Trauma as structural conceit and fannish tropes: "freedom" by synecdochic
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| Title: | Trauma as structural conceit and fannish tropes: "freedom" by synecdochic |
| Creator: | cathexys |
| Date(s): | March 13, 2006 |
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| Fandom: | Stargate Atlantis |
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| External Links: | Trauma as structural conceit and fannish tropes: "freedom" by synecdochic |
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Trauma as structural conceit and fannish tropes: "freedom" by synecdochic is a post by cathexys at The Cutting Board. The topic is the Stargate Atlantis story Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left To Lose's by synecdochic. There were 85 comments.
The Introduction
I've been very interested in the general response to synecdochic's Freedom, and I wanted to collect my thoughts and hopefully hear some different/opposing interpretations. Some of these ideas are influenced by the comments I read (esp. the author's interchange with luthien and cesperanza), some are from comments synecdochic made directly. I have decided to focus on two (among the myriad of things) that interested me in the story, and I hope it's OK to post them together.
Some Topics
- is Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left To Lose slash or gen and does it matter
- the mighty influence of McShep in Stargate Atlantis fanworks
Excerpts from the Essay
trauma as structural conceit
Many fan stories employ a particular narrative conceit in that they work around a secret, a traumatic memory or loss, which, through the course of the story, gets revealed to the reader. It's an almost mystery-like approach, and, when done well, can be very successful in keeping our suspense and making us decipher the clues along the way. Sometimes, the characters themselves are not aware of the horrific secret (i.e., they have repressed the memory of their childhood abuse, for example, or the horrible things they did while on drugs wickedwords's recent story Locusts and Wild Honey would be an example of that] and thus the readers and protagonist share a position of ignorance; sometimes the reader knows more than the characters (I can only think of watching Mysterious Skin last week, but I'm sure there are plenty of fannish examples); other times, the characters know, but the reader is kept in the dark (and somehow I think death stories are the typical example here, where we are shown a loss but cannot figure out where a character is or what happened to him/her, until the story reveals the details; or abuse recovery stories, like mmmchelle's A Better Fate where confronting the trauma eventually allows us to learn what has been treated with silence before or auburnnothenna's Legion the Things where the narrative moves back and forth clearly suggesting the central trauma yet not revealing it to us, the reader, until later).
Part of this method of evasion, of circling the trauma without mentioning it is explained both by psychoanalysis and trauma theory. In fact, a lot of trauma studies emphasizes how narrative rarely ever is able to confront the traumatic memory directly but needs to circumscribe the events, sealing them off and approaching them asymptotically at the same time. At times, then, we are given glimpses of knowledge as clues, like in mmmchelle's Looking Glass, where the first lines put us in Rodney's consciousness and experience, yet for the rest of the story we remain firmly in John's point of view, not knowing what Rodney experienced. We thus are put in the position of the trauma victim, with glimpses of memories and truths without being able to properly contextualize them.
Freedom is really not that kind of story. And yet it is. In fact, I'd argue that we're given two traumatic memories that mirror one another, are interdependent, and that the story offers us visible clues for one when, in fact, much of Rodney's reactions are about the other. The very first lines offer a clear suggestion that John may be dead, and while his name is never mentioned, thus providing the traumatic loss/lack around which the story seems to center, it is made almost certain to the reader that he is indeed dead, that Rodney wears his dogtags and commemorates him with so many of the touching rituals described throughout the story (and their physicality [the shooting, the workouts] stands in interesting juxtaposition to the academic and intellectual work to which Rodney has returned). Except that he hasn't returned to it. Clearly he can publish as we later learn in the story, but he chooses not to. He is hiding on a second rate campus, punishing himself for something that, to me, is the actual secret of the story.
fannish tropes
Throughout the story, there were moments, sentences, scenes that broke my heart, little throwaway lines that told entire stories. One such line was John's shape behind Rodney helping him hold his gun, another were the dogtags. And then there was the musical instrument that Rodney played in secrecy and John's mathematical article and the hinted at John/Atlantis intersection as well as Rodney's almost getting lost in it. And suddenly I realized that these were all fannish tropes, moments in one or several other stories. Now, fanon is an evil word in the circles I travel, but I am very interested in what I instead call shared interpretations of a given interpretive community. In fact, I've done some work on the way fan stories are always not only intertextual with the source text and culture at large but also with the fantext (i.e., the collective intellectual and artistic creation of a fandom) itself.
At its worst, that means that fanon runs wild, nicknames and one stop characterization and plotting by numbers. At its best, it means an active engagement with fannish tropes, means taking a cliche and twisting it, repeating with a difference and making something entirely new and original out of it. After all, art is always about talking to the past; even outside of fanfic intertextuality is at the core of it, most especially in postmodernism, which I think has a lot in common with fanfiction. At its best, fanfic references the fannish debates and other fan stories and yet doesn't make us feel like we've seen this before or scream because we cannot see that particular scenario (however endearing it may have been at first) ever again.
Case in point: as a former mathematician and married to one, I have quite personal issues with math wizard John. I cringe at the conflation of idiot savantish number abilities with mathematical intuition and ability. And yet when presented in a good enough story with sufficient surrounding supporting characterization, I love me some math!John. Reading Freedom, I immediately flashed back to astolat's Time in a Bottle where I didn't so much as blink seeing John being taught higher math by Rodney. Likewise (and maybe because this was the story I instinctually plucked in) it didn't bother me in Freedom either. Maybe it was because every one of these references called up a story I really liked, that really worked for me. So synecdochic's work became hommage rather than fanon use, it evoked other stories, almost effortlessly including them into her narrative.
In so doing, it became canonical fanfic to the fantext as far as I'm concerned, consistent with a variety of stories, so that I could see her Rodney be the Rodney who rescues John from merging with Atlantis and be the Rodney who finds the organ and starts playing again and be the Rodney whom John gives his spare dogtags instead of a more visible symbol and be the Rodney who grows closer to John as they practice again and again until Rodney can hit every single time...and on the one hand, I can name very particular stories, but then there are often more than one (thus the trope :-) and as such it references them all simultaneously, I think.
One of the things Freedom does for me and does really well, is acknowledging the fantext, acknowledging that we have created hundreds and thousands of stories about John and Rodney and Atlantis. Freedom builds on these stories and relishes them, commemorates them even as they are mostly absent, because they reference a time of John and Rodney together. One of the biggest fanon offenders are writers who are so certain of their OTP that they don't give us any indication of how they got from snark (or even outright hatred in some pairings and fandoms) to soulmatey love. And the reason the writers have a difficult time not doing so, is that in their minds all this stuff has already been dealt with, i.e., in their interpretive shipper community, all these things are clearly already covered, because aren't their hundreds of stories that have done that? synecdochic quite consciously employs this method by referencing stories as collective memory for us: Rodney recalls John the same way she makes us recall other stories. Not to shorthand and skip the necessary steps but because this story is clearly not about *that*.
In fact, someone suggested to me yesterday that the story could be read as gen. I found that interesting and as I'm pondering my personal fantext (which is very John/Rodney heavy) and think of the stories I come up with, I could imagine a similar set of stories (maybe not the dogtags and, as monanotlisa reminds me, Rodney does mention his status as being widowed to a partner of 5 years) that are simply emphasizing their bond, that are about Rodney being part of a team and having a good friend...and that could be enough to change him in the ways we see in Freedom. In other words, maybe the way we read the story is very much dependent on what we fill in for those years in Atlantis. But then again, every story we read is ultimately affected by what we bring to the text, our reading of the source text, our knowledge of Hugh Latimer, as well as what other stories in the fandom we read and write, what discussions we've taken part in, and, of course, our own writing or those who write...not all of us do :-)
Excerpts from Comments
[wickedwords]: I love the ideas of mycanon and mytext, and how they are influenced by the scores of stories we generate, and to extend it, I think that those constructs then influence our reading of the shows themselves.
Now, about the gen thing... *g*
I am one of the people that can read this story as gen. The issue here is that the dog tags themselves could easily be a symbol of deep-and-true friendship, and that no sexual aspect is implied in that. If we are reading into this story from the other stories that have gone before, then that includes gen stories as well. And I admit, the dog tag symbol could just as easily imply blood brothers in my mind as it could wedding rings, as I have read enough stories that have taken that kind of tack to illustrating the depth of the friendship between the two guys. The widdowed comment carried wonderful emotional ressonance, but no more so than any other conversation about the death of a beloved gen partner: Illya, Blair, Starsky and so on could have had that intense of feeling about their non-romantic partner and friend. They wouldn't have used the term widdowed, just as they would not use the term lover, but the depth of emotion would be the same.
[marythefan]:
I think the change in Rodney is partially attibutable to his relationship with John and partially to ... well, a whole host of other things. :g: Yes. The thing is, I still want to see the story as slash because I don't think all that other stuff overshadows the relationship with John, just as the relationship doesn't overshadow all the other stuff - I think all of it is important. And I can see how the story could be gen, but I think it gains something, for me, by being slash - by having the relationship with John be a defining aspect of Rodney without it being the defining aspect of Rodney. I like the idea that it's not an all-or-nothing deal, that the relationship is important enough that it can't just be pulled out without changing things but that Rodney can still manage to go on after it.
[wickedwords]:
See, and that is where we differ. To me, the sexual aspect could be removed without harming the story at all; the strength of their friendship would still be a defining aspect of this Rodney and he would end up in the exact same space, and he would still manage to go on.
[millefiori]: This may be a dumb question, but I'm not sure where you're coming from and I'd like to be. Are you saying that the story feels gen to you because, although John and Rodney had a sexual/romantic relationship in the past, that's not what the story is about, and since it's not mainly about a sexual/romantic relationship it feels gen? Or are you saying that from your reading perspective John and Rodney did not have a sexual/romantic relationship in the past, which consequently makes the story feel gen?...
Ahh, okay! I think we're on the same page with that. I think some people define 'gen' as no sexual/romantic relationship(s) at all, which gets confusing when trying to communicate with people who think gen can contain sexual/romantic relationships so long as they're not central to the story.
[lydiabell]:
I think that while the relationship itself is obviously in the past, and Rodney has grieved and is moving on, the relationship is still present throughout the story by its very absence. By which I mean: I think the story is fundamentally about Rodney moving on after the loss of Atlantis, the loss of that ideal, and what he had to do to the city. He's trying to find a purpose to replace the purpose that the Atlantis mission gave him, and to leave the world a better place than he found it. But -- and this is important, and removing this aspect would alter the story greatly IMO -- he's having to do it alone. Without all of his friends and colleagues from the Atlantis expedition, yes, but the most palpable absence is John's. He does not have his lover by his side and, even though in a sense he never expected to, he still feels that absence, that hole, every day. The relationship isn't what the story is about, but it colors everything.
[roseandrue]: Wow, this is really thoughtful.
Although I never thought about it as systematically as you do here, looking back I think I considered the other 'unstated fact' at the heart of the story to be not Rodney's silencing of Atlantis (which is eventually described as narrative) but the threat to Atlantis that triggered Rodney's actions. Unless I am missing it, there's never an exact explanation given of what the Earth governments planned to do with Atlantis that was repugnant enough to justify shutting Atlantis down forever. That threat of violence toward the idea of Atlantis (or what it ought to have been) is the actual secret, it seemed to me. Rodney's actions as described are evidence of the unstated horror that sent him into hiding/mourning, but I think they are not the horror itself. He is not ashamed of what he did, but he is afraid of what might have happened (which is never stated) if he had not done it. That lack of active regret would mirror what you describe as Rodney's acceptance of John's death: there is justification for both deaths, and ultimately that acceptance allows the story to point toward the future and Rodney's 'children' with hope.
I'd really like to hear what others think about what the actual impetus was for Rodney's actions.
[zvi likes tv]: I don't think that John's death is presented as a trauma or a secret. It is, instead, presented as a fannish trope, as something that anybody reading the story would immediately know and understand, in the same way that they would know and understand who Ronon and Elizabeth are when they show up on Rodney's doorstep uninvited. And, when I say it's not presented as a trauma, I mean it's not presented as something that Rodney needs to still get over. Yes, he had the relationship with John, and John died, and Rodney grieved and was sad, but he appears to have moved on from that by the time we get to the beginning of the story. I mean, no, Rodney doesn't get romantically involved again, but Rodney doesn't like people, although he can be friends with the occasional individual person; I don't see his not getting romantically involved again as a sign that something is broken for him on a social scale, it's really more par for the course. He is cordial to his colleagues, except the stupid ones, and given what we see on SGA? That's way improved social functioning from when he went to Atlantis.
All of the signs of restored functioning we see have to do with, how do I integrate having been to Atlantis and participated in/facilitated morally reprehensible things with my decision to a) stop the governments of Earth from using what I learned to do morally reprehensible things and b) continue to work in physics at all? I mean, he could have come back and been a housepainter. He might have been able to not work at all, for a limited period anyway, on the basis of his completely untapped earnings for that 7 year period. He could have become a piano teacher or an auto mechanic or gone back to school to learn about the Romantics. But he chose to come back to a field where he, eventually, was not going to be able to unknow what he knows. So, it's about Rodney, and responsibility, and leaving a legacy, and destroying and preserving knowledge, not about his dead boyfriend.
That is also why I think that the story is gen, because Rodney's relationship with John isn't a central component of the story. To me, a story is slash or het if it is about the relationship between two or more people, at least one of whom has sexual or romantic feelings for the other. This story was so clearly not about Rodney's relationship with John that I would have been disappointed if it had been presented to me as slash, because there wouldn't have been enough of that relationship to sustain the genre designation, to my mind.
[cesperanza]:
Respectfully--wow, I couldn't disagree more. "So clearly not about Rodney's relationship with John?"--I thought it was entirely about Rodney's relationship with John. But I think you can have a relationship with an absence as much as with a presence, and I'd go so far as to say that John's absense is the main character in the story, and that he dominates all the more for never being named
[natlyn]: I'm glad you brought this up. Considering several posts I've seen recently on the subject, I had been mulling over whether I'd consider this slash and under what criteria. I do consider this slash. I consider it slash because, although the story is not about John's death, John's death and his time with Rodney (alluded to as cathexys states, rather than spelled out) are used as an integral part of the story. The framing of Rodney's grief cycle for Atlantis by John's rememberance gives the reader the feeling that Rodney has gone through grieving before and has survived it. So the story is not about whether Rodney will pull himself out, but how he will. (I am oversimplifying. I think much of Rodney's grieving for John and Atlantis was concurrent; however, it seemed throughout to me that the process for John was much further along.)
As wickedwords mentioned previously, it could have been written as a gen story substituting a deep friendship for the John/Rodney; however, I think the author would have had to do much more work to equate the magnitude of a friend's death with the killing of the enormous potential of Atlantis. By making John Rodney's spouse, the author is able to deliver a shorthand to the reader about what John's death would have meant to Rodney. And then use the reader's understanding to tell the story she wanted to tell.
I don't equate slash or het with the romance quotient, so much as with whether the story's romantic/sexual relationship is canonical. So if Weir had been substituted for John, I'd consider 'Freedom …' het.
[cathexys]: I agree that the fact of whether the grieving is at different levels is not really relevant for whether to consider it slash...the relevance of John to and in Rodney's life is, however.
And the point that the analogy only works--or maybe works better--if they are indeed lovers is really good! If it had only been friendship, I think, the entire story would have needed to work on team and friendship and all the others as well...nd then the loss would have needed to include more people (not that John doesn't sdtand in for the friendships he's found as well...but I don't think his loss would have been suffiecient had all the others still been there for Rodney to mourn John as a group and support one another as a group...)
So yes, romantic relationship it has to be...
[cofax7]: Ah, good points. I had mentioned to someone else that I thought the relationship of this story to the fantext was very similar to the relationship of any fannish story to the source product: but you parse it out much more clearly and completely.
I also agree that the Atlantis issue is the fulcrum, not the death of John. Although I wonder--how Syn describes what Rodney did, doesn't read to me as "killing Atlantis" so much as "talking her into going to sleep". Because I suspect that if Rodney came back--and only Rodney, given that he was the one who talked her into it--Atlantis would function again.
[fairestcat]: In my head I've been thinking of this story as "aftermath fic", which I'm starting to realize is a common theme that I'm really drawn to. I really love stories that look at traumatic or difficult or life-changing events not as they're happening but from the perspective of hindsight; stories about what happens after everything changes, whether for the better or the worse. It's a structural conceit that I'm seeing more and more in fanfic and I find that it really speaks to me.
I didn't cry the first time I read this story. And I didn't cry just now as I read it again. But it did break me in it's own way, it hit me on a gut level and insinuated its way into my brain. And the reason it hit me so hard is because, in the end, Rodney is happy. He's really, genuinely happy. And that's why I love this story, because it's about life and living and the way the trauma isn't the end and it isn't the beginning. It just is, and then you move on; you take it with you and into you and you let it go and you go on.
[ dirty diana ]: One of the things Freedom does for me and does really well, is acknowledging the fantext, acknowledging that we have created hundreds and thousands of stories about John and Rodney and Atlantis. Freedom builds on these stories and relishes them, commemorates them even as they are mostly absent, because they reference a time of John and Rodney together.
This is part of why the story didn't resonate with me, because I don't read a lot of John/Rodney. I don't like the pairing or even really understand it. I guessed from who was reccing it that it was slash, and I went in planning to be as openminded as possible, but when I started reading and didn't see any (maybe because I wasn't looking for any), I started reading it as gen. When John and Rodney became text instead of subtext, near the end, I got thrown right out of the story, because that's not the Atlantis I watch or read.
The argument could be made that as a slash writer, she's not really required to write for readers that don't already buy the pairing. But on the flip side, I think the disconnect means that a lot of the reviews saying it's a good story in any category are false - it's a good John/Rodney story and that's it. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. (The fact that so many miss the fact that their reviews are coloured by their J/R love bothers me greatly, but that's not the author's fault and a rant for another day.)
[cathexys]: I'm not sure it's not a good story, because I saw quite a number of people commenting on it who were not invested in SGA at all or didn't know it. However, it certainly isn't a story for someone who *dislikes* the pairing!
In other words,I don't think it needs to be your kink, but it certainly can't be your squick!
So, in a way this reminds me of the debate going on in a later post in this community. I don't think it's ever possible to rec or review without personal biases. If I hate a pairing I will no more be able to review the story objectively than if I love it.
And finally, you are totally right about fan stories clearly not functioning quite in the same way and being recced in the same way as regular fiction. because you totally prove my theory about interpretive communities :-) I mean, when I was reccing it, I'd assume that my readers would know I'm a slasher and John/Rodney centric. So even if the story wasn't outright slash, it wouldn't have John running off with Lizzie and Rodney finally getting it on with Carter or something... DSo, yes, for my interpretive community, it was a good story...for yours it clearly wasn't !!!
[dirty diana]: Well, yes, but also, no, that's not quite what I meant. I actually liked the story. I just thought that hanging so much emotional impact on backstory that wasn't actually *in* the story, and also isn't in the source text, left it with a large structural hole. My problem was not that I went, ew, McShep. My problem was that I didn't see it coming, and not in the good, surprise-ending kind of way.
(Also: I like slash generally. I just find it hard to find slash in this particular fandom that I believe. I would love to read a story that convinces me, but this wasn't it.)
To me (and I'm just now realising that I might be alone in this, I might have to write my own essay on it), if a story is more difficult to read out of context, it's hard to call it great. A *great* story hooks people who might not expect to be hooked. That's what I *want* fic to do for me, when I start reading. In my case, I don't actually like Rodney that much. (Kick me out of the fandom. I know.) But the author's take on Rodney post-Atlantis totally fascinated me, and I kept reading to hear more about it. So, it is possible to be drawn in out of your comfort zone, and I give the story tons of bonus points for that.
But the romance part of it wasn't structured in a way where it could do the same thing, and I'm sad about that, because I think the opportunity actually was there.
because I saw quite a number of people commenting on it who were not invested in SGA at all or didn't know it.
Judging off *my* flist, I'd say those people were people who have soaked up from their own flists the impression that SGA is the J/R show, and maybe even read the ocassional McShepfic, even if they don't watch the show. I personally didn't see any reviews from people who are invested in the show but not the J/R, which is what I'd be interested in.
[carolyn claire]: When reading this story, I wandered through it with the expectation (unconscious, I think, but there) that this was going to be a story about the trauma of John's death and how Rodney's life following his death reflected that trauma, much like those I'd read before. I noticed all the little moments you point to--and how much does it tickle me to see you elaborate on the way those moments are drawing from and referencing the fanon the way many stories draw on the original source to build the backstory, something I'd felt but not realized. I found, though, while reading those moments that, for me, they served to make Rodney feel more grounded, more stable--I didn't feel trauma associated with those moments and memories, but felt them as moments of surety in his radically redesigned life. So the tension wasn't flowing from those moments, as I might have expected; they didn't generate any melodramatic flashbacks or moments of soggy mourning (the wrist pain brought back unpleasant memories for him, but not in an overtly emotional way.)
As I read my way through, it started to become apparent to me that John's death was not the mystery; John's death was actually a fanon one, one we've read before, just as the moments of his life with Rodney were, and we were meant to understand that. The mystery surrounded Atlantis' fate, instead, and the trauma that still needed to be worked through was about Rodney's role in that--none of that was about John's death. Rodney was a functioning widower, not a melodramatic mess but a man missing and still loving and feeling his absent spouse, and had accepted and was living with his loss. The ending made this clear to me, his final words at John's headstone, and, whoa, I was taken aback, at first. Hey! I thought this was a slash death story! I thought Rodney's issues were supposed to be about losing John! Why isn't he, there's supposed to be, um, hmm. The slight dissonance I'd felt while reading coalesced into mild outrage that John's death wasn't the center of the story, that Rodney was okay, a man who'd lost his love but was going on with his life and focusing on other things.
And then...I liked it, I liked it a lot, and the more I thought about Rodney being portrayed not as Romeo to John's Juliet (or the other way around) but rather like anyone I might actually know who'd lost a partner, the more I liked it. The Atlantis mystery was mostly resolved (though not really solved as long as Rodney lives and the US military is comfortable with infringing individual rights during wartime), and a vision of a brighter future is presented to us--one without John, but also without any sad my-man-is-dead violins. It really struck me, and still works on me extremely well. Imagine--she took all those slash fanon tropes to build the backstory for what could have been a fairly typical death story, and then turned it on its ear, in the end, made it remarkable by not actually writing that fannish story. I find that very cool. :) Reading your analysis of what she did and how she did it was what really brought all that into better focus for me, and I appreciate that. Next stop: what the author herself has to say about it.
[loldemort]: This may just be a slashy reading, and perhaps just "what Loldemort wants to think", but I read Rodney-loves-John/John-loves-Rodney as being the bedrock of who he is now, and how he carries on.
For me it's all in "It's a good thing I knew full well when we started that you were never going to be an old man, because otherwise I'd probably be a wreck." It's true, you could read that (*just* possibly) in a non-slashy way, referring to the change that exposure to John, to John's values, to his moral sense, has wrought on Rodney, making him who he is now, the new Rodney who is capable of coming to terms with what happened at Atlantis, as opposed to the pre-John Rodney who one assumes couldn't. But there's a personal connect there, that's very clear: Rodney's not just mourning another, albeit close, soldier who's dead because of what they did; he's talking about his man. "When we started" isn't Atlantis, it's John and Rodney.
Rodney is now a man who has Something Important To Do, and it's a work for the rest of his life. But you need more than that, you need a reason to care, and you need a source of energy to get up in the morning and still do the things you have to do, and I believe that it's his acceptance of John's death and, because of that, his ability to go into his memories and pick up something good from their time together and bring it back with him into the present and use it to lighten his darkness, that's what's keeping him going. That's the difference between the life-affirming Rodney we see and the dead-inside Rodney who would have been.
We get the feeling from the story that he's not looking for a new relationship. He may have moved on to acceptance, but he's never going to move on to being anything but John's guy. I don't think a day goes by when he doesn't think about John and mourn him, and then ask himself what John would want him to do now, and then get up and do it the best he can.