Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:21:32.146Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Illusions of parody

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2009

Christine Brooke-Rose
Get access

Summary

I would like to take up a problem I left unresolved in my book A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981), namely the problem of parody. All the more so because Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), a book I have already quoted and much admire, takes me to task on this problem. I shall not go into a private polemic with him, for in fact (to my surprise) we basically agree.

Parody and stylization

Christine Brooke-Rose has described Thomas Pynchon's V (1963) as a parody of classic realist fiction, and not a very satisfactory parody at that, since the crucial distance between the parody and the model being parodied is not scrupulously enough maintained. I disagree; by my reading, V is not a parody but a stylization, and not of classic realism but of modernist fiction – like Molloy, La Jalousie, Lolita, and other texts of stylized modernism.

(McHale, 21)

He goes on to say that I draw my distinction parody vs. stylization from Bakhtin, which is true, and I shall do so again. However, since I had in fact called Pynchon ‘ostensibly parody, towards stylization’ (p. 385), and since the techniques supposedly stylized are (as in many postmodern novels, see Ch. 14) those of the realistic novel taken over by Modernism and already parodied by Joyce (for example, defocalization of the hero, pushed to excess, or ‘free indirect discourse’), McHale's objections seem a quibble of terms.

Type
Chapter
Information
Stories, Theories and Things , pp. 191 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×