When is a lift not a lift?
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| Title: | When is a lift not a lift? |
| Creator: | Hestia (fan) |
| Date(s): | February 1997 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | a focus on the The Professionals, but applies to many fandoms |
| Topic: | |
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When is a lift not a lift? is a 1997 essay by Hestia (fan).
It was printed in Strange Bedfellows (APA) #16.
Some Topics Discussed
From the Essay
I was thinking the other day about ' Consequences' - in the unlikely event of anyone's not knowing, that's the one where Bodie plays the Game with a drunk and confused Doyle and winning, rapes him - because I keep wanting to write a sequel to it. Along with dozens of others, yes, quite; I couldn't agree more that it's been done to death.But I started wondering; first, what it was about this particular story I found so compelling and second, what it says about the way slash is generated.
[...]
It's not a case simply of disagreeing with the story's premise, though I do, nor of thinking it badly made. I admire it as an artefact. Rather, I was trying to work out why I disagree with it so strongly when it's well-written and absolutely logical in its development And to my pleased surprise, I think I put my finger on it. I read it very closely the other week and noticed a sentence that had slipped past me the first couple of times. I haven't got it to hand so this is just a summary but the author has Bodie think something like,'.. He and Doyle had never been friends the way other teams were . . ' Yippee, I cried, that's it. Because a) I think that's absolutely wrong, which is why a story built on that premise makes me shake my head in annoyance -yet b)- if you do take such a premise then the events of the story are indeed credible. What a relief to get it clear in my mind. It bothered me that I should so utterly reject what happens, given that the author did in fact make the lead-up to the rape believable on its own terms. (I didn't like to think nothing more than reluctance to face painful possibility was behind my strong reaction against it). If one takes the They're Not Really Friends position, though, the rest follows.
Then I thought about how strongly I'd wanted to answer the story with a response of my own, at a time when I didn't think of myself as a fiction-writer at all (I've only lately begun reluctantly to accept that I've been bitten by the fiction bug.) If it had that effect on me, no wonder it's the most-sequeled story in Profs fandom. So then I started thinking about the way slash feeds on itself (to beneficial effect, I mean) and how characteristic of the genre it is that story begets story, whether in opposition or development.Screamingly obvious to you bods who've been around for ages, of course (not to mention old hat) but it struck me as one of the more delightful aspects of the way we write and read slash: that it is in many ways a shared enterprise. A writer produces a story; a reader enjoys/deplores it and becomes a writer in turn; another writer picks up the ball and runs with it. Me, I wonder how many stories grow from a writer throwing her hands up and shrieking. Never! So she takes that incident and gives it the slant she feels it should have; or the slant that comes from emphasising one side of a character as against another. (For example, I was re-reading MFae's powerful 'Grievous Bodily Harm' trilogy last week and I wondered whether part of it - the bit where Ray speaks of his traumatic experience with the lover who wanted to 'cure' him - was prompted by irritation with 'Dance With the Devil". If you felt like answering, MFae, I'd be interested to know! But the impulse to join in the game is the same whether it springs from love or from loathing.
This not, to my mind, plagiarism; it's a sharing of ideas. (Let's face it, as none of us is paid for our writing, sharing is exactly what we do.). Even when it's not just the home product that provides take-off points. There are lots of stories whose premise, or setting, or mood, or entire plot is taken from 'mundane' films or plays - Pam Rose's wonderful 'Professional Dreamer, for instance, or Meg Lewtan's touching 'An Affair to Remember'. Adaptations like this seem akin to remakes of classic films or the placing of old dramas in modem settings. I prefer Romeo and Juliet, for instance, but I wouldn't be without West Side Story either.
I can see the lure, too, of wanting to take the denizens of one fictional universe and drop them into another, just to see how they'd cope - hence the seductive nature of crossovers. (Me, I yearn to see how Bodie would handle Avon. Or would Avon handle Bodie? And what would Doyle say if he tried? Light blue touchpaper and retire, I suspect I revel in the idea of mapping one fictional reality onto another. Look how fascinatingly Ellis Ward handled the 'mirror universe' idea from Star Trek in 'And Memories Die'. Sheerest fun. Then there's borrowing piled on borrowing; Jane Mailander's rich and joyous Quanta Leap series, which adopts the mechanism of Quantum Leap in order to rifle the fiction attic even more ruthlessly. Indiana Jones, Mary Renault, Dante, Robin Hood - all grist to her splendid mill.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that this sort of borrowing isn't done from a bare faced desire to take over someone else's work. (When it is, and you know the source, it's perfectly obvious.) I think it's because given an enjoyable mise-en-scene the yen to get one's hands on it and stir vigorously is well-nigh irresistible. As I said, to me this isn't plagiarism, or at least not culpable plagiarism; it's not stealing someone else's work and passing it off as one's own. It's the longing to work out one's own version of a tantalising circumstance, to take. it along a different path, or, sometimes, push it in a different direction altogether. Not parasitism but symbiosis. And getting back to where I started, the strength of the reaction to 'Consequences' is a perfect example of this. No, the world doesn't need another sequel to that story but perhaps I need to write one...an idea shared with friends can never be stolen. The operative words being 'shared' and 'friends'.