Serial Narrative, Scholarship, and Free Will
My goals with this project were (and still are) manyfold. At the most basic level, I sought to dig deeper into my favorite TV show, one that shaped me since I was a young teen, with the hope that I could understand it better than I already did. At this, I feel I’ve succeeded, and will continue to do so. But more than that, I wanted to apply my own knowledge and skills acquired through years of academic inquiry to consider the ways that a popular series like Supernatural can teach us something about ourselves and the world. That goal is much loftier, and I doubt it’s my place to decide whether I succeeded there—after all, scholarship, like popular series, should not exist in a vacuum.
I’ve barely scratched the surface here in terms of the complexity of Supernatural’s negotiation of concepts of seriality, authorship, and freedom. But more than just scholarly analysis, I endeavored to produce something that reflected, formally not just analytically, the same concepts I hoped to explore. For that reason, I found it appropriate to place my analysis, my exploration, in the medium of a website.
The medium of a website, unlike an academic essay or journal article, affords me the opportunity to continually revise my work, even after it is published to the world. I can go in and edit it, restructure it, add to or subtract from it, and even elicit responses from readers more informally. I can also seize control of the overall delivery of the information—I sought to restrict the ways the user could interact with my content, providing no menu through which to hop around from page to page (until you get to the end, or unless you are an observant and rebellious reader who found the Table of Contents hidden on the homepage) and delivering information in a certain order. This was an attempt to replicate the same serial experience one would get from watching a show like Supernatural on television, one episode at a time, in order.
I also sought to replicate the serial’s recursive character that Kelleter describes by reevaluating my analysis of previous episodes in light of new knowledge gleaned from later ones. In that way, I not only hoped to replicate the experience of making sense of and reconstructing a television series after each new installment but also to exhibit the ways that scholarship is (or can be) the same. As I was reading Fathallah’s and Favard’s works, both of which were published prior to Supernatural’s conclusion, I couldn’t help but wonder how they would revise their arguments in response to the newer episodes. How would their perception of Chuck’s character or the show’s overarching structure change if they had written their work after the show ended?
When writing my analysis here, I wanted to make it seem as though I was producing each page as I watched the show, as if I didn’t have the hindsight that comes with seeing the narrative whole. In a way, I was channeling Chuck—a sort of God-Author pretending to be a prophet, learning these things along the way, revising as I went. But just like Chuck, it was a farse. I knew from the beginning how I would revise my analysis, and at times, I purposefully avoided a line of inquiry that might suggest otherwise, that might give away some essential revelation later. But in doing so, Chuck became the villain, an authoritarian figure who stifled freedom in favor of “literary symmetry,” who led his characters and audience to believe they had a choice only to seize control at the last second. Is that what I have embodied here? Is that what writing scholarship is?
Maybe it can be that way, but we mustn’t forget, Chuck lost. He was usurped, replaced, his story taken from him and repurposed into something new. Scholarship might be this way, too, with new authors taking up the mantle, continuing our work with new insights and challenging, shaping, destroying it for their own purposes, their own stories. Perhaps there’s freedom in that.
Another question this project provokes for me is, what would it mean for scholarship to be serial? How could our process and its outcomes change if scholarship existed in a production/reception feedback loop much messier, much more in the present, than it is now? What if, instead of watching every episode and reading every study of Supernatural, I actually did produce a theory of authorship as I watched? What if reader, academic and non-academic alike, had access to our work-in-progress, gave us active feedback that shaped our scholarship on the go? What would be the implications for authorship? I think maybe there are spaces that allow for scholarship to do these things—in many ways scholarship is serial. But what I hope this project allows for is a consideration of the radical affordances of seriality for the production and circulation of critical thought beyond the authoritarian Author figure, both in popular culture and scholarship. Perhaps there’s a way for scholarship to make way, through content and form, for more freedom.
The God Author 