HASTAC Dialogues | Systems of Storytelling in Classics and Fan Studies: A Conversation with Stella Fritzell and Hannah Mendro | Part 3/3

This dialogue continues from Part II: Narrative Potentials & Positions.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, HASTAC Scholars Stella Fritzell and Hannah Mendro met to discuss some exciting intersections between their work in the fields of Classics and Fan Studies. What arose was a fruitful discussion about engagement in myth and narrative media, questions of narrative potentiality and positionality, and the promise of storytelling and story-interpretation as liberatory acts. Stella was periodically joined by her two cats, Hermes and Maui, whose interruptions have been noted accordingly in the transcript.

The HASTAC Scholars Dialogues Program is intended to forment discussion not only between individual scholars, but among the community at large. We hope that the content shared from this dialogue will inspire further conversations with friends, family, and colleagues. If any part of this discussion resonated with you, we encourage you to comment on this blog post to share your own scholarly thoughts and impressions. All comments should be civil in tone and refrain from using profanity or intentionally incendiary speech.

Due to the length of Stella and Hannah's discussion, this dialogue is shared in three parts: 
Part I: Myth & Narrative Media 
Part II: Narrative Potentials & Positions
Part III: Liberatory Potentials of Storytelling

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Part III: Liberatory Potentials of Storytelling

Stella Fritzell:
It seems like we're both approaching stories and story making as something that is, to a certain degree, group oriented. Both fanfiction and mythic narratives are things that are produced by certain people for certain people. And I know that I'm oversimplifying things quite a bit with this statement. So I'd like to think about what this element of production means for participation in storymaking, and what forces of inclusion and or exclusion happen to be at work, either explicitly or implicitly in those processes.

Hannah Mendro: 
Yes, this is a great question, and I'm also really looking forward to hearing your thoughts in relationship to myth. I think—okay, I'll use the Tolkien fandom as an example. So much of that original text is structured by whiteness. I'm doing a reread now, and every time I read the books, I see more and more how much colonialism and imperialism and implicit superiority and sometimes just explicit racism are at play in those books. And I love them! But that's something that's in them that I have to deal with and know is there. But because those books are so canonized within the world, within the existing dominant structures of whiteness and maleness and patriarchy, it can be really hard to challenge them, especially if you are a person of color. There has been something of a reckoning within some parts of the fandom, especially as—and some people like Robin Reid[1] and others have done really excellent work on this—but people like white nationalists use these books to talk about their plans and their intentions. And even people who are not white nationalists, who are well-meaning white people like myself, might miss some of these cues in the books. Especially when you think about a lot of the villains in the books and the ways that they're described and coded. And so the thing is that if you are not actively writing against that in fanfiction, you are going along with it. 

Fanfiction gets held up as something that is transformative and writing against the source text. And in some ways it is, but it's not inherently that. We have that affirmational tendency that I talked about earlier. My past research dealt with the genre of hurt/comfort fanfiction, which is exactly what it sounds like: you hurt a character, and then you make them feel better. It really soothes an emotional need, and I did a lot of study into why people are doing this, what it gives them, what kinds of narrative conventions are at play. But one of the narrative conventions that I noticed is that often descriptions of the hurt character—I chose to look at Legolas, because there's a lot more of this genre written about him—really emphasize descriptors of whiteness and femininity. Which in turn plays into that question of who is a victim, who is more likely to be hurt, who is fragile. And then, of course, you have to ask, hurt by whom? And if you're going with the villains that Tolkien has written, you're playing into racialized stereotypes. So all of this can happen really implicitly, but it's there. And if you're a fan of color, and if you're someone who also loves the books, but has always had to reckon with the racism in them, and then you see someone else write this story that plays into that same trope . . . and then you try and speak up about it and people in the fandom don’t like that . . . It’s complicated. I'm certainly not suggesting that there's an easy solution, but that is one of those forces that's very much at work in a way that that existing hierarchy can reproduce itself.

Stella Fritzell: 
I want to interject with something that just popped into my head, because what you're saying is resonating with me in terms of visual coding that we see particularly in animated movies, but also in films in general. We immediately know who the villain is, because they are, well, conventionally unattractive, they tend to wear purple or red—colors that are bright and vibrant, but also dark. They don’t look like “nice” people, they have suspicious expressions, they’re typically dark haired, and they may not be white. Right? Or even if this villain is coded as white, they will still have darker-toned skin. So there’s clearly some sort of colorism at work. And this isn’t exactly a trope, but a sort of coding that is practically implicit in the form of media that we have created. You know how if you’re watching a movie, or a TV show, and features a character who exhibits all of these visual aspects and they turn out not to be the villain? Then suddenly you’re very turned off. You’re uninvested in that narrative, because it’s thrown off your expectations as an audience member. 

So I’m wondering if fanfiction and general fan-creation is a way of addressing that, maybe even the best way of addressing it, because fanfiction has this transformative potential. And obviously fanfiction has its own issues to grapple with, as you’ve mentioned, but do you see a potential within fanfiction to actually confront and address these issues that are so prominent in our common dialogue and in our interpretive rhetoric for storytelling?

Hannah Mendro: 
Absolutely, I would say there is potential. I think that race is one of the trickiest axes of identity to address, because it is so woven into a lot of these existing hierarchies and has gone ignored for so long, but I think you can see where fanfiction has done really revolutionary things with gender and sexuality in other areas. And there's a lot of movement, especially lately, towards reimagining characters and identities in different ways. And—this is actually something that fanart is maybe starting to do a little more than fanfiction, because it is so explicitly visual, but there’s a trend called racebending. The term became popular when the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie came out several years ago and almost all the characters were cast as white actors, so people used “racebending” as a joke. Initially it was a bad thing, reimagining characters of color as white, but it has become more of a positive—people in fandom will engage in racebending and reimagining characters who are written or portrayed as white as different races or ethnicities. People are also doing it with, for instance, disability and neurodiversity. So people are taking a character's actions and saying, “this would make a lot more sense if this character were autistic,” for instance, and then reading them as autistic, and writing about it and representing that perspective. So I think that there's absolutely a lot of potential. I just also think that it needs more reckoning than there has been thus far.

But I'm really interested now in thinking about where you're seeing this sort of thing in the myths that you’re studying, and if you’re seeing these examples across different time periods of the myths. Or even, I don’t know how much you’re engaging with modern reimaginings, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on all that.

Stella Fritzell: 
I'll admit that I haven't engaged too deeply with modern retellings of myth, despite just saying that, “Hey, myth is fanfiction.” I think it has to do with the fact that it’s so adjacent to my work, and it’s hard to turn off that critical lens. Maybe once I put aside my dissertation project and move on to something else, I’ll be able to turn back towards modern reimaginings of myth. 

The question of who is represented and who is producing—who is writing and telling and receiving—is, I think, part of the interpretive, scholarly side of myth. And this again comes down to the scarcity of our source material. It’s pretty hard to determine who is being written for—who is the audience—when we can’t get a decent sample size from the surviving evidence that we possess. But we definitely have this issue in the modern scholarly reception and perpetuation of myth. Particularly in terms of the canon and what is supposed to be central and what is not in Classics. We typically talk about the canon as the authors that are central to Western civilization, and that bears a clear burden to be reckoned with. And Homer, and Plato, and Caesar, all of these people, they're important, but we're not thinking as much about the smaller things that don't get preserved in the same way, that don't get the attention or the recognition that maybe they need. As we start to interpret these and prioritize certain narratives over others, these then become central to our thinking of who the Greeks were, what they believed, who they liked, and who they did not. And that, I think, creates a false imagination of who these people actually were, and the sorts of stories that they actually told. Now, there's certainly some grain of truth somewhere, but we're looking at ancient texts, and we have to kind of take them at face value. What are they saying?

But to read some more exclusively than others is an issue, and this is something that I’ve thought about more and more as I’ve looked at local or epichoric myths. When I’m doing this research, I really have to pull every possible mention of the story that I can find, whether it’s super fragmentary or not—every piece of evidence that points to a particular story being told in a particular place. What I'm doing when I'm teasing these out is thinking about what particular inflections they bring forward from this greater meta-narrative, and then to ask why these inflections are important in this place, or are more prominent than other narrative possibilities.  And what that has allowed me to do is to think more deeply about these local groups as being indigenous, not necessarily in the modern colonial context, but as people who have inhabited a land from long, long ago, who haven't really moved from that place and who view themselves in that close connection to the place in which they live. At least, that's one possibility for a particular set of myths that I'm looking at. Another possibility, for a different set of myths brings out the experiences of people who may have been disenfranchised as non-citizens or as foreigners who, after arriving in a place, were incorporated to some degree in the community. But this isn’t reflected in the legal or historical writing per se, because those records were created by certain people, in certain positions, with certain interests. And the people who have since preserved those records also have a certain positionality. 

So myth is allowing me to think more closely about what voices in ancient Greece may have been underrepresented, at least in these particular places.  And the beautiful thing about storytelling is that it can be suggestive of those experiences and voices. Much, I think, as with fanfiction when it is used well. Because from a central or privileged standpoint, one is unable or unwilling to preserve all of those experiences. And this is just as relevant for thinking about what voices we hear and circulate today, as it is for ancient Greece. In either case, it tends to be people with money, with the ability, and means, and time to write that end up disseminating information. 

Hannah Mendro: 
This is fascinating, and I'm curious—and no pressure if you don't have something off the top of your head, because this is very specific. But I, of course, have experienced that kind of exclusion-based general perception of Greek myth that exists in the collective cultural consciousness, and so I can imagine that the experience of really going back to the source and combing through it would be—well, I'm fascinated to hear about it. Is there an example of something in particular that surprised you when you found it?

Stella Fritzell: 
There are so many things. In some of our previous conversations, we’ve talked about the figure of the Maenad and how she is depicted in ancient narratives and perceived in modern scholarship and receptions, so maybe we can use her character as a jumping-off point. So to quickly summarize, the Maenad is a female—or typically portrayed as a female—follower of Dionysus. Whether or not the Maenad was actually exclusively female is an idea that's currently being challenged in scholarship, and it's really interesting work.[2] But generally what we possess and what we tend to perpetuate in our scholarly imagination of the Maenad is the image of a fictional, female follower of Dionysus, who is somehow driven mad by the god out of punishment, or for someone else's failing to observe his rites, and she goes into the mountains and does horrible things—she hunts down animals with her bare hands, and just generally goes crazy. So she lives, leaves society, and leaves normative behavior behind, to go and do things that would seem insane to “normal” people. So Maenad stories are often interpreted as negative examples of female behavior, or even as exaggerated expressions of a very ancient, savage ritual, involving human sacrifice.

And, quite frankly, I think that's ridiculous. As much as those imaginings of wild, unhinged women are interesting and in some ways appealing—who doesn't want to just leave behind their housework and go to party in the hills? That sounds fantastic!—Maenads were also a historical religious follower. We see the term being attached to women who held a sort of religious office, where they would direct a Dionysiac rite and then they would return to normal activities. And this consideration has become more mainstream in the past 50 years or so.[3] 

So in my research I’m looking specifically at Maenad myth in Argolis, which is a region in the Peloponnese, in southern Greece. There’s a story about Dionysus coming from the Aegean Islands to the city of Argos along with an army of Maenads and Satyrs, and other followers, where he then wages war against Perseus and an Argive army, because for one reason or another he is not welcomed into the city. What I have found in my digging is that this episode of myth is resolved in one form or another when Dionysus—and presumably his followers—is incorporated into the local community. In one of the later narratives of this story, Dionysus and Perseus come to a reconciliation, after which the Maenad followers of Dionysus come together with the citizens of Argos to worship the god and celebrate together. So we see a form of integration between outsider and insider groups. This is particularly interesting, because Argos has an actual history in which non-citizens were incorporated into the citizen body through marriage as a means of counteracting population loss after a horrific military defeat. So, I think that within this very local context, a story of people coming from elsewhere and then being incorporated into the local community very much resonates within this history, and with the generations of individuals descended from these politically necessary marriages.

This is still a relatively new part of my research, so it’s an idea that will obviously transform in different ways. But by looking very closely at what threads of a story exist, and at what histories of a place connect or resonate with that story, we can bring out certain nuances that I think are very, very significant and really interesting.

Hannah Mendro: 
Yeah, this is fascinating. I love just hearing about how you're doing your research, both because I think it's interesting in concept and also because of the thought of—of tracking ancient mysteries, almost, or putting all of these pieces of something together to try and reassemble a story. Or maybe you’re not reassembling anything; maybe you're putting together something new. I guess that's one more question that I'd be interested in hearing about—what you feel your relationship is to this, looking at it from the present. Do you see yourself as someone trying to find truth, or do you see yourself as someone trying to create a new story, or something else?

Stella Fritzell: 
I think from my standpoint as a scholar it's more about trying to find truth. In much the same way that archaeologists are invested in examining material evidence and in reconstructing a site through its stratigraphy, Classics, as I try to practice it, is a process of combing through literary evidence to learn more about the people who informed it. Some scholars will really think about the context of authorship and how that feeds into the creation of a particular work—thinking about how Ovid’s political contexts might have informed his creation of the Metamorphoses. In my case, I’m looking well beyond a single text or author, I’m really trying to pull every cursory or fragmentary mention of a story to see what larger picture will emerge and what possibilities of truth that will open up. Okay, “truth” is tricky, because there’s not a definitive or singular truth, it’s very much subjective, I very much think that’s the case. So when I’m thinking about the truth of a story, I’m trying to open up the realm of possibilities for its interpretation. Not just thinking about the narrative in diametric terms of Good and Bad, or White and Black, Locals and Foreigners, which tend to dominate discussion, particularly when the story involves any form of conflict or opposition. 

And admittedly, there are moments when I look at a myth and I really want to interpret it one particular way, because that interpretation would really resonate with me and with my experience. And in many ways, I can do that. I can hold that thread very close to my heart, because I know that it's there. I can acknowledge the very appealing possibility of that interpretation, while at the same time acknowledging that the large meta-narrative, the larger cultural imagination of that myth that spans different time periods and authors, may not allow for my personal reading, at least not in the specific form that I want of it. So I have to acknowledge at times that as much as I want a particular interpretation to be right, it just won’t work within the broader scope of my methodology. If I want to think of myth as a whole, as a narrative that encompasses numerous possibilities, I need to set aside parts of my own preferred interpretation and look at the texts in front of me. I can always return to my own reading when I put the laptop down.

Hannah Mendro: 
I love that. I think that's really beautiful. And actually, if this feels good to you, I think I have a resonance that we could maybe end on. Which is that—I love the way that you're talking about a story as like you're looking for the truth of the original, but acknowledging all these many different branching, sprawling narratives of the story that you can be searching through and recognize all of those different stories as true in their own way, because they're meaningful to someone. But you're looking through those to try and find the original. And I feel like there's almost a mirroring of what tends to happen in fanfiction, which is that the original text is there, and it's on the page, and it's what the original author said. But that truth can mean so many different things to so many different people, and it is the creation of those many different other branching, sprawling narratives that creates that kind of shared truth of the story, and of the people who are sharing it with one another.

Stella Fritzell:
I absolutely agree. I love how you brought that together. I suppose the only thing that I would add, or maybe slightly adjust, is that with Greek myth, at least, there's really no original. What I think of as the original is actually the whole. To place it into fanfiction terms, as I understand it, is that each unique narrative, whether the work of a fanfic author, or creator, or the source text itself, each is contributing to a much larger imagination of the story as a whole. So the myth encompasses both the cannon, and the fanon, and every other related thing. It’s big, and it’s all possibility that can be drawn upon. And for me, that’s what I’m looking for. Not necessarily the original stories, but the body of possibilities that individual narrators can draw on.

Maybe not so robust as fanfiction communities based on output alone, but —

Hannah Mendro: 
But with a vast history. 

Stella Fritzell:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I absolutely see myth as a form of fanfiction. Or maybe we should see both as a form of human creation, of cultural creation. 

Hannah Mendro: 
Yeah, I mean, I think fanfiction is also a creation of myth in a lot of ways, and it's been very, very cool to put those two together.

Stella Fritzell: 
I've been loving it. 

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Notes:
[1] Much of Robin Reid's work so far has taken place in conference presentations like that at PCA 2022.
[2] For reference: Jaccottet, Anne-Françoise. 1998. “L’impossible bacchant”. Pallas, 48: 9-18.; Bednarek, Bartłomiej. (forthcoming). "Single males among wild women? Gender trouble in the parodos of Euripides’ Bacchae". BICS.; Scullion, S. (forthcoming). "Maenads and Men" (based on an essay previously published online, now unavailable).
[3] Henrichs, Albert. 1978. “Greek Maenadism from Olympias to Messalina”. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 82: 121-160.

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