Parody: The Art that Plays with Art (review)

Parody, Robert Chambers reminds us in this approachable, eccentric, self-deprecating, and mildly megalomaniac book, is one of the few literary terms that come down to us from ancient Greece, where it means something like "beside-or-against song" (3). Certainly Chambers has taken the licence of its antiquity to extend the scope of parody way beyond what most people have taken it to mean up to this point. It is not to be confined to the minor and disreputable genre beloved of nineteenth-century littérateurs and the New Statesman/New Yorker. This is because it is not to be confined to a genre at all, since it is in fact a pervasive technique characteristic of all literary periods, possibly even of all language use, which works to combine or play off one convention or set of conventions against another. Its scope is therefore very wide indeed, encompassing children's mimicry, all of the traditionally designated parodic genres (so: mock-epic, comic epic, burlesque, travesty, spoof, lampoon and hoax - though it's not itself a genre), word-play and puns, much of the history of the novel, skaz, film adaptations, imitations, Dada, self-reflexive art, and what we know as modernism and postmodernism. Parody is characteristically multistable, that is, it permits or encourages several perspectives simultaneously, thus challenging the linearity of Western thought in favour of the Yin and Yang of Daoism; it is the principal means by which genres get exploded and new genres develop; and its pervasiveness has only been overlooked by criticism since the Romantics because of extraordinary critical myopia (not to say stupidity). Chambers undertakes to remedy this myopia, more perhaps in hope than expectation, and does so with wit, wild erudition, much repetition, and lots of diagrams.

He develops his case by means of his own critical terminology, which at times threatens to get out of control and proliferate like a Mandelbrot fractal (one of the analogies for the complexity of parodic effects to which Chambers himself is drawn). In a conveniently alliterative way, parody works by banging, binding, or blending, usually in combination; that is, it either sets off explosive contrasts between conventions, binds them together while keeping them separate, or blends them in smoothly sustained combinations. This categorisation leads to further categorical proliferation, and permits mostly brief discussions of a wide range of examples taken from literature, film, the visual arts, popular culture, and music. One chapter is devoted to "Parodic Innovation and Modernism". The great writers of High Modernism, including especially Eliot and Joyce, are to be understood as centrally parodic writers. But given the low critical esteem afforded to parody, neither they nor their critical supporters have been able to admit this. Chambers, unfortunately, devotes his critical fire more towards rectifying the low critical esteem afforded to parody than to developing analyses of the parodic elements in The Waste Land or Ulysses. Much of the chapter also is devoted to making the case that, since modernist parody has the effect of trashing previous conventions, the history of art in the twentieth century, especially in the visual arts, has been of successively more extreme repudiations of each succeeding convention. This sounds a little too much like the cry of "the emperor has no clothes" for comfort. But in general the chapter is of a piece with the rest of the book: provocative, would-be iconoclastic, showing signs of too-obsessive a fixation on his topic.

Nevertheless, Chambers has a strong point to make, in fact a series of strong points. First, the pervasiveness of parody: seeing it as a technique rather than as a genre clears up a lot of the confusion generated by genre-based approaches to the topic, and locates it in an understanding of basic linguistic and aesthetic practice. But perhaps Chambers could go further with this insight, not so much in expanding still more the scope of parody, but in being more specific about the social, cultural, historical, even anthropological circumstances in which...