by ANNA WILSON
Welcome to the second part of a two-part guest series from Anna Wilson, on medieval fanfiction. The first part,
her fanfiction piece on Margery Kempe, is here. Read that if you haven't yet, and then read on below! - karl
As I was writing this piece, I
was thinking of the course I had just finished teaching at Harvard, an
undergraduate lecture class in English called “Medieval Fanfiction.” Medieval
Fanfiction begins with the idea that students who choose to take a class with
fanfiction in the title come to it with a critical vocabulary and hermeneutics
that we then build on to think about adaptation, reception, reading, and
retellings in medieval literature and modern medievalist pop culture. We read
Gawain romances and passion meditations, Canterbury continuations and apocryphal
gospels, and ended with Patience Agbabi’s Telling
Tales, A Knight’s Tale (2001), and some Canterbury
Tales fanfiction from the web (taught with their authors’ permission). I
don’t maintain that all the texts we read are fanfiction: indeed, we returned
several times to the question of what fanfiction is, refining our definition as
we encountered each new text. Fanfiction functions in this course as a framing
idea, a set of opening questions, an invitation for the students to bring their
own expertise as readers of pop culture into the medieval literature classroom.
As the final assignment, the students could choose to write a conventional
essay, or they could write a piece of fanfiction on one of the assigned texts
and a shorter reflective essay.
Although that class was in my
mind (indeed I was writing this story in the last week of classes), I actually wrote
‘Margery Kempe in SPACE!’ for David Townsend, my beloved PhD thesis supervisor,
for a conference organized by Carin Ruff, Suzanne Akbari, and myself in May of
this year on the occasion of his retirement. Creative and scholarly pieces
shared the space, in a celebration of David’s personal, reflective,
transgressive, queer, capacious work and teaching. Writing fanfiction for him
seemed appropriate, as he’d nurtured my thesis on fanfiction and medieval
literature, which saw its start in a paper I wrote for his seminar on
vernacular English piety, in the last class of which he read aloud a scene from
a historical novel he had written in which Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich
meet. I was conscious, as I wrote this, of how he’d made my work possible because
of his willingness to be delighted, his generosity in sharing that delight, and
I wanted now to write something expressly to delight him.
Although it was a project
unrelated to teaching “Medieval Fanfiction”, writing my own fanfiction for a
medieval text I know well and have thought about as a scholar felt like a
natural continuation of my thinking about this class and this assignment, an
investigation from the inside-out of what I was asking my students to do, and
why. Like my students, and at the same time as them, I was writing a piece of
fanfiction on a medieval text to a short word limit, and on a deadline. This blog
post represents the second part of my own attempt at this assignment, which ITM
has kindly agreed to host: the reflective essay. I know I’m not the only one to
run fanfiction assignments in medieval literature classes (in fact, one of my
students uncovered a trove of Canterbury
Tales fanfiction on fanfiction.net that appeared to have all been written
for a class); it’s my hope that this double post might be useful for those
thinking about running such assignments, or open up conversation among those
already running them.
I approached my story with three
things in mind. Firstly, the length of the story I had in mind could make use of
the fragmentary structure of Margery’s story, its lack of linearity, to give
the impression of telling her whole story with far fewer fragments. There’s an
extent to which any part of the Book of
Margery Kempe can stand in for the whole; it’s eucharistic, in that way.
Second, I liked the idea of telling this fragment-story as a trail of
documents. It evokes a particular kind of scholarly work on a figure like
Kempe: we are always one step behind her, trying to assemble her existence from
the traces she leaves when she brushes up against institutional bodies –
ecclesiastical, legal, corporate. My third idea was more playful: the challenge
of imagining Margery’s voice, Margery’s life, into a science fiction setting. For
me, the work of reading The Book of Margery
Kempe and of reading my favourite science fiction or fantasy books requires
analogous imaginative construction of the world the protagonist moves through. In
my favourite kind of science fiction and fantasy storytelling, this world is
constructed from throwaway descriptions (‘worldbuilding’, in fiction), because
it is normal and familiar to the narrator/protagonist (I’ll take this
opportunity for a gratuitous book recommendation: Spin State by Chris Moriarty), not introduced as to a naive
outsider (e.g. Harry Potter). This is
my favourite kind of science fiction storytelling, and what I find so alluring
about The Book of Margery Kempe. So,
visual implants. Holoshrines. Astrocorp. No explanation. And yet, these
throwaway descriptions build on shorthands established within the science
fiction genre. The collaborative work between my reader and me is part of a
larger, communal collaborative project of imagining, analogous perhaps to
Margery’s audience, steeped in the language and forms of Christian affective piety.
The work of following Margery is thus twofold: collecting documentary traces,
and steeping ourselves in that language.
I also thought about translation.
The author of the opening fragment, an unnamed ship captain, asks, “Did
you know humans lived that long?” The intended implication (I’m frustrated at
the rough edges of this story, but I’m smoothing them over for the purposes of
this essay – it could be better, but that doesn’t matter for now) being that
neither he nor his recipient is human. What act of translation, then, has
already taken place, in order for you to read this? Margery’s Middle English
speech, her language (“vanitee”), is as alienating as the science fiction neologisms
(“holoshrine”), if not more. The ‘happy ending’ of Margery’s story, as I
imagine its condensed version here, is one of successful comprehension, as much
as transcription.
The prompt for the reflective
essay portion of the assignment was: “Discuss your fanfiction as a
critical response to its source text(s).” I had asked the students to use their
fanfiction as a medium to comment on their text (one student drew out the
homoerotic undertones of the Gawain/Bertilak/Lady Bertilak triangle, for
instance; another imagined a conversation between the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde and ‘Geoffrey’ the
pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales). The
reflective essay was meant to allow them to gloss their commentary, in the
context of discussions we had had in class about the way all the adaptations we
read contained commentaries on the text they were adapting. Having written my
own fanfiction, I now wonder if this was the wrong way around; when I run this
assignment again, I will invite them in the reflective essay to think about
what new insights, ideas, or questions emerged from the process of writing the
fanfiction.
These were the questions that occurred for
me, that will occur to me the next time I read or write about The Book of Margery Kempe: firstly, the
two writing challenges that emerged first were that I could not suppress or
ignore her voice or perspective; I switched very early from a purely epistolary
form to one that switched between her documentary traces and her personal
experience. Second, I began with the intent to write a fairly comedic story,
but could not sustain it. Kempe’s entire praxis is designed to evoke mixed
feelings; she invites us to participate in her humiliation and ridicule while
also take seriously her spiritual journey. I’m reminded of Brantley Bryant’s
fantastic “Margery Kempe at the feest of MLA” fanfiction on Geoffrey Chaucer
Hath A Blog, which maintains a similar balance of comedic brilliance and
agonized empathy.
Other questions that emerged for me
through the process of writing this were more esoteric: what rhetorical
effects, what affects, does the anchorhold produce, and could we call the
anchorhold a technology? To what extent are the bodies that Margery gathers
around her disposable, to her or to society? We often speak of the Book as a mix of genres, but usually
those genres are hagiography and vision text; what of the letter? Finally, I
imagined a radically interventional edition of The Book of Margery Kempe that re-arranged her chapters in our best
guess at their chronological order and interjected among them the documentary
traces from the archives that pertain to her life.
After doing that work of
unpacking my fanfiction “as a critical response”, I find myself thinking more
about the process of writing it, and the pedagogical implications of such an
assingnment. Writing fanfiction rather than writing scholarship requires one to
reorient oneself towards a text, just as pivoting from writing scholarship to
writing a lecture, or writing for a general audience, requires one to
re-acquaint oneself with a text with a new set of questions in mind, and, in
this case, a new goal: not to illuminate, inform, or impress, but to delight
someone who loves the text, perhaps the way you love it, perhaps in a different
way. Asking students to write fanfiction thus invites them to imagine
themselves as someone who has feelings
about the text, to inhabit that possibility; it also invites them to use a craft
in which they may have far more expertise than in essay writing (many of my
students were prolific fanfiction writers and readers), and to relate that
craft to the work of reading and thinking about medieval texts. However, I also
invite them into a specific relationship with me as the reader of their
fanfiction.
Writing fanfiction for David,
something came into focus for me that I had not realized through the semester,
that when I invite students to write in a genre that is intended to delight, I
also perhaps exacerbate the fraught transaction between student-as-writer and
teacher-as-reader. Fanfiction is, by definition (at least for me), written with
an audience of fans in mind. By assigning fanfiction, was I saying, “Delight me, a fan with specific emotional
investments in this text!” in a way that might lead to discomfort, confusion,
or inappropriate boundary-crossing, on my part or my students’? Presenting the
fanfiction assignment to students takes some care, so that the imperative “Delight
me!” is subsumed, or balanced, by, perhaps,
“Delight yourselves!” or, “Imagine what it might mean, to be a fan of this
text, and to be delighted by it.”
I don’t know if this
assignment actually feels any different for the students than a conventional
essay assignment which asks them to inform, illuminate, impress ‘the reader’
(me). Perhaps it was simply harder for me to ignore that I have no control over
what they think about me. I feel that with this assignment I come into focus (for
myself if not for my students), as their reader,
a specific reader. Writing feedback for these assignments was harder than usual, I
realize now, because I had made an implicit promise to my students with this
assignment to be an engaged, passionate reader of fanfiction as well as a
reassuringly detached teacher. Those two personas take some juggling and can
undermine each other or, as Carolyn Dinshaw notes in How Soon is Now, take time from each other. Reflecting on this experience,
I’m all the more amazed at how well David managed to be both, for me.
