Let's put the "iterate" back in "literate": 5 novelists with cult followings

1. Charles Dickens


When people talk about the literary/high-culture value of “quality television” like The Sopranos and The Wire, they often refer to these texts as “the new Dickens.” Presumably, this comparison is meant to elevate the former--if The Wire is like Dickens, then watching TV could be good for you, right?

Maybe Matthew Arnold was right, and what this really means is that Dickens was a lowbrow panderer, just like all those soulless TV execs, but I choose instead to see the parallels between Dickens' work and contemporary televised serials as a sign of the aesthetic and cultural possibilities of television. Structurally, Dickens' serials share a number of story elements with contemporary serials: multiplot and densely layered stories, grotesque characters, and melodramatic/gothic elements.

At the same time, noticing this parallel offers us a chance to rethink Dickens as a fan phenomenon, on the level of famous contemporary serials like LOST or Star Trek. At the time of their release, the books were hugely popular both in England and America. Famously, when the final installment reached American shores, there was a crowd greeting the boat with the question "does Little Nell die?" This pressing need to know What Happens Next is at the core of many if not most cult texts, and Dickens is no exception.

Like his less legit contemporary brethren, Dickens has inspired fan fiction, reenactments by fans, and even theme parks (Star Trek only has a casino). Even in the realm of academia, there's a shockingly similar vibe among a group of hard-core Dickens scholars as there is at a Star Trek convention. It's not just by chance, I think, that the most famous annual Dickens conference is maybe the only academic environment where you could find a Victorian Ball. Which people attend in costume.

2. J.K. Rowling/ Harry Potter
Rowling, too, is frequently praised in terms of her similarity to Dickens. This is perhaps a more intuitive link, not just because she writes immensely popular serialized novels that are deeply rooted in the minutiae of British culture, but because she has captured the Anglo-American cultural imagination so thoroughly.

The thing that's particularly interesting to me, however, about Rowling is her intensely proprietary relationship to her characters. Her declaration of Dumbledore's secret gay history came months after the final book in the series had been published. Rather than leaving the matter open for fans to discuss in the forum of a classic critical conversation or through dueling fanfics, Rowling seemingly closed the book on the matter (as it were)--and by declaring Dumbledore officially gay, she precluded the possibility of other characters' queerness being “discovered” by fans. After all, if Rowling has definitively stated that Dumbledore is gay, then we can all stop wondering about the possibility of a love connection between, say, Harry and Draco. Rebecca Traister from Salon.com has an interesting take on Rowling's “outing” of Dumbledore which you can access here.

Like Dickens' struggle over copyright laws, Rowling has attempted to control fan activity w/r/t the Wizarding Universe she created, recently suing the creators of the Harry Potter Lexicon, a website that offers definitions of everything from Abraxan to Zonko's Joke Shop. Rowling used the web site herself as a resource when making a timeline for the film version of Goblet of Fire, but when its creators wanted to publish a hardcover version of the book, Rowling had a litigious fit, claiming that the printed lexicon would preempt her as-yet-unwritten Harry Potter Encyclopedia, and thus infringe on her authorial rights.
Both the Lexicon and Dumbledore's belated coming-out party place Rowling at the center of an ongoing argument over the power of the author and what defines authorship itself. As yet, puppet shows and middle school dance squads aren't considered copyright infringements, but Rowling's vexed relationship with fan activity opens up the question of where (or whether) the line can be drawn between interpretation, appreciation, and "infringement."

3. J.R.R. Tolkien and The Fellowship of the Ring
It would be impossible to talk about cult fiction without mentioning Tolkien: the "father of high fantasy" and the patron saint of the twenty-sided die. Tolkien invented a fantasy language 40 years before Klingon and The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy has remained required reading for three generations of geeks. For instance, although Gary Gygax (the creator of Dungeons & Dragons) denies any direct influence from Tolkien, he did admit that he had to change a number of the creatures so that they no longer resembled Tolkien's, and hobbits thus became halflings. The difference, of course, is negligible. Most of the tropes that define fantasy lit, and particularly its link to Celtic mythology (with all the elves and gnomes) can be linked back to Tolkien. Although the Fellowship of the Ring trilogy and its prequel The Hobbit are most well known, Tolkien also wrote The Simarillion, a compendium of Middle Earth myths that was published after his death.

The film adaptations were hugely successful, winning a record number of Oscars and changing the cinematic landscape (so it contained a lot more dragons and magic), and Tolkien remained the auteur figure at the center of the myth. Even after Peter Jackson blew most of the good will he'd earned with the LOTR films with his floptastic remake of King Kong and Guillermo del Toro was tapped to direct the adaptation of The Hobbit, the anticipation for the new Tolkien film has remained unabated. It's the fictive world rather than the specific director that provides the fodder for fan excitement (this might seem obvious, but Sam Raimi's connection to the Spiderman movies has been key to their success, as has Bryan Singer's name in relation to the X-Men franchise).

Ultimately, Middle Earth might offer the best existing example of the kind of hyper-dense fictive world that provides fertile ground for cult following, and it's thus no surprise that the narrative has inspired everything from over 40,000 (!) stories on fanfiction.net, to Harvard parodies, to fan encyclopedias, to quite possibly the most awesome thing Leonard Nimoy has ever done (including Futurama and Star Trek).

4. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin

According to legend, when Harriet Beecher Stowe met Abraham Lincoln, he greeted her with the comment, "So you're the little lady who started this big war." It's an interesting comment on the place of the author in relation to a work of literature: she's always diminutive (both little and a lady), and her actions seem to have spun out of control, leading to big, historical, and decidedly masculine events.

The truth of the relationship between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Civil War is (surprise!) more complicated than Lincoln's comment suggests, but Stowe's novel did move its Northern white readers to pity slaves and reject the institution. At the same time, however, it relied on and reinforced narratives of intrinsic racial difference in order to do so, and continued a long and depressing history of offering black bodies up for consumption in the American marketplace. The industry around Uncle Tom's Cabin traded in images and narratives, not real people, but African-American experience was still the currency by which white readers made sense of their lives. The novel remains the gold standard for the double-edged sword of sentimental literature, where readers weep over the plight of the suffering [fill-in-the blank] and then feel their work is done. It's a short leap from Little Eva's tragic death to Gwyneth Paltrow's African identity.

It's possible, I think, for narratives like this to serve as a kind of gateway to concrete forms of activism, but the commodification of the characters and the experiences makes that leap difficult. What do you think? Is it possible to understand the enormity of slavery's inhumanity when it's presented as a doll, part of a Plantation-themed party, or advertisements for thread and tobacco? Either way, Uncle Tom's Cabin has become the ur-text for some of the most enduring racial stereotypes in American culture: the Mammy, the tragic mulatto, and of course, the Magical Black Man.

5. Jack Kerouac/ On the Road

Required reading for disaffected teenagers everywhere, Jack Kerouac's loosely fictionalized autobiographical narrative of his cross-country travels with Neal Cassady and (more briefly) Allen Ginsberg, as well as other Beat luminaries (William S. Burroughs, Alan Ansen) formed the foundation for the contemporary road narrative. The myth of Kerouac's process is as important as the final product: the famous story is that he sat down and wrote the whole book in three weeks on a continuous scroll of tracing paper. The scroll itself now travels cross-country, keeping up the myth of the American Road.

Kerouac's success was as much about timing as talent--the novel came out just at the point when affordable cars and an interstate highway system made individual cross-country travel possible. In the 1950's, people could for the first time live as itinerant travelera without dropping out of society like Depression-era hobos. Even though Kerouac describes a rebellious and marginal lifestyle, he never loses the opportunity to reintegrate into mainstream culture. His work, then, might be read as part of the creation of the modern notion of adolescence as a period designated for rebellion--where you can step out of the expectations of mainstream culture for a period of time, but always have the option of safely returning (as evidenced by Kerouac's ideological shift later in life toward conservatism). As the clip suggests, Kerouac's later life was marred by alcoholism and misery, and he died of cirrhosis at 47.

Kerouac's understanding of the Road as a space for enlightenment and rebellion set the stage for generations of Road Narratives, from Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise to epic poems about road trips to gross-out comedies. Kerouac is distinct from other writers on this list because his influence is so widespread--I wouldn't say there's no On the Road fan fiction, but that it's harder to find, since Kerouac's influence tends to show up as someone trying to reproduce the general feeling of his narrative by chronicling their own alcohol- or drug-fueled trips cross-country. But of course, that's not to say that you can't still find weird fan ephemera like an interview with a Kerouac bobblehead doll.