Review | Unexpected Pleasures: Parody, Queerness, and Genre in 20th Century British Fiction
Reviewed by Naomi Milthorpe, University of Tasmania
How can we come to terms with writers who do not sit obediently inside an established movement or period? What do we do with those works that seem to cock a snook (so to speak) at the very genre they ostensibly inhabit? In parody—a pleasingly minor form—several recent scholars such as Michael Shallcross and Sarah Davison have found the means to read minor works and writers as both adjacent to and detached from aesthetic and critical hegemonies. Parody, which in Linda Hutcheon’s foundational work is “repetition with critical distance,” invites readers to destabilize hegemonic structures through laughter (6). In Unexpected Pleasures: Parody, Queerness, and Genre in 20th-Century British Fiction, Lauryl Tucker “identifies a strain of queer genre parodists who succeed in replacing one kind of pleasure with another”—one that combines the comical with the critical (2). These parodists, Tucker writes, “make genre fail in order to make visible (and risible) its ideological function” (11).
Parody is not originally a twentieth-century art form but it does find a congenial home in that century, which, as Robert Phiddian has argued, has “been peculiarly obsessed with those doublings, repetitions, transformations, and sensations of derivativeness that can be categorized as parodic” (679). As Linda Hutcheon posited in A Theory of Parody, parody is a parasite, not a genre in itself but a mode that transforms its host genre. Reading formalist theory of comedy and parody with queer theorists and writers, including Sara Ahmed and Jack Halberstam, Unexpected Pleasures posits parody as “an off-ramp for readerly expectations” (11) through the concepts of queer failure (11) and queer use (15). As Tucker argues, “queer parody is an imitation that goes backwards, performing a stalled form of progress” (11), replacing the pleasure of meeting generic expectations with “the pleasure of laughing at these expectations” (12). To make her case, Tucker covers a considerable historical span, from the 1920s to the twenty-first century, reading both well-known writers—Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers, David Lodge, Stella Gibbons—and those who may be less familiar to readers beyond the academy. These writers and their works parody genres and forms as diverse as biography, the Gothic, modernist experimentalism, immigrant fiction, detective fiction, and the campus novel. “In each case, the text does not give what is expected of its genre, in kind or in degree. Whether in oversupplying our expectations or mocking them directly,” Tucker writes, “these writers work to spoil our appetite for that kind of satisfaction” (12). In mocking narrative and genre expectations per se, Tucker’s parodists also “construct an alternative position for readers to occupy,” in which “generic thinking, like heteronormativity, [is] a bad frame, one we ought to look into but not through” (13).
Unexpected Pleasures is organized into sections whose weak connectivity (to paraphrase Paul K. Saint-Amour's remarks on weak theory) allows Tucker to oscillate between local arguments about these bad frames of genre and her more comprehensive theoretical position on form itself. Rather than a traditional structure with evenly balanced chapters, organized chronologically, Tucker offers two unevenly weighted sections, “Open Season on Genre” and “Passing Parodies,” with unequal numbers of chapters. Moreover, the chapters are not uniformly progressive; for example, the first chapter in part two connects thematically to the last chapter in part one, but Tucker revises her reading methods between these two parts. As Tucker notes, while the novels in part one “stand in an explicitly satirical or ironic relation to genre” (15), the texts in part two have been “marketed and received as straight examples” of their respective genres and therefore “require a different critical methodology, one that accounts for each works ‘passable’ generic conventionality along with . . . its ‘queer use’ of genre” (15). The book’s structure echoes her argument about queer parody as “a refusal of genre’s prediction and projection into the future, and . . . a dandyish, detached appropriation of available (even hostile) genres” (232). The book’s loose connectivity allows Tucker to show the ways that parody’s parasitism shifts in relation to the host work/genre. As Tucker argues in her conclusion: “Queer genre parody invites us to reorient towards form, becoming more promiscuous in what we want from it. . . . it is not a project of negation, but of mining genre for different forms of satisfaction, forms of pleasure gleaned from conventionality that nevertheless take us out of its normative range” (233).
Part one, “Open Season on Genre,” begins with two shortish chapters on Woolf’s parody of generic forms in her queer mock-biographies, Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), followed by a much longer chapter dealing with Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Both Woolf and Gibbons were writing obvious parodies, self-consciously drawing the reader’s attention to the genre conventions they flouted. The arguments about Flush and Orlando concur with and extend Melanie Micir’s work on Orlando as queer biography. As Micir argues, “formal normativity protects and produces living normativity,” so, in “rupturing the generic conventions of biography,” Woolf finds a “means of unseating the keystone of normativity itself” (Micir 123). Tucker agrees, noting that, in these “queerly inclusive mock-biographies” (56), the pleasures of parody compensate for the failure of genre (42), thus “challeng[ing] us to recognize our own pan-textual tastes, the multiple ways we take pleasure in genre” (56) beyond normative narrative conventions.
Tucker’s reading of Gibbons is consciously against the grain of most available criticism of Cold Comfort Farm—though, as Tucker notes, it is a “conventionally” queer reading aligning the queer with the Gothic, in the spirit of Eve Sedgwick (93). She argues rightly that, although the novel endorses nineteen-year-old protagonist Flora’s tidying-up of the farm, the novel’s pleasures largely emerge from the queer, chaotic energies that unfold, repeatedly and excessively, through its beginning and middle section. The novel sets up both its original genres (the rural novel and the gothic) and the parody simultaneously, with the explicit aim of policing the excesses of the original genres through laughter. As Tucker points out, the novel’s best jokes about the gothic and rural genres, whether running (Judith’s Freudian obsession with her son Seth, Aunt Ada’s repetition that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed”), or one-off (the loss of the cow Graceless’s leg) are queerly, and generically, excessive. In the novel’s end, these pleasures are mustered and harnessed, and queer comic excess deflates into straight (both heteronormative and serious) conventionality: “The excessive stamping out of what’s funny in Cold Comfort Farm indicts both the predictable forms of generic pleasures and the broader heteronormative ends they serve” (63). Flora, in Tucker’s reading, is less a heroine than a eugenicist, “stand[ing] for a naturalizing generic order in which all extraneous or excessive reminders are gathered into enervating compatibility” (75).
Tucker stitches this first part of the book to the second, “Passing Parodies,” through her consideration of the gothic, linking Gibbons with Bowen’s “passing” parodic and queer mobilization of gothic tropes in her short fiction. As Tucker notes, though both the queer and the gothic are notable characteristics in Bowen’s fiction (and in criticism of the gothic more broadly, from Sedgwick onward), they are “remarkably spun apart in her writing and in critical discussions of the fiction . . . because Bowen does not represent queerness as part of gothic chaos” (94). In fact, as Tucker argues, “the gothic short stories that allude to queer desire expose the assumption that the one inevitably arises out of the other” (96). This reading corresponds, perhaps, with Maud Ellman’s earlier assessment of Bowen’s fiction as “unusual” in “its frictional disjunctions between modes of writing” (146). This longer chapter on Bowen is thoroughly engrossing, especially in its choice of close readings of three stories—“The Cat Jumps” (1934), “The Apple Tree” (1934) and “Love” (1941)—which “queer the gothic by laying it bare, making it look like an awkward, funny, or campy habitation” (96).
Though the weight of critical work on Bowen tends to read these two genres apart, there are more stories to which Tucker’s critical framework could apply: “The Back Drawing-Room” (1926), for instance, in which an interloping, unnamed storyteller narrates a tale-within-a-tale of an encounter with a ghostly house, to which he humorously refuses to attribute gothic conventions (223). His tale becomes more conventionally gothic as it proceeds – including a ghostly woman and the revelation that the house had been burned down –yet its gothic credentials are undermined when the storyteller reveals that the ghostly projection he encountered was not a dead person, but someone living elsewhere, in Dublin or England. The story unsettles readers and its internal audience because the tale seems both to confirm the emotional excesses of the gothic genre as attached to the queer “outsider” and to undo them (Ellmann 154). His tale causes both a break in the tight-knit social “semi-circle” and a redrawing, “intimately,” of its boundaries (Bowen 227). Tucker concludes of Bowen’s gothic short fiction that:
as a whole [it] does not allow her readers to settle into a generic home: periodically, it reminds us that the gothic can be a ridiculous dwelling place. . . . The parody does not make light of the lives at risk, but it mocks the complacency of conventions, the habit of squatting in another older form to accommodate yourself in the present. (126)
The ill-fit between settled readerly expectations and newly arrived forms of desire centers Tucker’s readings of Sam Selvon and Zadie Smith. In these writers’ work, immigrant or so-called multicultural narratives offer an opportunity to imitate and evolve colonial forms and expectations. Throughout the book, Tucker has approached genre, following Hans Robert Jauss, through its relation with readers’ expectations and satisfactions (3); parody marks what Michael Prince terms “the decay of genre,” allowing for genre’s destruction, evolution, and renewal (4-5). In The Lonely Londoners, Tucker argues, Selvon parodies the white colonial and sexual desires for Black masculinity and West Indian literary hybridity (131). These desires are answered and exhausted by Selvon’s Black male narrators, who self-consciously mimic and mock them (154). Smith’s White Teeth, in Tucker’s reading, similarly associates readerly ambitions about genre—which Tucker argues are inevitably invested in the dominance of reader over text—as violent and dehumanizing (160). This occurs both within and outside the text: within, in the efforts of characters to assert scientific and genetic control over the future (165), and, outside, of readers to do the same to the novel itself (Tucker offers an account of several reviewers’ attempts to discipline Smith’s "hysterical" style [160-65]). Inside of the plot, Smith’s characters' exclusionary activities, which limit queer, non-normative and Black futures, lead to parody turning upon them (165). The question that animates Smith’s novel, as Tucker argues, is therefore “how to orient ourselves to an always unknowable future” (165), whether this orientation is readerly, scientific, or political.
The book’s concluding chapter, on “Disciplinary Fictions,” considers the detective and campus genres, as represented by Sayers and Lodge. Sayers’ scareer is typically read in terms of progress from the generic to the innovative (197). But, Tucker argues, even in Sayers’s “bad” or generic fiction—key examples are “The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers” and The Five Red Herrings—Sayers queers the detective genre by making the “inflexibility [of its rules] visible,” “foreground[ing] superfluity, redundancy, or excess” through her playful approach to detail, event, and narration (199). Noting the binary logic of the novel’s first sentence (“If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints”), and the immediate undermining of that binary that follows (“‘Either’ is perhaps misleading, for most of the painters are fishers also in their spare time”), Tucker reads Sayers’s red herrings – fish, false leads, and the gaggle of artist suspects – as a critique of both originality and binary logic (211-14). As much as the novel satisfies conventional desires for the genre markers of rationality and simplicity, and conclusiveness, it does so to demonstrate the limits and ambivalences of those desires (216). Thus, according to Tucker, “these texts, apparently frivolous concessions to popular taste, emerge not as conservative or stylistic regressions from . . . her less conventional novels, but as queer parodic engagements with form and desire” (222).
Frivolity also animates Tucker’s discussion of David Lodge’s campus satires, selected to conclude the book “because the disavowed pleasures of academic self-parody underwrite our current method wars” (226). The unsettling unseriousness of queer genre parody “anticipates” the kinds of academic agitation over depth, surface, and reparative reading which has unfolded in the wake of post-critique’s ignition of a new method war for literary studies (223). This final chapter outlines the stakes of reading differently, through parody, but also of simply continuing to read, no matter how serious or how frivolous the text. For Tucker, uniting to assert the value of reading in itself – rather than fighting over the importance or quality of the text under analysis or the method by which we read – is our means of professional and disciplinary survival in the face of literary studies’ trivialization by culture warriors and by neoliberal managers. In seeking to straighten our reading in line with corporate values, we risk erasing the multiple, unruly forms of pleasure and knowledge that literature embodies, and that run athwart such conventional expectations.
Unexpected Pleasures belongs to a broader scholarly turn to thinking about minor forms and styles—among them, aphorism, satire, and nonsense—that informed literary production in the long twentieth century, and which were and continue to be more pervasive than previously assumed. (Here I am thinking especially about Noreen Masud's recent book on Stevie Smith and the collection Aphoristic Modernity). In focusing on the mutation of parody across genres and temporal periods, Unexpected Pleasures invites us to “see a new image of the twentieth century stretch before us,” one that embraces “chronological latitude” and unsettles “the traditional divisions between popular genre and literary experimentation” (16). In its approach, Tucker’s monograph re-engages critically with works or writers marginalized, made minor, or pushed out of critical histories of the twentieth century due to their genre or popularity, the long span of their career, or weak ties to the dominant themes of literary history.
Works Cited
Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Back Drawing-Room.” The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, introduced by Angus Wilson. Vintage Books, 1980, pp.214-27. Kindle Edition.
Boyiopoulos, Kostas, and Michael Shallcross, editors. Aphoristic Modernity: 1880 to the Present. Brill, 2020.
Davison, Sarah. Modernist Parody: Imitation, Origination, and Experimentation in Early Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford UP, 2023.
Ellmann, Maud. “Shadowing Elizabeth Bowen.” New England Review (1990-), vol. 24, no. 1, 2003, pp. 144–69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40244225. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. U of Illinois P, 2000.
Masud, Noreen. Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language. Oxford UP, 2022.
Micir, Melanie. The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives. Princeton UP, 2019.
Phiddian, Robert. “Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?” New Literary History, vol. 28, no. 4, 1997, p. 673-96. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nlh.1997.0056.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, vol. 3, cycle 3, 25 Aug. 2018. https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/weak-theory-weak-modernism.
Shallcross, Michael. Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture. Routledge, 2017.