Notes Regarding the "Transgressively Industrial" in a Post-Industrial World: How Fifty Shades of Grey Blurs the Line Between Appropriation and Autonomous Creation

Were I to place myself on the spectrum of people who have any kind of opinion about Fifty Shades of Grey (my opinion based on principle alone rather than on any exposure to the books themselves), I would say that I agree with Katie Roiphe from Newsweek who, in a review of E.L. James' bestselling trilogy, wrote that what is “most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena, what it gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambiance, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level.”  Usually I refuse to pass judgment on books until I've at least sampled them myself.  In this case, however, I trust what I've heard:  the writing is trite. The themes are cliched and even antithetical to the rights modern women proclaim they deserve. I can't think of any redeeming study of the trilogy besides maybe a horrified investigation into what, exactly, in our culture makes these books so appealing.


No matter how much I dislike the series itself, however, it turns out that the nature of its origin has some surprising connections to what we've been discussing in class re the post-industrial web (this is the only reason, I think, James' name would ever appear on my blog). I stumbled across this article from The New York Review of Books (the lead to the post having appeared on my Twitter feed) about the connection between the multimillion-dollar-grossing series and fan fiction, which illuminates the ways in which James' profit transgresses the unspoken social mores of the fan fiction community.


Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that the first incarnation of Fifty Shades of Grey appeared as a fan fiction story on a Twilight forum, a series I similarly loathe on principle alone. But I suppose I am:  no matter how poor the prose, I guess I'm still used to the author/reader binary. Self-publication via services such as Lulu is becoming the industry norm; more and more frequently, publishers of popular fiction will offer contracts to books only after they've gained a substantial readership independently. This practice at once removes the red-tape involved in publishing (knowing a guy who knows a guy from your MFA program) and maintains its essence, which is networking (knowing a guy who knows a guy who has stumbled across your writing in the vast literary desert of the web and thinks it's quality stuff). While the latter depends heavily on chance, it may be more egalitarian. Web 2.0, if nothing else, is all about egalitarianism (at least initially):  Facebook brags that "anyone" can create a profile.  "Anyone" can sign up for Twitter. Then, as internet users, we trust in the democracy of the web:  more popular figures on Twitter gain followers because they post uniquely funny or informative tweets, not simply what they've had for breakfast.  More innovative or interesting websites, such as Postsecret, rack up hits; others without quite as innovative or interesting a premise fade away.  


Sometimes this democracy of the web works phenomenally.  At others, it results in Fifty Shades of Grey, the popularity of which (over ten million copies sold) most critics ascribe to praise of the most democratic nature:  word-of-mouth. Whatever the quality of the outcome of the democratic process of the web, however, it's hard to deny that the critic/reader relationship is changing in a way that subsumes the traditional cultural authority of the critic to the authority of the reader. As Emily Eakin writes in her article, "It’s tempting to argue that the Fifty Shades trilogy marks the apotheosis of a new industry paradigm, in which power has shifted from high-status cultural arbiters—agents, publishers, and professional reviewers—to anonymous readers and fans" (Eakin).  Is this resurgence of mass culture (versus "high" culture) for the better, or is it, culturally, for the worse?*


But I'm getting off track.  What Eakin argues in her article, and what I'd like to complicate using chapter 3 of Lankshear and Knobel as well as our most recent reading from Jenkins, is that there is a problematic divide between the collaborative, "resolutely anti-commercial" nature of fan fiction and the attainment of commercial success in the publishing industry.


In a definition of fan fiction that could just as easily have appeared in Jenkins, Eakin writes that "Fan fiction [...] exists in a state of dependency, borrowing not only a source work’s fans, who provide a ready-made community of readers, but its characters (and frequently its settings and basic plot) in order to tell the story in a new way" (Eakin).  In other words, fan fiction relies on appropriation. A fan fiction story is a work which takes already-extant characters from books like Harry Potter or movies like Star Wars and places them in new stories, rewrites of a particular scene, or uses them to create alternate endings to the "official" book.  In Twilight fan fiction, Eakin specifies, "Edward [...] is variously reconceived as a surgeon, a high-school principal, and a cat, and his teenage human love interest, Bella, as a wedding planner, a divorcee, a US Army sergeant, and an assistant pastry chef. There are children and car accidents, creepy government experiments, divorces, disappearances" (Eakin).^ Because it so explicitly borrows from published works, using the characters, worlds, and situations "property" of the works' authors, fan fiction supposedly cannot be sold; to protect themselves from intellectual property lawsuits, fan fiction authors place disclaimers at the beginnings of their stories in which they acknowledge appropriation of intellectual "property" from the original author.


I used "supposedly" purposefully in the previous sentence.  E.L. James' work is apparently an exception; so, too, are books like Pride and Prejudice with Zombies (seen but not yet sampled) and many other Pride and Prejudice cult favorites--published!--that follow Mr. Darcy and his new wife to Pemberley. But if we consider the examples Jenkins gives of the cultural history of appropriation, in which Homer "remixed" different Greek myths and tragedies to produce his works and Shakespeare similarly "borrowed" plot threads and themes from his contemporaries, what is the limit?  Where is the line demarcating "autonomous authorship" and "creative collaboration"?


In the examples from Twilight fan fiction Eakin lists above, the situations and alternate personas for the characters in the series seem almost too fundamentally different from the author's original creation to belong to his or her original conception of them. At some point, then, autonomous authorship springs from creative collaboration.  Fifty Shades of Grey morphs itself out of Master of the Universe (James' original Twilight fan fiction) which derives itself from Stephanie Meyer's popular series. Key in the legitimization of Fifty Shades, if not the noncommerical aspect of fan fiction (which obviously becomes irrelevant as soon as any volume is published) is autonomous authorship:  Eakin notes that "Fan-fiction writers and legal scholars have argued persuasively that the genre meets the legal criteria for fair use, because it is [...] “transformative” (it adds novel insights or meanings to the source work)" (Eakin).  In other words, Fifty Shades is a work of fiction in its own right (technically, if not aesthetically) because it has taken Edward and Bella from vampire-land and made them so unrecognizable that they can masquerade as Christian and Ana in your typical corporate America.  But it had to start with Edward and Bella.


I think what fan fiction is forcing us to confront is that the line between appropriation and "autonomous creation" (term Jenkins') is often much messier than we often believe.  And, in this, I find a historical study of appropriation in general is a valid practice in the classroom.  Students may often feel inhibited when writing because they're not the "experts"; when they look at Shakespeare, they see a man who sat down in an day or two and wrote Othello while sitting alone at a desk.  In fact, collaboration and "borrowing" are essential for most writers (Proust is the only one I really know of who managed to write truly excellent books while sitting alone in a cork-lined room). But students don't usually see how many books most writers read in order to become good writers, nor how most of writing is the act of participating in a conversation that is already taking place by using allusions and generic forms common to the conversation to scaffold original thought.  Writing, like most other practices, is less about invention and more about innovation. And that reminder, if nothing else (in this case, there really is nothing else), is why Fifty Shades of Grey might ultimately be valuable in some capacity.


*It's worth noting that this high culture/low culture divide is not a new concern.  The Beat poets caused such consternation way back in the '50s; now nearly every college survey of contemporary poetry includes a study of "Howl."  
^I hope, in at least one story, Edward as cat gets together with Bella as assistant pastry chef.  And that they're in a spaceship.