How Fiction Evolves

Is “keeping the brand alive” bad for books? Esther Bintliff contemplates the pros and cons of literary franchises:

[M]ost of us like to think that writers create something unique, that characters belong to the authors who created them. We can feel cynical about the financial interests lined up behind literary franchises and spin-offs. Yet the phenomenon of characters outliving their authors has been around for a long time. The foundations of literature itself, after all, are in iterative storytelling. By the time Homer came to write The Iliad, “he was writing it for an audience that already knew the story,” says Marina Warner, professor of literature at the University of Essex. “So I think the actual stratagem [of franchises] is an ancient way of approaching stories; you have a rapport with your audience before you even start, you don’t have to establish the characters. And then, when you take a step that is unexpected or that springs a surprise, that can be very pleasurable for the audience.”

Warner points to the character of Odysseus as an ancient, untethered version of a modern franchise character like James Bond. “Odysseus turns up again and again, until he reaches a modern apotheosis in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as the common man. It’s a step that some characters take, like Frankenstein or the creature – they sort of walk out of the book and take on this extra dimension, that allows them to live on.” For Warner, whether a protagonist outlives their original author is not just a financial decision, but hinges on whether the character possess the qualities that allow them to resonate outside their own era.