My problem with this paper is that I have several competing directions I want to go with it. First, I was interested in looking at the “fable” and the overall parody to which it’s attached, through the lens of humor theory. What makes it funny? How does the humor work?
Second, theories of parody. Is a parody essentially deconstructive of the text it parodies? Is parody, as a self-aware text, ipso facto a form of metafiction? Some feel that a parody is inherently hostile to the text being parodied; a parody of hunting manuals, therefore, would have to be essentially anti-hunting. This view completely ignores the fact that for a parody to work it has to assume both a writer and readers well-versed in the text being parodied. Take Don Quixote, for example. A broad and brutal parody of chivalric fiction, no? But in order to write it Cervantes had to have been well-versed in the texts he was making fun of and his audience had to be just as well-versed in order to understand half of the jokes. Is mockery inherently an attack? Or is it an homage?
Fourth, I wanted to look specifically at the “fable” within the parody, in which a falcon (masculine symbol) basically gets gang-raped by a bunch of sexually ambivalent shorebirds. I was particularly interested in what I saw as the “problem” of sexual violence used for comic effect. Problem is, this problem is more a 20th century problem than a medieval problem.
Fifth, I could look at it in terms of discourses of masculinity and effeminacy and situate it within an overall fifteenth-century critique of effeminacy, but I suspect that to do justice to this I would have to be much better versed in Freudian, feminist, and/or queer theory than I am.
Sixth, I’m now leaning toward a title of “Of Birds and Bawdy Bodies” and limiting myself to an examination of sexual and scatological imagery, through the lens of humor theory, but that seems like a cop out.
So I’m being pulled in many directions at once and have to narrow it down, and fast.
3 comments:
I have struggled with these very questions regarding parody. I have been writing on LdT as being an "inversion" of the Life of Homer in which the public is depicted as being exceedingly charitable to the wandering beggar Homer. I have avoided the term "parody" for the reasons you describe: some texts can be "inversions" or a "degraded rendering" of the intertext without parodying it I suppose (every definition of parody I have seen includes the word satire which definitely connotes the source text and/or author being held up to scorn). You need to see Gerard Genette's _Palimpsests_; particularly the section on parody; the closest I've seen him come to using a term of the sort I have been hoping to find is "heterodiegetic transposition," which, the critic admits, is more useful than beautiful.
I don't know how much time you have for working on this, but your discussion of parody and whether parody is a satire seems pretty cool to me. It reminds me of an idea I ran across once and was intrigued by, so looked up. A phrase sums it up, the title phrase of the book: Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State by Michael Hertzfeld. He's an anthropologist, and I don't know if you want to go into that territory, but his notion of cultural intimacy might be just the ticket to resolve the seemingly unresolvable question of whether this parody is a satire. I'll quote a footnote of mine:
On Michael Herzfeld’s formulation, cultural intimacy is an ironic way of relating to one’s cultural group that comprises the forms of “rueful self-recognition in which people commonly engage” Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics Int He Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997).. As Boym points out, it involves “everyday games of hide-and-seek that only ‘natives’ play, unwritten rules of behavior, jokes understood from half a word, a sense of complicity…” Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
To me, these formulations point the way to seeing the parody as a sort of discursive community formation in which the author includes himself, thus explaining the quality of the text that reminds you of empathetic parodies such as Best In Show.
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