Canonicity
Can fanfic be canon?
This is a seemingly simple question that has been debated in this space of late, but to answer it we must travel to the strange and perilous woods of aesthetic theory.
The reader is forewarned that this following essay will be overlong, because not only is the question tangled and varied, but one where your humble author is easily distracted, like a leaping dog in a garden full of squirrels, for I sight many tangential topics which will set me barking vociferously.
Hence, the essay, as befits the topic, will consist of one original column and its sequels, which may or may not share continuity.
The reader is also warned that, I cannot in good conscience use the word fanfic in this context. For reasons to be explained later, I coin the term ‘Mary Sue Fiction’ or ‘sue-fic’ where others use the term ‘fan-fic.’ I trust the generous reader will excuse the eccentricity.
But let us begin at the beginning.
When we ask “can sue-fic be canon?” we are asking whether sequels that violate the spirit and integrity of the original creator’s vision for his story are official and authentic and worthy of respect.
We ask, in other words, are they real?
A reader with the godlike yet friendly name of Theophilus comments:
I do think debating what “really” happened in a fictional universe is a bit bizarre.
More than a bit. Indeed, making up a fictional universe, and inviting pilgrims within to sojourn or even to dwell, is also a bit bizarre. More than a bit.
It is also magic.
Ninety percent (if we are to believe Sturgeon’s Law) of fiction stories we come across are merely junk and potboilers, perhaps entertaining, perhaps not, largely forgettable.
But then there is a ten percent, and a one percent, or perhaps only one story, which comes to life in the imagination of the reader, and lives in his heart forever.
Magic!
Such tales that live in the heart are make-believe, but they are also gold, because the fictional falsehoods of the story reveal to the inner eye a truth, a mythic truth, that has no other way to be expressed.
Golden tales are no more literal than the forgotten potboiler one read the day before, but the golden tale is true in a way that the potboiler is not.
A McTofuburger with a Slurm Cola from a burger joint verses the glowing peach of immortality from the mountain of the gods washed down by the mead of poetry from the Well at the World’s End, are both consumed by the mouth, but one is junk food, and the other is an elfish sacrament.
Both are literally untrue, but the junk food story is less than literal truth, whereas the golden tale is somehow more.
In such cases, whether the author knows it or not, he has reached his hand toward a star, and muse of heaven has put something on the tip of his pen, bright as lightning and delicate as a cherry petal, which he managed to put to paper.
This is what the author offers the reader. What does the reader offer in return? Once we answer this, we can see what duties come with the offers, and what constitutes a breach of that duty.
The reader graciously suspends his disbelief in the falsehoods that all fiction, by its nature, must embrace.
This suspension of disbelief is like voluntary auto-hypnosis on the part of the audience, and the poet is an enchanter weaving a spell of words.
A critic perhaps can stay awake during the hypnotic session of reading storybook, but a fan expects to be lulled into a waking dream, and see and feel the things depicted as if they are real.
Anyone who cries when Bambi’s mother dies shed real tears for a make-believe talking game animal.
You have been, with your own consent, enchanted by a spell, that allows you to believe what you know, without doubt, you do not believe. The harp of art lulls the watchful dragons of skepticism somehow to close their cold serpentine eyes.
How far can the reader reasonably be asked to extend his suspension of disbelief? The answer is that it depends.
It depends on diverse things, but mostly on the the skill of the poet, expectations of the audience, and the degree of the infatuation or investment in the work.
Let us digress a moment into the question of reader expectations.
Genre readers are asked to be more gracious than mainstream readers, since there is more latitude granted the author, and, surprisingly, the muse reaches higher into the realm of myth. There is no one like Milton’s Lucifer or Saul of Taursus in mainstream literature these days, but such towering figures can be found in fantasy and science fiction, in the shape of Sauron or Darth Vader.
Indeed, the main objection to genre writing from the mainstream, ever since the two parted ways in the early Twentieth Century, and the mainstream grew fell into swampy stagnation, was that such things as ghosts, monsters, interplanetary flight, fairies, time travel, and magic are unrealistic and not modern, fit only for children, and do not serve the high and noble purpose of social progress.
It is ironic to note that dragons, interplanetary flight, time travel, demons, fairies, ghosts, witches, and magicians appear in such works as Beowulf, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, Marlowe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Indeed, it is difficult to name a great and foundational work of English or world literature that does not contain some element which would, if written in the modern day, shelve it with the genre fiction. There is even a ghost in Julius Caesar.
It should come as no surprise that comedy and horror have more generous audiences, when it comes to plot holes, than detective stories, simply because the audience is willing to accept any coincidence in a comedy, as long as it is funny, or in a horror, as long as it is scary. Indeed, sometimes the sheer absurdity makes its more funny or more scary, because it cannot be figured out.
On the other hand, comedy and horror are more strict when it comes to matters of mood and character. The clown must be funny in general, and the monster be scary in general, in order to keep the story generally within the genre.
Likewise, science fiction readers, at least of old, made less demands on characters being deep and realistic and more demands on getting the props and scenery correct, and, in science fiction, that means keeping the props and scenery within the bounds of scientific verisimilitude.
Verisimilitude is not scientific accuracy. There is more scientific evidence for ghost sightings than for time machines, but a time machine falls squarely into the tradition of scientific romance about clippers in the clouds or submersible ironclads or invasions from Mars, whereas ghosts have no scientific explanation.
Hence few or no science fiction readers scoff at faster than light travel, provided this is done by a machine rather than by the hippogriff-drawn chariot of Lessingham, or the spirit of Beatrice, or a crystal coffin towed by the angel of Venus; nor do we think time travel is unscientific, as long as this is done by a TARDIS or by a Time Tunnel, but not when done by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.
Nonetheless, and for the same reason, when, for example, when Terry Brooks puts a modern battery-operated flashlight in the hands of an elf in the magical Four Lands of the Sword of Shannara, and reveals that the fantasy land of the nostalgic faux-Medieval setting is actually a far future post Apocalyptic setting, he departs from the high fantasy genre of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and enters the science fantasy genre of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern or Jack Vance’s Dying Earth.
So, again, the question of how far can the reader reasonably be asked to extend his suspension of disbelief cannot be answered, without answering what genre or subgenre the story is aiming to satisfy.
To that question we will turn in the next column: Canonicity 2: the Sequel.
But first, a footnote may be in order.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
