“You can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want”: Anna Wilson on affect
Continuing my desire to shout out literary scholars, I give you Anna Wilson’s 2016 TWC essay, “The role of affect in fan fiction.” The essay is about the openness of love and other strong emotions about characters and texts in fandom – a strong contrast to academia, where experts often strive to be (or at least appear) unbiased, objective, and dispassionate. Wilson quotes from a number of Yuletide asks that show great enthusiasm for characters and texts from classical history:
I have a thing to confess, and that thing is: I love Marcus Tullius Cicero. No, seriously, I adore him. I'm fascinated by his intelligence, his ambition, his—grandness, I suppose you could call it; he's a historical figure who is genuinely larger than life. (Emilyenrose)
And
I love Callicratidas!…I love him for his straightforwardness and integrity and honour, for his vigour without rashness (well, mostly) and obedience without obsequiousness, for being a man of principle in a morally bankrupt world undergoing rapid, profound social change, and I can't help but adore his total lack of people skills. (tevildo)
But the particular parts of this essay I want to tease out are the ways these Yuletide asks invite the prospective fanfiction author not just to interpret and extend the canon, but to invent things, to make new things with these old texts.
So, for instance, Wilson discusses how Rumpleghost asks for a Yuletide story based on Demosthenes's legal speech "Against Conon,” noting that Rumpleghost’s letter “takes a character-focused approach that opens up the speech to fannish imagination but likewise balances this with historical detail.” Rumpleghost tells her Secret Santa that:
because the only information we have about Ctesias's character is from the speech and most of that is slander, you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want, though I would love it if you based him on details you found in the text.
Hence the title of my post: you can go totally wild in making him be whatever you want is actually the subtext of a lot of fanfiction, even though fans talk a lot about good fic seeming canonical and hewing closely to canon. Wilson shows that fandom is doing something more complicated: while Rumpleghost would love it if the characterization is based on details from the texts, those details are the basis for going totally wild. Wilson explains that:
The request fleshes out the bare bones of the story about these two men gleaned from the legal speech, suggesting a story about "the days they first meet at the army camp on garrison duty, where Ctesias and his friends are drunk every day and Ariston is a little:|:|:|-faced dude, follow flirtiness/hijinks/confrontation/sex there!" The request overall conveys deep affection for these characters and a profound affective investment in the antagonistic relationship that Rumpleghost imagines between them ("Ctesias being lazily charmed by Ariston's snarky little existence"), while there is an unspoken shift away from the aspects of the speech typically studied in the classroom (such as its legal, ethical, political, and linguistic elements) onto its affective content: Ariston, the speaker, is "prickly" and "pompous" with "incredible self-righteousness," while Ctesias is "a provocative douche," and the speech shows "what grumpy, similar little guys they could be."
Wilson thus argues that the letter “establishes the fannish discourse from which fan fiction can emerge.” The fanfiction writer is here being encouraged to fill up the dry details of canon with affective life as well as meaningful (and pleasurable) tropes and themes.
[…] the hegemonic orientation toward the affirmative I am describing entails not only an emphasis on positive modes of affective sociality but on a singular way of contending with affective experience of all permutations. In other words, affirmationism in this context is not solely, or even primarily, about an insistence on joy, pleasure, and other recognizably “positive affects” (though there is no shortage of work with that focus). Rather, the pull of affirmationism is evident in how we read and contend with even so-called negative affects, those dimensions of affective experience that emerge at sites of violence and dispossession. Many of the significant considerations of the negative affects have been characterized by the naming of specific negative affective states or “bad feelings”—for example, shame, anger, envy, paranoia, disgust, pain, depression, and so forth—and subsequently affirming and positioning them as legible and credible modes of affective experience, in contrast to the pathologization and dismissal with which they are generally met. Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings is an especially noteworthy text in this vein for its foregrounding of the marginal and “minor” affective registers—those affects that are indicative of suppressed, diminished, or “suspended” agency, that do not immediately present themselves as useful or pleasant but are in fact often experienced as intense displeasure. Yet as essential as Ngai’s text is for its centering of “sites of emotional negativity” as they emerge from and around the aesthetic, she notes that “it is part of [her] book’s agenda to recuperate … negative affects for their critical productivity” as well as their “social and symbolic productivity”. Although looking at negativity through a critical lens, there is an enduring emphasis on what is useful about it politically, socially, and aesthetically in a way that ultimately falls in line with the methodological imperative of productivity articulated by [Brian] Massumi. Along similar lines, in the conclusion to her contribution to the first Affect Theory Reader, titled “Happy Objects,” Sara Ahmed calls for a move “beyond the affirmative gesture” in our considerations of affect, noting that the dominant tendency is to try to convert supposed “bad feelings” into “good feelings,” generally toward the ultimate goal of attaining “happiness”: the ultimate good feeling. The pursuit and attainment of positive affects is placed above a reckoning with the negative and in fact misapprehends the true scope of negative affects—as Ahmed states, “[The] affirmative turn actually depends on the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presumes that bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive”. Yet rather than taking this observation a bit further and therefore leading to an outright rejection of affirmation in toto, Ahmed argues that “it is the very exposure of … unhappy affect that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life”. In other words, a shift in orientation toward what are often dismissively characterized as “bad” affects can function as a gateway to affirmative “possibilities”—getting us back to the always ever-present potential for “something new” to emerge, for “alternative model[s] of the social good”. The question remains, unasked and unanswered, of affective registers that threaten the very stability of the social, that are pointedly and irredeemably antisocial in their orientations and manifestations.
i wish it was more widely known and discussed that emotional experiences and expressions are both spectra. not as in each individual experiences a spectrum of emotion (though that is true) but as in there is a spectrum of how emotional someone is and how emotional someone acts. some people just feel less feelings. some people just feel more feelings. some people's emotions last longer or shorter. some people express their feelings more or less. all of this is normal and should be discussed way more as part of the variety of human experience
Forgiving yourself is not erasure.
Forgiving yourself is slowing down to see
what happened for what it really was.
It's saying to yourself,
Oh, I see that I have done this thing.
I see who I was.
Yes, that's who I was.
And now I will choose who I will become.
Forgiving yourself is saying,
I'm choosing to accept consequences for that,
but I'm not going to punish myself anymore.
I'm choosing to acknowledge
that I live in a world where my actions affect others.
For better or for worse,
we all affect each other.
I look back on my life and I see streaks of jealousy,
judgment,
and resentment.
I see a shape of my soul I hardly recognize today.
But I still have power to mold this story.
I cannot erase the marks I've made.
But I can move forward to make new ones.
Morgan Harper Nichols - You Are Only Just Beginning
