Uściński, Przemyslaw. Parody, Scriblerian Wit and the Rise of the Novel: Parodic Textuality from Pope to Sterne (original) (raw)

2021, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

After a thorough tour of this ambitious study of parody, one is reminded of Dryden's admonition: "This is the Mystery of that Noble Trade, which yet no Master can teach to his Apprentice: He may give the Rules, but the Scholar is never the nearer in his practice." Or, more succinctly, E. B. White's comment: "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process." The book's title ought to be fair warning that the author has chosen a rather large frog to dissect. In a later chapter, Uściński alludes to Fielding's "bill of fare"; his own offers a generous buffet of Gay, Pope, Fielding, and Sterne, as seen through the critical eyes of Bakhtin, Watt, Derrida, McKeon, and a host of others. This obviously revised doctoral dissertation can be either forgiven or applauded for the scope of its effort to explore the role of parody in eighteenth-century literature, focusing on the Scriblerians. While the author seems primarily interested in examining parody as it relates to the novel (hence his chapters on Fielding and Sterne), his more interesting readings are of Gay and Pope. Before embarking on specific readings of Beggar' s Opera, The Dunciad, Joseph Andrews, and Tristram Shandy, Uściński lays out his critical approach, an attempt to unite Bakhtin's writings on parody and novelistic discourse with Derrida's emphasis on textual performance. He states in his introduction that "Parody is omnipresent in the Scriblerian literary discourse because it is a key textual mechanism of 'wit' as they practiced it. They parodied specific works and discourses as well [as] broader stylistic and generic conventions, questioning in their creative parodic practice such fundamental concepts as 'the poem,' 'the book,' 'the learned discourse,' and 'the novel.'" It certainly makes sense that Uściński would turn to Bakhtin on parody (primarily Rabelais and His World, but also Problems of Dostoevsky' s Poetics) to describe and explain the parodic impulse he sees in the works in question, and the first two chapters are perhaps the most useful in