There are two kinds of fiction. One supportive of the aura of factuality and one digressing or even openly questioning or defying it.
That’s the broad, simple terms. In reality, of course, it’s never that simple. Many works include elements of both where the author was psychologically swaying from one to the other.
Scott’s Ivanhoe, for instance, is a brilliant example of such swaying. While Scott wrote from a highly moralist point, consistent with his upbringing (he was a child of extremist parents; especially his father seems to have been so severe that even poetry was questionable, but his mother loved it – conflict nr one (Ivanhoe by Sir W. Scott, Penguin Popular Classics, foreword, 1994), and his would-be hero – because it is very difficult to stretch the notion of a hero over Ivanhoe, no matter how much you squint! – bears many extremist traits, the figure of the Templar, a typical Byronic figure, fiercely independent, heavily individualist and resultantly in conflict with the world around him, is free to do things and ask questions that very likely plagued Scott subconsciously.
Perhaps the best quote to illustrate this can be found in the chapter where Malvoisin informs Bois-Guilbert that Rebecca is to be tried for witchcraft, and his response is: ,,Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!”
The Templar’s character is represented through the terms of extremist (so moralist) aura of factuality, and therefore painted darkly, if ambiguously so, which has led to many false representations… false from the perspective of psychology and resultant actions. We will not, of course, do an extensive study on any of that here – but suffice to say that his portrayal as a Dark Man, so a figure used as a “warning” to especially women in extremist situations does not completely manage to inspire the dread you are expected to feel. Ironically, as he is the only one not really worried about conventions, morality and what others might say, he is the safest person to be around in the book, as he regularly fails to act as he is expected and acts instead in accordance with his own decisions and wishes… while still managing to take into account Rebecca’s, even if the two are constantly at loggerheads, mainly because Rebecca, on the other hand, puts religion before all her personal decisions in a brilliant example of what is known as RTS. Her concerns are never personal – they centre around the religious and the social conventions, even though it is easy to guess that some form of emotion must exist between her and the Templar that is, even more importantly, absent from the connection between her and Ivanhoe… their conversations, even their arguments, are much more personal, much more intense and emotional, positively and negatively, whereas Ivanhoe treats her coldly and dismissively, which she never responds to, however much she responds otherwise.
The Templar dies because the inner conflict of Scott’s needed a resolution. The “goodness” of society, the accepted norms, however wrong they may have felt personally, had to triumph for the aura of factuality to remain static for him and for any audience he wished to appeal to, and that meant the destruction of the character that questioned it most. As Scott had had a love that remained unrequited, and married later more with his head than his heart (even though that particular match was still questioned by his parents, for not being extreme enough in their particular vein of extremism) (http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/biography/marriage.html), the loss of his passionate love and the conflict of his marriage in many ways remained present almost to a point of clinical obsession within his writing… Often presented in deaths of the characters that loved passionately (such as the Templar, or Edgar in The Bride of Lammermoor). Another interesting thing about Scott is that he generally claimed some form of precedence for his stories, be it the made-up Wardour Manuscript (held generally to have been a work of his fiction and nothing else, not unusual, as he tended to ruthlessly abuse actual history to make a moralist point) or a person as a source, often an “old man” – a hierarchical elder figure within the SCR structure.
Curiously – or perhaps not so curiously, as not everyone is going to be blinded by the author’s intent, or, shall we say like Scott would, an arrow may miss its mark 🙂 -, the interest in the Templar and Rebecca and their whirlwind would-be romance has attracted much more interest overall than the other characters in the story; it is also perhaps the best known and most reproduced story of Scott’s, and he wrote a lot. It has inspired quotes in heavy metal (Look your last upon the sun – Opeth); it has inspired films, more or less fitting to the original, it has inspired manga, it has inspired operas (Der Templar und die Judin, Il Templario, etc.) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe#Legacy). It has even inspired paintings – you have the picture of Leo Cogniet from the Wallace Collection as a cover for this article.
Scott isn’t alone in his works being heavily influenced by his society. Practically all well-known works of classical fiction (by classical fiction we mean roughly 18th and 19th century here) were written from either the perspective of supporting the aura of factuality or the confusion about it, a personal conflict that was being chewed over and resolved and unresolved again by the person writing, very much in conflict with themselves and their society’s extreme aspects but trying to find resolution through writing supporting fiction. Often enough, the lives they led were at huge odds with the morality they professed (Dickens, for instance, known for being an instrumental part of a morality based organisation that worried about young women and their loss of virtue and their “reintegration” into society to put mildly, had left his wife and their 10 children to live with a young actress; his views were heavily racist and biased, as can be seen in the stance he took about the conflict on Jamaica; and his portrayal of life in London, especially the looming number of executions for the smallest crimes, inconsistent with the actual judicial structure in England at the time upon comparison with actual judicial records – https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Punishment.jsp).
Another brilliant example of aura of factuality in conflict with the writer is Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte). While the Bronte sisters actually did spend time in a girls’ establishment (which actually cost one of them her life and the health of the rest was irreparably damaged), this did not stop Charlotte from further oppressing her sister Anne, whose writing she deemed inappropriate and immoral (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bronte/bronte-anne.html). And yet is Jane Eyre half an ode to morality and half a clear message of personal conflict – in fact, the start, where Jane confesses that the mistreatments she had suffered as a child, particularly being locked in the room she feared because of the death that had happened in it, reads not only as a psychology manual, but gives us one of the best era-specific descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder, in this case CPTSD (Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, currently recognised in the UK but still studied in the US (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25750837); it deals with repeat and long-lasting trauma, such as Jane would have been subject to). Not only that – it alludes to man rape, which is sadly still a taboo topic now, with Rochester admitting that his wife had subjected him to sexual intercourse he did not in fact want. It all falls apart when Jane realises that she could only be a mistress (even if she was the only one aware of that) while the previous wife lived… a notion that she has social and religious issues with, and that she rejects. Her further actions are actually typically those of a psychological abuser… with the intent of making Rochester “good” (i.e. acceptable to her notions of indoctrinated acceptability), she proceeds to slowly tear him apart psychologically bit by bit, with little consideration for his actual well-being.
Those examples are just a few of many, but they are by no means the only books left to us by the era. Many books did not conform, such as the works of Wilkie Collins, who lived, for his time (and even for this one, as consensual polyamory remains an issue today), a rather scandalous life. But he lived it openly and honestly, and has given us some of the strongest characters – including female – of the era. Valeria is much stronger a woman than Jane, and yet it is Jane that is considered a start of feminist writing – and Valeria is forgotten. The reason for that is the start of the 20th century’s aura of factuality following the Victorian notions. This is only properly challenged in the 90s, but by then, many old books were forgotten, and it’s really with Kindle and Project Gutenberg and the emergence of the ebook that rare, little known and forgotten works have seen light again, and can be read and are being distributed. Doyle, too, has written much more than is remembered, and his works very often question the then-extant behaviours, thus giving us an interesting mode of thinking to introspect by where our own prejudices and aura of factuality are concerned. In fact, while Doyle was mainly hailed as the writer of Sherlock Holmes, many forget that his own investigative work has led to defence of many who would have been convicted wrongfully simply because of prejudice, in itself the result of aura of factuality of a specific society (Turvey, 2011).
This of course leads us to an even more exciting prospect now – while we do read books for the content, and it is neither necessary nor expected to read or watch films to have deep thoughts (that, btw, is extremist behaviour too, equitable in psychology as pattern seeking and confirmation bias), we do, consciously or subconsciously, often form links between ourselves and the characters. To some, this starts a life of adventure – inspired by a work, they decide to live their life accordingly by becoming, say, a doctor, or an archaeologist (and before you ask – nope, that was not the case with me 🙂 ). To others, it inspires their own original works of fiction, or, in a case of film crews, a representation of a topic.
And of course, there is the fanfiction. Fanfiction is possibly one of the most anthropologically interesting things that we do, and it is far from being new. Rebecca and Rowena, a derivative work by Thackeray, published after Scott’s death (and really, really REALLY poor, from all possible perspectives… the only thing it can claim to be is informative of the writer’s own character, but you can read a biography for that!), is a fanfiction. Religious legends found locally are technically a fanfiction. Many holy texts are broadly speaking a fanfiction. Robin Hood as presented by Gilbert is a fanfiction of Scott’s take on the ballads collected by Child. Nosferatu was the German fanfiction of Stoker’s Dracula in many ways.
And of course, the best part, fanfiction is where we can read stories that may be either set into a specific universe and only uses the said universe and/or characters to spin a completely new story or is deeply introspective of the characters in question, and the universe they inhabit, including actual history where that is of issue, and builds works actually better than the originals.
I’m sure all fanfiction readers will agree with this, and if you haven’t read fanfiction yet, I do warmly recommend it. There are many good ways of getting to fanfiction, with Fanfiction.net and Archive Of Our Own being probably the best known sources. Of the two, Archive often offers better stories and better writing, but this is really dependant on so many factors that you will have to look through whatever interests you to see for yourself.
Many consider fanfiction to be stealing. Legally, that is not exactly the case – since no contract or finances are attached to the matter, since it is both clear where the work comes from and the disclaimers are provided, it is actually difficult to claim that fanfiction trespasses on the rights of the original writer(s). Rather, the notion of “sharing culture” that has been legalised in the EU (cf. here and here) is applicable unless an actual attempt at copyright infringement is made.
For many writers and readers, fanfiction is in part about romance. Pairings of all kinds, some more or less realistic, some more or less paraphilic and some outright dark, appear in fanfiction with the complexity and the frequency of both the psychological leanings and the social trend of them in both our Western but sometimes also other cultures. Some actually explore even the original pairings better than is explored otherwise, because often enough, writers do not take into account actual human psychology, but tailor actions and reactions to their predispositions, prejudice or intent – much like we have seen with the works of 18th and 19th century. I can actually recommend a few such stories from the perspective of exploration of character within a difficult restrictive situation of their own aura of factuality – the Merlin/Arthur pairing as explored by Versaphile in the series Bird of the Gauntlet, or Tehta’s take on the “forbidden” pairing of Echtelion and Glorfindel are very good from both linguistic perspective and the exploration of bias vs real life. While language often suffers in fanfiction (and, let’s be honest, in published works as well!), these writers fall into the category that joins capability with amazing introspection of the universe they deal with, as well as actual comprehension of human behaviour to a great extent. Homosexual pairings are one of the strongest motifs of fanfiction, and with a good reason – not only are the LGBT rights a matter highly debated and prominent, they have been a matter of contention and even life and death (which they often remain) for many, and therefore inspire sympathy and thought. Furthermore must we consider the repression of women’s sexuality, which of women’s sexuality, which often results in a form of detachment – in simple terms, instead of being ok with her own sexuality, with the fact that she has sexual desires and needs, that type of a woman will try to detach herself from what she has been told from childhood on is “wrong”, and will instead try to form safe pairings (such as a male gay couple) or will even begin to fantasise about rape or dubious or reluctant consent, if I use the fanfiction-typical language, to no longer have to have the responsibility for sex happening. This is true of many BDSM-ers as well in my experience.
This is not the same as actually craving violence – but it is a mild to moderate paraphilic reaction to be at ease with one’s own sexuality, and therefore not odd, even if it can be worrying in the more extreme cases.
Returning to the topic of fanfiction, we should probably mention that, as author rights expire, and the books become public domain, fanfictions often become the next work on the topic. Carmilla has recently seen a revival through Carmilla’s Lament; Robin Hood has been done and redone, for better or worse, a thousand times, and my own work as a consultant for a small publisher has actually led me to the discovery of a fantastic work, soon to be published, on the topic of Ivanhoe (which is one of my favourite works). The work in question centres on Bois-Guilbert and is a series of books, all dealing with his life before Ivanhoe, and what excites me most personally is that it is written in the period language (and that imitating Scott’s so well I actually couldn’t guess which was which when reading bits, and I know Ivanhoe practically by heart) and, while remaining true to the original plot where it touches it, it actually works with history to the point where it satisfies even my personal tetchiness. In many ways, it is a modern book, as it does not shirk a certain amount of erotic scenes, but it does it in the language of the time and it is all written so seamlessly that I confess I have, when rereading Ivanhoe afterwards, found myself interposing it completely subconsciously into the original.
(This information has been provided with the kind permission of Gold Orchid Publishing.)
To finish, before I get carried away and share information I am not supposed to (lol…), stories fascinate us, be they fiction or fanfiction. We find ourselves in them; they inspire us to many things; they make us question ourselves and the world around us or simply just give us an escape, a little bit of a good time, when we need it.
It’s not odd that Pratchett, in his works, calls us Pan Narrans – the narrating chimp. In many ways, we live for stories, just as much as they live through us.