Carga sísmica (E)

Yeats provides a link to the next poetic trope whose discourse ethics I will test, the use of parody in poetry during and after World War I. Yeats’s 1888 “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” will help transition us into the parody of Pound and Eliot:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,5 Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10 While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (Yeats 39)

The lyric is, of course, “original,” a primary composition of a single author. However, for the reader who has encountered Thoreau, it is difficult to read Yeats’s poem without hearing the ebbing of Walden Pond in Yeats’s description of Lough Gill, or to miss seeing Thoreau’s $28 house casting a shadow over Yeats’s “small cabin.” More subtly, Yeats’s poem borrows from other sources as well: the opening line of “Innisfree” echoes a line from the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s Gospel, Hugh Kenner notes (A Colder Eye 51), referencing Yeats’s longing to return to ancient Ireland and Celtic art, wearied of modern London’s “pavements grey.” Though not a proper parody, Yeats’s speaker must still rely on past works to describe his present discomfort.

Kenner goes on to say that the poem became one of Yeats’s most popular, to the poet’s chagrin, seen as a touchstone of “Celtic melancholy” to most of its American audiences, though Ezra Pound felt differently (Kenner 53). Yeats’s lament sounded too earnest to Pound, who noted his objections by producing a parody of Yeats’s poem called

“The Lake Isle.” Pound’s poem first appeared in the September, 1916 issue of Poetry, appropriately positioned alongside another parodist-to-be, a young poet billed in the magazine (twice) as “T. R. Eliot.” In this issue, Eliot’s “Observations” and Pound’s “The

Lake Isle” were part of a collection of “Poems Old and New.” Pound’s title nods toward Yeats’s poem, and it aptly frames the rest of the parody:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, With the little bright boxes

piled up neatly upon the shelves

And the loose fragment cavendish 5

and the shag, And the bright Virginia

loose under the bright glass cases, And a pair of scales

not too greasy, 10

And the volailles dropping in for a word or two in passing, For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Lend me a little tobacco-shop,

or install me in any profession 15

Save this damn’d profession of writing,

where one needs one’s brains all the time. (“The Lake Isle” 277) Pound’s parody of course takes liberties in addressing Yeats’s poem, itself a recreation of past themes. For instance, Pound’s invocation of any and all muses in the first line pokes fun both at Yeats and himself—suggesting a universal writer’s block—with the speaker knavishly angry at his “damn’d profession,” “where one needs one’s brains all the time”

(ll. 16-17). The playful Pound’s true muse is “Mercury, patron of thieves” as he decides that parody—a mild kind of literary theft—trumps poetic originality (l.1). Thus Pound recycles Yeats’s title and adapts the wishful thinking of the elder poet’s poem, while also invoking the “greasy” scales that recall the “greasy till” of Yeats’s modernity (from

“September 1913”). Interestingly this offhand reference to one of Yeats’s most important political poems is buried within a text that pawns itself off as a trinket, a joke. Pound’s poem spreads its self-conscious sense of triviality back to the parodied original.

In fact this is the charge traditionally leveled against literary parody, the claim that the trope is merely “parasitic,” as F. R. Leavis deemed it, and that duplicating another artist’s style is wrong, winning a parodist unwarranted praise while disparaging an original work (qtd. in Hutcheon 3-4). Over time even the word parody has gained a negative connotation, seen as an act of “malignantly ridiculing” rather than a playful

adaption of another work (Rose 9-10). Thus we could imagine a reader feeling insulted by Pound’s parodic allusions in “Lake Isle” if the reader felt Yeats’s poem was the “real thing” and Pound’s was more mockery than poem. A reader might react in particular to the casual allusion to “September 1913,” a poem carrying considerably more weight for an Irish reader than for the Anglo-American Pound. In contrast, when Pound (who made something of a living at parody) mocks the English poet A. E. Housman with his “Song in the Manner of Housman” and its sardonic accompanying notes—or when Pound sings out lustily, “Winter is icummen in, / Lhude sing Goddamm,” (“Ancient Music” l. 1)—

few readers are incensed (except perhaps lovers of Housman or troubadours performing the “Cuckoo Song”). But when Pound begins leeching political power out of poems—as his mocking of Yeats might do—his parodies begin to make him enemies. Pound

becomes a primary figure of contempt for Leavis and his ilk (The Common Pursuit 36-37), adding injury to insult: if literary plagiarism is not bad enough, Pound (and Eliot, we will find) has the gall to dilute or obscure the “message” of the original artwork, raising the ire of readers who seek a direct politics in poetry. Pound’s parody trumps Leavis’s critique, but only in his postwar poetry, where Pound begins to take on himself. In the prewar meantime, Pound takes potshots at Yeats’s earnestness.

What parody actually does is reveal and occasionally shatter a major literary convention: the idea of originality. With the rise of the Romantics, originality or creative genius was valorized as the primary source of true art. After Wordsworth, poets were no longer to imitate the ancient masters: instead, they would speak forth from their hearts the truths within. Thus it is unsurprising that the art of parody petered out after the eighteenth century (as Neoclassicism gave way to Romanticism) and didn’t return in full force until the moderns and post-moderns. Pound’s “The Lake Isle” illustrates parody’s complexity and its modernist uses: Simon Dentith argues that Pound’s parody is not actually

attacking Yeats or the elder poet’s style, emphasizing that without the title we might not even connect the poem to Yeats (Dentith 35-6). Instead, Pound’s poem attacks an entire

“aesthetic,” the Romantic idea of the poem as solely the site of lyrical beauty, of pastoral or melancholy daydreams (Dentith 36). Thus “The Lake Isle” reveals Pound’s vision of poetry as shaped not from the “deep heart’s core” but from the measured, exacting work of the intellect; parody becomes a modernist missive (36). To Dentith’s account I add that

Pound is not as interested in the isolated intellect’s work as he is in the link between minds, an exchange that parody is particularly suited to foregrounding. This interaction between old text and new may seem disrespectful or offensive, depending on our investment in to literary originality, but neither originality nor ethics is lost in parody. I will contend. Parody is more than mockery: it can perform political work (or stifle it), and it can be as creative and innovative as its source material.

Parody and Play

And what is parody, precisely? As with satire, it depends on whom you ask.

“Parados” or “paraodia” is the Latin and Greek root, denoting an “imitating song” (Rose 7). It may also be translated as a “beside-song,” one sung alongside an original—thus an imitation that is not purely derivative (Kiremidjian 2). Typical parodies do not obscure their originals but create a new relationship between the texts—engendering a dialogue about their existence. Kiremidjian also notes that parody traditionally is a space to sing not of great, heroic deeds, but of the local “quotidian” (2). Parody works at the level of the everyday, replacing the elevated and ineffable with the common and apprehensible.

This is illustrated in Bakhtin’s descriptions of medieval parody in carnival, where kings and popes are parodied by common merrymakers (Rabelais and His World 81-82). John Gross writes that parody is located literarily between “pastiche” and “burlesque,” where pastiche borrows the style of another artist (a neutral repositioning) while burlesque

“fools around with the material of high literature and adapts it to low ends” (xi). The parodic elements in a work occupy a self-consciously lower, clowning position.

When a text reveals itself as parody it gives up any guise of “truthfulness” or

“reality”: parody admits what it is, a literary figure. It makes itself a jester poking holes in both reality’s and art’s often-inflated rhetoric. Joseph Dane points out that parody is both a critical concept and an artistic trope: parody works as a “meta-literary genre and thus...

a form of literary criticism” (5). Hutcheon calls parody “a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (6).

Further, “Parody... is repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (Hutcheon 6). This “critical distance” makes parody more than just childish imitation or sarcasm. Parody can contain multitudes. It is not so much a recreation of a

previous event, status, or idea as it is the creation of a new space between the past world and text of the original and the present world the parodist shapes. Parody is not laziness or plagiarism but a new experience of art within art. It carries a greater honesty within its ostensible theft and can express forms of experience beyond an origin text (Kiremidjian 15-16). As Gross explains, “Much of the pleasure of parody comes from contemplating the rival worlds that authors inhabit, each incurably idiosyncratic, each revolving on its own axis” (xii-xiii). Further, beyond the pleasure parody creates from its unity/disunity trope is also a realm of potential dialogue that can go beyond pure jest. As with Pound’s parody, the jokes do not spoil the original poems for us, but they do raise questions about their efficacy and usefulness in our time. Parody always engenders a debate between past and present requiring its audience’s judgment and participation. In this, a connection to Habermas’s discourse ethics appears, and I will further explore the possibility of an equal exchange between sender and receiver within parody throughout this chapter.

However, this is not to say that all parody implies an ethical relationship with its audience; Gross notes that in the twentieth century parodies become a weapon of choice for satirists wishing to critique modernity (xvii). When parody functions as solely a vehicle for satire, it exhibits the same faults as the coercive language of sarcasm. Thus, while a poet may shape a space of discourse ethics with parody more easily than with straight satire (since parody works primarily on the linguistic level, promoting a sense of doubt about its own context and performance) this is not always a given. There is a reason satire and parody are often confused: mocking another’s words (satire) can be even more successful when mocking another’s style as well (parody). Denisoff writes that while marginalized groups have made use of parody as a progressive political tool to critique mainstream society, nevertheless, “[t]he use of parody... is not one-directional.

Supporters of dominant or established social institutions also use parody to challenge what they see as a burgeoning cultural threat in order to undermine its claims to

legitimacy” (Denisoff 2). Parody, like satire and sarcasm, can be abused as a method of literary control and unethical coercion when used at the expense of its audience’s reasoning faculties, undermining the discourse of communicative ethics.

How then is parody more open-ended than its satirical counterparts? Parodies almost always invoke humor, but they do not always carry the imperatives of satire or

sarcasm. What makes parody a more ethical form of literary humor is that it more-overtly requires an audience’s participation in creating its meaning. Not only are readers

entrusted to find the link between new poem and old poem, but they are also given the opportunity to fail to recognize the allusions at all. In contrast, in the satirical poems of Sassoon and Owen we recall narrators who do not leave the decoding of their ironies to others. If we fail to realize that the church fathers are singled out for raillery in Sassoon’s satiric “They,” for instance, then Sassoon’s satire has failed. But the same is not true for parody: parodies require knowledge that is external to the parodying work (Rhetoric of Irony 123). Even if we cannot recognize a parody as such, the text still operates. Wayne Booth uses the example of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’s Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun” (which parodies Petrarchan poetic cliches), as Booth comments that Shakespeare’s love poem is a parody of a love poem; yet Booth adds that even if the reader knows nothing of these tropes, it still works as a poem (123-24). Satire unrecognized is nonsensical: parody unrecognized is still something.

Linda Hutcheon calls this “double-voiced” element in parody “democratic” (94-95). The parodist’s work is a sort of “gambling” (Hutcheon 96). Parody can be an honest kind of wordplay that satire cannot; satire uses the guise of play to mask very clear instructions or results, and the reader of satire has no real say in determining what exists behind that mask. Parody involves a very real game, to which Hutcheon alludes, because unlike the illusion of choice offered in sarcasm or satire (where a reader is not really allowed to participate in the meaning of a text), parody does actually offer two options, based on our awareness or unconsciousness of the parody’s origins. In this gaming or gambling, I argue, is the ethical potential of parody: it asks its audience to decide what a text will mean for each individual, and parody works on those terms, in much the way that Habermasian discourse ethics outlines communicative morality—built on mutual validity agreements. The multiple layers of meaning in parody do not produce a unilateral statement of fact from an author. Instead, varying levels of significance are allowed a reader, and the resultant meaning of the parody is left largely up to the reader. Parodies vary; all are not equally open. But parody offers interpretive options that satire does not.

But parody is not always read this way: as I mentioned with the Pound-Yeats parodic complex, there are readers of Pound’s “Lake Isle” who would consider it an

abuse of or lack of empathy for Yeats’s style or intentions. There remains a stigma to parody, perhaps because the appearance of every significant cultural product spawns a host of parodies in our time. A popular method of cashing in on success remains to parody popular music or videos. The ubiquitousness of the parody has cheapened it in the eyes of many audiences. What’s more, parody can be seen as useless for communicating a social message: Bakhtin, though praising parody in the medieval world, writes darkly of its descendents, saying: “In modern times the functions of parody are narrow and

unproductive. Parody has grown sickly, its place in modern literature is insignificant,”

(Dialogic Imagination 71). Modern parody, to Bakhtin, cannot do the political work it once did, wallowing in flippancy and impotence. It looks easy and feels cheap.

But, lest we forget, a parody is more than an imitation. Were it merely mimicry, a parody would do nothing for us: it would merely direct us back to the original text. F. R.

Leavis’s fears that parody “demeaned the integrity of [its] subject” (qtd. in Mack 15, Amis xiv-xv) speak to this assumption. After all, parody was long seen as a fundamental

“mis-usage” of an original piece (Rose 23). Perhaps parody’s “treason” or “betrayal” of art-as-art is a fair accusation—but is parody’s pulling back the veil any worse than the lies that “original” or “straight” art promotes? I counter that an ethos of honesty indwells parody: parody reveals itself as a staged performance and it shows its origin texts to be the same. Parody is a game of revelation, not obscuration. It is a parasite that paints itself and its host as artificial artifacts. Parody admits art’s “indebtedness to the past,” one reason why Pound and Eliot use it, and it is a way to “celebrate” past works and others’

ideas (Mack 25). Parody preserves the artistic past even when it appears to attack it (Dentith 37). By transmitting the past into present ironies, parody can comment on itself as art in a way otherwise impossible (Kiremidjian 18).

Thus when Pound and Eliot use parody, they are doing what Yeats’s early poetry does not: they are admitting that there is little new under the sun—at least in human creativity. Further, they are seizing the opportunity to comment on both past and present through the parodic link. If modernism means to define itself against the past, it can only do so by presenting that past for inspection; when the modern pair of parodists invoke the mythological past, Romantic truth, or Enlightenment objectivity, they maintain the power to say something new in recalling the old. Parody is built upon the need to “refunction”

parts of the past (Hutcheon 4) to serve the present. Thus when an attitude, belief, or style begins to lose its value it can still be infused with new life from the parodist’s pen. Satire has no need for its source material beyond its materiality—for satire always discards its target’s opinions—but parody cannot operate without it.

Thus I will argue that the great ethical potential of parody is built upon three basic premises, and the accordance with which a particular text accepts these three givens determines its ethical utility. First, an ethical parody admits that art is not equivalent to reality, although it may contain or inspire real effects. Parody dwells within a realm of artificiality, which engenders the apprehension of difference in the contrast between source material and parodic reuse. I would argue that the deliberate work of revelation for the audience is a way of admitting them, of believing others are capable of dealing with texts beyond the straightforward level of literature-at-face-value or even the (reverse, but straightforward nonetheless) level of sarcasm. By deliberately placing the reader in a position of literary doubt, the writer essentially puts all the cards on the table and offers the other a rhetoric of openness, rather than abusing literature’s persuasive ability. This Levinasian move exhibits the mutual kindness found in parody. It is this admission that art is unreal but can have real effects that makes parody an ethical form of address; in poking fun at literature’s gravitas and pointing out its fictionality, parody can still do things—politically, socially, aesthetically. It just chooses not to do them at the reader’s

Thus I will argue that the great ethical potential of parody is built upon three basic premises, and the accordance with which a particular text accepts these three givens determines its ethical utility. First, an ethical parody admits that art is not equivalent to reality, although it may contain or inspire real effects. Parody dwells within a realm of artificiality, which engenders the apprehension of difference in the contrast between source material and parodic reuse. I would argue that the deliberate work of revelation for the audience is a way of admitting them, of believing others are capable of dealing with texts beyond the straightforward level of literature-at-face-value or even the (reverse, but straightforward nonetheless) level of sarcasm. By deliberately placing the reader in a position of literary doubt, the writer essentially puts all the cards on the table and offers the other a rhetoric of openness, rather than abusing literature’s persuasive ability. This Levinasian move exhibits the mutual kindness found in parody. It is this admission that art is unreal but can have real effects that makes parody an ethical form of address; in poking fun at literature’s gravitas and pointing out its fictionality, parody can still do things—politically, socially, aesthetically. It just chooses not to do them at the reader’s