Bert Hamilton once asked if I could write an article on 
parody for the Spenser Encyclopedia, and I tried and 
shortly thereafter demurred.  Rather later I was asked to 
provide a response piece for an article by Donald Cheney 
in Connotations, and I recycled something of what I knew 
and had already written, with examples of parody in Milton 
— but my 64 page piece was one that the journal in 
question hadn't any use for.  Its time has either passed 
or not yet come, but I can seize the present occasion to 
quote, though again at virtually unforgivable length, a 
couple of my introductory remarks, perhaps in a not 
altogether resigned mood of "yet once more."

Parody, in literature, is a kind of impersonation or 
ventriloquization or parroting (of an author or of the 
voice of another text or speaker) taken a comic step too 
far, along the continuum from influence to pastiche to 
slavish imitation to counterfeit to parody proper, and 
from parody proper to spoof to lampoon to burlesque to 
charade to travesty.   The relation of a parody to the 
thing parodied is a parasitic or symbiotic one.  Sometimes 
the original, being familiar and affectionately received, 
is merely used as a vehicle to send-up or spoof a more 
recent object that has developed absurd but conceivable 
and exploitable analogies to the "straight" archetype. 
 The original is itself satirized only when its own 
vulnerabilities and susceptibilities are exposed and 
ridiculed:  by an exaggerated imitation of its potentially 
ludicrous or risible features or conceits or conceptions. 
 Often parody’s object, in that case, is the 
all-too-easily imitated style, the pretenses and 
affectations of which readily lend themselves to 
exaggeration and excessive repetition; or the object is 
modes of thought or feeling or expression that have become 
familiar and contemptible from too much repetition; from 
which it is possible to have become disaffected.  At the 
same time, and despite the jaundiced view they typically 
take, the best parodies are loving tributes and homage to 
the spell cast by the original or convention or tradition 
that is being mimicked, and inevitably they are thus 
confessions of its influence and ubiquity.  ((Petrarch in 
relation to the troubadours and the sweet new style as not 
so new.  [Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland has been long 
admired — more lately by John Updike  — as a remarkable 
and acutely diagnostic send-up of 25 English prose 
stylists; Henry James leads off the succession, James 
being an author whose manner has seemed to many as bent on 
eventually undoing itself.  But one could obviously not 
have been unaffected by it, to have written the parody.])) 
 ...

If parody makes affectionate sport of that which a 
multitude of readers or listeners or spectators have found 
irresistible--and is a kind of sweet or gamesome revenge 
taken on a mode or a model that has prevailed and found 
its place in the sun of popular favor, nonetheless, for 
parody to exist, something in the original must have gone 
to seed, or become obsolete, or lost favor or lustre or 
relevance.   A good parody may sneak up on us, and it 
always forces us to rediscover the properties of the 
original—along with its ingenious imitation in—or 
importation into--an ultimately alien context.  ...  . 
 Parody must hew to and mimic its referent in order to be 
recognizable, and yet misapply the indications of that 
referent’s presence to make them sufficiently facetious to 
be parodic.  Its method is that of a shadow: walking both 
mockingly and exactingly in the steps of a received and 
proven original.  (See Robin Williams and Nathan Lane on 
John Wayne's macho walk in the Hollywood remake of La Cage 
aux Folles.)  ...

The alchemy and the metaphorics whereby literature turns 
the water of reality into the wine of imagination are also 
working when parody turns the wine into vinegar.  Melville 
transforms the energies of the Nantucket whale fishery 
into the Byronic Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the well-nigh 
eschatological White Whale; but J.M Barrie reconfigures 
these antagonists and reverses the pursuer and pursued (as 
in the legendary Mocha Dick) into the piratical Captain 
Hook and the crocodile with the clock in its belly—a 
clock-o-dial, so to speak.  But since parody necessarily 
follows upon an original, an element of it inheres in the 
allusive imitation of any literary model, not merely in a 
satiric one.  Thus Urizen exploring his dens in Night VI 
of Blake’s Four Zoas is offered as a virtual parody of 
Milton’s Satan reconnoitering chaos in Book II of Paradise 
Lost.  Or the speaker (or harangue artist) retailing much 
of Pound’s Cantos can introduce himself as a parody of one 
of Browning’s preoccupied cranks who are dramatic 
monologists by nature as well as art: “Hang it all, Robert 
Browning, / there can be but the one ‘Sordello,’ / but 
Sordello and my Sordello?” (Canto II, 1-3).  And thus 
Spenser begins with a similar reference back to an 
original:  “fierce warres and faithful loves shall 
moralize my song” (FQ Proem, 4), not merely echoing 
Ariosto as in Harrington’s later translation in 1591, “Of 
Dames, of Knights, of armes, of love’s delight, / Of 
courtesies, of high attempts I speake” — but with Spenser 
suggesting that the Ariostan “Knights and Ladies gentle 
deeds” will be levied for moral examples, and, if Ariosto 
is an immoral poet, in that sense will he be parodied:  or 
counter-parodied.  For faithless loves turn up often in 
the Orlando Furioso and Ariosto’s original, the Orlando 
Inammorato, as well as faithful ones.  Harrington’s 
“attempts” indeed will latterly become the poet’s own, in 
the two temptation-epics of Milton.   ...

I. The Recycling of a Virgilian Topos, as Found in 
Milton’s Paradise Lost, as an “Arch” Kind of Parody

In his article for Connotations, Donald Cheney makes a 
calculated use of an occupied term, “parody,” to 
denominate the phenomenon of the marked literary 
reminiscence, perhaps otherwise to be identified as “the 
figure of echo” (Hollander).   It is typically the 
somewhat lightsome but pointed paralleling of one author’s 
exact words, diction or rhythms by those of another—a kind 
of internalized and potentially ironic citation—that 
Cheney takes to mark a particular kind of Renaissance 
parodic metier, a mode conformable to much that has been 
said about both the practice of literary imitation and the 
inflection of literary topoi in the period in question. 
 When understood in these terms, parodic practice nicely 
conforms to David Bromwich’s remark that parody belongs to 
the larger family comprised by literary allusion. 
(“Parody, Pastische, and Allusion,” in Hosek and Parker, 
Lyric Poetry).  Parody, it thus appears, is a critical 
species of dialectical or dialogic intertextuality, 
whether reformist or desconstructive — or merely 
ambivalent.

-- Jim N.
  

On Fri, 22 Aug 2014 16:51:29 -0400
  "John W. Moore" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Great answer!
> 
> 
> 
>From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List 
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of 
>Dorothy Anne Stephens
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 4:50 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Convention into satire
> 
> 
> 
> That’s a great question.  I can’t give anything like a 
>broad reply, but I would start by saying I believe many 
>conventions are satirized long before they’ve begun to be 
>overused.  I would argue, for example, that Petrarch 
>satirizes some poetic conventions at exactly the same 
>moments in which he is creating and earnestly, richly 
>fulfilling them.  One might, I suppose, differentiate 
>this satire of poetic convention from his satirizing of 
>certain states of mind and of certain emotional 
>strategies—and of course he doesn’t invent the human 
>psyche.  On the other hand, he pretty much erases any 
>boundary line one might draw between conventional states 
>of mind and conventional poetic expressions.  That’s one 
>reason I find his poetry so compelling: he doesn’t regard 
>artistic conventions and the most sincere of human 
>emotions as being in any way antithetical.
> 
> 
> 
> Dot
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List 
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sean 
>Henry
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 11:30 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Convention into satire
> 
> 
> 
> A random, fairly general question I posed earlier to 
>some of you off-list, but one I want to put to you all as 
>well: when do you think a convention starts becoming 
>satirical of itself? Overuse? But even a satirical 
>version of a convention still carries something of its 
>original savour, so to speak. Some context---I'm prodding 
>away at an endless thing I'm writing, and I'm writing a 
>page or two on the pastoral interlude in Don Quixote, 
>which includes this wonderful description (in a 1612 
>translation) of how gentlemen-students have taken to the 
>hills in pursuit of Marcela, a young rich woman living 
>the life as a shepherdess:
> 
> 
> 
> "Sir, if you staid here but a few daies, you should 
>heare these mountaines resound with the lamentations of 
>those wretches that follow her. There is a certaine place 
>not farre off, wherein are about two douzens of Beech 
>trees, and there is not any one of theme in whose rinde 
>is not ingrauen Marcelas name, and ouer some names grauen 
>also a crowne in the same tree, as if her louer would 
>plainly denote that Marcela beares it away, and deserues 
>the garland of all humane beauty. Here sighes one 
>Sheepheard; there another complaines, in another place 
>are heard amorous ditties, here in another, dolefull and 
>despairing laments." 
> 
> I can only think of Jacques' comment: “I pray you, mar 
>no more trees with writing love-songs in their barks.” 
>The extremity of what Cervantes's goatherd describes is 
>satirical, but it still has something of the beauty of 
>the pastoral mood it cocks its eyebrow at. There's still 
>wistfulness to all the students of Oxford throwing 
>themselves into the Isis over Zuleika Dobson, even 
>through the black absurdity of such amorous mass suicide. 
>But the Cervantes got me wondering about when using a 
>convention shades over into satirizing that convention. 
>Is it as simple as Humpty Dumpty's view of language, 
>"When I use a word, it means just what I chose it to 
>mean"? 
> 
> Any thoughts off the tops of your learned and witty 
>heads? 
> 
> Sean.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Sean Henry, B.A., M.A., PhD.
> Lecturer, Department of English
> University of Victoria, B.C., Canada
> [log in to unmask] 
> 

[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121