Dante is great *in spite of* immortalizing his enemies in Hell.

I disagree. It may have been unkind or less than an admirable impulse, but it is a big part of the book. You cannot subtract it out and have that work. There's pettiness in it. Great works accomodate that fact.

Ezra Pound is a great author in spite of his anti-Semitism.

But I'm arguing that what Joyce and Dante did is a part of their writing process. Anti-semitism is just part of Pound. That's a big difference.

You don't get to say "Well, a great author did it, therefore it's okay if I get it too" unless your work winds up on the same shelf as Pound's

I don't agree with this. The principle doesn't disappear because of the quality of the work. And I'm not arguing that their infractions give me leave. I'm arguing that the writing process is such that this particular line is so smudged as to be defensible on anything other than opinion.

Well, there was the part where he outed his own teacher by putting him in the part of Hell reserved for homosexuals. It was, notably, the only time he addressed a Hell-resident with the formal "voi", rather than the informal.

Yeah, I'll say that Dante's use of real people he expected his audience to know (most of them dead! You can't be in Hell if you're not dead!) was integral to his writing. Because he was working out a moral system, that he expected to apply to everyone; there are several cases in Hell where he hears the very sad story of a resident, and sort of asks, Why is this guy suffering for eternity?? And Virgil explains that even people who are wronged and have sad stories get judged according to their actions, and not according to the actions of those who act against them.

Today, 700 years later, it's interesting to note that we don't condemn the same people Dante condemned when he wrote it. Ser Brunetto is evidence that homosexuality existed in Renaissance Italy, and that Dante knew about it and knew his mentor was gay, and presumably said nothing against him in life. So, backwardswise, the grand (strugglling) condemnation of homosexuality is also very good evidence for the continuity of gay life through history. Which is some interesting irony.

I don't know as how this has anything but peripherals to do with the rest of the discussion.

The principle doesn't disappear because of the quality of the work.

But the principle, for me, is that "Well, you didn't punish Sammy when HE did it!" isn't an excuse. Dante gets away with doing something I consider morally questionable because the result is great art. That doesn't make it any less morally questionable. It's the fruit of a poisoned tree.

So I retain the right to think that RPF is foul, without saying I will stop reading Dante (or Guy Gavriel Kay, for that matter.)

When did Guy Kay write RPF? or are you talking about how his fantasies are thinly-veiled historical novels about real historical figures?

I do maintain there's a difference in fictionalizing the life of someone who's dead. If they're dead, either they can't be bothered to be offended, or they've got other worries, or (if there is no afterlife) they'll never know.

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.

What I don't think this argument addresses is that RPF is, on some levels, not an individual issue. You're looking at it from the perspective of art and artistic value, which is fine, and not a way it would have occurred to me to approach the issue.

On an individual basis, I don't care what people read or write. Honestly. Lots of well-known slash writers are now reading, writing, and reccing RPF, and it mystifies me. I choose to keep reading their other work. Someone else might decide that she can't morally read anything by anyone who writes RPF. Fine.

But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The fanfic community is one big, messily linked whole in many ways, and that complicates the issue (or introduces tangential issues, depending on your perspective).

• If a hypothetical person has strong moral objections to RPF, there is no real way for that person to disassociate herself from sites and people who read and write it. Ten Buck Fucks, the Hard Core Logo archive that existed before the current one (run by shrift) was taken down by the archivist because she could not prevent people who had RPF on their sites from linking to her site.

• Anyone who isn't familiar with fanfic and starts exploring may very well find a site that has only RPF or both fanfic and RPF, and that's going to vastly color that person's impressions of the whole community. Acceptance of RPF is a *very* recent development, largely because of boyband slash, and then LOTR actorfic. People can read what they like, but I'm uneasy about being judged by the prevalence of RPF.

• Anything that brings the attention of people with lawyers and money to the fanfic community is BAD.

So the issue isn't solely individual taste. Nor is it the whole "fight the power!" argument that Jenny-o and Kate Bolin like to drag out.

Sorry, the thinly-veiled thing is what I mean. It's a legal [Principle. Principle principle principle. AAAARRRGH.] that you can't libel the dead, right?

Dana speaks for me. RPF, and in particular RPS, is a car-wreck waiting to happen. If you (generically, not a Buffista) choose to write it, so be it, but I think it should be done in full awareness of the possible consequences. And I'm sorry, but I'm not going to leap to your defense.

Well, libel is premised on the fact that the statement in question can injure someone's reputation, which injury would have a real impact on their life. Can't really injure the dead. So no, no libel against the dead, although I'm unclear about situations like the Karen Carpenter thing. I'm very fuzzy about the rights of an estate to the likeness and so forth of a decedent.

At any rate, I don't think anyone's worried about defending the reputations of Justinian or El Cid from Guy Kay. I mean, how many readers really know the history well enough to figure out who he's talking about?

Can't an estate sue for libel, based on potential damage to the estate's future earnings off the dead person's image/likeness/reputation? (Because if someone accused Audrey Hepburn of being a child molester, I can guarantee her image wouldn't be licensed for those high-end watches.)

Then again, when Fred Astaire's estate licensed his image so he could dance with a Brand-Name Vacuum Cleaner, I know there was a lot of "Oh god, I think I may barf" behind the scenes, and some public wrangling. So that kind of post-mortem licensure, especially with interactivity, may be the "official", legal version of RPF. By which I mean it has nothing to do with art, and everything to do with money, but it makes people bristle in a similar way.

This is gonna be a long response post:

However, he is part of a literary tradition of including real people in his work when he was pissed at them.

That’s a different thing entirely than what I was referring to, actually. I can think of incidents where Joyce references real people who pissed him off, or influenced him (thin line for that guy), albeit in fictional form, with fictional names, etc., and I can think of scenes where he did what I said, included a real historical personage & recounted the actual history of what happened, but I do not think he necessarily knew those people himself. Plus, such scenes can only be described as incidental and not at all central to the narrative. I can think of only one or two scenes where Stephen confronts a historical person, for example George Moore, in a fictional scene. Again the scene is short, incidental and in no way can one argue that the scene is central to the narrative.

As far as I know, in RPF the RP is a central character, right? So I still have to argue that Joyce is doing something else.

Hec, if you want to argue that such fiction is a traditional genre, why not invoke a text that actually participates in RPF, such as Don DeLillo’s Libra? Is that not tony enough for you? And I can think of numerous films (although I can’t recall any titles) in which one or two of the main characters are historical figures. Joyce is a bad example, so why bring him up when numerous good examples abound?

I'm just saying unethical artists make great art and I'd rather have the art than the ethical artist.

Sometimes unethical artists make great art, but sometimes they just make bad art. Likewise sometimes a great work of art is also very ethical in its representation of other people that the artist knew. There is no demand that great art be unethical. For example, Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Like I said: separate issues. Conflating them makes things messy.

Yes, I am saying this. It was wrong to ban Ullysses even if Joyce was immoral to libel people.

By English law, it was libel. By American law, it wouldn’t be, because he wrote the truth. Also, illegal and immoral are not synonyms. Personally, I do have some ethical qualms about some of what he wrote, but those scenes are not among them. Even so, I think that calling Joyce’s an unethical artist is an unfortunate oversimplification, but as you can see, I have quite an investment in him.

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

In the US it was banned for obscenity alone. In England in Ireland, there were libel issues as well.

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?

Most creative non-fiction is actually truthful. I mean, by definition it’s all supposed to be truthful, but some of it fails the sniff test.

Dante's Inferno doesn't exist without him putting all of his (still living at the time) enemies in hell.

My memory was that he put all his then-dead enemies in hell, along with some of his then-dead friends.

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.

Yes, ITA. That’s why I think it is inappropriate to characterize Joyce as writing RPF. Go ahead and argue for RPF, but don't bring in an example like Joyce and then say that all puppyslash fic is simply following in his footsteps.