‘We Cannot Think of What Hath Not Been Thought’: Or, How Critics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Literary Parody

Abstract

The stigmatization of literary parody as an essentially parasitic activity, and the concomitant denigration of parodic reference as an authorial technique manifestly unworthy of serious critical scrutiny, exerted the force of profoundly influential stereotypes within our literary culture for an extraordinarily long time. An indignant F. R. Leavis, endeavouring in the last century to express his personal contempt for the mode in the kind of language that even he reserved only for his most vitriolic criticism, not only insisted that parody ‘demeaned the integrity of [its] subject’, but went so far as to characterize parody as nothing less than ‘the worst enemy of creative genius and vital originality’.² Parody was an act of lacerating discursive rebellion — an enemy to literature worse (or so Leavis would have had his readers concede) than the frustrating impotence consequent upon the arbitrary stasis of writer’s block; worse than the casual or (for that matter) intentional misconstructions of one’s audience; worse than the rhetorical arrows drawn from the quiver of a hostile rival; worse than the ill-intentioned carpings of unsympathetic critics; and worse, Leavis would have compelled his readers finally to admit, than those constraints that are typically brought to bear upon an author forced to produce his or her work within the ever-vigilant shadows of an inflexible ideology.

Let’s not theorize about humour; … it’s utterly fruitless and makes the very dullest kind of conversation.

— Robertson Davies, World of Wonders¹