Saturday, March 7, 2015
allow me to write of other people's experiences
Henry Kingsley had never written a book but then he went to Australia and afterwards he did it. The same for Mary Theresa Vidal and Caroline Leakey. Australia convinced them to commit violence on their own unblemished previous records of not publishing books. It was a great silent continent, thinking of the quiet of the deserts. Longus of Daphnis and Chloe hopes at the end of his preface that fiction will not derange his mind with alien ideas. "I hope that god will allow me to write of other people's experiences while retaining my own sanity" (tr. Paul Turner). But the others are not afraid of that possibility at all: they have been stimulated or shocked and they drive ahead without a fear of their own characters; they don't worry about their sanity: they are reassured that they are quite strong or else they are insensitive to this form of brutality, and Longus was as well, if you read those words as a rhetorical gesture rather than a serious statement of feeling.
The readers are the ones who obsess and go deranged over characters, writing fanfic as they do, not being able to absorb or possess the characters themselves because their beloveds are already tied up with another, and will always be so, no matter how diligently they press towards them, and the author is not interested in that character by now, and would let it free if they could, for the fanfic writers to take (if they want it so much), but they can't, the characters can't be released, any more than you could pull out a word somehow and give it to somebody (André Maurois, in his autobiography, suggests that when you are a child words are not so much meanings as fields of emotion and that some children, in this respect, never grow up).
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Haha, DKS, love your description of readers/writers of fanfic. It's an intriguing thing and clearly has something to do with "how" or "why" we read. Those who love fanfic are, I guess, those who also love to read those long fantasy series. I, on the other hand, get bored. I want new characters and new pastures AND yet, in my "actual" life I hang onto friends, I do want to know them forever! Sorry, I've rambled but that's what you do to me - spear me off onto some little tangent.
ReplyDeleteHarry Potter fanfics are the ones I usually hear about. But there's a thought: if the people who write fanfic ever decided to rewrite the lives of real people as well -- their friends -- would the writing be very different?
DeleteOf course, I usually hear about the Jane Austen ones - and have to read a couple for my JA Group but I avoid them like the plague.
ReplyDeleteHmm, would the writing be different? I'm not sure, but at least it would be new characters to the readers, so it would then rely on the quality of the writing because they couldn't rely on pre-interest in the characters?
I suppose you'd feel compelled to explain them, if they weren't already established characters, you'd want to say, "Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich man who owned ..." -- etc etc -- "and had a friend named Bingley" -- instead of plain "Mr Darcy walked into the room" but, aside from that, I'm wondering about the way that fictional-person fanfic is segregated away from what you could call real-person fanfic. Why don't we say that The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's father fanfic, when we know that the father in the book 'is' her father? (I'm not arguing that we should, only pointing out that we don't.)
Delete(This is all fairly rhetorical, by the way.)
DeleteIn Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds - published in 1940 - a character, Dermot Trellis, a character in a novel being written by the hero, practises the ultimate logic of fanfic. He is writing a novel and conscripts characters from other novels to serve as his characters.
ReplyDeleteIt all goes wrong, of course.
I haven't read it, but I imagine that the poor character thought he'd do better with a professional cast.
ReplyDelete