On the rhetoric of fan letters, or: Why I may never actually write to Mr. Armitage

bZirk said it here: Mr. Armitage probably needs another fan letter like he needs a hole in the head.

You see: the rhetorical problems involved confound me. I can think of two reasons to write a fan letter.

a) to express admiration for the work of the addressee. (This is the explicit justification.)

b) to express that special thing that *I* found in the work of the addressee, i.e., to say “I admire you. Look at MY unique admiration of you! SEE ME!” (This is the implicit motivator.)

Presumably, b) is stronger than a), and probably very few writers of such letters — even those conscious of the problems involved in b) — can keep it separate from a).

Even assuming that b) were a legitimate motivation for contacting Mr. Armitage, any letter would have to go under in the flood of letters he receives. What can he possibly say, except “thanks!”? Thus, no matter how great the letter, or how unique the insights, nonetheless the circumstance of being part of a very large fandom means that even unique insights will appear conventional or simply disappear.

So all that effort — and it requires true effort for most people to write a sophisticated letter — would be wasted. In the worst case it would create negative feelings in the recipient stemming from the impossibility of responding adequately to the effort the writer put into the letter.

I posit that the true audience for the fan letter is actually fellow sufferers from Armitagemania, who can be offered new insights into Mr. Armitage’s work by reading the unique perceptions of their fellow fans.

Mind you, I am not trying to discourage anyone else from writing, if she or he has something to say. But receiving adoration is a burden. Writing for a single recipient is hard. In contrast, adoring someone — especially from afar — is easy, and larger audiences make that sort of writing fun for the writer.

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I wonder if I’ll actually be able to stick to this.

~ by Servetus on April 10, 2010.