go.
Mieke Bal argues that there are two kinds of space, frame-space (which stays in the background and provides a place for the action) and thematised space (which is an 'acting place' and influences the story; p.136). The setting of Border Town is a thematised, dynamic space.
By contrast, the setting of In the Name of Research is a fixed frame-space. It is also one of the most popular fanon locations: a bar. Perhaps because the setting of bar or pub generates a host of generic expectations and associations, not much description is needed. Readers will fill in the details of the setting from minimal clues (usual corner booth, wooden table). These clues are not given until seven paragraphs into the text (compare Border Town which starts with setting). Research propels us into the story via dialogue and free indirect discourse. Because the narrative in Research does not need to stop for any descriptive pauses, it is quite fast-paced, told through the back-and-forth of dialogue and action. Indeed, most of the descriptions that do occur are descriptions-in-action: Harry looked around their usual corner booth... Karl said, leaning forward, forearms resting on the wooden table... "Back booth, no one can see much." (See also my point on adverbs above, in section on frequency.)
Narrative causality
The simplest building blocks of a narrative are events, succeeding each other in time: x happens; then y happens. Many narratologists believe that there also needs to be some causal connection between the events happening: x happens, as a result, y happens. The drive towards tight narrative causality is especially strong in Hollywood cinema. Hollywood narratives proceed along a chain of causes and effects until all dangling causes are tied up at the ending and narrative closure is achieved (see Bordwell and Thompson; Thompson). Fanfic is not quite as tightly plotted along causal lines as are Hollywood scripts but causality nevertheless plays an important part, if only in the breach.
Border Town leaves a number of events and emotional effects unexplained by any explicit cause. As we have seen, not all analepses and ellipses are filled in; the precise relationship between 'you' and 'he' is not spelled out nor is their past history described. However, we do know that the 'you'-character's emotions are caused by some emotional trauma, that this emotional trauma has to do with the 'he'-character in some way, and that the motoring trip is a kind of therapeutic journey to deal with this trauma: safer, he tells you. As I discovered during my analysis, there are also other causalities at work: they buy bottled water because the water in the taps is rusty; because they are away in the supermarket, hoodlums are able to snap off the aerial; the broken-off aerial causes the mock swordplay in the guesthouse.
Causality operates strongly in Research. Very little is left unexplained and unmotivated in this fic. Harry is not really listening: this is because of his stupid allergy medication. Karl gets his idea of kissing from Viggo on some wild adventure, and he wishes to follow this idea through because he thinks he ought to have experimented a bit more at his age and if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--
Rimmon-Kenan argues that readers do not need explicit causality. We tend to construct causality from simple temporal succession (p.18). So if we read x happens; then y happens we will infer from this that y happens because x has happened. I tend to agree with this view. Causal expectations of narratives are very strong; we will always look for motivations, reasons, connections and meaning in narrative, unlike in real life.
Structural peculiarities of slash
The Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp proposed that folktales are structured using a small number of components in different combinations, e.g. 'return', 'pursuit', and a small number of roles, e.g. 'hero', 'villain'. We can also think about fanfic in terms of a finite number of story structures underlying all individual fics. The most common of these is the boy-meet-boy, boy-wants-to-have-sex-with-boy model. (By 'boy', I also mean 'man'; and by 'sex', I mean anything from kissing to buggery.) This plays out in a number of ways:
(A) boy meets boy, boy wants to have sex with boy
(1) boy has sex with boy
(2) boy is shy / reluctant; obstacles and embarrassing situations intervene; a final revelation of mutual desire ends in boy having sex with boy
(3) boy angsts about his sexual proclivities
(3a) after obstacles and embarrassments, boy has sex with boy
(3b) boy does not have sex with boy
(4) boy wants to have sex with boy but other boy has sex with someone else; boy angsts
(I have probably missed out some scenarios but these are the main ones that come to mind.)
What is, of course, crucial to all slash is (A): there is a predetermined expectation that boy will meet boy, and that this meeting will result in the desire to have sex. No origfic, with the exception perhaps of gay porn, has this plot expectation built into it as such an absolutely integral component. If a slashfic features a number of boys, it usually becomes apparent at some point which particular boy will want to have sex with which other particular boy -- this is also where the 'pairings' rubric in the Header plays its part.
In the Name of Research is based on my model (2): 'boy is shy / reluctant; obstacles and embarrassing situations intervene; a final revelation of mutual desire ends in boy having sex with boy'. 'Sex' here comes in the form of kissing. The humour of the fic arises from the twist to this pattern. Readers expect the final revelation of mutual desire; what they get instead is the final revelation of mutual sexual indifference. The humorous twist can, however, only be appreciated (and the meaning of the fic understood) if the predetermined pattern exists in readers' minds.
Border Town is a type of plot that involves an aftermath of events that took place before the beginning of the fic. All the analepses in this fic are crucial to our understanding of the narrative as an aftermath-plot. Readers may deduce (at least, that's what I deduced) that the 'you' and the 'he' were, at one point in the past, involved in plot model (2) or (3a), perhaps even (4). This kind of aftermath-plot is not rare in fanficdom. It might even merit its own plot model:
(B) after having sex with boy, boy angsts about it.
Plot model (B) needs plots (1) to (3), however. It can only exist if readers assume that either (1), (2) or (3) (and indeed, [A]) have already taken place. In a way, all of my plot models could be rewritten as:
(i) sex takes place, boy is happy
(ii) sex takes place, boy angsts
Using this simplified model, Border Town follows plot (ii), and Research follows plot (i).
One could complicate the above patterns by inserting the component of romance. Indeed, after devising my plot patterns, it occurred to me that 'having sex' in fanfic is actually mostly subservient to 'falling in love'. One of the key structures in slash involves the various interweavings and criss-crossings of the 'sex' component with the 'romance' component. Much of the angsting in slash arises from some form of mismatch between these two components in the mind of the focalisor. In fact, coming to the end of this analysis makes me realise how crucial both of the components of 'sex' and 'love' are to the underlying narrative structures of slash. They are so crucial that I may have to write another essay specifically about this aspect (I know! stop me now). For this, my first analysis, I deliberately chose two fics that do not feature explicit sex of the NC-17 type. I think I did this because subliminally I already suspected that the inclusion of sex would explode my narratological analysis beyond the limits of this one essay. And isn't that always the way with sex...?
Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed reading this narratological analysis of fanfic even a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing it. I don't know of any similar analysis, and I suspect this is because academics (who tend to indulge in this sort of analysis) have so far not taken fanfic seriously enough. A handful of scholars have written on fandom and slash but they tend to discuss fanfic as a sociological phenomenon and remain frustratingly superficial about the actual nitty-gritty of the fics themselves (see Alexander and Harris, ChristineCGB, Jenkins, Penley). I wanted to write something that does justice to the actual texts of fanfic.
In the process, I have learned an great deal about narratology (I finally understand all those concepts!), and I have also learned a great deal about the two fics I analysed and about fanfic in general. I've been delighted to discover that fanfic holds up under the scrutiny of Genette, Aristotle et al., and conversely, that Genette, Aristotle et al. hold up under the scrutiny of fanfic! One final point about all narratologists, though: much as I love them, they tend to write exclusively from the point of view of the reader and the finished product. They don't take the writer and the creative writerly process into account. Some even state explicitly that there is no point in discovering how authors work.
From the point of view of writers, this is a limitation of narratology as it has been practised so far. On the other hand, a liberating side-effect of the narratologists' bias towards reception (not production) is the blissful absence of any kind of 'advice to writers' or guidelines on 'how to write a novel'. This reminds us yet again that there are no hard and fast rules for fic-writing. Every narrative device can be used to good or bad effect but no single narrative device as such is inferior to any other. All of the possibilities are there for the taking, and it's up to each writer to discover them for herself.
Texts cited
Primary sources
Arabian Nights, The, translated by Husain Haddawy, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990 (first written down c.1250-c.1300).
Austen, Jane, Emma, London: Penguin, 2001 (first published in 1815).
Brenda, In the Name of Research, 2003,
http://www.livejournal.com/users/azewewish/126223.html
Dee, Ring Pull, 2002,
http://www.viscerate.com/manflesh/ringpull.html
Gabby Hope, Saturday Night, 2002,
http://gabbyhope.afinepoint.com/fics/satnight.html
Homer, The Iliad, translated by E. V. Rieu, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1950 (probably written c. 750 BC).
Jenn Abiding, No Soft Goodbye, Part Two of the Wrong To Love You series, 2002,
http://secret-panel.net/softgoodbye1.html
Nova, Border Town, 2003, http://www.dombillijah.com/users/nova/fic/bordertown.html
Nova, Real Person Slash: RPS Fic (Table of Contents),
http://www.dombillijah.com/users/nova/rps.html
Secondary literature
Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Malcolm Heath, London: Penguin, 1996 (Greek original c.360-347 BC).
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 'The Problem of Speech Genres', reprinted in David Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, Harlow: Longman, 2000 (Russian original: 1952-3).
Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd edition, Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Barthes, Roland, 'The Reality Effect', reprinted in Lilian R. Furst (ed.), Realism, London: Longman, 1992 (French original: 1968).
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.
Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
ChristineCGB, 'Coming Out as a Fanfiction Writer', Zendom: A Webzine and Mailing List About the Fandom Within, posted 2002,
http://zendom.diaryland.com/020404_18.html
Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974 (first published: 1927).
Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980 (French original: 1972).
Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 (French original: 1987).
Harris, Cheryl and Alexander, Alison, Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1998.
Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge, 1992.
Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction, London: Jonathan Cape, 1954 (first published: 1921).
Penley, Constance, NASA / Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, New York: Verso, 1995.
Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, Austin, Texas: Texas University Press, 1968 (Russian original: 1928).
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London/New York: Methuen, 1983.
Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System, New York: Random House, 1981; cited in Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge, 2000.
Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975 (French original: 1970).
Filmography
Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, USA, 1942
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© Lobelia. All rights reserved.
22 March 2004
All manner of feedback is welcome, including examples that reinforce my own ideas but also comments that are counter-arguments to mine and, of course, simple expressions of interest. In short: I would love to hear from you!
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http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257458.html#cutid (part 2)
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