I turn to a matter not a million miles removed from those addressed in my immediately preceding post (which is of no real relevance to ‘meta’, I hasten to add, and is by no means something you want to look out before reading this).

I see that a debate – or at least a contention – has (evidently ‘once again’, from what I am reading) broken out regarding academics acting academically in fandom.  The academics, to the surprise of absolutely no one, protest that they are a valuable influence upon fandom.  Other fans, as everyone might well have expected, insist that academic readings of canon and of fannish responses, are ruining fandom.

This is all very odd.

Insofar as fandom exists, it is the creation of, if not academics, at least the intellectually inclined.  It’s all very well to make Star Trek and fanzines the founding myth of fandom, as I have seen done to the point of staleness, but it is I think inaccurate.  What we recognise as fandom may well have very ancient roots (the Æneid comes to mind), but is more accurately seen as beginning with the Irregulars (and their followers in the detective genre, such as Martin Gardner for Fr Brown and Scott-Giles for the Wimsey family).

My own experience is in the Potter fandom.  I’ve the privilege of maintaining the Britpickery community and being a member of the Potterpast community.  I have never encountered this quarrel in my fandom.

To the contrary.  I have encountered a gratifying willingness to share knowledge and a remarkable appetite for knowledge in my fandom.  From Ethelred to today’s parliament, from blacksmithing to rivers to geography and geomorphology, from the Queen’s English and how it is different to (not ‘from’) the American language, from ceremonial magic to cricket, the fandom is dominated by ‘’satiable curtiosity’ on the one hand and reservoirs of specialised learning and specialised knowledge on the other.

And this is very like what the Irregulars did and yet do.  The past, famously, is another country; and when, for example, Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Nicole B. Meller set out to publish a new and definitive critical edition of Mrs Humphry Ward, they were able to call upon the dispersed expertise of the VICTORIA listserv.  The Irregulars are forever annotating and explaining Victorian London to those first making the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Hamish Watson.  Well, for many Potterfen, even the current era in the Potterverse is set quite literally in another country; and they are avid to learn of its ways, recognising that even the Wizarding world is a funfair mirror of Britain.  Historians, archæologists, geographers, Old Boys who can stammer out an explanation of the mysterious ethos of the public schools, cricketers, solicitors, sociologists, anthropologists, Latinists, curates, growers of prize vegetable marrows, and heralds, all contribute to the dissemination of knowledge in the Potter fandom and are eagerly sought after.  To the extent that the Potterverse includes the Continent (Viktor Krum; Durmstrang School; Gellert Grindelwald; Beauxbatons), those with some special knowledge of All Those Places East of Calais and of the odd languages there quaintly spoken by the unfortunate natives who have no English, are regarded with awe and wonder, and fans sit at their feet as at the feet of Gamaliel.

As far as one can make out from the current squabble in other fandoms, it is not academics as such who are disregarded or disdained by other fen.  It is, almost exclusively, the Faculty of English Language and Literature who have made themselves unwelcome.  This seems to me significant.  It seems to me more significant still that it is, so far as I can determine, primarily American dons of Frenchified theoretical leanings who are making themselves unpopular with the mass of fandom.  I mean, if the academic fen in question were, say, Womersley of St Catz, Shrimpton of LMH, or Turner of Jesus, let alone Jenkyns of LMH, I shouldn’t expect the same quarrel to have arisen.

My primary point is simply that this seems not to be a case in other fandoms of something I’ve never seen and don’t anticipate seeing in mine: of ‘the revolting peasants rising against their intellectual superiors’ or of ‘all academics sucking the soul out of fandom like so many Dementors’, which appear to be the two rallying cries here.  One simply doesn’t observe this sort of anger’s attaching to historians or those who read Law at university or even to wild-eyed, Balliol-Wadham-and-Grauniadista sociologists and anthropologists, at least not in my fandom.  Therefore, I submit that it is misleading and contrary to resolution of the quarrel to cast it in terms of all fen in all fandoms against all academics of all schools of thought.

My subsidiary point is that, when one accepts it is largely those fen within the Faculty of English, and whose thinking is informed by certain schools of thought, who are at odds with certain non-academic fen in certain fandoms, a remedy may be proposed.  Without here joining either camp (although I know where I stand), I confide that the academic fen must concede either that the intellectual underpinnings of their approach are understood and rejected by the non-academic fen, or that they are not understood, or indeed, it may be, recognised.  In the first instance, more effective argument is the remedy; in the second, basic explanation.  At the same time, non-academic fans may well decide, on balance, that the theoretical position of the academic fen is, simply, balls, utter rubbish; but they must – as a matter of intellectual honesty – reach that conclusion and that rejection only having once understood the theory.  Such principles will not, I am certain, end the debate; but they are the only way in which it can be expected to generate rather light than heat.

Tags: appalled & incredulous: follies exposed, critical analysis, current events, essays