Dobrislav protrčao kroz Jugoslaviju, 1977), a highlight of its time and paean to the glory of amateur literature. Danojlić considers the efforts of his hero, an amateur poet, with respect, empathy, and tenderness, relativizing the borders and hierarchies established between amateurs, outsiders, and losers on the one hand, and the established artist on the other. At the same time, Danojlić’s book was also a “textbook,” showing us that there is no difference in the mechanism that moves the hand to pick up a pen—the differences lie in the execution, in the work itself.
Theoreticians of the day took an interest in this colorful anonymous “literary” production, the ethnologist Ivan Čolović’s monumental study, Wild Literature (Divlja književnost, 1985), examined everything from newspaper obituaries and headstone epigraphs to retro-modern folk songs and urban football legends.
It is unfortunate that today, thirty years later, Danojlić is a half-forgotten author, and that his novel, together with the time and context in which it was written, is completely forgotten. Criticism has changed. Today no one dares set out the differences between master and amateur, between good and bad literature. Publishers don’t want to get involved; they are almost guaranteed to lose money on a good writer, and make money on a bad one. Critics hold their fire, scared of being accused of elitism. Critics have had the rug pulled out from under them in any case. No longer bound by ethics or competence, they don’t even know what they’re supposed to talk about anymore. University literature departments don’t set out the differences—literature has turned into cultural studies in any case. Literary theorists have little to say on the subject—literary theory is on its deathbed, and the offshoot that tried to establish “aesthetic” values long in the grave. Critics writing for daily newspapers don’t set out the differences—they’re poorly paid, and literature doesn’t get much column space in newspapers full-stop. Literary magazines are so few as to be of no use, and when and where they do exist, they are so expensive that bookshops don’t want to stock them. Tracy Emin’s bratty retort—What if I am illiterate? I still have the right to a voice!—is the revolutionary slogan of a new literary age. The only thing that reminds us that literature was once a complex system with in-built institutions—of appraisal, classification, and hierarchy, a system that incorporated literary history, literary theory, literary criticism, schools of literary thought, literary genres, genders, and epochs—are the blurbs that try and place works of contemporary literature alongside the greats of the canon. Vladimir Nabokov is the most blurbable of names. But if so many contemporary books and their authors are Nabokov-like, it just means that literature has become karaoke-like.
Fan fiction
I remember a childhood ditty from the region where I grew up. I think it’s a folk song, and quite by chance I recently discovered that a Croatian pop group had done a successful remake. The verses of the song go like this:
On a hill sat a little house
A house with two windows
Where sat a pretty maiden
Pretty as a spring rose
Fair maiden, what are you doing
On this a glorious night?
Oh star so bright, my sweetheart
He said he’d come tonight
Three nights have passed
Alone I’ve been waiting here
And many more will come to pass
And many more a tear
My sweetheart is kissing another
Far behind he has left me
But curse him I shan’t
Because who I loved was he
We sang the song with a wee addition, inserting the words “in her undies” and “with no undies” in the original verses. Here’s how it went:
On a hill sat a little house (in her undies)
A house with two windows (with no undies)
Where sat a pretty maiden (with no undies)
Pretty as a spring rose (in her undies)
My young friends and I were delighted with our innocent intervention. Our delight was in vulgarizing the original text (we’d done something rude), in destroying the idyllic setting in which a “fair maiden” spoke with a star and waited for her sweetheart. It was in the liberty of changing the meaning of the song, in “taking its undies off.” We were children and had no idea that our little gesture was fairly common in oral literary practice. Folk literature, myths, legends, fairytales, stories, fables, songs, puzzles, and nursery rhymes were all created in the telling and retelling, in the interaction between an original text, its narrator, and his or her listeners. In the retelling narrators either deliberately or accidentally modified the original narrative, something every parent telling his or her child the story of Little Red Riding Hood for the thousandth time well knows.
Fan fiction (fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a term used for a new writing practice that has developed together with the Internet. Anonymous fans, their real identities hidden behind pseudonyms, intervene in an original source text, which is simply referred to as canon. These source texts are mainly gleaned from “trivial literature” (vampire and fantasy novels, gothic fiction, etc.), comics, graphic novels, and popular TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and The X-Files. Ficers, writers of fan fiction, remain within the closed virtual communities of their fandoms, their “interventions” intended exclusively for other fans. The key assumption is that everyone in the fandom is familiar with the canon. When J. K. Rowling finished her seven-novel Harry Potter cycle, Harry took on a new life in fan fiction. Ficers continue to dream up new adventures for her hero and intervene in his old ones. This sort of thing is hardly new. Throughout the centuries anonymous authors have served up all kinds of reworked stories to hungry readerships, from unauthorized installments of Don Quixote, tales about King Arthur and his knights, and new stories from A Thousand and One Nights, to re-workings and parodies of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the Sherlock Holmes stories. As a modern phenomenon, fan fiction is attributed to Star Trek fanzines, one of which—Spockanalia—is thought to contain the first examples of fan fiction.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction in which fans write about the sexual preferences of fictional heroes from the world of popular culture. Fans get off on projecting, intimating, suggesting, and constructing lesbian and homosexual relationships between various characters. Most slash fiction writers (slashers) are said to be heterosexual women. Slashy is fandom jargon for homoerotic, and slashy moments are those in the canonical source text that a slasher implies are homoerotic. “Femslash,” also known as saffic (from sapphic) centers on female characters. Of course computer programs such as Photoshop have seen amateur artists let loose, doctoring downloaded photos to create sexual images of their idols. For the moment these idols tend to be the actors and actresses who play their favorite TV and film heros/heroines, but it appears almost any celebrity will do.
Slash fiction even has its own sub-genre known as real person slash (RPS for short), in which fans invent biographical details and fabricate stories about real people (musicians, actors, pop stars, TV personalities, famous sportsmen and women). RPS has a number of sub-genres, among them, popslash, musicfic, and actorfic. Although there are almost no limits on what can be invented, there is an unwritten rule that suicide, murder, and rape are all off limits.
RPS is an Internet variant of a folkloric form mankind has practiced since the beginning of time—gossiping or spreading
