Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World

A Prehistory of Fanfiction

"It's writing, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we--" LOL my bad. It's totally writing as we know it. We just don't know we know it.

--Mashup: "Star Trekking" and my internet persona

1. 

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who theorized that art was primarily an imitation of nature. (He had a lot more to say, and his theories are readily available all over the internet, but that's the soundbite version.) Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and rhetorician who came a few hundred years after Aristotle, and he saw things differently. He held that art--at least the art of writing--was more truly a matter of imitating other good writers who'd gotten it right ahead of you. But that's the way of the world. Writing communities and the way they see their work change. We might say that writing is a community whose only constant is change, but then we'd immediately have to amend our cliche to include the constant wank--a term that's recently evolved to designate irritable and strident discussion--that the constant change causes. (But don't worry. We don't get to that particular sense of wank for a couple of millennia.)

Anyway, Dionysius (not the wild, sexy god, but the historian) saw good writing as imitatio, and this understanding all but totally replaced the Aristotelian conception, mimesis, among Latin writers of the day. In fact, Dionysius's theory held sway for a lot longer than most people today have any idea of. This conflict between imitatio and mimesis plays out with greater or lesser intensity until right this very minute, where on a blog near you an Edward/Bella fic writer is taking down a Rob/Kristen fic writer with something akin to extreme prejudice.

It could get down and dirty in the eighteenth century, too--as we see in debates surrounding the work of Charlotte Smith, who appropriated lines of Shakespeare and others into her influential sonnets. Was she engaging in the elegant tradition of imitation? Or was she plagiarizing?

Writing. The community whose only constant is the extreme glee with which one writer tells another writer, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. It's what Plato told all the poets, after all.

2. 

Del CHEVALIER DE LA CHARRETE

Comance Crestiens son livre;

Matiere et san li don et livre

La Contesse, et il s'antremet

De panser, si que rien n'i met

Fors sa painne et s'antancion

Here Chretien begins his book about the Knight of the Cart. The Countess furnishes him with the source material and overall spin she'd like him to give it, and he undertakes to think how to put it all together. All he's really adding is his own hard work and some ideas about context and narrative.

--Chretien de Troyes, approx. 1171; writer's note to Lancelot de la Charette (from the "Arthur material" kinkmeme), my translation

The well-known medieval romance The Knight of the Cart announces itself as a fill for Countess' prompt, apparently a request for Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere with a cart (the exact wording of the request has been lost). There's some evidence to suggest Chretien added the whole adultery plot, which has since become canon. There's no evidence, however, to prove Chretien didn't invent the request to begin with (a request from a countess makes you look pretty important, after all). Chretien plays down his own role, as is expected of fan writers, and pays plenty of deference to his source and The Powers That Be. But, as sometimes happens, it seems that Chretien's version was more compelling than its source, if we are to judge by longevity. It's hard to judge on merit, since Chretien's source has been lost. As we all know in the age of the internet, it happens all the time, texts just explode. Natural causes.