20140626.0833

I made a comment yesterday about "the idea of literary succession," the notion of writers taking over the works of other writers (with permission or other ethical justification), indicating that I might take it up again. Today does not seem like a bad day to do it.

Some clarification is needed before I go on, though. Succession implies legitimacy as determined by the originator of the intellectual property,* so those works which have passed into the public domain and are given refigurings or sequels are excluded from this discussion, as are various forms of fan fiction (although Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons argue in Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution, and Female Sexuality that there is some legitimacy in fan- and slash-fiction, albeit of a different sort than that I mean by "succession"). Instead, it will focus on such things as the estate-authorized expansion of a given corpus and the assumption by a child of the continuation of that corpus; examples include the Second Foundation trilogy and the Dune volumes of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

While the former cases are legitimate in principle--a person's estate and its executors, in which that person presumably vested trust and authority, have the right to open the person's property to the use of others--they do operate under the necessity of fidelity to the demonstrated intent of the original person. While the exact intent cannot ever be known, of course (following a weak version of Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy), it can be strongly suggested. If, for example, an author's corpus never ranges to, say, avocadoes, then it can be inferred that the author had no intention of treating avocadoes. Authorized successors who then range into avocadoes do poorly in doing so; they go against the wishes of the person who ultimately authorized them, which is rude at the very least and, in other circumstances, actionable. Such is the problem of the Second Foundation trilogy, which runs headlong into matter that Asimov appears to have abjured in his own writing.

The latter case, that of an heir assuming authority after the death of the original person, is also clearly legitimate. And it offers, at least potentially, privileged insight into the intent of the original person; it hardly strains credulity to believe that authors will speak to their children of the directions they mean to follow in their works. The thing for which they must watch is the difference in narrative voice. Each author will be distinct, of course, as each person is, and it is not to be expected that the child will be a duplicate of the parent. Trying too much to be so results in problems; what one person does as an expression of that person's being, another can only do through an effort that cannot be hidden and which mars the performance through being obvious. This is the problem with the Herbert/Anderson Dune books. Anderson is not a good writer, however many titles he may have to his credit, and he and Brian Herbert tried too hard to replicate Frank Herbert rather than adding to him. The texts suffer greatly as a result.

There is clearly more that can be said, of course. There always is. I could do more to consider the issue, although I do not think it likely that my own work will push forward as some others' has.

*I realize that my making such a statement places me ideologically on the side of traditional understandings of copyright, which provokes another discussion entirely. But I do believe that those who develop works have a right to benefit from the labor involved in doing so and that the benefit involves some control over how it is presented and displayed.