The Genius of Parody: Imitation and Originality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century English Literature by Robert L. Mack (review)

250 ROBERT L. MACK. The Genius of Parody : Imitation and Originality in Seventeenth - and Eighteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. vi ⫹ 285. $85. Far from being mechanical, derivative , or parasitic, parody reveals something central about literary meaning, what Mr. Mack calls the ‘‘referential dialectics of creation.’’ Parody makes explicit , and perhaps this accounts for its frequent marginalization, literature’s intertextuality , its ‘‘lack of stable linguistic authority,’’ and the fiction of originality to which many theories of literature cling. Via the ‘‘dizzying, eternal mirror of its transformation,’’ it reflects ‘‘the inherent instability and the inescapable mutability of any and all textual activity.’’ Central to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and celebrated by postmodernists, parody was, for these reasons, not befriended by ‘‘liberal humanist critics.’’ Taking issue with the scholarly commonplace that parody is ‘‘critical and conservative,’’ Mr. Mack argues for its transformative capacity —its ‘‘troubling’’ and ‘‘recombinative ’’ forces. The straw man here is the idea (attributed often unfairly to New Critics) that literary texts—and their authors —have or should strive to have autonomy . Parody by contrast is exuberantly social and ‘‘conjunctive’’; it does not hide its dependent character nor its debt to social convention, and it demands active participation from the reader. I admire how this study conjoins historical and formal concerns, both thematically and methodologically. Not merely an historicized study of a form, The Genius of Parody reveals the many ways that the resolution of history and form is parody’s central concern. As a mode that works via generational and intertextual transformation, parody affirms both ‘‘distance and proximity ,’’ both tradition and innovation. Mr. Mack’s method allows the book to range freely and effectively over an astonishing range of texts and ideas. Chapter Four, for example, moves seamlessly from discussing three hundred years of the performances of Shakespeare’s Henry V to analyzing medieval mystery and morality plays, in order to show how changes in the theatrical conventions of distance and intimacy (via transformations in the chorus and the physical space of the theater) map onto the formal and historical aspects of parody that he is pursuing: how parody emerges when ‘‘role playing and formalism’’ are acknowledged as necessary to the creation of meaning. The smart Introduction and stunning first chapter make this study most welcome , but for readers of this journal, Chapters Five and Six have the most appeal . The argument about Dryden—that he employed a ‘‘homeopathic’’ method of parody—is intriguing, if a bit too swiftly dispensed. Dryden plants a selfconscious parody within his own text as a means of throwing off potential critics , but also in order to effect critical consensus. This argument ties Dryden’s ‘‘generational self-awareness,’’ and his conservative political and religious commitments , to his parodic method. The following chapter, which analyzes Eloisa to Abelard, finds its parodic strategy similar to Dryden’s: Pope’s poems, motivated by the desire to ‘‘rewrite and recraft the poetic object’’ are both parodic and self-parodic. This chapter hones in on a central argument of the book: that parody enacts ‘‘on an explicitly literary level’’ the epistemological struggle be- 251 tween ‘‘memory and imagination’’ that structures modern identity (and its discontents ) as it was beginning to be theorized by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. Dryden’s struggle between tradition and innovation at the level of history is psychologized in Pope, whose parody remains open both to design (even Providence ) in human affairs and to the extension of the individual beyond these memorialized structures. Given that Mr. Mack situates Dryden at the beginning of a ‘‘new age of parody,’’ and given their own interests, readers of this journal might have hoped for more than two chapters on the Augustan age. Still, the final chapter, on Charlotte Charke, is a conceptually brilliant choice. The parodic tension in Charke’s The History of Henry Dumont (1756)—between the ‘‘proliferation’’ characteristic of ‘‘lived experience’’ and the ‘‘teleological impulse ’’ of literary form—shows how the political parody of the earlier period was transformed into the ideological and identity concerns of the novel. Because parody always attends to style, and because such pronouncements have been out of fashion for so long (though in what seems to...