Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Art forms have increasingly appeared to distrust external criticism to the extent that they have sought to incorporate critical commentary within their own structures in a kind of self-legitimizing short-circuit of the normal critical dialogue. In other fields—from linguistics to scientific philosophy—the question of self-reference has also become the focus of attention. The modern world seems fascinated by the ability of our human systems to refer to themselves in an unending mirroring process. 1

Parody is one of the major forms of modern self-reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse. 2

However, since Eliot’s valorization of the “historical sense” and the formalist (New Critical, structuralist) complementary, if very different, turning to the text, we have witnessed a renewed interest in questions of textual appropriation and even influence. Now, however, we see influence as a burden (Bate 1970) or as a cause of anxiety (Bloom 1973). Parody is one mode of coming to terms with the texts of that “rich and intimidating legacy of the past” (Bate 1970, 4). Modern artists seem to have recognized that change entails continuity, and have offered us a model for the process of transfer and reorganization of that past. Their double-voiced parodic forms play on the tensions created by this historical awareness. They signal less an acknowledgement of the “inadequacy of the definable forms” of their predecessors (Martin, 1980, 666) than their own desire to “refunction” those forms to their own needs. 4

This more positive method of dealing with the past recalls in many ways the classical and Renaissance attitude to the cultural patrimony. For writers like Ben Jonson, it is clear that imitation of previous works was considered part of the labor or writing poetry. After being repressed by the Romantic or post-Enlightenment emphasis on the need for something else (genius, and so on), this stress on craft and knowledge of the past has come back into focus today. This is partly, I suspect, because so many artists are now part of the academy, but it is also probably a result of aesthetic formalism, from Roger Fry to Roland Barthes. Michel Foucault (1977, 115) has argued that the entire concept of artist or author as an original instigator of meaning is only a privileged moment of individualization in the history of art. In that light, it is likely that the Romantic rejection of parodic forms as parasitic reflected a growing capitalist ethic that made literature into a commodity to be owned by an individual. The last century saw the rise of copyright laws, of course, and with them came defamation suits against parodists. Perhaps this means that today’s turning to parody reflects what European theorists see as a crisis in the entire notion of the subject as a coherent and continuous / source of signification. Parody’s overt turning to other art forms implicitly contests Romantic singularity and thereby forces a reassessment of the process of textual production. 4-5

In fact, what is remarkable in modern parody is its range of intent—from the ironic and playful to the scornful and ridiculing. Parody, therefore, is a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text. 6

Parody is, in another formulation, repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity. 6

Similarly, criticism need not be present in the form of ridiculing laughter for this to be called parody. 6

When Eliot gives Marvell’s poetry a new context (or “trans-contextualizes” it), or when Stockhausen quotes but alters the melodies of many different national anthems in his Hymnen, parody becomes what one critic calls a productive-creative approach to tradition (Siegmund-Schultze 1977). In Stockhausen’s words, his intent was “to hear familiar, old, preformed musical material with new ears, to penetrate and transform it with a musical consciousness of today” (cited in Grout 1980, 748). 7

Quotation or borrowing like this is not meant to signal only similarity (cf. Altmann 1977). It is not a matter of nostalgic imitation of past models; it is a stylistic confrontation, a modern recoding which establishes difference at the heart of similarity. No integration into a new context can avoid altering meaning, and perhaps even value (Vodička 1964, 80). 8

In his famous essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth (1967) remarked that, if Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony were composed today, it would be an embarrassment—unless it were done ironically to show that the composer was aware of where music both is and has been. 8

Its frequency, prominence, and sophistication in the visual arts, for example, are striking. It is part of a move away from the tendency, within a Romantic ideology, to mask any sources by cunning cannibalization, and towards a frank acknowledgement (by incorporation) that permits ironic commentary. 8

It is a way of creating a form out of the questioning of the very act of aesthetic production (Poirier 1968, 339; cf. Stackelberg 1972, 162). In my focus on twentieth-century art forms, I hope to suggest that there are probably no transhistorical definitions of parody possible. Nevertheless, I shall constantly be using examples from other periods to show that there are common denominators to all definitions of parody in all ages—although they are not the ones usually cited. It is modern parodic usage that is forcing us to decide what it is that we shall call parody today. In fact the closest model to present practice was not called parody at all, but imitation. I am thinking of the central and pervasive force of Renaissance imitation as what Thomas Greene calls a percept and an activity which “embraced not only literature but pedagogy, grammar, rhetoric, esthetics, the visual arts, music, historiography, politics and philosophy” (1982, 1). I am not claiming that modern parody is only Renaissance imitation: it would require the addition of an ironic and critical dimension of distanciation for it to be an accurate reflection of the art of today. But, like parody, imitation offered a workable and effective stance toward the past in its paradoxical strategy of repetition as a source of freedom. Its incorporation of another work as a deliberate and acknowledged construct is structurally similar to parody’s formal organization. Bu thte ironic distance of modern parody might well come from a loss of that earlier humanist faith in cultural continuity and stability that ensured the sharing of codes necessary to the comprehension of such doubly coded works. Imitation, however, offers a striking parallel to parody in terms of intent. In Greene’s words: “Every creative imitation mingles filial rejection with respect, just as every parody pays its own oblique homage” (1982, 46). 10

Ironic “trans-contextualization” is what distinguishes parody from pastiche or imitation. 12

The work of Tom Stoppard would provide another example of the complexity of the modern phenomenon that I want to call parody. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, there is a tension between the text we know (Hamlet) and what Stoppard does to it. Whenever an event is directly taken from the Shakespearian model, Stoppard uses the original words. But he “trans-contextualizes” them through his addition of scenes that the Bard never conceived. This is not like Ionesco’s total inversion of the diction and moral value of characters in his Macbett; Stoppard’s intention is not as satiric as Ionesco’s. The same is true in Travesties, but there is yet another level of complexity because, as its plural title suggests, not only is there more than one parody, but those texts parodied are themselves often parodies, especially Ulysses and The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s play parodies the literature of romance and the comedy of manners. What one critic has called its “queer double consciousness” (Foster 1956, 23) is really only its parodic double coding. 14

I would not want to argue that such complex parodic echoing is unique to the twentieth century. Clearly works such as Petronius’ Satyricon libri parodied not only the Greek novel form / in its frame and episodes but other diverse specific works as well (Courtney 1962, 86-7). Nevertheless, the number of modern works of art in many media that partake of this mode does make it important, if not unique, to this century. 14-15

I want to argue for calling such complex forms of “trans-contextualization” and inversion by the name of parody. It is indeed a form of “artistic recycling” (Rabinowitz 1980, 241), but a very particular form with very complex textual intentionality. 15

I want to retain the term parody for this structural and functional relationship of critical revision, partly because I feel that word like quotation is too weak and carries (etymologically and historically none of those parodic resonances of distance and difference that we have found to be present in modern art’s reference to its past. 15

According to their teachings, parody can obviously be a whole range of things. It can be a serious criticism, not necessarily of the parodied text; it can be a playful, genial mockery of codifiable forms. / Its range of intent is from respectful admiration to biting ridicule. Nietzsche (1920-9, 61), in fact, wondered what was Diderot’s relastion to Sterne’s text in Jacques le fataliste: was it imitation, admiration, mockery? 15-16

While we need to expand the concept of parody to include the extended “refunctioning” (as the Russian formalists called it) that is characteristic of the art of our time, we also need to restrict its focus in the sense that parody’s “target” text is always another work of art or, more generally, another form of coded discourse. I stress this basic fact throughout this book because even the best works on parody tend to confuse it with satire (Freund 1981, for instance), which, unlike parody, is both moral and social in its focus and ameliorative in its intention. This is not to say, as we shall se, that parody does not have ideological or even social implications. Parody can, of course, be used to satirize the reception or even the creation of certain kinds of art. (I am aware that this separation would break down in a deconstructionist perspective where there is no hors-text, but such a view of textuality is not my immediate context in this study.) 16

To say, quite simply, that any codified discourse is open to parody is more methodologically cautious and more true to fact than to assert, as some do, that only mediocre works of art can be parodied (Neumann 1927-8, 439-41). 18

Is it a genre, as some have claimed (Dupriez 1977, 332)? 18

Gérard Genette (1982, 40) wants to limit parody such short texts as poems, proverbs, puns, and titles, but modern parody discounts this limitation, as it does Genette’s restricted definition of parody as a minimal transformation of another text (33). 18

The kind of parody that I shall be dealing with in this study would seem to be an extended form, probably a genre, rather than a technique (cf. Chambers 1974), for it has its own structural identity and its own hermeneutic function. 19

What is important is that all these historians of parody agree that parody prospers in periods of cultural sophistication that enable parodists to rely on the competence of the reader (viewer, listener) of the parody. 19

There are two related contexts into which this book fits. The first is the already mentioned current interest in the modalities of self-reflexivity in modern art, and the second is the emphasis in critical studies today on intertextuality (or transtextuality). 20

Parody is certainly one mode of auto-referentiality, but it is by no means the only one. 20

Rose’s Foucaldian reading of the role of parody in literary history is one that makes parody into a mode of discontinuity which rejects earlier kinds of textual reference to other works. Instead, I see parody as operating as a method of inscribing continuity while permitting critical distance. It can, indeed, function as a conservative force in both retaining and mocking other aesthetic forms; but it is also capable of transformative power in creating new syntheses, as the Russian formalists argued. 20

Genette’s categories are transhistorical, unlike mine, and therefore he feels that parody in general can only be defined as the minimal transformation of a text. 21

While the impulse is understandable in one of France’s foremost structural theorists, the reality of the art forms with which I want to deal demands / that a pragmatic context be opened up: the author’s (or text’s) intent, the effect upon the reader, the competence involved in the encoding and the decoding of parody, the contextual elements that mediate or determine the comprehension of parodic modes—all these cannot be ignored, however easier and more “maîtrisable” such a denial would make my project as well. 21-22

Like Genette, I see parody as a formal or structural relation between two texts. In Bakhtin’s terms, it is a form of textual dialogism. 22

Charles Morris’s (1938) early division of semiotics into three parts provides the background for my insistence on a more extended context. In contrast to semantics, which concerns itself with the reference of the sign to its object, and to syntactic studies, which relate signs to each other, pragmatic studies the practical effects of signs. When we speak of parody, we do not just mean two texts that interrelate in a certain way. We also imply an intention to parody another work (or set of conventions) and both a recognition of that intent and an ability to find and interpret the backgrounded text in its relation to the parody. 22

My pragmatic perspective would not, however, make parody into a synonym for intertextuality. Today’s theories of intertextuality are structural in focus, as we shall see, but depend upon an implied theory of reading or decoding. it is not just a matter of the text’s somehow parthenogentic or magical absorption and transformation of other texts (Jenny 1976, 262; Kristeva 1969, 146). Texts do not generate anything—until they are perceived and interpreted. For instance, without the implied existence of a reader, written texts remain collections of black marks on white pages. Modern art, especially metafiction, has been very aware of this basic fact of aesthetic actualization. 23

In other words, parody involves not just a structural énoncé but the entire énonciation of discourse. This enunciative act includes an addresser of the utterance, a receiver of it, a time and a plac,e discourses that precede and follow—in short, an entire context (Todorov 1978a, 48). We may know that addresser and its intentions only in the form of inferences that we, as receivers, make from the text, but such inferences are not to be ignored. 23

There is clearly a new interest in “contextualism” today, and any theory of modern parody should also be premised on the belief that “texts can be understood only when set against the conventional backgrounds from they emerge; and . . . the same texts paradoxically contribute to the backgrounds that determine their meanings” (Schleusener 1980, 669). When that background is actually grafted onto the text, as in the form of parody, such contextualism cannot be avoided. 24

There are as many possible techniques as there are possible kinds of textual interrelationships of repetition with differentiation (Gilman 1974, 2-3; Revzin 1971). We cannot even claim that parody is necessarily reductive (Shlonsky 1966, 797) or even, more simplistically, that it is abbreviating in form. (Some very traditional parodies, like Housman’s of Longfellow’s “Excelsior,” incorporate the original and extend—indeed, in this case, double—its length.) 25

The limitations of the standard definitions will be examined, from both a formal and a pragmatic perspective, and the new definition will be used to differentiate parody from other genres that are often confused with it: pastiche, burlesque, travesty, plagiarism, quotation, allusions, and especially satire. It will study the special interaction of irony and parody, since irony is the major rhetorical strategy deployed by the genre. 25

This is what will be investigated in Chapter 4 as a central paradox of parody: its transgression is always authorized. In imitating, even with critical difference, parody reinforces. 26

In Foucaldian terms, transgression becomes the affirmation of limited being (Foucault 1977, 35). Parody is fundamentally double and divided; its ambivalence stems from the dual drives of conservative and revolutionary forces that are inherent in its nature as authorized transgression. 26

For, if the receiver does not recognize that the text is a parody, he or she will neutralize bots its pragmatic ethos and its doubled structure. 27

Chewbacca picks up C3P0’s detached, skull-like head, holds it in one hand, and grunts—but the grunts have the rhythmic syntax of Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horation; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” The necessary shared codes in each case are different from the filmic ones of Oz, but in all cases the decoder’s competence is involved. So too is the inference of intent. 27

Imitating art more than life, parody self-consciously and self-critically recognizes its own nature. 27

The mimetic, and ideological status of parody is more subtle than this: both the authority and transgression implied by parody’s textual opacity must be taken into account. All parody is overtly hybrid and double-voiced. This is as true of Post-Modern architecture as it is of modernist verse. Paolo Portoghesi’s “architecture born of architecture” (1979, 15) is a dialogue with the forms of the past, but a dialogue that recirculates rather than immortalizes. It is never “a turning back to waken the dead, in self-satisfying, narcissistic forms of reflection” (Moschini 1979, 13). Parody is a form of auto-referentiality, but that does not mean that it has no ideological implications. 28

As early as 1919, T. S. Eliot argued that all literature possesses “a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (1966, 14), / and that the poet and critic therefore needed to cultivate their “historical sense.” Northrop Frye claimed that he wrote his Anatomy of Criticism as an extended annotation to this belief (1970, 18). It was also in 1919 that Viktor Šklovskij made the connection between this view of art and parody: “Not only a parody, but also in general any work of art is created as a parallel and a contradiction to some kind of model” (1973, 53). More recent theorists, such as Antoine Compagnon (1979), have wanted to make the related notion of quotation take on this paradigmatic function; others, like Michael Riffaterre, have offered intertextuality. Still others see parody as the model for all art’s relationship with its past and present (Klein 1970, 376) or for the distance that all art has from the object it imitates (Macherey 1978; Weisgerber 1970, 42). 28-29

Parody is a complex genre, in terms of both its form and its ethos. It is one of the ways in which modern artists have managed to come to terms with the weight of the past. The search for novelty in twentieth-century art has often—ironically—been firmly based in the search for a tradition. 29

The novel today often still claims to be a genre rooted in the realities of historical time and geographical space, yet narrative is presented as only narrative, as its own reality—that is, as artifice. Often overt narratorial comment or an internal self-reflecting mirror (a mise-en-abyme) will signal this dual ontological status to the reader. Or—and this is what is of particular interest in the present context—the pointing to the literariness of the text may be achieved by using parody: in the background will stand another text against which the new creation is implicitly to be both measured and understood. 31

In the previous chapter I argued that there are no transhistorical definitions of parody. The vast literature on parody in different ages and places makes clear that its meaning changes. Twentieth-century art teaches that we have come a long way from the earliest sense of parody as a narrative poem of moderate length using epic meter and language but with a trivial subject (Householder 1944, 3). Most theorists of parody go back to the etymological root of the term in the Greek noun parodia, meaning “counter-song,” and stop there. A closer look at that root offers more information, however. The textual or discursive nature of parody (as opposed to satire) is clear from the odos part of the word, meaning song. The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned—that of “counter” or “against.” Thus parody becomes an opposition or contrast between texts. This is presumably the formal starting point for the definition’s customary pragmatic component of ridicule: one text is set against another with the intent of mocking it or making it ludicrous. The Oxford English Dictionary calls parody:

A composition in prose or verse in which the characteristic turns of thought and phrase in an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous, especially by applying them to ludicrously inappropriate subjects; an imitation of a work more or less closely modeled on the original, but so turned as to produce a ridiculous effect.

However, para in Greek can also mean “beside,” and therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast. It is this second, neglected meaning of the prefix that broadens the pragmatic scope of parody in a way most helpful to discussions of modern art forms. 32

Parody, then, in its ironic “trans-contextualization” and inversion, is repetition with difference. A critical distance is implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony. But this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive. The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual “bouncing” (to use E. M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and distance. 32

Parody is a bitextual synthesis (Golopentia-Eretescu 1969, 171), unlike more monotextual forms like pastiche that stress similarity rather than difference. In some ways, parody might be said to resemble metaphor. Both require that the decoder / construct a second meaning through inferences about surface statements and supplement the foreground with acknowledgement and knowledge of a backgrounded context. Rather than argue, as does Wayne Booth (1974, 177), that, although similar in structure to metaphor (and therefore to parody), irony is “subtractive” in terms of strategy in its directing of the decoder away from the surface meaning, I would say that both levels of meaning must coexist structurally in irony, and that this similarity to parody on the formal level is what makes them so compatible. 34

It should be clear from the discussion that it is very difficult to separate pragmatic strategies from formal structures when talking of either irony or parody: the one entails the other. In other words, a purely formal analysis of parody as text relations (Genette 1982) will not do justice to the complexity of these phenomena; nor will a purely hermeneutic one which, in its most extreme form, views parody as created by “readers and critics, not by the literary texts themselves” (Dane 1980, 145). 34

Unlike imitation, quotation, or even allusion, parody requires critical ironic distance. 34

The structural identity of the text as a parody depends, then, on the coincidence, at the level of strategy, of decoding (recognition and interpretation) and encoding. As we shall see in a later chapter, these are the two parts of the énonciation that our post-Romantic formalist age has considered most problematic. 34

But, for the decoder of parody, this creative function for an individual artist is less important than the realization that, for whatever, reason, the artist’s parodic incorporation and ironic “trans-contextualization” or inversion has brought about something new in its bitextual synthesis. Perhaps parodists only hurry up what is a natural procedure: the changing of aesthetic forms through time. Out of the union of chivalric romance and a new literary concern for everyday realism came Don Quijote and the novel as we know it today. Parodic works like this one—works that actually manage to free themselves from the backgrounded text enough to create a new and autonomous form—suggest that the dialectic synthesis that is parody might be a prototype of the pivotal stage in that gradual process of development of literary forms. In fact, this is the view of parody of the Russian formalists. 35

Parody, therefore, is both a personal act of supersession and an inscription of literary-historical continuity. 35

Northrop Frye feels that parody is “often a sign that certain vogues in handling conventions are getting worn out” (1970, 103). 36

In a more general perspective, however, this view implies a concept of literary evolution as improvement that I find hard to accept. The forms of art change, but do they really evolve or get better in any way? 36

Again, my definition of parody as imitation with critical difference prevents any endorsement of the ameliorative implications of the formalists’ theory, while it obviously allows agreement with the general idea of parody as the inscription of continuity and change. 36

Yet Samuel Johnson defined parody as “a kind of writing, in which the words of an author or his thoughts are taken, and by a slight change adapted to some new purpose.” Although it is true that this defines plagiarism as well, it does have the singular merit of not limiting the ethos of parody. 36

The danger of such a definition is that it might appear to risk confusing the limits of the genre’s boundaries even more than is already the case. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to showing that this is, in fact, not necessarily true. In defining parody in both formal and pragmatic terms, however, it might be argued that I have reduced it to intertextuality. 37

However, it seems to me that parody does seek differentiation in its relationship to its model; pastiche operates more by similarity and correspondence (Freund 1981, 23). In Genette’s (1982, 34) terms, parody is transformative in its relationship to other texts; pastiche is imitative. 38

Although neither parody nor pastiche, as used by someone like Proust, can be considered as trivial game-playing (Amossy and Rosen 1974), there may be a difference in textual localization that makes pastiche seem more superficial. One critic calls it “form-rendering” (Well 1919, xxi). Pastiche sually has to remain within the same genre as its model, whereas parody allows for adaptation; Georges Fourest’s sonnet on Corneille’s play Le Cid (“Le palais de Gormaz . . .”) would be a parody, rather than a pastiche à la manière de Corneille. Pastiche will often be an imitation not of a single text (Albertsen 1971, 5; Deffoux 1932, 6; Hempel 1965, 175) but of the indefinite possibilities of texts. It involves what Daniel Bilous (1982; 1984) calls the interstyle, not the intertext. But, once again, it is similarity rather than difference that characterizes the relationship between the two styles. Parody is to pastiche, perhaps, as rhetorical trope is to cliché. In pastiche and cliché, difference can be said to be reduced to similarity. 38

“stylometry,” the statistical analysis of style to determine authorship (Morton 1978). 38

fundamentally different from parody in their desire to conceal, rather than engage the decoder in the interpretation of their backgrounded texts. 39

The English retains the metaphoric sense if not the simile: “The genre itself, the style, the language are all put in cheerfully irreverent quotation marks” (1981, 55). Bakhtin wanted to define parody as a form of indirect discourse, as referring to other forms; hence his idea of its being “as if” in quotation marks. 41

“Trans-contextualized” repetition is certainly a feature of parody, but the critical distancing that defines parody is not necessarily implicit in the idea of quotation: to refer to a text as a parody is not eh same as to refer to it as a quotation, even if parody has been voided of any defining characteristic suggesting ridicule. Both, however, are forms that “trans-contextualize,” and one could argue that any change of context necessitates a difference in interpretation (Èjxenbaum 1978b). 41

I include allusion here because it too has been defined in ways that have led to confusion with parody. Allusion is “a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts” (Ben-Porat 1976, 107), but it does so mainly through correspondence—not difference, as is the case with parody. However, ironic allusion would be closer to parody, although allusion in general remains a less constricted or “predetermined” form that parody (Perri 1978, 299), which must signal difference in some way. 43

Parody, then, is related to burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation, and allusion, but remains distinct from them. It shares with them a restriction of focus: its repetition is always of another discursive text. The ethos of that act of repetition can vary, but its “target” is always intramural in this sense. How, then does parody come to be confused with satire, which is extramural (social, moral) in its ameliorative aim to hold up to ridicule the vices and follies of mankind, with an eye to their correction? For the confusion certainly does exist. Parody has been implicitly or explicitly called a form of satire by many theorists (Blackmur 1964; Booth 1974; Feinberg 1967; Macdonal 1960; Paulson 1967; Rose 1979; Stone 1914). For some, this is a way of not limiting parody to an aesthetic context, of opening it up to social and moral dimensions (see Karrer 1977, 29-31). While I sympathize with the attempt, two subsequent chapters (4 and 6) will address the complexity of this issue. Just calling parody satire seems a little too simple as an instant way to give parody a social function. 43

Yet the obvious reason for the confusion of parody and satire, despite this major difference between them, is the fact that the two genres are often used together. Satire frequently uses parodic art forms for either expository or aggressive purposes (Paulson 1967, 5-6), when it desires textual differentiation as its vehicle. 43

Both satire and / parody imply critical distancing and therefore value judgments, but satire generally uses that distance to make a negative statement about that which is satirized—“to distort, to belittle, to wound” (Highet 1962, 69). In modern parody, however, we have found that no such negative judgement is necessarily suggested in the ironic contrasting of texts. Parodic art both deviates from an aesthetic norm and includes that norm within itself as backgrounded material. Any real attack would be self-destructive. 44

The mock epic did not mock the epic: it satirized the pretensions of the contemporary as set against the ideal norms implied by the parodied text or set of conventions. 44

Modern parody, however, teaches us that it has many more uses than traditional definitions of the genre are willing to consider. Nevertheless, many still feel that parody that does anything short of ridiculing its “target” is false parody. One logical conclusion of this sort of reasoning is that mock epics that do not discredit the epic cannot be so labeled (Morson 1981, 117). To argue this, of course, is to go against the entire tradition of the term’s usage. I would like to argue that the same is true of parody in general, despite the long tradition—dating back to Quintilian (1922, 395), at least—that demands that parody be considered pejorative in intent and ridiculing in its ethos or intended response. The traditional range allowed seems to be “amusement, derision, and sometimes scorn” (Highet 1962, 69). Most theorists implicitly agree with Gary Saul Morson’s (1981, 110, 113, 142) view that a parody is intended to have higher semantic authority than its original and that the decoder is always sure of which voice he or she is expected to agree with. While the latter might be true, we have see that the “target” of parody is not always the parodied text at all, especially in twentieth-century art forms. 50

For others, however, parody is a form of serious art criticism, though its bite is still achieved through ridicule. Admittedly, as a form of criticism, parody has the advantage of being both a re-creation and a creation, making criticism into a kind of active exploration of form. Unlike most criticism, parody is more synthetic than analytic in its economical “trans-contextualizing” of backgrounded material (Riewald 1966, 130). Among those who argue for this function of parody (see Davis 1951; Leacock 1937; Lelièvre 1958; Litz 1965), W. H. Auden perhaps articulated it most memorably. In his “daydream College for Bards” the library would contain no works of literary criticism and “the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies” (1968, 77). This more serious function of parody has the potential to allow for a wider pragmatic range besides ridicule, yet few choose to extend it in that direction; “critical ridicule” (Householder 1944, 3) remains the most commonly cited purpose of parody. 51

In examining the OED history of the usage of the word parody in English from 1696 on, Howard Weinbrot (1964, 131) argued that ridicule or burlesque were certainly not the only meanings of the term, especially in the eighteenth-century mock epic, as we too have seen. Yet that century did mark both a valuing of wit and an almost paradigmatic mixing of parody and satire, one that tended to dominate in subsequent attempts to develop a theory of parody; from then on, parody had to be funny and pejorative, as the Abbé de Sallier decreed in 1733. But, if we no longer accept the limitation of the form of parody to a verse composition of a certain kind, why should we accept / an outdated limitation of ethos? Within a pragmatic perspective too, there again appears to be no transhistoric definition of parody: nothing is perhaps more culture-dependent than ethos. Why must Sallier’s model (which presents the attitude of the parodist to the “target” as one of aggression and ridiculing criticism) necessarily still be relevant today—especially since modern parodic texts from Eliot to Warhol suggest the contrary? Yet, as Wolfgang Karrer (1977, 27) has documented so extensively, most work on parody today still accepts this limitation. 52

There are a few exceptions to this finding. One critic makes a useful distinction between parodies that use the parodied text as a target and those that use it as a weapon (Yunck 1963). The latter is closer to the truth of modern, extended, ironic parody, while the former is what has more traditionally been considered parody. 52

Let us return now to the two functions of irony: the semantic, contrasting one and the pragmatic, evaluative one. ON the semantic level, irony can be defined as a marking of difference in meaning or, simply, as antiphrasis. As such, paradoxically, it is brought about, in structural terms, by the superimposition of semantic contexts (what is stated / what is intended). There is one signifier and two signifieds, in other words. Given the formal structure of parody, as described in the previous chapter, irony can be seen to operate on a microcosmic (semantic) level in the same way that parody does on a macrocosmic (textual) level, because parody too is a marking of difference, also by means of superimposition (this time, of textual rather than of semantic contexts). Both trope and genre, therefore, combine difference and synthesis, otherness and incorporation. Because of this structural similarity, I should like to argue, parody can use irony easily and naturally as a preferred, even privileged, rhetorical mechanism. Irony’s patent refusal of semantic univocality matches parody’s refusal of structural unitextuality. 54

By ethos I mean the ruling intended response achieved by a literary text. The intention is inferred by the decoder from the text itself. In some way, then, the ethos is the overlap between the encoded effect (as desired and intended by the producer of the text) and the decoded effect (as achieved by the decoder). Obviously, my use of the term ethos is not like Aristotle’s, but it is closely related to his concept of pathos, that emotion with which the encoding speaker seeks to invest the decoding listener. 55

Verbal (not situational) irony is represented in Figure 1 as a broken-line circle in order to remind us that it is a different entity from the others [parody and satire]: it is a trope and not a genre. But it too does have an ethos. The generally accepted ethos of irony is a mocking one (Groupe MU 1978, 427). In this sense it is “marked”—in the linguistic meaning of the term—as being coded in a definite way: here, pejoratively. Without this mocking ethos, irony would cease to exist, because the pragmatic context (encoded and decoded) is what determines the perception of distance or contrast between semantic contexts. This ethos, however, contains within itself a range of degree from the lighthearted snicker to the cumulative ironic bitterness of Mark Antony’s repeated “Brutus is an honourable man” refrain in Julius Caesar. 56

Satire, like irony, possesses a marked ethos, one that is even more pejoratively or negatively coded (Morier 1961, 217). This can be called a scornful or disdainful ethos. It is that kind of encoded anger, communicated to the decoder through invective, that led Max Eastman to describe the range of satire as “degrees of biting” (1936, 236). Satire should not be confused with simple invective, however, for the corrective aim of satire’s scornful ridicule is central to its identity. While satire can be destructive (Valle-Killeen 1980, 15), there is also an implied idealism, for it is often “unabashedly didactic and seriously committed to a hope in its own power to effect change” (Bloom and Bloom 1979, 16). 56

In the light of parodies like these, it is tempting to concur with the traditional pejorative marking of the parodic ethos. But we have learned from other modern art forms that the critical distancing between the parody itself and its backgrounded text does not always lead to irony at the expense of the parodied work. Like Pope’s mock epics (Paulson 1967, 6), many parodies today do not ridicule the backgrounded texts but use them as standards by which to place the contemporary under scrutiny. 57

The Weekly Dispatch sponsored a series of satires, formally based on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy “To be or not to be,” but aimed at the Suez Canal fiasco (5 August 1883). In none of these satires was the parodied text ridiculed; therefore, the ethos of the parody was not negative, even if that of the satire was. 58

It is important to keep in mind, however, that this reverential variety of parody is like the more pejorative kind in one significant way: it too points to difference between texts. Although respectfully marked parody would be closer to homage than to attack, that critical distancing and marking of difference still exists. 60

Berio’s work is less composed than assembled in such a way as to allow for the listener’s perception of difference through the mutual transformation of all the component parts. 60

There are two possible directions that the overlapping of parody and satire can take, since the aim of parody in intramural and that of satire is extramural—that is, social or moral. There is, on the one hand, a type of the genre parody (in Genette’s (1979) terms) which is satiric, and whose target is still another form of coded discourse: Woody Allen’s Zelig ridicules the conventions of the television and movie documentary. On the other hand, besides this satiric parody, there is parodic satire (a type of the genre satire) which aims at something outside the text, but which employs parody as a vehicle to achieve its satiric or corrective end.

A range of pragmatic ethos is often implied in those distinctions between kinds of parody: negative versus curative (Highet 1962); critical versus amusing (Lehmann 1963); affirmative versus subversive (Dane 1980). I prefer to retain the idea of a range of intended ethos, rather than that of formal opposing types of parody, because of the structural similarity underpinning all these types (repetition with critical difference). The pragmatic dimension is where the difference among types of parody lies, and concentrating on that fact might also allow for distinction rather than confusion between parody and satire: curative parody sounds perilously close to satire. 64

The musical analogy to which Tuve resorted in order to account for Herbert’s kind of parody is suggestive. In music, parody has two distinct meanings that recall the range of parodic ethos we have been examining. Its first meaning is closer to the respectful ethos of parody or even to the Renaissance practice of imitation. As a genre, musical parody is an acknowledged reworking of pre-existent material, but with no ridiculing intent. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians defines parody in this sense as a genuinely re-creative exercise in free variation. We have seen that parody has once again become important in modern music, but one element must be stressed, on that would reinforce the definition of parody as repetition, but repetition with difference: in musical parody like Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, there is a distance between the model and / the parody that is created by a stylistic dichotomy. This is even true of the reverential ethos of parody in music: Prokofiev paid tribute to the wit and urbanity of Haydn and others in his “Classical” Symphony, but there is still a sense of difference. This is more evident in the second, non-generic meaning of musical parody—the more traditional notion of a composition with humorous intent. Frequently this type of parody in music, as in other arts, is a limited phenomenon, usually restricting itself to quoting isolated themes, rhythms, chords, and son, instead of the more global reworking to fuse old and new elements that characterizes both sixteenth-century and modern musical parody. In this more traditional kind of parody, recognizable noble turns of phrase will often be applied to inappropriate subjects, as when Debussy recalls Tristan und Isolde in his Golliwog’s Cake Walk. As in literature or painting, this kind of parody is frequently conservative in impulse, exaggerating stylistic idiosyncrasies. 65, 67

The first, however, is potentially the more fruitful here: parody as the transmuting and remodeling of existing musical forms (Finscher and Dadelsen 1962, 815) without any specifying of ridiculing intent. 67

Parody, which deploys irony in order to establish the critical distance necessary to its formal definition, also betrays a tendency toward conservatism, despite the fact that it has been hailed as the paradigm of aesthetic revolution and historical change. It is to this paradox of parody that we now turn. 68

Overtly imitating art more than life, parody self-consciously and self-critically points us to its own nature. But, while it is true that parody invites a more literal literary reading of a text, it is by no means unrelated to what Edward Said (1983) calls the “world,” because the entire act of the énonciation is involved in the activation of parody. The ideological status of parody is a subtle one: the textual and pragmatic natures of parody imply, at one and the same time, authority and transgression, and both now must be taken into account. To use the categories of philosophical logic, the language of parodic texts subverts the traditional mention/usage distinction: that is, it refers both to itself and to that which it designates or parodies. Because parody is so overtly inter-discursive and “two-voiced,” it is not surprising that we have been witnessing lately a revalorizing of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the formulator of literary polyphony and of dialogism, for whom parody is “an intentional dialogized hybrid. Within it, languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” (1981, 76). For Bakhtin, parody is a relativizing, deprivileging mode. 69

But we have been noticing that today our cultural forms are more rather than less self-reflecting and parodic than ever. Perhaps, then, we do not, pace the utopian Bakhtin, live or write today in a linguistic context that is free and democratic. Certainly the radical Italian poets and novelists / of the early sixties, whose rallying cry was asemanticitá, led the attack against what they saw as the linguistic reification caused by bourgeois neocapitalism (Manganelli 1967). 71

Bakhtin’s own lesson of the singular historicity of every utterance. 71

Contemporary metafiction is decidedly characterized by a very Bakhtinian, ironic use of parodic forms: we at once think of the works of John Fowles or John Barth and their overt historical development from prior literary forms. Bakhtin argued that the European prose novel was born and developed through a process of free and transforming translation of the works of others (Bakhtin 1978, 193). He also felt that the novel was unique as a genre in its ability to internalize or constitute a self-criticism of its own form (444). The novel that he prized so much for this autocritical faculty, Don Quijote, could easily be seen as the direct forebear of the contemporary metafictional investigations into the relation of discourse to reality. Furthermore, today’s auto-representational novels, because of their use of parody, are even more overtly and functionally polyphonic in structure and style than Dostoevsky’s work ever was. 72

It is Bakhtin’s theory, if not always his practice, that allows for looking at parody as a form of “double-directed” discourse (1973, 153). Recent theorists of intertextuality have argued that such intertextual dialogism is a constant of all avant-garde literature. According to Laurent Jenny (1976, 279), the role of self-consciously revolutionary texts is to rework those discourses whose weight has become tyrannical. This is not imitation; it is not a monologic mastery of another’s discourse. It is a dialogic, parodic reappropriation of the past. Postmodernist metafiction’s parody and the ironic rhetorical strategies that it deploys are perhaps the clearest modern examples of the Bakhtinian “double-voiced” word. Their dual textual and semantic orientation makes them central to Bakhtin’s ([Bakhtin] Vološinov 1973, 115) concept of “reported speech” as discourse within and about discourse—not a bad definition of metafiction. 72

Like Bakhtin’s Renaissance and medieval carnival (Bakhtin 1968) (and, we might add, like the 1970s performance art), modern metafiction exists on the self-conscious borderline between art and life, making little formal distinction between actor and spectator, between author and co-creating reader (Hutcheon 1980). The second, joyous, inverted world of the carnival, according to Bakhtin, existed in opposition to official, serious, ecclesiastical culture, just as metafiction today contests the novelistic / illusion of realist dogma and attempts to subvert a critical authoritarianism (by containing within itself its own first critical commentary). 72-73

Contemporary metafiction, as we have seen, exists—as does the carnival—on the boundary between literature and life, denying frames and footlights. 73

The ambivalent openness of contemporary fiction also suggests, perhaps, that the medieval and modern worlds may not be as fundamentally different as we might like to think. 73

Today we live in fear of the consequences of what our forefathers unironically called “progress”: urbanization, technology, and so on. We too have developed “popular-festive” forms in response to this. But we call our folk culture “pop” today; Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones, or the punk phenomenon signal urban protest. 73

Instead, our pop culture, for all its admitted vitality, still appears to represent instead our increased alienation. 73

Nevertheless, in discussing the particular case of the medieval carnival, Bakhtin seems to have uncovered what I believe to be another underlying principle of all parodic discourse: the paradox of its authorized transgression of norms. 74

The recognition of the inverted world still requires a knowledge of the order of the world which it inverts and, in a sense, incorporates. The motivation and the form of the carnivalesque are both derived from authority: the second life of the carnival has meaning only in relation to the official first life. 74

This paradox of legalized though unofficial subversion is characteristic of all parodic discourse insofar as parody posits, as a prerequisite to its / very existence, a certain aesthetic institutionalization which entails the acknowledgement of recognizable, stable forms and conventions. These function as norms or as rules which can—and therefore, of course, shall—be broken. The parodic text is granted a special license to transgress the limits of convention, but, as in the carnival, it can do so only temporarily and only within the controlled confines authorized by the text parodied—that is, quite simply, within the confines dictated by “recognizaability.” 75

Nevertheless, parody’s transgression ultimately remain authorized—authorized by the very norm it seeks to subvert. Even in mocking, parody reinforces; in formal terms, it inscribes the mocked conventions onto itself, thereby guaranteeing their continued existence. 75

Often the number of parodies attests to a pervasive influence (Josephson 1975). Fifteen different parodies of Zola’s L’Assomimoir appeared on stage in the first eight months of 1879, including one by Zola himself (Morgan and Pagès 1980). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parodies of the most popular operas often appeared on stage contemporaneously with the original. 76

Its potentially conservative impulse can be seen in both extremes of the range of ethos, reverence and mockery: parody can suggest a “complicity with high culture . . . which is merely a deceptively of-hand way of showing a profound respect for classical-national values” (Barthes 1972b, 119), or it can appear as a parasitical form, mocking novelty in the hope of precipitating its destruction (and, by implication, its own). Yet parody can, like the carnival, also challenge norms in order to renovate, to renew. In Bakhtin’s terminology, parody can be centripetal—that is, a homogenizing, hierarchicizing influence But it can also be a centrifugal, de-normatizing one. And I think it is the paradox of its authorized transgression that is at the root of this / apparent contradiction. Parody is normative in its identification with the Other, but it is contesting in its Oedipal need to distinguish itself from the prior Other. 76-77

In a sense Nabokov was correct in saying: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game” (1973, 75). 78

To move from these examples of parody’s potential conservatism to the situation created by contemporary metafiction is to feel as if today we really are at what Robert Scholes (1969, 269) called “an ideological watershed,” one comparable to the one at the end of Bakhtin’s favorite period, the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Renaissance. But that earlier (conservative?) confidence in human modes of knowing, understanding, controlling, and even surviving seems to be lacking today. Along with this has disappeared our ability or willingness to establish, with any sureness, hierarchies of value, either aesthetic or social. The “elitism” on both of these levels that characterized literary modernism—its respect for form and craft, and also for both reason and psychological “truth”—has been challenged by postmodernist literature. The conservative value of control has given way to what some feel to be anarchy and randomness (Hoffmann, Hornung, Kunow 1977). 80

Typical of this new kind of high/low self-reflexive fiction is the parodic work of Tom Robbins. There are two epigraphs to his Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, one from William Blake and one from Roy Rogers. If all the arts are part of the same culture today, it is because the popular arts have become internalized, incorporated into the serious forms, democratizing the class-inspired hierarchies of an earlier time. In this sense, then, we may indeed be witnessing a variety of (or variation on) Bakhtin’s carnivalesque parodic inversion and the triumph of the people. 81

As with his prized Don Quijote, today’s self-referential fiction has the potential to be an “auto-critique” of discourse in relation to reality. In saying this, we must remind ourselves once again, however that there is no necessary correlation between self-criticism and radical ideological change. 82

Perhaps parody can flourish today because we live in a technological world in which culture has replaced nature as the subject of art (Hughes 1980, 324). 82

Bakhtin felt that early parody prepared the way / for the novel by distancing language from reality, by making overt the artifice that in fact defines all art. What we are reading today in the works of those obsessively parodic and encyclopedic metafictionists—from Jorge Luis Borges to Italo Calvino, from John Fowles to Umberto Eco—is the logical result of this view of the novel’s engendering. But all of their parodic transgressions remain legitimized, authorized by their very act of inscribing the backgrounded parodied text, albeit with critical distancing of various degrees. 83

Parody is one of the techniques of self-referentiality by which art reveals its awareness of the context-dependent nature of meaning, of the importance to signification of the circumstances surrounding any utterance. But any discursive situation, not just a parodic one, includes an enunciating addresser and encoder as well as a receiver of the text. 85

To use the terms “producer” and “receiver” of a text, then, is to speak not of individual subjects but of what could be called “subject positions” (Eagleton 1983, 119), which are not extratextual but rather are essential constitutive factors of the text, and of the parodic text in particular (see Eco 1979, 10-11). The Romantic myth is put to rest; the “writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting. The image for writings changes from original inscription to parallel script” (Said 1983, 135)—a change attested to by metafiction’s parodic structures today. In other words, the position of the textual producer, banished by the anti-Romanticism of modernism, has been reinstated, and I would argue that the omnipresence of parodic forms in art today has played its role in this reinstatement, as has the new stress on performance, / whereby “signs of the artist’s . . . presence are demanded in the published work” (Rothenberg 1977, 14). 87

As the work of Michael Riffaterre has made clear, from the perspective of any theory of intertextuality, the experience of literature consists only of a text, a reader, and his or her reactions, which take the form of systems of words, grouped associatively in the reader’s mind. Two texts, then, could share these systems without being parodically encoded; the locus of textual appropriation here is in the reader, not the author, real or inferred. An intertext, then, would not necessarily be the same as a parodied text; it is “the corpus of texts the reader may legitimately connect with the one before his eyes, that is, the texts brought to mind by what he is reading” (Riffaterre 1980a, 626).

What if he or she misses the parody or substitutes for it an intertextual chain of echoes derived from his or her own reading? Can the producer of parody today assume enough of a cultural background on the part of the audience to make parody anything but a limited or, as some would say, elitist literary genre today? 88

In writing a parody of the Victorian novel in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles has created what Bakhtin called a “double-voiced” or hybrid form: it is not a pastiche or an imitation. And it is largely the modern narrator who prevents the monological trivialization of the imitative impulse. In a move similar to that of Post-Modernist architecture, Fowles suggests that out of earlier artistic modes can come new forms, forms that will teach the reader to read through the lenses of books. While retaining all the moral and social concerns of James and the English novel tradition, Fowles can offer something new. 91

Whether parody is intended as subversive of established canons or as a conservative force, whether it aims to praise or humble (Yunck 1963, 30) the original text, in either case the reader has to decode it as parody for the intention to be fully realized. Readers are active co-creators of the parodic text in a more explicit and perhaps more complex way than reader-response critics argue that they are in the reading of all texts. While all artistic communication can take place only by virtue of tacit contractual agreements between encoder and decoder, it is part of the particular strategy of both parody and irony that their acts of communication cannot be considered completed unless the precise encoding intention is realized in the recognition of the receiver. 93

In the optimal situation, the sophisticated subject would know the backgrounded work(s) well and would bring about a superimposition of texts by the mediation of that parodied work upon the act of viewing or reading. This act would parallel the parodist’s own synthesis and would complete the circuit of meaning. It is this sharing of codes or coincidence of intention and recognition in parody, as well as in irony, that creates what Booth has called “amicable communities” (Booth 1974, 28) between encoders and decoders. The reader or viewer gets what one critic calls “an extra fillip” of pleasure from completing his or her part of the meaning circuit (Worchester 1940, 42). This, of course, also leaves both irony and parody open to accusations of elitism—the major point of attack against much metafiction today as well. 94

But the reader too must share a certain amount of this sophistication, if not skill, for it is the reader who must effect the decoding of the superimposed texts by means of his or her generic competence. This is not a matter (as in intertextuality) off a general ability to call upon what one has read, but, rather, it is specific to the particular text or conventions being parodied. 96

The structural parodic act of incorporation and synthesis (whose strategy or function for the reader, we might recall, is paradoxically one of ironic contrast or separation) might be seen as the means for some writers to shake off stylistic influences, to master and so supersede an influential predecessor: one thinks of Proust’s L’Affaire Lemoine. Parody would then be one more mode to add to Harold Bloom’s catalog of ways in which modern writers cope with the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1973). 96

This example, like that of the Fowles and Calvino novels we looked at earlier, is quite overt in its teaching of the reader, and as such is typical of much postmodernist writing. Modernist texts, however, do not usually appear so accommodating, as we have seen. The enigmatic and complex form of the work of Eliot, Poiund, Yeats, or Mallarmé might suggest less of a direct concern to accommodate the reader. Or does it merely imply a greater confidence in reader competence than can be indulged in by writers today? Certainly Dante could assume more about his smaller readership and its position within a literary culture than could, say, Donne, and Donne in turn could assume more than Eliot. But maybe Eliot could assume more than a novelist like Fowles today dares to. Perhaps our present culture, for all its global-village aspects, does lack that cohesion and stability which Herman Meyer lamented (1968, 20). 98

As we saw in the last chapter, we must be careful not to equate automatically words like transgression with positive revolutionary change; nor, however, must we assume that elitism is necessarily a negative term. The ideological status of parody cannot be permanently fixed and defined: “Parody, or ‘reflexive art,’ like this where signifiers refer to other previous signifiers in a formal game of inter-textuality has no necessary relationship to radical innovation at either a formal, avant-garde level or a political, vanguard level” (Nichols 1981, 65). 99

According to a Romantic aesthetic, such forms of art are by definition parasitic. Even today, this same negative evaluation persists and its basis, as betrayed by its language, is often ideological in a very general sense: we are told that parody seeks to dominate texts, but that it is still ultimately peripheral and parasitic (Stierle 1983, 19-20). 100

We have also seen, however, that there is another kind of parody, different from the traditional mocking type that is often both limited in size and text-specific (or occasional). This other kind or mode has a wider range of pragmatic ethos and its form is considerably more extended. Parody in much twentieth-century art is a major mode thematic and formal structuring, involving what I earlier called integrating modeling processes. As such, it is one of the most frequent forms taken by textual self-reflexivity in our century. It marks the intersection of creation and re-creation, of invention and critique. Parody “is to be understood as a mode of aesthetic foregrounding in the novel. It defines a particular form o historical consciousness, whereby form is created interrogate itself against significant precedents; it is a serious mode” (Burden 1979, 136). It is this “historical consciousness” of parody that gives it the potential power both to bury the dead, so to speak, and also to give it new life (Bethea and Davydov 1981, 8). 101

It cannot be accounted for only in terms of différance, deferral, even if it is true today that, for many artists and theorists, a stress on undecidability has replaced previous concerns for aesthetic unity, even in diversity (Derrida 1978; 1968, 46, 51, 57). Parody is both textual doubling (which unifies and reconciles) / and differentiation (which foreground irreconcilable opposition between texts and between text and “world”). 101-102

In parodic repetition, if not in all repetition (Rimmon-Kenan 1980, 152), difference is a necessary defining characteristic; but sameness is not, for all that, merely obliterated. Parody manages to inscribe continuity while permitting critical distance and change. 102

To go beyond those reductive dictionary definitions of parody 103

The parodied text today is often not at all under attack. It is often respected and used as a model—in other than artistic ways. 103

The ideological status of parody is paradoxical, for parody presupposes both authority and its / transgression, or, as we have just seen, repetition and difference. 106-107

For Portoghesi, this parodic historical consciousness is the source of continuity—both aesthetic and social. He sees Post-Modernism / as based in the interaction between historical memory and the new; in other words, it reveals the need to “trans-contextualize,” to give buildings a new relation to both the past and to their present environment (1982, 29). 112

The range is clear in the work of Robert Venturi. Its parodic and ironic recycling of historical forms aims not just at double encoding and communication, both to the minority of architects and historians who will see all this parodic play and to the public at large. It intends to provoke reaction in all viewers. 115

As in Eliot’s verse, there is a high degree of engagement of the decoder, combined with a high degree of textual complexity. And parody is central to both. If Post-Modernist theorists do not often use the word parody itself, I would argue that this is because of the strong negative interdiction that parody is still under because of its trivialization through the inclusion of ridicule in its definition. 115

Parody today is endowed with the power to renew. It need not do so, but it can. 115

there are no completely transhistorical definitions of parody possible. 115

But the “world” does not disappear in the “inter-art / traffic” that is parody. Through interaction with satire, through the pragmatic need for encoder and decoder to share codes, and through the paradox of its authorized transgression, the parodic appropriation of the past reaches out beyond textual introversion and aesthetic narcissism to address the “text’s situation in the world.” [Said] 115-116

This is why my so-called “theory” of parody is derived from the teachings of the texts themselves, rather than from any theoretical structure imposed from without. Parody today cannot be explained totally in structuralist terms of form, in the hermeneutic context of response, in a semiotic-ideological framework, or in a post-structuralist absorption of everything into textuality. Yet the complex determinants of parody in some way involve all of these current critical perspectives—and many more. It is in this way that parody can, inadvertently perhaps, serve another useful function today: it can call into question the temptation toward the monolithic in modern theory. 116