Michel-Antoine Xhignesse is an instructor at Capilano University. His research focuses on a number of topics centring on art’s status as a social kind, including the explanatory role that intuitions play in grounding judgements about the ontology of art and social kinds, the constraining power of authorial intent, and the problem of truth in fiction.
A post by Michel-Antoine Xhignesse
I really like reading historical fiction. I mean, I really really like it. I don’t mean Honoré de Balzac, Robert Graves, or Georgette Heyer, though. I’m talking about the kind that comes in a series of a dozen or more installments, which features Vikings (or Romans!), and is structured around some big, historical set-piece battle—the bloodier, the better! Once you’ve read a few dozen of these, you start to suspect they might be written to a template.
These are paradigmatic examples of what Thomas J. Roberts (1993) called ‘junk fiction’, but which a kinder reader might prefer to call ‘genre’ or ‘pulp’ fiction. These are novels which aspire to be page-turners and which belong to well-established genres, but whose plots are somewhat… formulaic. Think airport novels and drugstore Harlequins; Agatha Christie and Anne Rice; Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Even children read a lot of them—remember Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys?
In film and TV, these are the soaps, romcoms, slashers, and zombie films; Rosemary & Thyme, Stargate, and Star Trek. This isn’t to say that junk fiction is of generally low aesthetic merit; Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, for example, are a remarkable piece of work, as is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). It’s just that when we pick these up, we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for.
Now, the thing about junk fiction is that it’s incredibly popular. And it’s easy enough to see why, especially where serialized stories are concerned. Zach Dundas has characterized Holmes and Watson, for example, as “ready-made adventure machines” (2015: 8), and it’s not hard to see what he means: there are over 200 films about Holmes, many of them not even tied to any of Conan Doyle’s original stories (Young 2020: 133). Our familiarity with the characters makes it relatively easy for us to generate new stories: all we need to do is come up with a new scenario, plug in the characters, and we’re good to go.
And it’s not just characters; storyworlds, too, are ready-made adventure machines. Just think of the novelizations of Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and the planes of the Magic: The Gathering multiverse, or Potterworld and Supernatural fanfic. Our familiarity with these settings, and the characters who inhabit them, allows us to explore fictional worlds without having to rely on any single guide (for a striking illustration, see Kolmes and Hoffman forthcoming). Perhaps that’s why fanfic is so popular: pre-existing storyworlds and characters allow us to just plug & play.
I think it’s interesting that so many of these adventure machines (or adventure-generating machines, as James Young calls them—2020: 133) come from junk fiction. I don’t mean to imply that they only come from junk fiction—Jane Austen’s works, for instance, have inspired all kinds of fanfic, ranging from blushworthy tales from Darcy’s dingy dungeon to Jo Baker’s rather more respectable Longbourne (2014). But it is striking that so much of the fiction we consume is built up out of these recycled elements. Recycling is so pervasive, in fact, that some scholars have argued that there are only 6-7 basic story plots (see, e.g., Booker 2006 and Reagan et al. 2016)! Junk fiction is like the junkyard of the imagination: a much-maligned place where old story scraps go to be recycled.
No doubt the reason why junk fiction features so prominently in our social imaginary is just that it’s so widely accessible. But I think there’s a little more to it than that: I think that these practices are quite deeply-rooted. In particular, I don’t think that writing 50 Shades of fanfic is just a weird quirk of 21st-century internet culture. In fact, I think it’s a perfectly natural way of engaging with characters and stories we like, and one which enjoys a history as old as stories themselves.
What I’m getting at is this: characters and storyworlds are, first and foremost, public property. There’s no good reason (well, apart from threats of lawsuits) why we should accept that only the original author has the ability to tell stories set in her world or using her characters. Don’t get me wrong: I wait patiently every year to read Uhtred’s latest adventure in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories. But that’s because Cornwell is a master of the genre, and nobody else writes quite like him. If anyone else wants to try their hand at one of Uhtred’s adventures, then they should, and I’m not sure that it makes much sense to deride those attempts as non-canonical or to insist that only Cornwell has creative access to that storyworld. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that reifying auctorial authority in this way stunts our imagination.
There’s a straightforward way in which it does so: there are far fewer stories about Uhtred, Harry Potter, and Bella Swan out there than there might otherwise be, and those which do exist have largely been relegated to the hands of uncompensated amateurs. But I also think that reifying auctorial authority in this way has warped our philosophical intuitions for the worse.
We are too accustomed, I think, to thinking of characters and worlds as having been created by their authors, and thus imbued with all of their essential properties through someone’s deliberate (and authoritative) decision-making. As a result, we accord too much weight to the author’s interpretation of features of the storyworld which are otherwise underdetermined by the text, and open to being filled in myriad ways. Indeed, I worry that we have backed ourselves into a corner by thinking of stories as static, self-contained works of an individual’s imagination rather than living, public works of collective storytelling and re-telling.
Storytelling’s likely origins lie somewhere in the vicinity of the bardic tradition, which is characterized by poets/singers/performers who create or perform oral narrations, usually with musical accompaniment (Pellowski 1977: 19). Oral storytelling, however, is not typically characterized by a burning need for fidelity to the original (except, perhaps, where genealogies are concerned). The amautas, aushek, bards, bhopa, griots, minstrels, trouvères, and tze-ti of the world enjoyed considerable latitude in their tellings. And while tellers matter in oral traditions—some people, after all, are just better at telling stories or crafting them than others!—it doesn’t really matter whether it’s any particular teller’s exact story which is being re-told (that’s a feature of the Judaic and Islamic traditions, but wasn’t very widespread—see Pellowski 1977: 11).
So perhaps, for example, we should take more seriously the suggestion that no two of us read the same story, that my Uhtred and yours are different (fictional) people, inhabiting similar but different worlds. Or perhaps a text is more akin to a musical score: it helps set the identity-conditions of a multiply-instantiable abstractum, each of whose instances can actually differ quite significantly from one another. Perhaps our prioritization of the original author’s work is mistaken, and we should treat derivative works as part and parcel of the original or, conversely, treat them as separate but equal.
Remember how upset people were by the way Game of Thrones ended? (I know, a lot has happened in the last two years!) It’s genuinely upsetting for something you enjoy to end in a manner that feels unsatisfying or out of sync with the spirit of what came before. But let’s not forget: the show is a derivative work, and it diverged quite a bit from the novels, far outpacing them. In fact, I’d wager that many—perhaps most—fans of the show have not read A Song of Ice and Fire, and never will. The TV show is an independent work, but it’s also derivative; so what should we do with it? Which version gives us the ‘real’ story? Did the stuff at the end “really” happen? It seems clear to me that fans of the show are primarily interested in what happens in the world of the show; for them, it’s Game of Thrones, not A Song of Ice and Fire. But I wonder: does it even matter?
I’m not yet sure what we should do, but I worry that we think of stories far too narrowly. That we make too much of the fiction/non-fiction distinction; that we ignore the long history of our storytelling practices and prioritize the recent past instead; that we defer too often to auctorial authority and too readily accept as true what we are told about the storyworld. That (as my friend Hannah Kim argues) we model our theories of fiction on the narrative fictions which characterized early twentieth-century publishing, at the expense of non-narrative formats (such as epistolaries). That we worry far too much about what J.K. Rowling thinks of Dumbledore and Hermione, and not enough about the audience’s Dumbledores and Hermiones.
In short, I worry that we’ve restricted our thinking about fiction to too few, too recent, and too homogenous cases. What we need, I think, is to reimagine our philosophical engagement with fiction.
References
Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006.
Dundas, Zach. The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.
Kolmes, Sara & Hoffman, Matthew A. (forthcoming). Harlequin Resistance? Romance Novels as a Model for Resisting Objectification. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Pellowski, Anne. The World of Storytelling. New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1977.
Reagan, Andrew J., Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds. "The Emotional Arcs of Stories Are Dominated by Six Basic Shapes." EPJ Data Science 5, no. 31 (2016): 1-12.
Young, James O. Radically rethinking copyright in the arts: a philosophical approach. New York: Routledge, 2020.