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Monday, August 22, 2005
Commentary: Parodies
By Gary Covington
WILSON Ng’s column, Wired Desktop, is always worth a read because Wilson has the knack of explaining in layman’s terms what all these electronic gizmos are really all about.
Last Thursday though Wilson strayed from his usual technological pathway to recommend that we readers take a look at the dreadful prose that won the World’s Worst Writer (WWW) awards. What Wilson didn’t tell us was that the wretched writing is deliberate; that the WWW is a competition—more properly the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest—in which entrants are asked to submit the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels or, in other words, the best parody of bad fiction.
The dictionary defines parody as the ‘humorously exaggerated imitation of an author, a literary work, a style or a genre’. It and its near relation the pastiche are ancient and honorable trades; pursued to this day although, in these litigious times, with more than a passing glance at the laws of libel.
The WWW mini-parodies, the supposed opening lines of a really awful novel, are only one sentence long, say fifty or sixty words, but full-blown novel length parodies abound. Think of any popular novelist, past or present, and he or she is bound to have been parodied somewhere along the line.
There are two on my bookshelf. The first is by the 19th century western writer Bret Harte—better known for his rip-roaring tales of the California goldfields—who in 1900 came up with a superb parody of a Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story.
It’s called the Stolen Cigar Case, a laugh out loud parody featuring Harte’s masterly detective Hemlock Jones experiencing an off day, all, of course, revealed and narrated by the sleuth’s faithful (and here anonymous) companion and chronicler.
(I was tempted to quote a couple of paragraphs but realized it would be pointless. To appreciate a parody the reader must have read the author parodied. Sherlock Holmes, I’m sure, is not to everybody’s taste.)
Bored of the Kings is a pocketbook-length parody of J.R.R. Tolkien’s astonishing fantasy The Lord of the Rings. It was written in the late 60s by a pair of Harvard College men; an inane, absurd, punning tale populated with the likes of Goodgulf, Sorhed, Boggies (Frito and Dildo), the evil narcs and the riders of Roi-Tan.
No doubt the volume raised (and is still raising) the hackles of a good many dyed-in-the-wool Tolkienites but, as the Harvard authors pointed out, when they wrote to Tolkien explaining their project he ‘wrote back a charming letter, sweetly expressing bafflement that anyone would consider his work worth the effort to parody but wishing us well none the less.’
The latest author to attract the attentions of the parodist is J.K. Rowling (she—if there’s anybody out there who hasn’t heard yet—of the Harry Potter tales). Enter Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody which was published in 2002 and went on to sell a quarter of a million copies. And two sequels. Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel and Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse.
Still, I don’t suppose Ms. Rowling is overly concerned. Parody is a form of imitation and that is the sincerest form of flattery.
(August 22, 2005 issue)
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