Parody

Defining Parody
While the dictionary names parody simply as ‘a humorous or satirical imitation’ and as a literary genre composed of such imitations, such reductive definitions fail to reveal the complex capacities and bidirectional textual operations by which parody is variously constituted, assimilating any distinction between satire and parody in the process.

Bakhtin on Parody
In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin argues that the textual plurality entailed within parody was a major constitutive influence on the historical development of the novel -- the novel, in Bakhtin’s theory, above all characterized by linguistic polyphony. His exploration of parody, while revealing, is limited as his particular attention is focused to establishing his concept of dialogism. Not considering parody a genre, but “a degree of dialogism; and by virtue both of its dialogism and of its generic indistinctness from nonparodic forms, it functions not as criticism but, to the contrary, as a challenge to critical discernment and authoritative interpretive practice” (mark jones, 57), Bakhtin writes:

“It is our conviction that there never was a single strictly straightforward genre, no single type of direct discourse – artistic, rhetorical, philosophical, religious, ordinary everyday – that did not have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comic-ironic counterpart.”

Consider a brief moment of the interaction between Stephen Daedelus and Mr Deasy in Ulysses, a particular textual moment perhaps more easily described as simply 'intertextual' that I would also like to describe as parodic''. ''Deasy, concerned to establish the authority of his opinions, quotes Shakespeare in his uninvited lecture of economics and morality. Stephen in reply silently speaks Iago's name to his mind's ear, in reply to which the reader might know or venture to discover (outside the text of Ulysses itself) that the authority Deasy borrows is only from the bards most insidious villain, Iago. In this brief intertextual parody, with Stephens single silent word, Joyce mocks the appropriation of Shakespeare, but the critique of the appropriation is written with another deployment of appropriation. The textual process it mocks is the textual process it deploys to make such a critique. The ethos of this mockery is not so straightforward; in its bidirectional movement, again parody refuses to settle into a neat object for our study.

In parody Bakhtin sees language as both “represented and representing” (dialogic imagination, 45; see 44-59). Parody here is not to be understood as a genre but, on the contrary, as a challenge to critical distinctions and generic conventions themselves; between the authorial and the imitation, the serious and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane and so on perhaps ad infinitum. Within this approach every literary idiom or generic convention becomes necessarily double; tragedy and comedy are no longer discrete genres but instead make each other. This double nature both constitutes the convention as expressible and at the same time forms a necessary instability in its structure. Here we see traces of the same logic that would later inform Derrida’s notion of iterability, itself interestingly brought through his rebuttal to John Searle’s ‘citational’ distinction between serious and non-serious performatives. This logic of parody and its critical and political potential, as well as its limits, is more explicitly traveled in the conclusion to Butler's Gender Trouble

Judith Butler: Performative Identity and the Parody of Drag
In the parody of drag Butler finds the performativity of gender identity dramatically revealing itself. The questions such performances can raise are for Butler a serious intervention. Is a man in woman’s clothing only ever a man in costume with only the exterior appearance of a woman, or does the overt femininity displayed prove his essence as feminine after all, to spite a male anatomy? This seems consistent with the Bakhtinian reading of parody discussed above, once again parody seen not in terms of a generic construct but in terms of a force disrupting ‘bodily’ or generic distinction itself. Drag, as a parodic performance, can function to destabilize assumptions of an essential or ‘true gender’ identity. This does not mean that all drag is parodic in this sense, or indeed that all drag performed is parody. The kind of parody in drag that Butler privileges aggressively targets the generic distinctions themselves by revealing such distinctions as performed, taking the idea of the original ‘true gender’ as its target of mockery, if parody must have one. Engaging parodies attack on discrete distinctions of original and imitation, by parodying the very idea of an original, Butler is interested in the way drag queens can enable a political recognition of mimicry at the base of any structure of identity. Once recognised, exposing the social coercion at the base of gender, the performativity of gender chastises any liberal theory of the (theorizing) subject that could dismiss the weight and tendencies of traditions of such enormous history. Believing that resignification is the only way to negotiate our embeddedness in the fields of power/knowledge, Butler is naturally drawn to parodies subversive citational operations and redeployments.