Richard Poirier
THE POLITICS OF SELF-PARODY
Parody has always had the function of literary criticism.
From Chaucer's "Sir Thopas" through Max Beerbohm's "The Mote
in the Middle Distance" on to Hemingway's
The Torrents of Spring
and Henry Reed's Eliotic "Chard Whitlow," parody constitutes
criticism of the truest, often the best kind. For one thing, it demands
the closest possible intimacy with the resources of a given style; for
another, it treats writing as a performance, rather than as a codifica–
tion of significances. Up to now parody has been almost entirely
other-directed - by one writer against another or at the literary
modes of a particular period. Even self-parody has traditionally been
other-directed, as in Coleridge's "On a Ruined Cottage in a Romantic
Country" or Swinburne's "Nephelidia," allowing a writer to external–
ize and disown the mannerisms of his earlier work.
As
against these recognized forms of parody, I want to define
a newly developed one, a literature of self-parody that makes fun of
itself
as it goes along:
it proposes not the rewards so much as the
limits of its own procedures, it shapes itself around its own dissolvents,
it calls into question not any particular literary structure so much as
the enterprise, the activity itself of creating any literary form, of
empowering an idea with a style. The literature of self-parody
continues, then, the critical function that parody has always assumed,
but with a difference. While parody has traditionally been anxious to
suggest that life or history or reality has made certain literary styles
outmoded, the literature of self-parody, quite unsure of the relev–
ance of such standards, makes fun of the effort even to verify them
by the act of writing.
Thus the difference between older kinds of parody and this
newer one
is
a measure of the difference between concepts of
