Parody

Abstract

‘The fictional journal illustrates clearly the inherent tendency of the formally mimetic text to parody its model’: not for the only time I find myself agreeing with one of Valerie Raoul’s statements about the genre without endorsing the arguments which produce it.¹ The reason for such conditional support is her general tactic of merely portraying characteristics and accepting them all as equally valid, with a resultant laxity over such things as chronological accuracy or stylistic verisimilitude. This same all-inclusiveness seems to underlie the quoted remark, the rigour of which is undermined by the weak conclusion that there are parodic elements to be found in all sorts of examples. Now, depending on definitions, this may be true, but it is surely important to try to ascertain whether a given case of so-called parody is a deliberate piece of humour on the part of the novelist. The over-written horrors and unlikely writing situations of The Journal of Edwin Underhill, for instance, may be amusing in their very excesses, but the author clearly intended them to be part of a gripping yarn: the parody is unconscious and should be seen as the bad or careless writing that it is.