Assigning categories proved to be something of a challenge; I’ve always found the labels cumbersome and the choices of classification unclear and arbitrary (sorry, Henry!). Recontextualization, refocalization, and expansion of the timeline in particular seem to overlap to the point of uselessness given the examples in Textual Poachers, and dislocation and genre-shifting can be nearly identical. The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, takes place in the afterlife. Key scenes of A Christmas Carol are reinterpreted as evidence Scrooge wasn’t so bad, Charles Dickens takes the stand as a witness, and several characters from other Dickens’ novels appear. Is this dislocation because of the setting, moral realignment because Scrooge is shown to be better than the original text implied, recontextualization because scenes of the original are explicated, or personalization because the author is on stage? The answer is, yes. Just as fan fic may receive multiple labels, so professional fan fic may fit several of Jenkins’s categories. I tried to limit classification to the most significant factor, but many fit at least two categories.
Frankly, I’m not as interested in getting the classifications “right” as I am in showing that regardless of the medium or status of the authors, writers are using similar strategies in engaging the original texts.
The chart indicates the percentage of the whole list that fell into each category. I’ll go through them in order of popularity and cite examples. Please note that I had to refine the definitions in order to apply them consistently. As discussed above, Doyle and Austen lead the pack, that’s why so many of my examples are drawn from them.
Refocalization shifts the focus of the story from the main characters to a supporting character from the original or a new character created by the continuing author. These books might retell the original, as Mary Reilly retells the story of Jekyll and Hyde from the point of view of a maid in the household. The more common approach, however, is to spin-off a supporting character. As I mentioned above, almost every supporting character from the Holmes canon has spawned his or her own series: Irene Adler, Mycroft Holmes, Inspector Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and so on. The Mary Russell series is a variation of the spin-off in that Laurie King continues the Holmes characters but centers the new stories on her own character, Mary Russell.
Both The Aeneid and March are also refocalizations. Vergil employed a classic fan strategy by lifting a comparatively minor character from The Iliad, a work attributed to another author, and giving him a slew of new adventures including romancing an exotic foreign queen and founding a civilization. In March, which won a Pulitzer in 2006, Geraldine Brooks vividly relates the horrors of the Civil War as experienced by Mr. March during his absence from Little Women.
Expansion of timeline: In practice, every story is going to expand the timeline unless it retells the original, so I tried to use this category only when the main purpose for the book was a sequel or prequel focusing on the main characters of the original work. I think of this category as Further Adventures of the Hero and it’s probably the most obvious way of continuing a text as a new author simply picks up where the original ends. Many of the Holmes pastiches are Holmes & Watson doing exactly what they do in Doyle’s stories but with new cases, some of them those “tales for which the world was not yet prepared” Watson hinted at in the canon. [WTF is with the Giant Rat fascination, people?]
NonHolmes examples include the wretched Return to the Secret Garden which provides a joyless adulthood for Mary, Colin, and Dickon. The Darcys, Excessively Diverted, and many others chronicle the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy and the courtships of the remaining unmarried Bennets and assorted others.
Personalization hinges on the idea of “double-viewing”; fans pretend that the fictional universe is real and mix it with real life: characters show up in place of actors at a fan convention, fans are transported into the fictional universe. In the books I’ve read, personalization takes the form of interaction between the fictional characters and the original author. In God Bless Us Everyone, Charles Dickens is told the story of A Christmas Carol by one of the characters and must get Scrooge, Cratchit, et al to agree to let him use their real names so he can publish. In Marley’s Ghost, Jacob Marley sends the story to Dickens in dreams. In Holmes pastiches, personalization also occurs when fans play at being Holmes in books such as The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Barker Street Regulars, and Holmes on the Range. In Holmes on the Range, a cowboy in 1893 Montana is so impressed with Holmes’s methods that he decides to apply them to a mysterious death on the Bar VR ranch. (VR being an in-joke on the initials Holmes shot into the wall of 221B Baker Street.)
Recontextualization fills gaps in the timeline of the original narrative or goes behind the scenes of the original text in order to clarify actions, motivations, or emotions. Thus Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, a novel in 3 parts, recounts Pride & Prejudice scene-for-scene from Darcy’s point of view, and explains what he was doing while absent from the main narrative. In The Secret Diary of Dr. Watson, Watson relates the “real” stories behind the stories and how he has to change names, dates, and events to get Holmes’s approval for publication. The Diary also serves as a meta-commentary/in-joke for Holmesians who struggle to construct timelines for Holmes’s cases using “Watson’s” mistake-riddled narratives.
Crossovers come in a number of forms. The most common is based in one fictional universe with guests from others. For example, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula books use Dracula as the main text—Dracula survived, married Queen Victoria, and vampires occupy most important government and social positions--but imports Mycroft Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau, Raffles, Simon Templar, Bigglesworth, Tom Ripley and others over the course of the series.
Some crossovers make equal use of two or more fictional universes that typically share a time and place: in Fred Saberhagen’s novels, The Holmes-Dracula File and Séance for a Vampire, Watson and Dracula take turns narrating the story in alternating chapters.
A third type of crossover is set in a multi-verse populated by characters from a multitude of texts. Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen illustrates this by using several of the same characters as Newman, along with Allan Quartermain, Mina Murray/Harker, and Capt. Nemo but putting them into a shared Victorian setting and making them work together on a mission that has no direct connection to any of their separate original texts. The Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde also use a multi-verse: Every fictional character exists in his or her separate book, but they can leave the text and enter a shared space called Bookworld where diverse characters including the Cheshire Cat, Miss Haversham, Heathcliff, and Falstaff can interact.
Dislocations usually involve retelling the original story in a different time and/or place: In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley sets King Lear in 1970s Iowa; Windward Heights sets Wuthering Heights in the Caribbean. In fan fic, dislocation is called Alternate Universe, or AU, and often involves fanciful changes to the characters like making them elves or giving them wings.
Genre-Shift may occur when a dislocation is extreme enough to move a novel from mystery to fantasy, or romance to mystery. East Wind Coming may involve a mystery but the fact that it makes Holmes and other characters immortals living a strange science fiction universe changes it from mystery genre to science fiction/fantasy genre and that’s where it would be shelved in a bookstore. Carrie Bebris’ Mr. & Mrs. Darcy series has Elizabeth & Darcy spending their married life investigating murders and other nefarious deeds. As these books also involve interaction with characters from other Austen novels (Sense & Sensibility, Northanger Abbey), they are also crossovers.
Moral realignment explains why the villain is not really bad, he’s just drawn that way by the original author; it’s refocalization for the bad guy. The subtitle of The Dracula Tape sums up this category: “the truth behind the events so shamefully misrepresented by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula.” Moral realignment can also be used to question the original protagonists’ actions or undermine the underlying assumptions of the original text by presenting events from the point of view of a marginalized or vilified character, or from the point of view of a character impossible for the original to imagine. In The Wind Done Gone, Scarlett O’Hara’s half-sister gives the slave’s view of the antebellum South. Cynara is not a character whose existence Gone with the Wind could accept. Wide Sargasso Sea, and the many rewrites of The Tempest (A Tempest, Indigo, Prospero’s Daughter) all seek to confront the depredations of slavery and/or colonialism by viewing the original text through the eyes of the characters denied agency in the originals, whether it’s Bertha Rochester or Caliban.
All of the methods of rewriting above are amply represented in both fan fiction and published books. The next two are underrepresented to such a degree that they barely register.
Emotional intensification: This was perhaps the hardest category for me to identify; I’m just not that keenly aware of when common heightened drama turns to fannish wallow. However, Pride & Prejudice has yielded some texts that revel in angst in a very fan ficcish way: Letters from Pemberley and More Letters from Pemberley, which are awash in domestic melodrama, The Diary of Henry Fitzwilliam Darcy, in which young Darcy writes like a girl (seriously, you know he was doodling unicorns in the margins), and An Unequal Marriage, which makes one want to slap Elizabeth Darcy and tell her to snap out of it.
Eroticization: Although huge in amateur fan fiction, tales of the sex lives of fictional characters is unfortunately rare in professionally published texts. The only 2 exceptions I’ve found so far are both by Linda Berdoll: Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and Darcy & Elizabeth recount every sexual encounter the newlyweds have in startling detail. I haven’t found any examples of slash or any of the more taboo forms of eroticism common in fan fiction. I find the absence of sex baffling. As I have often said, drool is the glue that holds fandom together. Of all the glaring omissions from official texts that fan fiction has the ability to redress (or undress, as it were), the erotic interests of women are the most compelling. So where are the Mary Sues, the graphic exploration of het canon pairings, the hot boy-on-boy-action of slash?
There are differences between fan fiction and the professional books I’ve read so far. Quality is not one of them. The worst Mary Sue mpreg and oh-did-I-mention-they’re-elves blog fragment has nothing on Emma Tennant and some of these other writers who have unaccountably found professional publishers to indulge them.
My point, as I hope I’ve made clear, is that regardless of the outcome, whether it’s a wayward plot bunny or an award-winning novel that revisits an American literary classic, writers engage the original texts in the same ways. Fan fiction is a cultural response to shared texts that is not unique to one body of viewers/readers.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: List Parameters
Part 3: Doyle & Austen
Part 4: Fan Fiction Categories
Part 5: Annotations
