23
her own theory of the poem’s composition, a combination of what
Beowulf scholars commonly refer to as the “author as eyewitness” and
“multiple composer” hypotheses.’
Using as a theoretical frame French critic Roland Barthes’
“From Work to Text” (pub. in French 1971, trans. 1977), I examine the
ways in which Oldham engages what Barthes defines as “the Text” of
Beowulf. Giving the word “Text” a meaning beyond what we might
normally understand, Barthes defines “Text” as something surpassing a
mere work: a Text is a “methodological field,” and “not to be thought of
as an object that can be computed” (901). Where a “work” (such as a
poem, novel or play) is fixed and concrete. Text is fluid. A “work”
cannot be re-written, but a Text can be “played” with. An author like
W.B. Yeats who often revised his previously published poems is
therefore playing with the Text of those poems, not re-writing his works,
since once a work is written, it becomes a fixed and unchangeable object.
Barthes says readers should approach the Text with pleasure since it is a
space without hierarchies. In other words, the Text is an ideal space in
which the usual social divisions between author, reader, and critic do not
exist. While there is a certain pleasure in reading “works,” the pleasure is
that of consumption — one can read these authors but never re-write
them since, as Barthes writes, “it is impossible today to write ‘like that’
and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the
production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness
establishes my modernity” (905). Barthes acknowledges the frustration
of being unable to actively interact with older works simply because of
the temporal distance between himself and the work’s origins.
Barthes’ work aligns with more recent work being done on fans
who produce fan works, such as fan fiction, in response to or in
conversation with source texts, by producing texts of their own which fill
in or enrich perceived gaps in the source narrative. In their introduction
to the Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014), Busse and Hellekson
emphasize the role played by “transformative” fans who (unlike
“affirmative” fans who collect, analyze, display, discuss, and critique)
are concerned with taking the “creative step to make the worlds and
characters their own,” presenting an “active audience” rather than the
passive audience earlier studies assumed existed (4).
Fan Studies scholars regularly observe that fans reject the notion
of an untouchable source text, arguing that fans gravitate toward
producing transformative works precisely because they see gaps and
fissures in the text that call out for completion or elaboration. In this
way, fan scholarship echoes Barthes, who notes that “over against the
traditional notion of the work, for long — and still — conceived of in a.