When do both fan fiction and the nuances of meter in ancient Greek poetry get brought up at the same time? The answer, apparently, is during a talk given on Tuesday afternoon titled “Euripides’ Orestes and Postcritique” by speaker Jonathan Ready, a University of Michigan professor of classical studies, in the Gund Community Foundation Theater.

Ready explained that by viewing the Greek playwright Euripides’ Orestes as a work of fan fiction, we can begin to understand what it has in common with contemporary fan fiction and address the question: “Why was it one of Euripides’ most popular plays?” Impressively, Ready managed to not only answer this question but also to discuss the CW show Supernatural and the plethora of erotic fan fiction it spawned in an academic tone that I truly hadn’t imagined possible.

Following an introduction from department chair and Associate Professor of Classics Micah Myers, Ready began by explaining that, in his education as a classicist, he had exclusively been taught to approach texts as works to be interrogated. Writings were things to be read into, considered in their historical and political contexts and examined for didactic qualities. According to Ready, postcritique, an approach to reading that is the antithesis of this critical one, can allow scholars to understand the affective appeal of stories and art. He explained that he chose Orestes for this particular postcritical reading because “by viewing Orestes through the lenses of fan fiction and trash [media], we’re able to begin to think about this really important question about attachment and enjoyment, why someone would spend their time schlepping all the way to the Theater of Dionysus to see this show.” 

To start his analysis of Orestes as a fan fiction piece, Ready first read through a detailed summary he had written of the play, stopping at certain moments to point out fan fiction-esque traits. He explained that the play is a tragedy (or, according to many of its detractors, a melodrama) about the events that follow Orestes and his sister Electra’s murder of their mother Clytemnestra. (For more on the events that lead to those in Orestes, see Euripides’ play Electra.) However, the most engaging aspects of Ready’s analysis were the shared qualities he identified between the play and fan fiction and his explanation of why these literary features are pleasing to us as people. 

One major commonality entails using the gaps or “off-screen” events in a piece of media as a breeding ground for “what if” questions. The result are unknown encounters and the frequent transformations of unexpected or minor characters into protagonists. In this case, Pylades, Orestes’ friend who, outside of this play, is essentially a background character, gets the spotlight. 

Expanding the role of a minor character, in addition to adding novelty to familiar narratives, can also render the world the story is set in is fuller and more real, he expounded. Fan fiction, by placing favored characters outside of their narratives, can also lend them a sense of being larger than these narratives. This allows us to engage in “the most taboo literary response, which is the belief that characters and their story worlds exist outside of the texts in which they appear.” The last pleasing attribute of fan fiction that Orestes engages in is providing a sort of soothing balm for the “parasocial breakup” that occurs when a narrative ends and the audience’s relationship with the characters also ends.

“When you pick up on an intertext, you feel competent, and you feel connected to all the other people who you imagine pick up on the intertext,” Ready said, expanding on why showing off-screen events or referring to things the audience knows have already
happened is satisfying. He also explained that there is a nostalgic element to such callbacks and that writing about characters and events that audiences are already familiar with can make engaging in a piece of media more enjoyable and feel less like work. “An intimate pre-existing familiarity with the narratives [and] characters … [is] bound to enhance entering into a state of flow,” Ready said. 

The play also converges with fan fiction in its use of the “hurt/comfort” trope where there is a focus on one character comforting another, the way it creates a space for “a zone of sexual experimentation” and its dramatic but rather unrealistic conclusion. (In Orestes, Apollo emerges as a deus ex machina and marries the characters off neatly.)

Ready asserted that the attraction of Orestes is due not just to its fan fiction-esque qualities but also to what he labels the genre of “trash.” Trash, he explained, is the messy soap-opera, the guilty-pleasure talk show, the things that exist outside the bounds of our “patriarchal, heteronormative bourgeoisie ideals and norms.” He added that “[Orestes] culminates with one of the trashiest scenes in extant Greek tragedy.”

In this vein of thinking, during the Q&A session following the talk, one audience member asked, “Would you admit that you are attracted to this play because it is trashy?” to which Ready responded, “One of the founding principles of postcritique is for scholars … to not pretend that they don’t have these naive attachments themselves. So yeah, I’m happy to acknowledge that as a kind of motivating force.”