Subject: (whorl) Re: Fan fic Fooey? Fooey

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 21:46:58 +0000

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> Okay, I'm not a
> libel lawyer, but there's a _reason_ for all those "no
> resemblance to any person living or dead" disclaimers you read
> in the front of books, and there's no way any of those Nsync
> fans could claim that their fictional characters bore no
> resemblance to the real bandmembers. Oy, whatever.

Just as a digression, I've always wondered whether those really do any good.
A lot of books with such disclaimers contain charaters whose "resemblance to
persons living or dead" is more than coincidental; and in the one case I've
heard of in which an author was sued for libel and lost for her portrayal of
a fictional character, I'd bet that the disclaimer was there.
> 
>> If there were Lupine slash, I'd lay odds that the
>> most popular relationship would be Horn/Krait.
> 
> Duh. Should of thought of that one myself. Or maybe
> Silk/Horn, though it would be hard to locate that
> in the received chronology... Maybe Jolenta/Dorcas...

I thought of that last one, but m/m seems to be a lot more popular than f/f.

>> But functionally, I would argue that the sections are fiction,
>> and should be read as fiction, with a protagonist who is
>> distinct from Narr, but based on the editors' view of Narr.
> 
> Functionally, I would disagree strongly. By interspersing their
> reconstructions with the Narr's manuscript, I feel that they've
> implicitly claimed for it a status of equivalent facticity, to
> which it is not entitled. Which drags me back to the Gospel
> According to Luke... but I'll let that one swing.

Okay, "functionally" was not a very good choice of word (I'm not sure now
why I used it).  I agree that the narrators implicitly claim for their
third-person sections equivalent facticity to the Narr's manuscript (or more
so, since it's third-person, and occasionally shows us stuff the Narr
apparently did not witness).  What I was trying to say was that once we
realize that the third-person sections do not have this status, the best way
for us, the readers, to regard them is as a fiction.

Whether or not you want to say the editors are lying depends upon how
loosely you're willing to let them apply the term "re-created."

(To return to the Biblical analogy for a second, I note that contemporary
scholars are reluctant to say that the authors of apocryphal texts, or texts
in the Bible believed not to be by their supposed authors, were lying or
committing fraud in claiming false authorship.  They usually take the stand
that this was a convention of the time, to sign some holy person's name to
your text as a way of claiming authority for it.  To go even further afield,
it occurs to me to wonder if there is any evidence that people of the time
saw things that way--that the attributed author was merely a convention,
making no claim about the real author.)

--Adam

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.com

---

From: Kevin J. Maroney <kmaroney at ungames.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 11:36:50 +0000

At 09:46 PM 6/20/01 -0500, Adam wrote:
>To go even further afield,

In my classical readings, I've come across references to pseudipigraphia 
which are outside of the Jewish and Christian traditions--much later works 
attributed to Virgil and suchlike. Heck, think of Plato--he wrote dozens of 
books which put his own thoughts in the mouth of Sophocles.

-- 
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://www.nyrsf.com

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 09:19:32 +0000

> In my classical readings, I've come across references to
> pseudipigraphia which are outside of the Jewish and Christian
> traditions--much later works attributed to Virgil and suchlike. 

Yep. And the idea persists in the Christian tradition well beyond
the time of the apostles: an excellent example being a set of
works which were probably by a Syrian monk in the 5th or 6th 
century, but widely accepted for a long time as the work of 
Dionysius the Areopagite (a guy who Paul converted in Acts), 
and were so important in the development of theology that they're 
still in circulation (as the "work of Pseudo-Dionysius").

> Heck, think of Plato--he wrote dozens of books which put his
> own thoughts in the mouth of Sophocles.

No. No way I'm touching this one. Uh-uh.

--Dan'l

---

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 09:49:41 +0000

--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com> wrote:
...
 
> No. No way I'm touching this one. Uh-uh.

You could at least say "Socrates" safely.

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 11:31:36 +0000

on 6/21/01 10:36 AM, Kevin J. Maroney at kmaroney at ungames.com wrote:

> attributed to Virgil and suchlike.

I'm sure there are; but my question applies to these too.  Did people of the
time regard these attributions as merely a convention?  Or were they fooled
into thinking they were reading works by the real Virgil?  Or, whether or
not they were fooled, did they believe that the author meant them to think
that these works were written by the real Virgil?

> Heck, think of Plato--he wrote dozens of

You mean Socrates, obviously.