Searching for Homeric Fandom in Greektragedy

Searching for Homeric Fandom in Greek Tragedy Lynn Kozak McGill University [email protected] Abstract This article proposes an application of fan studies, and particularly a refined model of Suzanne Scott’s “fanboy auteur,” to reconsider Homeric creative response, with a spe- cial focus on the parodos of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. Keywords fandom – reception – epic – tragedy – affect Fan studies, and particularly the model of the fanboy auteur, can offer a new framework for thinking about Classical receptions of the Homeric poems and for Classical receptions more generally.* Fan studies combines several distinct issues that we wrestle with in Classics and Classical reception, including audi- ence response, intertextuality, metapoetics, authorship, and affect. While the means of production and cultural contexts of contemporary fandoms around twentieth- and twenty-first-century transmedia texts vastly diverge from those of the Athenian tragedians,1 a fan studies approach can still illuminate modes of engagement between authors and audiences around established texts like the Homeric epics. The term “fans” assumes some sort of an affective community (cf. Wilson 2016: 1.2): fans as individuals are emotionally invested in those things (including, but not limited to, storyworlds, characters, actors, auteurs, and texts) that * Many thanks to Jonathan Ready and Christos Tsagalis, to my anonymous reviewers for their bibliographic and conceptual suggestions, and to audiences at Greek Drama V at UBC in July 2017, who gave valuable feedback, particularly George Kovacs, whose work on Aristophanes as a Euripides fan dovetails with this work. Thanks also to Alex Martalogu for his close eye and his help with formatting. All translations are my own. 1 Willis fights against a specific historicity to fandom, seeing it instead (as I do) as a “heuristic lens to open up new approaches to Classical, medieval, and early modern texts” (2016: 1.7). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/24688487_00201004Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:21:34PM via free access searching for homeric fandom in greek tragedy 119 they are fans of, and they may share that investment within a “fandom,” or fan community.2 These fans actively engage with their object-texts, from the act of formally or informally acknowledging a community around them to producing analytical or creative responses to them. Fan studies describes fans as either “affirmational” or “transformational”: “affirmational fans play within a source text’s boundaries by analyzing, illustrating, collecting, cosplaying, etc.,” as opposed to transformational fans, who “use the source text to introduce their own ideas, relationships, even characters” (Busse 2013: 82).3 I will show that these two modes exist along a spectrum, while I focus primarily on the transformational fan and the creative impulse that expands on or critiques existing storyworlds. While in the contemporary context these fans, and their creative work, often represent marginalized sub-communities that have fewer options for authoritative or mainstream cultural production,4 they might also include Suzanne Scott’s so-called fanboy auteur (2013a), which stands as a compelling analogue to the Athenian playwright. As the term suggests, the fanboy auteur occupies both a fan space and an auteur space—their fan role placing them within and making them beholden to a broader fan community, while their auteur role gives them producing authority, to such an extent that they might even transform canon. The fanboy auteur’s creative output also spans transformational and affirmational responses to source material. These features, particularly when combined in what I call an “intraditional” fanboy auteur, or someone working within a tradition that they are a fan of, make for an alluring model of affective creative response. To situate this model’s usefulness in analyzing fifth-century tragic responses to Homer, I will first look at fan studies and the historical possibilities of fandoms with an eye towards how they might fit the Ancient Greek world. Then I will focus on and refine Scott’s model of the fanboy auteur, before moving on to an examina- tion of Euripides’s possible Homeric fannishness in the parodos of Iphigenia in Aulis. 2 See Jenkins 2006 for distinctions between “fannish behaviour” and “identifying as a fan.” 3 Busse here discusses a distinction originally posed by Ofan writer obsession_inc 2009. 4 Bacon-Smith refers to women’s fan fiction as a “crime” and as a “subversive act” (1992: 3). Look- ing at archontic literature “produced by postcolonial, feminist, and ethnic American writers,” Derecho draws attention to fan fiction (as archontic literature) serving “as political, social, and cultural critique” (2006: 70). Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:21:34PM via free access 120 kozak Fan Studies Fan studies emerged in a specific historical context as a response to changing dynamics in media culture: the majority of early fan studies looked specifically at Star Trek fans, fan communities, and fan fiction.5 These three components represent more generally the three primary strands of fan studies: being a fan as a marker of individual identity; fandom as a unifying thread for community; and, finally, fandom as a productive site for new creative material by aforemen- tioned “transformative” fans, contrasted to “affirmative” fans, who tend to “col- lect, view, and play, to discuss, analyze, and critique” (Hellekson and Busse 2014: 4). Fan studies initially resided comfortably in this twentieth-century context and its attendant cultural, commercial, and consumptive media constraints. Those constraints have changed drastically in the half-century since fans first sat down in front of their televisions to watch Star Trek in its original broadcasts. Digital platforms now allow for much more idiosyncratic viewing practices as well as for a much wider range of social opportunities for fans, including the easy sharing of fans’ creative work like fanvids, fanfic, and fan art. The internet also allows commercial and creative producers of media to aug- ment their storytelling transmedially through online games, twitter feeds, and other paratexts within the “convergence culture” that Henry Jenkins discusses (2009). This culture blurs the lines not only between primary and secondary texts but also between producers and audiences: “Within convergence culture, everyone’s a participant—although participants may have different degrees of status and influence” (Jenkins 2009: 132). I will discuss this fluidity of status later in greater depth, particularly in relation to fanboy auteurs, who often pur- posefully skirt the line between producer and consumer. But a similar dynamic exists in a work like E.L. James’s New York Times best-seller Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as a piece of fan fiction responding to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy: many scholars cite its success as a clear mark of fan culture’s contemporary prominence (Hellekson and Busse 2014: 5; cf. Busse 2015: 110–115; De Kosnik 2015: 116–125). We can say the same of Comiccon’s ascending significance for the film industry or of the fact that our summer blockbusters now are almost entirely superhero movies. Fandom has come out of the margins and into the mainstream, exerting vast influence over the way that media is produced and consumed. Fan studies has followed, with work expanding outwards into our 5 For a more in-depth history of fan studies, starting from the seventeenth century to the present day and encompassing fandoms that include music-based fandoms and sports-based fandoms, see Duffett 2013: 5–17. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:21:34PM via free access searching for homeric fandom in greek tragedy 121 technologically networked lives and all the mediated experiences, from enter- tainment to politics and war, of contemporary twenty-first-century life: “the most important contribution of contemporary research into fan audiences thus lies in furthering our understanding of how we form emotional bonds with ourselves and others in a modern, mediated world” (Gray, Sandvoss and Har- rington 2007b: 10; cf. Jenkins as quoted in TWC Editor 2008: 3.6). Fandom and Historicity We have yet to define fandom itself, and how we define it closely intertwines with questions of historicity and cultural context. Definitions of what consti- tutes fandom run from the very broad to the very narrow, corresponding to historic eras and their types of texts. At its broadest, Matt Hills understands fandom as the site “of a cultural struggle over meaning and affect” (2002: xi). With this open definition, fandom easily accommodates archaic Greek poetry, as Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse suggest: “If we think of [fandom] as a form of collective storytelling, then the Iliad and the Odyssey might be tagged as the earliest versions of fan fiction” (2014: 6). Stacey Lantagne also sees fandom in the epic tradition: “Virgil’s Aeneid was essentially a piece of Iliad fan fiction, focusing on a secondary character from that story” (2015: 267).6 But the majority of those working in fan studies define fandom more nar- rowly, as emerging from discrete historic moments.7 Hellekson and Busse say that, if we consider fan fiction “as a response to specific written texts,” we can date its inception to the Middle Ages (2014: 6). But “a response to specific written texts” could certainly apply to the Classical period, given tragedy’s, and especially comedy’s, strong drive towards textual reference. George Kovacs’s work on Aristophanes as a Euripides fan perhaps most strongly demonstrates this idea: he considers Aristophanes’s numerous creative engagements with the tragedian’s work and with the now-lost Telephus in particular (2017). Aristo- phanes’s Frogs also represents fannish behavior towards Euripides, starting with Dionysus’s exchange with Heracles, where he reminisces about reading the tragedian’s Andromeda during a naval battle: “And when I was on the ship, 6 Farley takes issue with this idea through system theory in her article because “Aeneas’s extraordinary qualities are due more to nationalism than to Vergil’s self-inert fantasies, what- ever they may have been.

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