hth | like Homer, in a way. no, not that Homer.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird is it to be REALLY REALLY EXCITED about getting my hands on a copy of the new Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World?

Scratch that, don't tell me.

But anyway, the other book I'm reading now that I have my SHINY NEW UNC BORROWER'S CARD, OMG (okay, one of the other books I'm reading now...) is Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales, which is a book that first came out in 1960 and put the smackdown on those who at that point still insisted that the Homeric epics were actually written by some dude named Homer with a lot of time on his hands. Lord not only established the basic ground-rules for what oral literature is and how you can tell it when you see it, but he did a huge amount of primary reasearch (not common, as you can imagine, among Classicists) with poets of the living oral narrative tradition in Yugoslavia. It's a flatly awesome book, and very readable, should any of you have an abiding interest in oral literature and/or Homer.

This is from Lord's preface:

The singer of tales is at once the tradition and an individual creator. His manner of composition differs from that used by a writer in that the oral poet makes no conscious effort to break the traditional phrases and incidents; he is forced by the rapidity of composition in performance to use these traditional elements. To him they are not merely necessary, however; they are also right. He seeks no others, and yet he practices great freedom in his use of them because they are themselves flexible. His art consists not so much in learning through repetition the time-worn formulas as in the ability to compose and recompose the phrases for the idea of the moment on the pattern established by the basic formulas. He is not a conscious iconoclast, but a traditional creative artist. His traditional style also has individuality, and it is possible to distinguish the songs of one singer from those of another, even when we have only the bare text without music and vocal nuance.

You know where I'm going with this, right? This is my shameless, shameless subversion of the preceding:

The fanfic writer is at once the fandom and an individual creator. Her manner of composition differs from that used by a writer of fiction in that the fanfic writer makes no conscious effort to replace the received canon and fanon; she is forced by the constraints of the genre to use these comunally agreed-upon elements. To her they are not merely necessary, however; they are also right. She seeks no others, and yet she practices great freedom in her use of them because they are themselves flexible. Her art consists not so much in passively consuming and repeating time-worn dramatic conventions as in the ability to compose and recompose the conventions for the idea of the moment on the pattern established by the basic canon. She is not a conscious iconoclast, but a traditional creative artist. Her traditional style also has individuality, and it is possible to distinguish the fic of one fan from that of another, even when we have only bare text without cues that would be presented in the course of a performance.

It's not a flawless fit, primarily because our ranks do in fact include "conscious iconoclasts" who seek to replace inherited canon and fanon with individually invented elements on occasion; we are not as reverent toward our canon as an oral poet would be toward his ancestral tradition, or at least we needn't be. Even so, the act of writing fanfic at all is a choice to remain within certain proscribed boundaries and to submit oneself for judgement partially on the basis of what use we make of the formulas and incidents we receive, so fanfic could be construed as an art form that allows us to bend our raw materials any which way we can manage, but not to jettison them altogether, much like oral narrative.