A Star-Forged Ruby

free online james baldwin stories, essays, videos, and other resources

**edit

James baldwin online archive with his articles and photo archives.

---NOVELS---

Giovanni's room"When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy. This book introduces love's fascinating possibilities and extremities."

Go Tell It On The Mountain"(...)Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves."

+bonus: film adaptation on youtube. (if you’re a giancarlo esposito fan, you’ll be delighted to see him in an early preacher role)

Another Country and Going to Meet the Man Another country: "James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit." Going to meet the Man: " collection of eight short stories by American writer James Baldwin. The book, dedicated "for Beauford Delaney", covers many topics related to anti-Black racism in American society, as well as African-American–Jewish relations, childhood, the creative process, criminal justice, drug addiction, family relationships, jazz, lynching, sexuality, and white supremacy."

Just Above My Head"Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land."

If Beale Street Could Talk"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche."

also has a film adaptation by moonlight's barry jenkins

Tell Me How Long the Train's been gone At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. 

---ESSAYS---

Baldwin essay collection. Including most famously: notes of a native son, nobody knows my name, the fire next time, no name in the street, the devil finds work- baldwin on film

--DOCUMENTARIES--

Take this hammer, a tour of san Francisco.

Meeting the man

--DEBATES:--

Debate with Malcolm x, 1963 ( on integration, the nation of islam, and other topics. )

Debate with William Buckley, 1965. ( historic debate in america. )

Heavily moderated debate with Malcolm x, Charles Eric Lincoln, and Samuel Schyle 1961. (Primarily Malcolm X's debate on behalf of the nation of islam, with Baldwin giving occassional inputs.)

----

apart from themes obvious in the book's descriptions, a general heads up for themes of incest and sexual assault throughout his works.

⬆️ More resources for people who want to learn about racism. And also just brilliant writing ⬆️

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

If you are seriously against CSA, then you should absolutely read Lolita. Yeah, the book that set the western world on fire with weird sexual conversations. 

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic). 

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes. 

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”. 

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT. 

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality. 

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it's nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.

Emphasizing this last sentence because it's so well put. We have to engage with things that make us uncomfortable so we can learn to be better.

Yes! I recall reading a quote from Nabokov about why he wrote it. What I remember him saying was “I read in the news about a man who was arrested for molesting girls, and I became curious. Why would a person do that? So I wrote from the perspective of someone who would.”

That’s… that’s not even weird, I don’t think. I wonder why people do horrible things all the time.

I don’t actually think Nabokov had everything about it right. It seems to me that many real molesters are much more aware of what they’re doing and sometimes even perving on the cruelty of what they’re doing. HH seems kind of quaintly Freudian in comparison.

But that’s what Nabokov would have seen around explaining it, so it makes sense.

And Nabokov really does seem aware, on my reading, that HH is doing harm, and that the idyllic love affair he’s dreaming of is in his head. What’s actually going on is just seedy and gross.

It’s hard to read, hard to understand, and messy.

But those things are what make it good, rather than just “hey look I picked a shocking topic have some torture porn.”

(I hate the term torture porn but it’s the best term I can think of rn)

Nabokov gave extensive interviews and talked about Lolita often. He gets such a raw deal. I have compiled a bunch on my main blog here. i just hate nabokov misinformation so here are three for you:

By all accounts and backed up by extensive interviews, Nabokov wrote a psychological thriller and expected people to be shocked and compelled by it in the same way you can't look away from a train wreck. His worst crime was total naivete. He literally never expected that anyone would take it as a romance.

nabokov wrote "don't create the torment nexus" and then children showed up at his door dressed as the torment nexus and people forever will be like "you wrote about the torment nexus, which is the same thing as being in support of the torment nexus".

It bugs me that so many people's default example of published fanfic is 50 Shades of Grey.

What about West Side Story, a famous modern AU of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet?

What about Dante's Inferno, a self-insert RPF if I've ever seen one?

What about Wicked, a pre-canon AU of The Wizard of Oz?

Hell, what about Percy Jackson? There's definitely an argument to be made that that's a modern AU of various Greek myths.

Humans have been writing fanfic as long as they have been telling stories. In about the year 20 BC, our dear Roman poet Ovid wrote the Heroides, a series of aggrieved "letters" from the female characters of famous myths to their respective male heroes. Are you telling me that Ovid, writing a letter from the perspective of Queen Dido to Aeneas -- Aeneas, whose fantastical adventures were put into poem by Virgil -- wasn't writing an outsider-POV fic? A fic that is, in fact, translated in Latin classes world-wide today!

There is so much famous fanfic out there, but people tend to forget that it is fanfic once it becomes mainstream enough. And as a consequence of that, people who aren't into fandom don't see how beautiful fanfic is, and some members of fandom feel shame associated with writing and reading fic. But fanfic is beautiful, and it is something humans have always done, and it is nothing to be ashamed about.

So if you ever find yourself in a situation to give an example of published fic, think outside the box. Remember that published fanfics hide in plain sight; once they're famous enough, we no longer think of them as fanfic. And never forget that fanfic is a very, very old human tradition, and your ancestors who partook in it would not have wanted you to feel ashamed of it.

i really can’t stress enough how much i recommend regularly engaging with older art– movies, books, whatever. like, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” and all that, but also, there’s just something really fascinating and kind of beautiful about reading something written by someone who lived so long ago and really connecting with it, recognizing the humanity of people who once seemed like abstract concepts to you

I started reading The Tale of Genji during the pandemic, figuring I might as well improve my mind during lockdown. It’s considered the oldest novel on record, possibly the first one ever written. Early in the book, there’s an incident where the main character has a crush on a girl, so he tries to sneak into her family’s property to get close to her, and along the way he runs into this ancient old grandma who can’t half see and who mistakes him for one of her grandkids. So she’s standing there going on and on about her digestive difficulties and whatever, and he can’t speak up because if she hears his voice she’ll know he’s not who she thinks he is, so he’s just having to stand there and nod and hope she’ll go away soon. And I’m reading all this and thinking that with a couple of adjustments this could be a modern day sitcom, and it made me happy to think that a thousand years ago someone was laughing at the same sort of stuff we laugh at today.

i read dickens’ great expectations in little fifteen minute installments on my breaks at work, sitting there dirty and tired and sweaty in a hot factory, and it made me think about how a hundred and sixty years ago there were probably tired guys in hot factories reading the story the exact same way, bit by bit, at their stupid jobs they couldn’t afford to quit and were damn lucky even to have, and they too were glad to read the next chapter of mr dicken’s latest weird little story about weird little people

in reading War and Peace I’ve discovered that “doing math homework at the dining room table with your angry dad” has been a common terror since the 1800s

i remember reading tom sawyer, specially the part where he gets chastized erroneusly for dropping the sugar and he just spends minutes sitting in silence sulking and fantasizing about how sad everyone would be if he died and reveling in the self pity of how lonely and misunderstood he is and as a teenager who did exactly that with my 14 years of age i was shocked that an adult in the 1800’s had managed to capture that so well

Remember all those memes about “what if we just pretend 2016/2020/etc never happened and never mention it again”? In 2004 BC, a refugee from Ur looked back on the past year and wrote: "May this year not be placed in the reckoning of years! May its number be taken down from its peg in Enlil’s temple, and may its name be unspoken, to far off days, to other days, and to the end of time.“

There’s another heartbreaking one from the same period in which a woman mourning her son’s murder specifically grieves for “my son who will never bring wedding gifts to his father-in-law’s house, my son who will never bounce a child on his knees.”

And some time between 2200 and 1900 BCE, a refugee from the destroyed city of Isin (now in South-Central Iraq) wrote this:

“This is my house, where good food is not eaten (not anymore). This is my house, where good drink is not drunk (not anymore). My house, where good seats are not sat in (not anymore) My house, where good beds are not laid in (not anymore)… My house, where no happy husband dwells with me, My house, where no sweet child dwells with me. My house, through whose doors, I, though jts mistress, never grandly pass- Never grandly pass, the doors of this house, In which I dwell no more. I- let me go into my old house, let me go in, Let me lie down, let me lie down! Let me go into my storehouse, oh let me in Let me lie down, let me lie down there, I- Let me lie down to sleep in my own house, It was sweet sleep I had there. Let me lie down in my house, let me lie down there in my bed, It was a good bed. I- Let me sit down on my own chair- It was a good chair.”

tiktokers who say classic lit is bad because its not relatable 1. thats not the fucking point 2. you've clearly never read twelfth night as a trans bisexual

you've clearly never read Frankenstein as a student

If you're fucked up enough a lot of classic lit suddenly becomes uncomfortably relatable tbh.

This is 100% true, but also: literature is a great way to engage with people you don't actually relate to, and practice feeling empathy for them anyway. I have never been in a battle, but I have cried over the Iliad multiple times because I was suddenly made very aware that every single war has people like Hector in it, who leave their families one day and just never come home to them. Please keep looking for things you find relatable in unexpected places - but not everything has to be relatable for it to be worthwhile.

Not everything has to be about you to be worth reading

Margaret Atwood with a flamethrower. That is all

Okay, I have mixed feelings about Atwood and mixed feelings about this book, but this is fucking gold and gave me a full week’s worth of serotonin all at once.

:)

The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1800 papyri that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 CE), constituting the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. Now using new x-ray technique, these scrolls are being read for the first time in millennia

https://museum-of-artifacts.blogspot.com/?m=1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CZ6Kxv2oeM0/?utm_medium=tumblr

something about stuff like “reading diversity bingo” puts a bad taste in my mouth. i feel like a lot of readers treat the works of marginalized authors as, like, a chore they have to complete to be Morally Good rather than just… art worth enjoying? i highly encourage all readers to branch out beyond cishet white guy authors but like… if you’re doing it because you think you have to rather, than just finding books by a wide range of authors you like, that’s something you need to unpack.

white people, black authors are not your medicine by yaa gyasi

[Image: excerpt from an article reading: So many of the writers of colour that I know have had white people treat their work as though it were a kind of medicine. Something they have to swallow in order to improve their condition, but they don’t really want it, they don’t really enjoy it, and if they’re being totally honest, they don’t actually even take the medicine half the time. They just buy it and leave it on the shelf. What please, what deepening, could there be in “reading” like that? To enter the world of fiction with such a tainted mission is to doom the novel or short story to fail you its most essential levels. End description.]

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

“All right—I’ll go to hell.”

i just read virginia woolf’s essay on charlotte brontë. at one point, she writes: ‘to write down one’s impressions of hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography.’

i can’t stop thinking about it? i love being reminded that literature is as much about the interaction between the reader and the text as it is between the writer and the text. not just the fact that, as we go through life and grow, we find literature increasingly commenting on the experiences we’ve had. but also the fact that we come to books with our own life experiences and thoughts, and we work retroactively with a writer to almost create a slightly new book from what they wrote - their book through our eyes. as readers, we are as essential to the literature-making process as the writer.

my copy of hamlet is probably very different to yours. i might’ve related more to hamlet’s musings on death and morality. you might be more interested in shakespeare’s questioning of power or revenge. same story, different notes, different eyes, different lives.

also WHY does every american lit or american history or w/ever course contain the entire history and writings of england & greater europe up until the colonies but NO documentation of the oral histories and stories from actual native american tribes and look at how that influenced and was influenced by european traditions to create the “american” story. like i KNOW why but christ

the first ever anthology of native american poetry was published this week and barnes and noble has a 1998 anthology of native american plays and those are literally the only two anthologies of native american literature i could find and i am PHYSICALLY INSISTING that u buy them and support the native activists and authors who pushed for them to published because holy shit y’all

So when Earth gets its own permanent superstorm like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and it makes it so the tropics are basically no longer habitable by humans is it going to have one of these random old-person hurricane names

How fucked up would it be if they chose your first name for that storm

Like you’d pretty much have to change it, right? The storm’s not going away and keeping your name would be in pretty poor taste, I’d think

in a Young Adult novel it would just be called The Storm

In a Terry Pratchett novel it would just be called Alfred. Not Hurricane Alfred, or Tropical Storm Alfred, just Alfred. This might be brought up once by a naive, sympathetic viewpoint character, but some wiser (for certain values of wise) character will admonish them for discrimination against natural phenomena, and noting that we would never call a human “Human Jim”. Later in the story, the Alfred’s individuality and relatability will be a significant plot point.

in a cyberpunk novel it would be the second half of an ordinary word, with an apostrophe at the beginning. the ‘phoon, the ‘cane, etc.

goddammit you’re absolutely right

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS POST IS CORRECT AND I’M ANGRY

In a steampunk novel it would be “the great perpetual tropical storm Strathclyde” with an accompanying explanation of Lord Strathclyde’s endowment to the university, and personal brilliance in the use, of a specialised meteorological analytical engine.

My favourite quote from ‘The twits by Roald Dahl’

I have to admit, this section broke me as a child.  Because I grew up around a lot of “beautiful is good and ugly is bad” and this was the final straw that convinced me that I was doomed to be a bad person.  Because if even my good thoughts couldn’t shine out of my face, well, then I must not have any.

Whereas this section gave me hope, because no matter how much my parents told me I was unlovable and ugly, if I tried hard enough to have good thoughts I could eventually shine out and earn love.

Which, I think, shows that two people can have very different reactions to a piece of media, even completely opposite reactions, and both are completely valid (which I know you know, my friend, but I think is worth pointing out to Tumblr at large).

Masterpost of Free Seafaring Literature & Theory (Gothic Literature) (Romantic Literature)

Pre-1600s The Argonautica by Rhodius Apollonius The Odyssey by Homer The Seafarer The Libelle Of Englyshe Polycye  Sir Mortimer by Mary Johnston Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley The Sea-Hawk by Rafael Sabatini 1600s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe & A General History of the Pyrates  by Daniel Defoe Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

1700s Fanny Campbell, The Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of The Revolution by Maturin Murray Ballou Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Baron George Gordon Byron The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” by William Hope Hodgson The Pirate by Walter Scott Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Treasure Island & Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Jonathan Swift

1800s The Lighthouse by R. M. Ballantyne The Pathfinder, Or The Inland Sea; The Pilot; The Two Admirals & Afloat ad Ashore by James Fenimore Cooper Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling The Sea-Wolf by Jack London The King’s Own; The Phantom Ship; Mr. Midshipman Easy & Poor Jack by Frederick Marryat Moby-Dick by Herman Melville The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe The Wreck of the Grosvenor & An Ocean Tragedy by William Clark Russell Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne

1900s The Shadow Line: A Confession & Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers Great Sea Stories, ed. Joseph Lewis French (anthology)

Non-Fiction Under the Southern Cross by Maturin Murray Ballou A Voyage to the South Sea & Mutiny on the Bounty by William Bligh Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana White Jacket; Or, The World on a Man-of-War by Herman Melville Pincher Martin, O.D.: A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy by H. Taprell Dorling

Academic Theory A topographical approach to re-reading books about Islands in digital literary spaces by J. R. Carpenter (Dis)Integrating Visions: South and Imperial/Colonial Difference in Dickens and Conrad by Luigi Cazzato The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Psychological introspection in A Maritime Journey by Justine Shu-Ting Kao “What if Icarus Hadn’t Hurtled into the Sea?” Some Remarks towards a Theory of Historical Narratology by Martin Klepper Religious Pluralism in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi: A Case of Intertextual Correspondence with Swami Vivekananda’s Religious Philosophy by John Kuriakose The Rebirth of the Musical Author in Recent Fiction Written in English by Carmen Lara-Rallo Arthur Morrison, Criminality, and Late-Victorian Maritime Subculture by Diana Maltz What Does Melville See on the Ocean? by Stipe Grgas

LIFE magazine, 1915

virgin bible vs chad fashion magazine

Disapproval of women’s choices in literature is hundreds of years old.

tywinning asked you: 2012-08-09 03:37

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else.  Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.“  He was the original Gary Stu).  Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic.  In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck.  Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot–although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF–and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic.  Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school.  And Spenser!  Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion.  Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome.  (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.)  People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of?  There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man!  (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship–barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real–and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history.  First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place.  And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together).  And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn.  And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you.  Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing.  And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work–to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time.  A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). 

What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later.  Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them.  If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.

I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more.  I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not–and I know how snobbish this sounds–particularly well-written.  That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”–there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose.  That’s why fic is awesome–it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling.  But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing.  There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. 

But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists.  Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist.  (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)

Excellent analysis.

Spot. On.