Fan fiction meets Roland Barthes
First of all, fan fiction by its very nature is ever-changing and wide-ranging. Fans stay with something only as long as it holds their interest. It is a phenomenon that can seem like a bulldozer on steroids one moment and a forgotten whim the next. That being said, any attempt to pin it down long enough to analyze is like trying to hold water in your fist. Any discourse is at best trying to catch up with an enormous, wildly-enthusiastic, semi-competent wave.
Anyway.
As far as literary theory goes, the potential for the phenomenon of fan fiction fits nicely with Roland Barthes' essay "From Work to Text." Barthes asserts that "the theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing" (1475). Well, he must have been thinking of fan fiction when he wrote that. Fan fiction writers write because they read and read so they can write.
Fan fiction is a labor of love. Fan fiction writers write because they enjoy working out parts of the untold story, because they like walking around in another textual space, because they like playing with the characters. "Playing" in the sense that fan fiction writers use established characters in new and sometimes bizarre ways, which is similar to Barthes' "playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which reproduces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis" (1474).The whole culture of fan fiction closely resembles Barthes' example of music where"'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity" (1474). Many fan fiction authors are flexing their writing muscles as well as participating in a hobby. James wrote of Dickens, "working-class fiction was apprenticed to [his] plots and characters, and by plagiarisms experimented in the popular taste; it was nurtured by this reflected popularity, and it bore the distorted marks of its first mentor long after it had set out on its own account" (71). In a certain way, internet fiction is apprenticed to these pop culture media. Fan fiction is experimented in the popular taste and nurtured by the reflected popularity of its original source.
A fan fiction community goes even further. The text is shared between not only a reader and writer, but a community of readers and writers. It becomes an ouroburos of reading and writing, text and derivative text. Fan fiction has the added advantage of drawing from a number of fandoms. Few people are dedicated to a single fandom. Fandom and fan fiction create a language that can bring together a variety of interests. Fans move fluidly from fandom to fandom, collecting and discarding bits and pieces of fan universes without every really abandoning concepts and ideas from any fandom. Through fan fiction, fans blur the edges of original pieces, taking and changing and reinventing universes, the perfect example of Barthes' "text."
Certain elements of fan fiction, however, fit better with Barthes' idea of a work. By approaching a story from a legal standpoint, fan fiction writers conceptualize that story as a work. Fan fiction writers deliberately limit the story to the pages between the covers. Fan fiction writers put a discrete and obvious distance between themselves and the original author. Barthes argues against this practice, "text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work, but by joining them in a single signifying practice" (1474). By defining a work legally, in terms of copyright and trademark, the work is most definitely a commodity.
One could argue that the whole "legal disclaimer" is simply lip service in an attempt to avoid lawsuits. But fan fiction authors separate themselves from the original story simply by being a fan. The term "fan" implies an unequal relationship between the original author and fan author. Fan fiction writers are usually hard core fans, which means they have hard core love verging on adulation for the original books/media. As Barthes points out "for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works" (1475). But while Barthes tries to diminish the barriers between himself and the text, the whole culture of fan fiction writers maintains and feeds off that barrier, to some degree. The fan fiction community exists because a group of people gathered to "revere" the same text. Their "common" bond is their equal footing as authors with respect to the original author. The original work is a clearly defined origin from which fan fiction emerges.
But in the end, it is Barthes final proposition about the Text that fan fiction writers truly understand. The idea of pleasure, the idea that "as for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation," (Barthes 1475). Fan fiction is never separated from the text, and fan fiction authors are always working with the giddy, geeky joy of being a fan.
Fan fiction=Text/Work=OTP!
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© 2004 F.B. Pendergast
Last updated 12/19/2004