Kristina Busse

Paratextual Commentary as Writer Response Theory

SCMS (March 2008)

[INTRODUCTION] Listening to these papers, I am struck by the tension between industrially-produced texts, including accompanying official paratexts, and emergent fantextual creations. In fact, this entire panel explores different aspects of these continued negotiations over authorship, over who can and ought to control paratextual material and what that means for the cultures that have defined themselves in connection and response to the corporately prescribed and permitted media uses. Whereas Jonathan and Louisa, in particular, have looked at audience responses within the parameters set by TPTB (even as they clearly can never prescribe or contain these responses) and Jason focuses on what one might call a first order paratextual fan creation (i.e,, fans direct responses to the text as they collect and analyze information), I want to move fully into the fannish space to look at the way it can become independent of the source text. I focus on the paratextual apparatus that commonly accompanies online fan fiction, which can range from header information and story notes to fan-created DVD commentaries and reader comments and feedback. These paratexts shape and affect reading experiences of fan stories, in effect forming a shared, complex interpretive architectural frame for the fan fiction they accompany. These paratexts are a central aspect of the overall fannish response, which shapes how people engage with the television show they're invested in. Indeed, paratexts play central roles in fan fiction communities, as these communities develop around shared readings and interpretations of television texts. These collective analyses, the debates surrounding them, and the fan-created texts responding to them create a dense textual network that forms a backdrop for fannish readings and writings.

[PARATEXT] For Gérard Genette, who coined and advocates the term, paratexts are “those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: [such as] titles, forewords, epigraphs.” For the purposes of this paper I want to expand the definition of paratext to include productions beyond those accorded to TPTB’s authorship and authority. According to Genette, “something is not a paratext unless the author or one of his associates accepts responsibility for it.” Interestingly, Genette actually acknowledges such a thing as unofficial messages, but also restricts these to the author (such as off-the-cuff remarks, unpublished material, etc). Nowhere, of course, is the reader present as creator or producer, but for the purposes of this essay, I want to appropriate the term and expand it to include fannish reading practices that create a paratextual apparatus of its own, an apparatus that shapes consequent readings of the source text.o I do so, in order to complicate the clear lines drawn between official and unofficial responses and interpretations, and I do so, because when looking at fan texts and their paratexts, it becomes quite obvious that clear separations are impossible to maintain. We can usefully reconfigure Genette’s definition, which restricts paratextual production to authors, to encompass writings within fan communities where authorship and origins of ideas often are not so easily identifiable. Fan fiction and other forms of creative and analytical commentaries and responses to the source text thus become a form of audience paratext. Moreover, these text themselves engender secondary paratexts.

I want to focus on these secondary paratexts to show how fans create a complex textual network that shapes the way fans engage with the stories, the source texts, and one another. These paratexts are written either by the story’s readers, as in the case of comments and feedback, or with readers’ needs and desires clearly in mind, as in the case of header information and story notes. As such, paratexts serve crucial functions (1) they respond to reading needs at the same time as they shape them; (2) they explore and exhibit the way readers and writers can never be separated as simply as traditional theories of audiences and authorships would propose; and (3) they shape and create the communities that read, interpret, and respond to the official source texts. In so doing, the metaphorical threshold Genette initially employs to conceptualize the spatial categories of paratexts translates into other thresholds as well, suggesting that readers and writers, texts and paratexts, source and fan texts, as well as creativity and analysis are intimately tied to and indebted to one another. So if my paper focuses on the fannish realm exclusively, its content nevertheless reflects back on the other essays that have complicated easy separation of creators and audiences, TPTB and fans. The fannish interaction that surrounds story production affects not only the stories themselves but also the content and form of the paratextual framework, which allows us to look at the relationship between readers and writers within the particular context of online fannish interaction.

[#1] [FAN PARATEXTS: HEADERS] Paratexts surrounding fan fiction come in multiple forms, each of them affecting not only the reading of the fan story but also, in turn, that of the source text. The most traditional paratexts are those created by the writer herself, such as headers. Headers serve a variety of functions that allow readers to quickly decide whether and how to read a story: warning, advertisement and reading guide all in one, headers have been formalized over the years and are amazingly similar across fandoms and varying communities. Beyond general categorizing function, however, headers affect reading practices, not only in terms of selection but also in terms of expectations. Given that a majority of stories contain headers, most reading occurs with a clear anticipation of not only the fandom and central romantic pairing, but also the level of sexual details and general tone. As a result, fan fiction readers resemble generic readers such as mystery or romance readers in that they can anticipate not only general plot points but also often pacing and generic elements. Much of this is true for genre writing in general. Often the summary of a romance novel already indicates the central pairing and even if it does not, savvy readers can quickly detect it from generic clues.

[#2] Within fan fiction, the information is even more extensive and often more detailed. Pairing information and NC-17 rating are quite explicit, but other warnings also can offer specific details: episode spoiler warnings, for example, indicate the specific framework of the story and hurt-comfort warnings prepare the reader for explicit physical or psychological harm to one or both of the protagonists but also offer assurance that the pairing will survive and get together through the trauma they have suffered. Even story length can be a good indicator since it shows readers how long it will take the chosen pair to get together in a first time story, for example. Regardless of whether a reader looks toward a specific header as warning or advertisement, the understanding is that the text will follow the promises made in these descriptions: if the header announces a rating, the reader will expect it to be no more but also no less; if a certain pairing is mentioned, the reader will know to expect that pairing but also that no other pairing will be center stage; if a certain potentially offensive trope gets mentioned, the reader can be forewarned but also assured that no other potentially offensive trope is likely to appear. So, rather than putting off potential readers, headers often function as advertisement. Indeed, when certain categories or warnings enter a fandom nomenclature, there exist enough stories to warrant a label like Wishverse (stories that explore the alternate world of Buffy’s "The Wish") or post-Gauda Prime (post Season Finale Blake’s 7 episodes).

Indeed, headers are one of the structural elements that allow communities to form around particular readings as people use them to pre-select and find what they want to read; in so doing, paratexts shapes and guide the user’s encounter with the fan texts. All texts contain reader/writer contracts: certain guidelines are set up in the paratext and early parts of the text, like establishing the universe, satisfying expectations set up at the beginning, and, not switching styles/universes/genres mid-text. Fan fiction headers, however, explicitly list the specifics as they literally invite a contract upon entering the story: the reader knows exactly what to expect and will read and interpret accordingly. Moreover, the reader will hold the writer responsible if disappointed or surprised. Audience and community demands shape header categorization and restrictions which, in turn, affect creative output. Most of these effects are not necessarily conscious decisions—influenced by what people read and like and discuss. After all, while fan writing may be a personal engagement with the source text, most of it occurs in a fan community and writers are well aware which pairings, plots, tropes appeal and which don’t. Moreover, our tastes can be affected by what we read; i.e., if there’s a large number of stories in a particular pairing, it often encourages new viewers and readers to also like and potentially write that pairing. If the majority of stories exist within romance tropes, it makes sense that new writers would write similar things to those they themselves enjoyed. In other words, interpretive communities create a framework indicating how the source text is read and interpreted, and headers shorthand those guidelines for the informed fan.

[#3] [FAN PARATEXTS: COMMENTS, FEEDBACK, AND RECS] Headers thus show a complex interpretive interplay between readers and writers, which becomes even more interesting when fan fiction readers actually respond to the stories in comments, feedback, and recs. Whereas some archives only allow private feedback, fandom has often cherished public responses, whether they be in Letters of Comment sent to zines, feedback on mailing lists or, more recently, public comments on archives or blogs. I’ll restrict myself in the following to LiveJournal (LJ), not only because this is the site at which most fandoms I look at are situated but also because it has one of the most immersive and immediate interactions between readers and writers. LJ’s interface is primarily intended for personal interaction rather than as an archiving service, and thus encourages and supports public dialog. For the author, LJ functions as archive and editorial playground as well as social networking site; for the readers, LJ’s offers review and feedback function as well as general interaction with the author. LJ comments directly follow stories, offering readers not only a sense of popularity (indicated by how many people have commented and even who has commented), but also initial interpretations they may not have considered. Moreover, comments encourage not only critical responses but also fictional ones, whether as missing scenes, sequels, or other forms of responses. When the fictional response remains in the comment itself, it is often called commentfic, thus indicating that the interface itself has affected the behavior and terminology. Such commentfic tends to be quick follow-ups, often shifting points of view, or exploring missing scenes. Just like fan fiction itself is a commentary that affects readers’ interpretation of the source text, comment fic, of course, shapes (retroactively) any interpretation of the original story, thus functioning paratextually and framing the story.

[#4] In fact, LiveJournal and its complex interlinking is a prime example of how the architectural design of online spaces affects paratextual material. Whereas archives and mailing lists developed formal guidelines and etiquette surrounding paratextual material, social networking and blogging sites complicate the architecture of autonomous fannish spaces as they merge multiple discourses, such as the personal and the fannish. The rhizomatic structure of LJ, for example, often spreads conversations out over various communities and journals, some restricted to only some users, and, at times, other off-LJ web sites. In the aftermath of a story, private emails and IM conversations merge with public feedback and reviews, some of them analytic, others emotionally responsive; some theoretical, others fictional. Comments, recommendations, and reviews function as paratexts that are central to the overall reception and interpretation of a given fan story, affecting interpretations of the mass media text. At its best, then, the rhizomatic structure of fannish interaction decenters meaning production through multi-authored paratextual intertexts.

[#5] [WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS] I want to end with a story that consciously plays with these ambiguities of thresholds and interpretive uncertainties as well as exemplifies the collective paratextual structure that can surround a text and affect meaning—its own and the source text’s. On its own—but even more so when read together with its own second order paratexts—this story creates a powerful critique of authorized versus fan narratives, and I’d like to suggest that in the last instance, it quite clearly sides with the creative energy of fan’s unruly readings.Last year’s Written By the Victors is a novel-length Stargate Atlantis story that describes an intergalactic revolutionary war of the Atlantis colony (the setting of the show) against Earth. The events are related mostly chronologically, but consist of multiple accounts, often mutually contradictory, ranging from diverse academic analyses to eyewitness accounts and varied other documents.

In so doing, Victors mirrors fannish and academic disputes in analysis and interpretation by asking the reader to weigh the different historical accounts and documents against one another. The story already contains multiple contradictory accounts, different stylistic and generic documents that ask the reader to understand that any true account, any attempt to know what “really” happened, is foreclosed and can only be circumscribed by these multiple sources. The comparison between academic and fannish discourses has been often repeated (and challenged by Matt Hills, for example); however, by presenting proper academic debates over the very subjects fans tend to argue, Speranza presents a fictional text that allows us to see the similarities without collapsing the differences. The ending is particularly interesting: whereas the historical Earth documents seem to suggest that Atlantis did not survive the final battle, the story’s Epilogue consists of a variety of future Atlantis documents, clearly indicating that the city survived and its inhabitants thrived. The last two texts are not in English and the final one not in Roman letters, thus leaving the reader with an incomprehensible, open-ended text.

[#7] As if this polyphonic presentation weren’t enough, the consequent reception of the story has created an amazing array of multi-media artifacts that accompany, comment on, analyze, and illustrate various aspects of this particular universe. In other words, as Victors mirrors not only academic but also fannish behaviors, the story’s reception, in turn, performs the very fannish aspect Speranza is describing in the first place: illustrations, vids, missing scenes, post-scripts, missing documents and academic analyses thereof, podcasts, and various artifacts sung and recited, all add to and expand this fictional universe. multi. In a metonymic mise-en-abyme, fandom, SGA fandom, the story’s fandom, and the story itself all reflect one another in their postmodern inability to ascertain one truth or even desire one interpretation.

[#8] Several of the artifacts fully embraces the conceit of an independently evolved Atlantian culture whose historians have mythologized the events that to us are (albeit fictional) present. One of the most fascinating pieces is “The Iohoannes Cash Poem”: it is presented as an old manuscript in an incomprehensible (and, in fact, made up) language, translated into English and accompanied by an academic (historical and literary) analysis. It is also Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line.” The song choice references SGA canon, since on of the protagonists is a Cash fan, and the serious discussion that tries to date the poem, track down Iohannes Cash’s Atlantean roots, and ventures to suggest various theories on why this poem was written—all, of course related to Atlantis and thus completely false. The text thus provides an amusing commentary both on academia (i.e., how much do we get wrong in our historical or biographical guessing games) and fandom (we can turn anything into a fannish artifact, even a country song). Yet to see it as a big joke would miss the point: the fannish creation is as heartfelt and careful and beloved as the scholar’s completely ludicrous analysis, i.e., we’re aware of what lengths we go to, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. Looking at this artifact, we can see how every single text is already layered and meaningful and intertextual and part of a complex social network, in this case the reception of the show and of the story in turn. But it is that very intertextuality that makes it often difficult to analyze any text independently. Looking at the collected artistic and theoretical writings within a given fandom, we can see how a literary analysis of only a single fan story may be flawed in its restrictedness, how the text when seen as part of a larger whole partakes in creating an artifact whose sum is more than its parts insofar as it illuminates the centrality of intertextuality that suffuses all of fanfiction.

[#9] This is not to say that none of this happens in non-fan fiction reading: after all, any scholar writing on a particular text is immersed in the varying, often contradictory readings which all affect and influence his or her interpretation of the original text. Fanfiction, however, is by its very nature already interpretive and complementary, and its surrounding culture thrives on multiplying these textual responses—in a way, media fandom is traditional scholarship writ large, a fact that lies at the center of this story. All writing is intertextual and communal to a degree; fanfiction just tends to be more so. In other words, more fanfic does it and fanfic does it more. And it is this communal reading, writing, interpreting that is affected by and affects the actual infrastructure of all textual communication. No two fans can ever read the same version of a fantext, no two fans will have read the exact same stories in the same order, will have participated in the same debate at the same time, and the available texts are everchanging and expanding. It is this very fact indicates how interfaces affect reading practices and the various paratexts that a given reader will actually see. Every fan decides which parts she will read or not read, which discussion she will engage in, which stories she’ll reread. The infrastructure of fandom contains archives that collect stories or newsletters and rec lists that link to them, its personal journals and mailing lists that may mix stories, analyses, and personal anecdotes. And yet, while these various paratexts are multithreaded and, at times, mutually exclusive, they all circle back to the same source text and thus exist within the vicinity of one another. [If we were to visualize it, we could think of fan paratextual artifacts as multidimensional clusters around a central source text, where some fan stories may even be situated closer to the center of another source text, picking up tropes and characterizations from elsewhere.]

[#10] If Written By the Victors illustrates fannish engagement of writing and rewriting canon and our multiple versions thereof, the ultimate question then remains who the victors are in Speranza’s scenario. The concluding piece, written in Ancient and even in its visual presentation thus purposefully incomprehensible to us, earth-bound and English-speaking readers, suggests that we are not meant to fully comprehend, that we may not be the ones that have the last word—or even understand it. Victors juxtaposes official Earth historical discourses that create and control the story with Atlantis’s own narrative. Atlantean accounts are more metaphorical, less comprehensible, thus hinting that the truth may lie more in narrative and fiction than a desperate attempt to collect and congregate mere factual details. They don’t present an idyllic utopia as they disagree and correct one another, thus recalling Earth historians’ quibbles, but they clearly get the last word and it is both poetic and, in the end, indeterminable and thus open-ended, letting us, the readers, conclude and expand to our hearts’ content.

If fans are of Earth and thus unable to read the final Atlantean narrative, they are also of fandom and thus on the side of the story tellers. If they are the academics who analyze and nitpick and debate canon details and interpretations and behold any all too small factual detail and try to make it meaningful in context, they are also the creators who sing songs and write poetry. If the story and its reception is a mirror to the likeness of academia and fandom, it is also a thematic response to its differences: the responses, which playfully embrace the unknown, that revel in the interstices and fill them in with narratives, clearly position themselves with Atlantis, with the uncertainly and ambiguity of song as history rather than academic treatise. If there’s an opposition to be perceived between academia and fandom, the story (and its reception) clearly sides with fandom, because as much as the show creators may think they know what they’re doing, as much as academics may analyze and debate (both show and fans), this story suggests that writing back is the ultimate act of aggression. It suggests that unauthorized paratexts with their creative appropriations are the tools that will make fans the ones who survive—even if the place of origin (be it Earth historians as source text creators or academics) never knows about their culture’s vibrancy and richness.