Parody and the Realist Novel

DA VID BAGULEY Parody and the Realist Novel Whether we equate literary realism, in the conventional way, with the aesthetic aims of its practitioners, or define it, in a more recent fashion, by reference to mimetic strategies, the question of parody seems at first to be totally irrelevant. There can apparently be no use for intertextual exchanges in a theory which asserts an integral relationship between the text and the reality it purports to depict and which would confine the role of the writer to the unmediated observation and recording of empirical phenomena. The mid-nineteenth-century French realists, for example, advocated a total sincerity and spontaneity of vision, a view which seemed to leave no room for the play of parodic effects, for it sought to expunge systematically all traces of textuality from the process of literary composition. The realist aesthetic is presumably more than usually suppositious since its ultimate aim is an impossible assimilation of art and life. How can parody, one might ask, be at all apposite to so grave an enterprise ? More modern definitions of realism tend to centre on the very narrative procedures that promote the mimetic or representational illusion and study their probable impact on the reader. In theory, the presence of parody in realist discourse can only disrupt such procedures, for the respective devices of parody and realism are seemingly incongruent. In plain terms, parody does not imitate actions and phenomena in nature, but another text or literary practice. Furthermore, it does not simply imitate, but distorts. The impulse of realism is to disguise literary conventions , whereas the mainspring of parody is to expose them. In creating an evident ironic hiatus between itself and the target text(s), the parody, of necessity, draws the reader's attention to literariness and artifice. By overtly exposing the devices of the rival text, the realist work would clearly tend to undermine its own mimetic conventions. It would be tempting, therefore, to conclude that the two modes are irreconcilable and to limit the study of the relationship between parody and the realist novel to the single direction of travesties on realist texts, looking to such works as Archibald Shepperson's delightful survey of the burlesque novel in English, The Novel in Motley. 1 It would be enlightening to examine the methods of some of the intriguing titles that he quotes, such as Muddlemarsh by H.F. Lester, Not Farfrom the Lowing Herd by Edwin UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER I, FALL 1985 PARODY AND REALISM 95 Clarke, Beerjester Brewers by Anthony Dollop, or, somewhat outside the confines of the genre, Twenty Thousand Tweaks Sundered the Flea by Rules Spurn. However, from a certain point of view, parody in the realist novel itself is far less inconceivable a notion than one might at first assume. As Harry Levin, for example, has pointed out, 'it cannot be an accident that realism, from Rabelais' burlesque of the Arthurian legend to Jane Austen 's glances at Fanny Burney and Anne Radcliffe, has so often originated in parody'; 'so many novelists, like Thackeray, have started as parodists, playing the sedulous ape to their seniors.'2 There is here either a remarkable change of method or, more likely, a discreet continuity. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that realist literature is in any way dissociated from the process of generic development for which parody, in some form or other, as the Russian Formalists have shown, provides an important motive force, whether as a factor consolidating tradition Cune parole classique' according to Barthes) or as an agent of change that violates literary norms and exposes stereotyped procedures and themes.3 The main problem, therefore, as this article seeks to demonstrate, is not the exclusiveness of our two terms, but the degree and modes of explicitness that parody can enjoy in a body of texts whose primary motivation would seem to preclude it. In discussing this problem I should like to take as a starting point and as a focal point a text which belongs to a decidedly more casual 'realistic' tradition than that of the nineteenth-century French realist or naturalist novel. In fact, I would initially invoke the very first...