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7.

Karaoke

Writing

Masters and Amateurs

Every time I come across a story on contemporary artists whose work uses anonymous human bodies I think of communist “bodygrams,” the stadium crowds whose collected bodies would form and “write” messages of love and devotion to their leaders. Interestingly, for western observers these “bodygrams,” communist body art, were, more than anything else, both crown proof of totalitarianism and first-class material for mockery. It’s also interesting that for the democratically orientated citizens of these communist countries, “bodygrams” were, more than anything else, the triggers of frustration, rage, and shame at living in such absurd regimes.

In August of 2009 Nic Green brought her “theatrical exploration of modern feminism” to the Edinburgh stage, inviting ordinary, anonymous women, all volunteers, to appear naked. “Such a life-affirming thing to do” is how one of the women described the experience. At this time, Anthony Gormley was staging his “living sculptures” project One and Other, in which 2,400 volunteers each spent an hour alone on a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Having gotten it into his head that a sculpture had to be naked, Simon, a fifty-year-old, had to be removed by organizers. Later he explained that the event had been a turning point in his life. (“This event will serve to symbolize the beginning of a new age for me—I always wanted to be a sculpture”). Simon is a wannabe, a karaoke-man, and Gormley’s project gave him the chance to “sing his song,” experience a moment of internal emancipation, and make a dream come true.

Parallel to the Yugoslav communist culture of “bodygrams,” Yugoslav actress and poet Katalin Ladik offered sophisticated examinations of the visual, phonetic, and gestural possibilities of poetry, appearing either naked or semi-naked. She never encountered censorship. Unfortunately, like many other conceptualist artists (among them body artists), she is today half-forgotten. Today, “translation” is required in order for the post-Yugoslav generations (young Croats, Serbs, and others whose parents were Yugoslavs) to understand that in the “communist darkness” a whole set of alternative practices also existed. Marina Abramović, then a Yugoslav, carved a star into her naked stomach with a razor. In the western art market, and in the context of body art at the time, the star was seen as a communist star, which it probably was. Abramović’s sadomasochistic performance had a context, a reason and political charge for which no “translation” was necessary. Everyone understood what was going on.

Cultural dynamics unfold and develop in the paradoxes between the expected and unexpected, the translatable and untranslatable, the “read” and “unread,” in the misunderstandings between sender and addressee, and in the errors of “translation” into a new language and new context. This was also true of Yugoslav cultural dynamics in the time of “Titoism.” With the affirmation of “workers, peasants and the honest intelligentsia,” a place within these dynamics was also found for amateur literature. The world of “outsiders”—amateur poets, bearers of oral traditions, gusle players, “living newspapers” (reciters of political events in traditional decasyllables), cranks, literati, epitaphists, the lot—was given wings. It was, however, largely thanks to established writers and filmmakers such as Želimir Žilnik, Dušan Makavejev, and Slobodan ijan that this “underground” amateur literary activity was given its due. Exemplary in this regard is Moma Dimić’s documentary novel The Backwoods Citizen ( umski građanin) about Radoš Terzić, an eccentric, a Marxist, an amateur poet, and the author of the poem “How I Am Systematically Destroyed by Idiots” (“Kako sam sistematski uništen od idiota”). Terzić later sued his “portrayer,” the court proceedings providing light relief for many. Together with Dimić, in 1983 Slobodan ijan made a film about Terzić, taking his amateur poem as the movie’s title.

Wanting in on the joke, the media would from time to time deliberately hype an amateur writer. As an exemplar of catastrophically poor literature, Miloš Jovančević’s slim volume The Male Virgin (Nevini muškarac) briefly enjoyed cult-status among the culturati. Today it seems an early forerunner of “bizarro fiction.” A number of amateur efforts such as the lathe operator Stanoje Ćebić’s Why I Became An Ox (Zašto sam postao Vo) achieved well-deserved recognition, their rough and ready vernaculars rattling the terminally moribund sinecures of “established” literature.

The writer Milovan Danojlić conscientiously read his way through an enormous pile of amateur literary production, the end result of which was the novel How Dobrislav Ran across Yugoslavia (Kako je Dobrislav protrčao kroz Jugoslaviju, 1977), a highlight of its time and paean to the glory of amateur literature. Danojlić considers the efforts of his hero, an amateur poet, with respect, empathy, and tenderness, relativizing the borders and hierarchies established between amateurs, outsiders, and losers on the one hand, and the established artist on the other. At the same time, Danojlić’s book was also a “textbook,” showing us that there is no difference in the mechanism that moves the hand to pick up a pen—the differences lie in the execution, in the work itself.

Theoreticians of the day took an interest in this colorful anonymous “literary” production, the ethnologist Ivan Čolović’s monumental study, Wild Literature (Divlja književnost, 1985), examined everything from newspaper obituaries and headstone epigraphs to retro-modern folk songs and urban football legends.

It is unfortunate that today, thirty years later, Danojlić is a half-forgotten author, and that his novel, together with the time and context in which it was written, is completely forgotten. Criticism has changed. Today no one dares set out the differences between master and amateur, between good and bad literature. Publishers don’t want to get involved; they are almost guaranteed to lose money on a good writer, and make money on a bad one. Critics hold their fire, scared of being accused of elitism. Critics have had the rug pulled out from under them in any case. No longer bound by ethics or competence, they don’t even know what they’re supposed to talk about anymore. University literature departments don’t set out the differences—literature has turned into cultural studies in any case. Literary theorists have little to say on the subject—literary theory is on its deathbed, and the offshoot that tried to establish “aesthetic” values long in the grave. Critics writing for daily newspapers don’t set out the differences—they’re poorly paid, and literature doesn’t get much column space in newspapers full-stop. Literary magazines are so few as to be of no use, and when and where they do exist, they are so expensive that bookshops don’t want to stock them. Tracy Emin’s bratty retort—What if I am illiterate? I still have the right to a voice!—is the revolutionary slogan of a new literary age. The only thing that reminds us that literature was once a complex system with in-built institutions—of appraisal, classification, and hierarchy, a system that incorporated literary history, literary theory, literary criticism, schools of literary thought, literary genres, genders, and epochs—are the blurbs that try and place works of contemporary literature alongside the greats of the canon. Vladimir Nabokov is the most blurbable of names. But if so many contemporary books and their authors are Nabokov-like, it just means that literature has become karaoke-like.

Fan fiction

I remember a childhood ditty from the region where I grew up. I think it’s a folk song, and quite by chance I recently discovered that a Croatian pop group had done a successful remake. The verses of the song go like this:

On a hill sat a little house

A house with two windows

Where sat a pretty maiden

Pretty as a spring rose

Fair maiden, what are you doing

On this a glorious night?

Oh star so bright, my sweetheart

He said he’d come tonight

Three nights have passed

Alone I’ve been waiting here

And many more will come to pass

And many more a tear

My sweetheart is kissing another

Far behind he has left me

But curse him I shan’t

Because who I loved was he

We sang the song with a wee addition, inserting the words “in her undies” and “with no undies” in the original verses. Here’s how it went:

On a hill sat a little house (in her undies)

A house with two windows (with no undies)

Where sat a pretty maiden (with no undies)

Pretty as a spring rose (in her undies)

My young friends and I were delighted with our innocent intervention. Our delight was in vulgarizing the original text (we’d done something rude), in destroying the idyllic setting in which a “fair maiden” spoke with a star and waited for her sweetheart. It was in the liberty of changing the meaning of the song, in “taking its undies off.” We were children and had no idea that our little gesture was fairly common in oral literary practice. Folk literature, myths, legends, fairytales, stories, fables, songs, puzzles, and nursery rhymes were all created in the telling and retelling, in the interaction between an original text, its narrator, and his or her listeners. In the retelling narrators either deliberately or accidentally modified the original narrative, something every parent telling his or her child the story of Little Red Riding Hood for the thousandth time well knows.

Fan fiction (fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a term used for a new writing practice that has developed together with the Internet. Anonymous fans, their real identities hidden behind pseudonyms, intervene in an original source text, which is simply referred to as canon. These source texts are mainly gleaned from “trivial literature” (vampire and fantasy novels, gothic fiction, etc.), comics, graphic novels, and popular TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and The X-Files. Ficers, writers of fan fiction, remain within the closed virtual communities of their fandoms, their “interventions” intended exclusively for other fans. The key assumption is that everyone in the fandom is familiar with the canon. When J. K. Rowling finished her seven-novel Harry Potter cycle, Harry took on a new life in fan fiction. Ficers continue to dream up new adventures for her hero and intervene in his old ones. This sort of thing is hardly new. Throughout the centuries anonymous authors have served up all kinds of reworked stories to hungry readerships, from unauthorized installments of Don Quixote, tales about King Arthur and his knights, and new stories from A Thousand and One Nights, to re-workings and parodies of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the Sherlock Holmes stories. As a modern phenomenon, fan fiction is attributed to Star Trek fanzines, one of which—Spockanalia—is thought to contain the first examples of fan fiction.

Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction in which fans write about the sexual preferences of fictional heroes from the world of popular culture. Fans get off on projecting, intimating, suggesting, and constructing lesbian and homosexual relationships between various characters. Most slash fiction writers (slashers) are said to be heterosexual women. Slashy is fandom jargon for homoerotic, and slashy moments are those in the canonical source text that a slasher implies are homoerotic. “Femslash,” also known as saffic (from sapphic) centers on female characters. Of course computer programs such as Photoshop have seen amateur artists let loose, doctoring downloaded photos to create sexual images of their idols. For the moment these idols tend to be the actors and actresses who play their favorite TV and film heros/heroines, but it appears almost any celebrity will do.

Slash fiction even has its own sub-genre known as real person slash (RPS for short), in which fans invent biographical details and fabricate stories about real people (musicians, actors, pop stars, TV personalities, famous sportsmen and women). RPS has a number of sub-genres, among them, popslash, musicfic, and actorfic. Although there are almost no limits on what can be invented, there is an unwritten rule that suicide, murder, and rape are all off limits.

RPS is an Internet variant of a folkloric form mankind has practiced since the beginning of time—gossiping or spreading rumors. The real people on whom RPS is based don’t protest too much. It’s never been clever to cut off the branch on which you’re sitting, and gossip, of whatever nature, is the most effective form of publicity. Also interesting to note is that slash fiction has attracted a lot of attention from academics who are interested in feminist, gay, and queer studies.