Kind of jumping in with a tangent, but what about people like David Sedaris? Who write presumably non-fiction, about real people with their real names, but embellish and generall make shit up to make it a better story? Where does that fall in the continuum?

And is humanity required to participate in this great art, or may it abstain itself and shun the things it deems unseemly?

Your choice of course.

Have all the unethical art you please, David, but don't make me look at it against my will. I'll make that decision myself.

Again, that's your biz and I'm sorry to have implied otherwise. I just don't see the arguments against RPF as being that hard or clear. As a matter of individual choice, nobody needs to justify their taste.

Why is it more important to humanity, then?

I'm not sure I'm clear on the question except what I said above: the value art brings to culture trumps my concerns about treading on privacy issues that people are using here. I can cite dozens of literary works which have abused the right-to-privacy and used real people in their work (either by name or barely disguised such that people who knew the artist and the characters would know who they were talking about). Dante's Inferno doesn't exist without him putting all of his (still living at the time) enemies in hell.

I'm not going to contend the quality of Ulysses or Dante's Inferno. But would the world be a demonstrably poorer place without them?

I'm going to swerve into complete hyperbole here, hovering around Godwin's law, but there are a *lot* of things one could do unethically to advance one field or another. I don't think doing them makes the world a better place.

I'm not going to contend the quality of Ulysses or Dante's Inferno. But would the world be a demonstrably poorer place without them?

I say yes.

edit: Don't mean to be so flip about it. Yes, a lot of unethical things could benefit humanity. I don't think writing about real people is (on balance) that big a deal.

I say yes.

And that is inarguably subjective.

I think, in any field, there are ethical boundaries. You think there aren't, at least in this one.

I think a world without Ulysses would be a world in which no one's read Ulysses, and a world in which someone else might have written something marvellous that filled that vacuum.

Please note I have NO opinion on Ulysses nor the RPF content within, and I also wasn't talking about Mengele. I was just talking about boundaries, some of which come loaded with historical baggage.

I don't think writing about real people is (on balance) that big a deal.

What if the real people (on balance) do think so?

It was wrong to ban Ullysses even if Joyce was immoral to libel people.

Ah, but Ullysses wasn't banned for the libel, it was banned for the obscenity. (Or so I have always understood.)

I understand what you're saying, David, and on one level I agree. On the other level I find it difficult to imagine the world is a better place for the existence of puppyslash. But who am I to make that distinction, where I cannot contest that the world is a better place for the existence of Dante's Inferno?

On the other hand, having never read the Inferno, can I assume that you could have a great poem without Dante's use of it to wreak vengeance on his personal enemies? I mean, is the RPF in the Inferno integral to the poem's power?

RPF is all about telling fictional stories about real living human beings who are in no way involved in the fictional process, who don't know the writers, and who don't even have the choice as to whether they'll be fictionalized. Novelists who salvage bits and pieces from their own lives and those of their families and friends are generally doing more than this. If I ever use any elements from my brother's fascinating and complicated life for a story, I'm going to do my best to make him unrecognizeable. Because I owe my art truth but I owe my brother respect for his privacy. And because, in some sense, the story isn't going to be about him, and won't pretend to be.

t shrugs helplessly

What it all comes down to for me is I'd be flattered if anyone fanficced a world I'd created, even if I thought they were missing the point with their pairings and themes, but I'd feel violated if anyone fanficced me. So, I avoid RPF under the "do unto others" clause.

Jesse, in answer to your question, I'm getting the sense that a lot of people give a free pass to comedy and/or parody where real people in fiction are concerned. I would suspect the freeness of the free pass correlates positively to the "this is obviously meant as a joke"-ness, but I've never read Sedaris and I don't speak for everyone. But it's a trend I've noticed.

I don't know how this applies to satire, or mean-spirited comedy, because I haven't seen discussion of that kind of fiction.

I'm with Auden.

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Dante is great *in spite of* immortalizing his enemies in Hell. Ezra Pound is a great author in spite of his anti-Semitism. (And if you can't look past either of those, I'm good with that.).

You don't get to say "Well, a great author did it, therefore it's okay if I do it too" unless your work winds up on the same shelf as Pound's, and not just because of alphabetical order. Great authors did lots of incredibly cruel, stupid, and vicious things, and these are tolerated because of the writing quality. Robert Frost was a lousy father. That doesn't mean I can be a lousy parent because I'm a poet. [Which, she added hastily, I am not. Hypothetical.]