scarfman | seen at rustyverse

Leonard Nimoy is quoted by Reuters to say, "Canon is only important to certain people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae. Open your mind! Be a 'Star Trek' fan and open your mind and say, 'Where does Star Trek want to take me now'."

I'm going to add this quote to my essay on how there's no such thing as canon. Full article here (minor spoilers).

Now I have to decide whether to be the person who first posts the quote to startrek.

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From:

drake57.livejournal.com

I have to agree with Mr. Nimoy.

From:

fourzoas.livejournal.com

Interesting; I had a quick read of your essay, and on first glance I have to disagree.

I tend to think of canon in the sense in which we use it in literary circles: a collected group of works that are considered "important" or "foundational" or "constitutive" of a period/school/body of work. So there's a Blake canon--texts and illustrations and even his annotations to various other authors--that I can point to as the group of works that constitute the foundation point of Blake scholarship.

Now, there has been for some time argument in academic circles about whether or not something should gain admittance to the "accepted" canon, which has resulted, for example, in the inclusion of authors like Jane Austen in what used to be the boy's club of British Romanticism (where there were really only 6 poets of note, all male). Canon stretches to accommodate various new elements, those elements becoming "standard" when, for example, the Norton Anthology starts including those authors and texts that were formerly, if not formally excluded, omitted due to lack of perceived canonicity. Teachers start teaching those texts, thereby creating a demand for them, and before you know it, they are produced for consumption in the marketplace. I wonder to what extent the demand of fandom for canon drives the restoration and release of, for example, old Doctor Who serials; how many other shows from the early 60's have fallen by the wayside? There's a demand for the "primary textual materials," which constitute the canon around which a group of people conduct some kind of discussion.

That's how I see fandom's use of "canon"--it defines a body of texts around which the fandom conducts its fannish business, be that business discussion, analysis, fiction, visual art, etc.

Of course, these are initial responses. I'm going to have to think a bit more about it.

From:

scarfman

I tend to think of canon in the sense in which we use it in literary circles ... That's how I see fandom's use of "canon"

But it's not, and if it were I'd have no objection. See the paragraph in my essay about the dictionary definition of canon. Canon wars may have been eclipsed by 'ship wars in internet screen fandoms since I first wrote this essay - certainly we didn't have 'ship wars in Doctor Who fandom before 2007 - but I assure you that the canon wars in rec.arts.drwho were every bit as vitrioloic as the 'ship wars on LJ are (or, are reported on my friendslist to be; I seem to have clairvoyantly avoided the communities where the major 'ship war engagements occur).

Fans get ideas about canon in their heads: what is canon, what isn't - and most importantly, what other people must think about it. An example from another fandom: Once on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer.creative someone posted discussing fanfiction stories that had been "jossed", which is to say, had elements that had been contradicted by elements in subsequent episodes of BVS*. I replied that, in my Forever Knight crossover, I'd initially had Cordelia spending the summer of 1998 in Sunnydale, but in the season premiere fall 1998 it turned out Cordelia had been out of town all summer. The original poster on the thread came back telling me that my story doesn't count because crossovers aren't canonical. (I wish I could find the exchange, but recently Google Groups has become quite useless, at least for posts this old.)

In Star Trek fandom it's generally accepted that the animated series from the early 70s isn't canon ... except the episode Yesteryear, because everyone likes that one. Come again?

I'm not just imagining this stuff. The attitude I speak/write of is exactly the same one addressed by today's quote from Nimoy. Fandom is supposed to be for bringing people together, and people with this attitude - or with 'ship blinders, too - drive each other apart, and innocent bystanders as well.

So, on the one hand, I agree with you: all "canon" ought to mean - all it originally meant - is a body of work. On the other hand, there are those in fandom who advance from a concept they call canon which regards certain works (e.g., Star Trek: Enterprise) in what you would call a canon to be less relevant, inferior, for failing to match what went before, as if precedence made it less fictional somehow. The gripping hand is, as Nimoy points out, doing that only cheats yourself.

(That is, it only cheats yourself as long as you don't try to impose it on those about you, especially the others who share your concept of canon but differ in what must belong to it.)

* These days I see the term jossed applied to fanfiction of any sources, not just Whedon's.

From:

sabremeister

Inclusion in canon: Star Trek
The animated series is not considered canon by the fans because once the movies came out, Gene Roddenberry and Paramount no longer considered it canon. Likewise, the ST:Voyager episode where they travel at warp 10 is held by all, fans and creators alike, to not exist it was that execrable (goldmine for Paris-Janeway shippers, though).
ST:Enterprise was a prequel, which is always harder to justify as canon after such a long and successful run of sequel-types. It certainly tried its' best, especially in the fourth season, to map itself to and relate itself to already-recorded Trek history.
The Star Trek - Nemesis movie is probably considered canon, even though it does contradict established material dealing with the inhabitants of the Romulan Empire's second homeworld, Remus - in previous sources, we have learned that there are none, yet in the film we see the indigenous population as almost lizard-like variants of Vulcan stock, a mutation that has taken place in only 2000 years.

From:

athelind.livejournal.com

This brings up the distinction between canon and continuity, and suggests that the fannish use of the term is closer to the religious use. Rather than encompassing the foundational sources, it conscribes the officially approved sources, in which the animated series, Voyager's Warp 10 episode, et al. are dsignated as Apocrypha.

In the literary sense, as Paul's footnotes in AKOTAS make abundantly clear, canon can contradict itself.

From:

scarfman

There's definitely a distinction between continuity and the fannish usage of canon. A criticism I saw of Superman II is that he seems to leave the villains to die at the end, and that goes right against one of the most fundamental aspects of the character in his source material - that he will not kill. This is an example of continuity of character through two (fannish use of the word) canons, comics and film, of the sort that's required for the character to be recognizable, not only from one episode to the next but in being transplanted from one media to another. Not so much a detail but an underpinning. Not exactly what sabremeister is talking about, but the distinction is to the subject.

From:

scarfman

I'm finding it difficult to respond to these statements in this context because, from my perspective as described in the essay under discussion, they don't matter. I don't believe that, if Orci and Kurtzman put any of these elements into their second screenplay (or, for all I know at the moment, their first), any one at Paramout, including Abrams, would care except in regard to their merit as a story element (which, I grant you, probably writes off the warp-ten-and-a-lizard thing). And if I wanted to use any of these elements in my fanficton, I wouldn't hesitate.