Forensic Fandom in Abram’s “S” and “Harry Potter”

            I love books, movies, or shows that get me involved, that make me feel like I’m an important part of the narrative, even though, logically, I’m not. Being able to continue the story outside the text can often result in a more meaningful and strong connection and experience with the book itself.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the most clever when it comes to solving mysteries in anything (I tend to read “in the moment”), so when I do figure something out on my own or with only partial help from others, I feel pretty accomplished. In “Lost in Time? Lost Fan Engagement with Temporal Play,” Lucy Bennett discusses how the creators of the hit television show Lost inspire this time of involvement in their audience through what she calls “forensic fandom”. 

Lost is not the only show to encourage its viewers to look closely and find clues to solve different mysteries. Many shows, movies, and books ask their audiences to do the same thing.  With the rise of social media and Internet forums, readers and viewers can connect even better with each other and help each other uncover new and exciting facts that otherwise would have been missed. J.J. Abrams’ novel S takes this idea of forensic fandom to new levels, giving the readers literal tools to use to solve the mysteries. In a smaller way, so does J.K. Rowling throughout the Harry Potter series.

Of course,

            Fans love to get involved in what they love, and they especially love when creators encourage that involvement. I recently contributed to a Kickstarter campaign to fund the YouTube group Team Starkid so they can create a new show this summer called Firebringer (fund here). While I do enjoy that I will get rewards for donating, I also love that I get to be involved in the creation process, albeit in a mainly monetary way. We were also given the chance to raise money in certain time frames in order to unlock special rewards for everyone, and again, I felt like part of a group working together to accomplish a common goal. Even though this time of involvement is not what Bennett is discussing, it is related because creators are giving the audience (or potential audience) a role to play in the creation/production/literary process.  Team Starkid involved people at the beginning. The creators for Lost involved its viewers after production.

As for the type of participation that Lost and S employ, Bennett describes forensic fandom as a “mode of storytelling…that involves ‘research, collaboration, analysis, and interpretation’” (299).  Viewers must work together to collect as much information as they can and make connections to each others’ findings and actually go investigate outside sources in order to understand the clues. Then they must analyze and interpret these clues and evidence into one cohesive explanation that fits with the original text.  In fact, Bennett compares this type of engagement to the participation found in video games, quoting Jones, who argues, “The writers seem to have based the formal structure and narrative possibilities of the show itself on video game conventions . . . in order to better create the kind of networked community or fanbase usually associated with games–a potential audience ready not just to watch but also ‘play’ Lost” (Bennett 300). Video games naturally require active participation. Gamers must use knowledge collected throughout the game to understand and decide where to go next and how to solve the next level, platform, world, et cetera. Even though readers are limited in how they can decide the story should progress or how they get there (or the fact that they get there at all, which for me is often quite the accomplishment), unless it’s a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, readers can still actively look for clues, make connections to outside sources, and feel as if they have a stronger connection to what they are reading.

It’s not surprising that the same individual, J.J. Abrams, created Lost and S.  Abrams deeply recognizes how to use narrative to make his audience think and explore. He understands what tricks to use, what hints to leave that make his audience excited when they figure out his clues, even if they discover them after the fact. Bennett writes, “This forensic inspection of the show is therefore encouraged by the narrative structure and form of the program, which is often littered with clues left by the writers to puzzle and engage these detective-like fans” (229). Abrams is very adept at leaving these clues for his audience:

However, as part of the learnt familiarity for many rested in engagement with the program as a puzzle or game, some fans used their forensic detection skills to work out the flashforward before the revelation in the final scene, solving clues left by the writers. For example, the make and model of the mobile phone used by Jack in the episode was immediately discovered by a number of fans as dating from 2006, therefore indicating that the episode was set in the future or present and not the past. (Bennett 300)

Following that example from Lost, S is definitely also littered with clues, written clues from two different narrators in the form of marginal notes. Through these writings paired with the “actual” text itself, readers are encouraged to use the “outside resources” that Abrams actually gives the reader in the form of loose inserts between the pages of the book. He also gives the readers literal physical tools to accomplish their sleuthing. In the very back of the book is a wheel that the reader can use to try to find out coordinates of various places and unravel other mysteries. I admit that I was completely horrible at this “mission.” I could not figure out how to use the wheel on my own. Reading the marginal notes allows the readers to feel as if we stumbled upon this book on our own and are doing our own type of research to find out what happens/happened to the two note-writers. The added inserts make us feel more like detectives on a mission that we feel confident we will eventually solve.

Rowling also sends her readers on detective missions, although not as specifically and literally as Abrams does in Lost and S. It seems as if every week, fans are coming up with new theories and explanations supported by hard evidence from the text and from outside research. To name a few: Trelawney, a (usually) hack divination professor, had a great-grandmother named Cassandra. As many of us English majors know, Cassandra was a seer during the Trojan War cursed with the ability to tell true predictions that no one will believe…which ultimately happens with Trelawney, as many of her predictions came true in ways no one really expected or noticed until years after the books were published. Many people guessed before the last book came out who R.A.B. was and what happened to the locket, due to their own sleuthing through past books. Readers even investigated small details that didn’t affect the plot in anyway but made for interesting discoveries, such as how a few readers researched past full moons and found out that Remus Lupin’s last Christmas at Hogwarts took place on a full moon, which meant he was a werewolf for his last happy Christmas. Sirius Black, instead of getting ready to celebrate his birthday (which we recently found out last year), instead was carted off to Azkaban (wizard jail) for a crime he did not commit (we are really good at finding the super depressing facts, apparently). Fans take it on themselves to see the million genius little secrets Rowling added in that foreshadowed future events or added to the narrative in small, almost unnoticeable ways. She would put some small detail in the first book and carry it through so that it would be revealed as important in the last book, and the investigative work that provides for her fans is incredibly fulfilling, even if we are not necessarily solving a puzzle in the conventional sense or how Bennett describes. No matter what kind of investigation is set forth for us as readers or viewers, we enjoy the opportunity to wrestle with the text and create our own connections.

How Does an Author Construct a Layered Narrative to Make it Appear Innate?

            Texts that utilize temporal play are my preference to read for both enjoyment and analysis; fiction and nonfiction texts that include multiple timelines, multiple points of view, juxtaposition of texts, and intertextuality will always move to the top of my to-be-read pile. I will even read a young adult novel that mentions any of those devices in its blurb. So while experiencing J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S., because “reading the text” does not adequately describe what I had to do, I wondered, “How does an author create this? How does he or she keep everything straight but also realistic?” I thought about some of my favorite layered narratives from this course and from my past reading, and I searched for interviews with the authors. I expected to find a similar thread of method, but, instead, I found many vague answers with little commonality.

            The most straightforward multiple narrative text that I own is The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation; I’ll be honest in that I own it because my collection of books by and about Anne Frank would not be complete without it, but I have not read it because the format is not comfortable for reading. This critical edition is a compilation of the three versions of the diary: 1) Anne’s original diary that is honest reflection of the life in hiding of an adolescent Jewish girl in the 1940s; 2) Anne’s edited and rewritten version of her original diary onto loose leaf paper; and 3) Otto Frank’s edited version for public consumption after World War II. Anne documented that the group in hiding had listened to a radio address by “Gerrit Bolkenstein, Minister of Education, Art, and Science in the Dutch Government” delivered  in London in which he stated, “If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or a priest” (Netherlands 59). Anne rewrote her diary with a future audience in mind and “drew up a list of name changes: ‘Anne [Frank]’ became ‘Anne Robin,’ ‘v. Pels’ became ‘v. Daan,’ ‘Pfeffer’ became ‘Dussel’” and so on (Netherlands 61-62). However, when Anne’s father Otto read his daughter’s diaries, he had “[h]ighly personal motives” to make additional changes before publication: “his strong attachment to his dead daughter; his awareness that with publication he would be putting into effect Anne’s dearest wish—to become a famous writer one day; and his feelings of respect, first and foremost towards his dead wife, but also towards those others about whom Anne had made less than pleasant remarks” (Netherlands 166). Gerrold van der Stroom suggests that a reader of the critical edition could “follow only what Anne Frank wrote in her first draft, he should read version a and ignore versions b and c. He will then be reading the book horizontally” (Netherlands 169). However, the layout of the three versions—one on top of the other to be read in a 1/3 of a page horizontal—does not feel natural.

            The text that immediately came to mind when I heard the description of S. was the Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock. The series began as a trilogy but ended as a series of seven books; I have read and own the first five (I didn’t know that numbers six and seven existed until I searched to verify the number; interestingly, number seven was released this past week on March 22^nd). Unlike S., this series does not include an original text; rather, the narrative is told through correspondence, letters and postcards. Like S. each author has a distinct handwriting. Each text is very visual with the fronts of the envelopes and postcards drawn on the pages; the backs of the postcards are also drawn so that they cannot be handled. But the letters are physically inside envelopes attached to the page so that the reader must remove each letter to read it. While a linearity exists within the texts, the texts play with the temporality especially in consideration of setting and reality. In an interview with IndieBound, Bantock describes his process: “I work in a circle. If I don't know what comes next, then I simply move on to something else. I tend to work from the middle outwards. An image will give me an idea for the text, and the text will give me an idea for an image, and I build up from the center outwards.” He admits that his method “sounds like new-age tripe, but I start where the book wants to start. Images and ideas are always floating through my head. It's a constant process. I'll do a little drawing, put it on the wall, and little by little things start to belong and have a place. Then it's moving them around until they have a place, like a jigsaw.” Bantock concludes that his books are “a cross between a jigsaw puzzle and a collage that you just keep moving and moving and moving. There's a point where there's some kind of internal click.” Not exactly a process that can be duplicated, but one that makes sense; once the text feels natural, the “click” occurs. Natural is not a construct but rather a feeling.

            A text that I both enjoy and have analyzed in Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase. I read the book because my junior high had put on the play; as an education major, the conflicts faced by English teacher Sylvia Barrett and her colleagues resonated with me. When I had to choose a text for my master’s thesis, I chose Up the Down Staircase as my case study text, in part because it had almost no secondary analysis and in part because it was created as the juxtaposition of texts. Again, a linearity exists within the narrative; the plot moves from the first day of the fall term to the first day of the spring term. However, the narrative is a compilation of letters, memos, overheard dialogue, information written on chalkboards, and student work. All texts created by Bel Kaufman but ones that feel natural. The novel was based on a previously published short story “From a Teacher’s Wastebasket”; Kaufman described her process as “I had jotted down some scraps of paper, which juxtaposed together showed a picture of waste, of lack of communication, of discipline problems, of loneliness.” She had taught in the New York City schools, so Kaufman had first-hand experience in the texts that she created; the feeling of authenticity was corroborated the teachers from across the country who would write to say, “‘How did you know? You described my class, my students, my problem.’ And I treasure all the letters that they sent me.” While her texts don’t have the look and literal feel of the real texts, the reader cannot remove them from the book and, for example, the student work is not printed on lined paper nor is it handwritten, the emotions summoned by those teachers vouch for the naturalness of the texts.

            Another series that I have enjoyed reading is Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series that begins with The Eyre Affair. Fforde plays with texts that he assumes his readers will know, such as Jane Eyre, but he has created a different 1985 and a parallel universe that is inhabited by the literary characters. Think of it as a living library in which the characters rest outside their texts when they are not on pages being read, and in which the characters can travel between texts and actually change the texts. Intrigued? Then I strongly encourage you to pick up The Eyre Affair. This fantasy element is realistic as long as the reader brings in the requisite suspension-of-disbelief. To create the multiple timelines, time travel, and parallel universes, Fforde was inspired by “[b]ooks, radio shows, newspaper reports, 70s sitcoms, films, plays. The Eyre Affair has tons of ideas compressed into it; if something amuses or grabs my attention then I try to attach it leech-like to the story and then let it grow” such as, “the Charge of the Light Brigade, Jane Eyre, the biggest corporation ever, an explanation of spontaneous human combustion, the notion of catching a meteorite with a baseball mitt, arguing about who wrote Shakespeare's plays, driving through a time warp and a police department that deals with werewolves.” Fforde describes his process as a “continuous linking of disparate strands [. . .] that [he] find[s] very enjoyable and quite challenging.” He admits that the “[c]ross-genre feel of the book put a huge amount of publishers off (76 rejections) and the précis itself condemned the manuscript to be unread by everyone I approached -- until my agent, hungry for material, read the whole thing, loved it and sold it to Penguin seven weeks later.” So someone had to give the narrative a chance in its entirety to be able to appreciate the innateness that results from Fforde’s construction.

            The novel that I am analyzing for my Pecha Kucha is Violent Ends edited by Shaun David Hutchison. This young adult novel caught my attention after I received an advanced reader copy at the ILA conference in July 2015. The plot about a school shooting, one of my worst fears, did not draw me in; rather, it was the blurb describing a story told through seventeen points of view written by seventeen young adult authors. I was hooked. The novel is amazing; I believe that it only received one starred review because the topic is not the usual bubbly young adult fare. The idea belongs to Hutchison; he explains on the Violent Ends website that “I had this crazy idea to write a story about a young man (Kirby Matheson) who brought a gun to school and shot his classmates. I didn’t want to tell the story of the shooting itself, but rather the story of the shooter as told by the people who knew him” and to do so “I wrote out a list of authors I could only dream of working with. Authors who works I loved and whom I respected immensely. I was certain they would laugh at my crazy idea. I wasn’t proposing an anthology, but a single story written by seventeen different authors.” When the authors agreed to Hutchison’s proposal, they worked “in a shared world with shared characters and shared histories. Each story would stand alone but would also be connected to all the others in both major and minor ways. [. . .]  We worked together online, trading inspiration, feeding off each other’s ideas, and hammering out the details of the school layout and what kind of car Kirby Matheson drove.” Because of this collaboration, with multiple writers paying attention to the numerous details, this disjointed narrative told from multiple points of view and over multiple settings (time and place) creates a realistic account of a school shooting.

            So, what about some of the novels we have read? Julia Alvarez explains that “it’s never as easy or clear a process when you are inside a mess and trying to make it a novel,” but years later she realized that the structure of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents “should recreate the way that I want the reader to experience the story. And that’s when I thought, I want my reader to be thinking ‘like an immigrant,’ always ‘going back to where we came from’; instead of progress toward a climax, a return to a homeland.” Alvarez’s construction came from her desire to make the experience natural.

In an interview with Robert Alford, Jennifer Egan explains that she was influenced by both Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and HBO’s The Sopranos in constructing her narrative. Proust influenced her choice to write a novel that spans years: “I especially loved Proust’s ability to capture the transformations and reversals that happen over time, the way that outcomes are so often unexpected and in fact almost the opposite of what you would expect.  The biggest question for me was how to capture the sweep and scope of those transformations and reversals without taking thousands of pages to do it.” To answer the question of “How?” was answered by narrative created for The Sopranos: “I was also watching The Sopranos, which also unfolded at a leisurely, kind of real time pace, through which the children in the series grew up, and all of the characters visibly aged,” which is accomplished through “this lateral approach in [. . .] in which a minor character suddenly becomes a major character for a while and then goes out of focus again, and the overarching story is almost invisible at times in the face of subplots and complications that are so engrossing that one almost would forget what the story, capital S, of the season was.” According to Egan, a narrative that draws in the reader or watcher with such intensity that one will not notice when characters appear or disappear creates an innate experience.

Finally, S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. Abrams is honest about his role as conceiver; he was intrigued by a novel he found in an airport that had a message written on the inside cover: “To whomever finds this book—please read it, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to find it.” He thought, “[W]hat if there were a very cool book that was completely annotated—just covered in marginalia and notes between two people? And—what if a conversation, or a relationship, began inside a book?” When pitched the idea years later, Dorst was excited by “the challenge of telling a story in this really restricted form” and added his own twist, “[W]hat if there were a mystery about its author? It seemed like it would be really, really fun to make up an entire bibliography and history about this writer. From there, it was a small step to deciding that the people who are reading the book should be book geeks themselves.” Dorst describes constructing both Ship of Theseus and S.: “I would’ve been well-served if I’d had a whiteboard, but I’m a fundamentally disorganized person, and I had nothing resembling an organizational system! I wrote Ship of Theseus first, all the way through—everyone agreed that it really had to be able to stand on its own—and then I layered in the marginal notes. A lot of it was trial and error.” Throughout the process, Dorst shared his work with Abrams and Abrams’s Bad Robot colleague Lindsey Weber; Abrams compared the process to writing a screenplay: “There were outlines and pitches at the beginning, then early chapters. Lindsey would often work with Doug, and then show me stuff.” Interviewer Joshua Rothman attests to the authenticity of the marginalia: “And the language in which the handwritten letters and notes are written feels very natural in its cadences. You feel like you’re snooping on something intimate,” and Abram confirms their desire to construct an innate experience: “It’s intended to be a celebration of the analog, of the physical object. In this moment of e-mails, and texting, and everything moving into the cloud, in an intangible way, it’s intentionally tangible. We wanted to include things you can actually hold in your hand: postcards, Xeroxes, legal-pad pages, pages from the school newspaper, a map on a napkin.” Like Garcia, Abrams and Dorst had a desire to construct an innate text.

Although some of the authors purport to focus on construction, those authors all implied that they know they are finished when the text feels complete, which is not much different from the authors who start with the desire to create an authentic experience for the reader. They, too, know that they are finished when the text feels complete. The common thread seems to be a willingness to be open to all possibilities combined with a willingness to revise until the jigsaw is complete. Not a definitive answer, but at least it’s not a formulaic one either.

           

Abrams, J.J. and Doug Dorst. S. London: Mulholland Books, 2013. Print.

Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical

            Edition. Ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and

            B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Print.