What is a Text?

By using this diagram I hope to answer the question: What is the text of fanfiction in relation to published works and how does audience’s interpretation affect its overall textness as both original and valued?

Simple enough. Ready. Set. Go.

As the semester is coming to an end, there are several things that I was sure I would know the answer to, like: where am I going to live next year, how long does it take to get to work from my house, and what is (a) text. Well, I know the answer to two of those things at least: not moving and 15 minutes. After an entire semester dissecting Text, I feel as though I’m no closer to understanding it than the first day of class. On the bright side, I can make a glorious mind map (see above). So, I've spent weeks unraveling this term, analyzing it from every possible angle, and I’ve come to this one conclusion: a Text is a communicative work which intentionally seeks to …do something. See, that’s the tricky part. Defining (a) text as something finite seems to limit its greater functionality. By defining it, we’re giving it a boundary, and I don’t think that it should have a boundary. That’s why there are so many different arrows in my mind map. There are so many different connections that it’s impossible to consolidate into one neat, coherent form.

In order to use this diagram to dissect fanfiction textness, I’m going to focus on key aspects that I find particularly important à intention, authorial intent, originality, audience interpretation, reception, aura, and value.

Fanfiction refers to stories written by readers or fans of popular books, TV shows, plays, musicals, and RPG games such as Final Fantasy. The stories often concern subplots that the author mentions but doesn’t pay particular attention to, unresolved conflicts, sub-character development, or post-ending story continuations. There are also fanfiction writers who use the platform to create completely new stories, known as AU (or alternate universe) based stories, with main characters that are OOC (out of character) in regards to the initial text.

A popular website for fanfiction writers is LiveJournal, an open-entry journaling website where users are encouraged to interact with one another and comment on journal entries. Many users have taken it upon themselves to use this website as a source for not only posting daily RL (real life) updates, but also as a place where they can publish their stories and receive feedback from fellow members of their online community.

A fascinating aspect about fanfiction is the vast amount of stories that are in no way related to their “base” story other than through the use of character names and descriptions. The INTENTION of these texts is a key element in unraveling their textness. For one, they are published first and foremost as stories which use the characters of another author; however, fanfiction writers’ fans will defend with great fervor the originality of an author’s stories. For instance, Cassandra Claire, author of City of Bones, was initially a fanfiction writer; however, those in the fanfiction world will be the first to testify to her plagiarism of a fellow writer. Even though these writers are using someone else’s characters, the originality of their work is still defended. Plagiarizing another author's work is a high offense among fanfiction writers.

The authorial intent of their stories is first and foremost for pleasure. Fanfiction writers do not write because it is their job, but because they genuinely love the stories that they are writing about. These writers also use fanfiction as a means for publication. For those who cannot gain the status of publication, yet still wish to convey their ideas and stories, fanfiction is an ideal platform. It allows an author to write about whatever they want under the banner of a fandom. As I wrote in my paper last semester, fanfiction provides “a great deal of freedom to imagine” one’s own world where one may “assume a more tolerant culture than that of [real life]” (Tosenberger 198). In many ways, fanfiction could have been the ideal platform for Emily Dickinson, who refused to publish her work during her lifetime because publishers wanted her to edit and revise her poems in order to fit with the standard for the time. Later on Dickinson states that "publication is the auction of the mind" but only under the pretenses that publication requires one to change their intention, therefore corrupting the innate textness of a work.

While many published authors critique fanfiction as the “lazy way out” or advise their readers to write their “own original stories,” the overall audience interpretation of fanfiction is quite different (Martin). Unlike printed novels, good fanfiction stories (those worth reading) are not always easy to find. Readers must sift through quite a few bad stories before finding one decent one, and an amazing story takes hours to find if you don’t know how to refine your search. All this to say: fanfiction readers are dedicated. They are so intent on reading these stories that if you were to tell them that the stories are unoriginal you’d better be prepared for a fight, because many of them will defend their fellow fanfiction authors with a passion. In many ways, fanfiction stories are “traces of [a] work” which have been adapted to new audiences, and are in fact a “phase in the structuring process” of a text (Zumthor 47/8). They serve as renditions of a text, the same way published editions serve as new versions of the initial text, or the same way adaptations or parodies function. Using today's technologies, fanfiction writers also create promotional videos for their stories, airing them on websites such as Youtube. The text transcends different mediums as it takes on different forms and reaches new audiences. The materiality of the text changes, yet the authorial intention remains the same.

The reception of fanfiction is another element of textness that is often overlooked, but which plays a major role in its overall functionality in society. Today’s generation is concerned with getting things immediately (the video above as a prime example). We don’t want to wait for the next book installment that requires us to sit around for months, maybe even up to year in order to find out what happens to our favorite character. In fact, we can barely stand to wait a week to watch the next episode of a TV series. Here is where timing and reception play a key role in the overall Text of fanfiction. While widely interpretive and often far from perfect, fanfiction provides an immediate resolution. Take for example Harry Potter and the amount of time audiences had to wait for the final book to come out. Before it ever hit the shelves at those midnight releases, writers all over the world were posting their final installments of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without even knowing the title. It’s true that our generation has become re-wired to a digital forum. In fact, most fanfiction websites provide a search engine that allows you to filter out any incomplete stories, saving readers the trouble of waiting for the next chapter installment. In his article on digital archiving in Electronic Scholarly Editions Kenneth Price states that “Jerome McGann has argued that the entirety of our cultural heritage will need to be re-edited in accord with the new possibilities of the digital medium.” In effect, our entire society is moving away from print culture and towards digital culture. The timing that fanfiction has rooted itself into society is directly related with the need for immediacy in a digital age. This element of textness is a key factor to fanfiction’s successful reception with audiences world-wide.

In regards to originality, the question of aura and value has rooted itself as an innate and fundamental aspect of textness. The aura of a work is tangled in with aspects of originality and reception along with timing and communication. (You can attempt to follow along in the diagram, but it gets a little complicated with all the arrows).

According to Walter Benjamin, the aura of something, the innate essence of a work, depletes over time as technology “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence;”

however, the aura of something also comes from the value that an audience

ascribes to it (II). An audience then has the ultimate say in whether something has value. A text’s true aura lies in the interaction between text and audience, in the functionality of the text. The question of fanfiction as having real value becomes superfluous because the audience, those that read fanfiction, consider the stories real and original. This concept of audience interaction plays on the notion that the audience, or the reader, is greater than the author. According to Roland Barthes, “writing” can only begin after a “disconnection occurs” between the author and the text (142). In the same sense, I believe that aura can only be achieved not in the production of the work but in its reception. An author therefore takes a backseat, and the Text arrives at the forefront.

Take for example the story Transcending a Dynasty by fanfiction writer Jadewing. The story, originally written as an Inuyasha fanfiction was an AU story with OOC characters. In fact, besides the characters’ names and descriptions, nothing about the story resembled the original show. The story has been re-written, maintaining its title, but with new character names (and slight reformatting). The author, Jadewing, published the story on fictionpress.com as an original work (you can see it here), with no affiliation to its initial fanfiction status. One major theme is the aspect of functionality of a public work. The site where Jadewing posted her work transformed this story from “unoriginal” to “original” overnight. When something is published in a public setting, it takes on this aura that we assign to it. Even though Jadewing’s story remains the same, the essence of it somehow transcends boundaries from fake to real the moment it takes on its own status of originality. Our culture has become obsessed with assigning a value to work. We maintain this idea that a work based off of something else is somehow less authentic.

Take for example Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. This world-renowned novel (and now movie) has received ample praise from audiences of all ages, yet at the same time waves of criticism about the novel’s similarities with the Japanese novel Battle Royale by Koushun Takami (which, like The Hunger Games, depicts a dystopian future where “kids violently murder other kids” in a contest engineered by a “leering master” of the world) have sprung up and called into question the validity of Collins' novel (Yang).

Even if Collins read Takami’s novel before writing The Hunger Games, the authenticity of her work remains the same. We still have the same interaction with her characters. We still read the novel and watch the movie the same way. The aura that a work takes on comes from the value that we ascribe to it. A work has no value unless an audience assigns it value.

Fanfiction ultimately serves as a label that we place on adapted work. For years, people have taken bits and pieces from other authors/producers/artists in order to create their ownoriginal work. In previous posts, I've shown this through sequential images of texts, paintings, and videos. Ideas are passed on from one good story to the next. Alberto Manguel states in his article The Library as Mind that a library is “above all an accumulation of associations, each association breeding a new image or text to be associated” (Manguel 203). I agree with Manguel's views on every person creating their own library (not necessarily tangible, but conscience). As authors/creators/producers we build up from what we know and what we have accumulated from others; however, this does not make every work merely a reproduction of what came before. Instead, I believe that each new version, each new rendition, edition, variance (I could insert more synonyms here but I'm quite certain you get the point) is original in its intrinsic value as a new text. In this sense, every text is an original based on another original.

That’s the dilemma that we’re facing. Every aspect of a text, ever minute detail, is both original and unoriginal, is both text and non-text. What makes something a text can just as easily make it not a text. And I can see you shaking your head, but listen to me here. How do we define a text? By definitions that we assign to it. By these preconceived notions that a text is whatever we want it to be. By notions that we as an audience ascribe to it. Texts don’t have an innate value; they have a value, an aura, a textness that we as an audience believe they should have. Take the elephant painting from HOTT for example. As a constructed audience in a college lecture hall, we assigned that painting value. We looked at it and said “Yes. That is a text.” and yet by all conventional purposes nothing about the painting made it a text. So then how did we ascribe value to it? The originality of it was unknown. The author, which Barthes believes has no real significance in the greater scheme of text, doesn't exist to us as an audience. If we are never made aware of the true “author” of the painting, then that splatter of paint will forever be a text in our minds.

A text is merely an audience-based interpretation of what we see and interact with. Yes, we say that a text should be intrinsic and transcendental and have all these elements that make it a Text, but when it really comes down to it, a text is just a made up word that we use to try and use to organize our own thoughts. You see a building and you call it a text. I see a building and I call it a building. Someone paid for it to be made, someone constructed it, someone used it for one purpose at one time, and someone used it for another purpose at another time. Whether or not something has true “aura” or “value” is just our way of saying that something makes us feel something that another something doesn’t make us feel. If an exact replica of the original Bible is placed before you, and you have no idea that it is a replica, then to you it is the original, and that is all that matters. The fact that it wasn’t really hand written thousands of years ago doesn’t matter. Because when it comes down to it, when it really comes down to the basic meaning of a text, the only true significant thing is what an audience believes. And if an audience believes that something has value, that something is original, that something makes them FEEL, then that, to them, is a text. For that audience, that text has meaning. That text is a TEXT.