hadjie

Being a fan of the fiction writing of Michael Chabon, particularly The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Final Solution, I grabbed a copy of Maps and Legends, his first work on non-fiction, off the new book shelf of my local library.  I headed right for the chapter titled, "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes."  Chabon has an interesting take on the subject of literature and fan fiction:

The first story that I ever wrote was a tale of Sherlock Holmes, a pastiche written in a clumsy ten-year-old's version of the narrative voice of Dr. Watson. I was inspired to write...by having read and adored Nicholas Meyer's then-popular account of the encounter between the detective and Sigmund Freud, which had in its turn been inspired, like every pastiche and Sherlockian  ten-year-old's versionof the narrative voice of Dr. Watson. I was inspired to write...by having read and adored Nicholas Meyer's then-popular account of the encounter between the detective and Sigmund Freud, which had in its turn been inspired, like every pastiche and Sherlockian monograph before and since, by those magical gaps, those blank places on the map that Conan Doyle, left for us, by artlessness or design.


Readers of Tolkien often recall the strange narrative impulse engendered by those marginal regions named and labeled on the books' endpaper maps, yet never visited or even referred to by the characters in The Lord of the Rings. All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, the adventure....

And yet there is a degree to which, just as all criticism is in essence Sherlockian, all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid  onward, is fan fiction... literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid  onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining, the stories that were told before us, and that we have come of age loving---amateurs---we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our readers---should we be lucky enough to find any---some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game.  All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

I do not write fan fiction (although I have been known to read it), but nevertheless have the impulse to want to keep my favorite characters and stories alive, paricularly from my youth, Robin Hood and Maid Marion, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson; Bilbo and Frodo; and more recently, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. I would like to hear what fan fiction writers think of Chabon's comments.