come on baby, let's get out of this town

[xaara]

I've been wondering lately whether being an English major might be messing with my ability to appreciate the face value of things. And then I was composing an essay in the shower (shut up, the shower is an amazing place to compose essays) and thinking about fandom offhandedly, and I came to a few conclusions and approximately six point eight billion questions. Let the navel-gazing commence!

I love text. I love the feel of paper beneath my hands and the shape of words on the page and sometimes I just breathe etymologies. But I have been trained to use it, trained to pick out the pieces of it that will prove a point I'm trying to make. My love for text has therefore come to endure only insofar as the text has something quantifiable to offer me, something I can isolate into a thesis statement and six to eight pages of supporting details with a works cited. Arguably, I have been trained to find things that do not exist and prove their existence. From time to time, I have crises wherein I wonder whether Chaucer is actually just sitting in the afterlife drinking ale and making fun of undergraduates for our incredible self-absorption.

And I love television. I love the play of images across a screen and the shapes of light and shade and the forced wait from week to week, from month to month, straining at the bit for another forty-something minutes of story. I interact with it on a much more visceral level: I fall in love with the characters. Their tears make me cry. Their laughter makes me smile. I live their lives. And if I don't connect like that, I walk away from them as I might from people whose company I don't enjoy. No hard feelings, just a mutual understanding that we are not meant for one another.

I've never been involved in a solely text-based fandom. Part of Star Wars (the part I wrote about, almost exclusively) was text, certainly, but the seminal medium was film. Buffy and Angel: television. Lord of the Rings? Originally books, but books that captured my imagination after the films prompted me to revisit them, and a canon whose film I actually enjoy more than the original text.

I've read Harry Potter, and I liked the books on a story level. They had magic and kids saving things and stairways that led to nowhere and talking paintings and dragons. But on a literary level (and I'm sorry, if there are HP fans reading this--I really do like the story), the books just didn't do anything for me. The imagery was old and cliche, the dialogue stilted, the use of adverbs painful. Clearly, though, the books caught the imaginations of hundreds, thousands of people, because the fandom is enormous, and amazing, and full of writers whose genius astounds me.

All of which is leading to a point. Which is: I think being an English major ruined me for text-based fandom.

I very much doubt I could ever write a fic for, say, Of Mice and Men. It's a brilliant book, and there's so much surrounding it that I want to and probably will explore someday, but as a piece of literature, there's no way anything I write will ever stand up to it. I'm not Steinbeck and as much as I wish I could write with his finesse, I can't. I get too caught up looking at use of pronouns and repeated imagery and other things that I only half-believe authors do intentionally. I know I can go back and look at some of the things I've written and pick those characteristics out even when they're not there on purpose. But once I see them in an original work, I feel the need to duplicate or at least do them justice in my own, which is simply a losing battle.

On the other hand, I don't think I could ever write HP fic either, for the opposite reason. I don't respect the literary value of the source text enough for it to inspire me to write back to it, and if that makes me a horrible person and a snob, well, I direct you to the entry after "English major" in the dictionary. I feel bad about it. There are so many books that deserve more than I can give back to them because I have been trained to shun their lack of importance to the literary canon. Which makes me sound like a totally passive participant in reacting only to "literature" and even then only in a cold, analytical way. I'm not. I've accepted this mode of interaction because it allows me to do well in school, but I don't know where I'll stand on it ten years from now. I suspect I'll be more than a little bitter. I'll probably start writing long and pornographic Harry/Draco fic in retaliation. This is what's called a "digression."

Back to the main thread: I don't have the above distanced response to "literature" and disdainful first reaction to "entertainment for the masses" with more visual source material. I have no problem watching a television show and then telling a story back at it. I honestly think that it's because I'm not telling it back a story in its original medium. I could never, for example, film a serious story set in the Supernatural universe. For one, I don't have access to the cast, but more importantly, I don't have access to the tools. And I know I don't have access to the tools. So I respond to it in the only way I can, which is through text.

The difference is comfortable, in a film-to-text interaction. The film is strong; it has its own integrity and canon. I like to think of myself as a decent writer, with a pretty good idea of how to present what I want to say in a way that will give back to the source material. I want to tell stories that stand on their own but also find a place within the larger structure of the source. This way, we're both sticking with our strengths. The screenwriters and directors and actors are creating their stories on a screen; I'm creating mine on a page. Our worlds spin in harmonious orbit.

Actually, in looking back at this, I'm not sure whether this is a conclusion or a very long question. So I'll pose a few shorter questions that I'll think about over the next few days and which you are of course welcome (and invited!) to answer:

1. A professor once said that a storyteller told him that she couldn't analyze the story she was telling, that she instead had to retell the entire thing. Is that what we're doing?

2. What's the real difference in reaction to visual versus text source material? Is it the difference between love and appreciation? (I love Copland; I appreciate Mozart. When I was a kid, I'd dance to Appalachian Spring and fall asleep to Mozart concertos.)

3. Does any of this make any sense at all?

Comments

[lady-of-winter.livejournal.com]

Sense is overrated! But yes, it does. :O