Abstract
‘The fictional journal illustrates clearly the inherent tendency of the formally mimetic text to parody its model’: not for the only time I find myself agreeing with one of Valerie Raoul’s statements about the genre without endorsing the arguments which produce it.1 The reason for such conditional support is her general tactic of merely portraying characteristics and accepting them all as equally valid, with a resultant laxity over such things as chronological accuracy or stylistic verisimilitude. This same all-inclusiveness seems to underlie the quoted remark, the rigour of which is undermined by the weak conclusion that there are parodic elements to be found in all sorts of examples. Now, depending on definitions, this may be true, but it is surely important to try to ascertain whether a given case of so-called parody is a deliberate piece of humour on the part of the novelist. The over-written horrors and unlikely writing situations of The Journal of Edwin Underhill, for instance, may be amusing in their very excesses, but the author clearly intended them to be part of a gripping yarn: the parody is unconscious and should be seen as the bad or careless writing that it is.
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Notes
V. Raoul, The French Fictional Journal: Fictional Narcissism/Narcissistic Fiction (Toronto University Press, 1980) p. 24.
G. Greene, The End of the Affair (Heinemann, 1951) p. 7.
S. Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13¾ (Methuen, 1983) pp. 16, 84, 88.
R. Haydn, The Journal of Edwin Carp (Hamish Hamilton, 1954) p. 8.
Ibid., p. 122.
Ibid., p. 239.
R. Queneau, Journal intime (1950), in Les Oeuvres complètes de Sally Mara (Gallimard, 1979) pp. 33, 151 (24 February; 21 April).
Ibid., p. 23 (29 January). Readers may have recognised ‘What?’ and ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’
Ibid., pp. 68–9 (20 May).
Ibid., pp. 119, 144 (7 March; 17 April).
Ibid., p. 7 (4 February).
Ibid., p. 25.
C. Bermant, Diary of an Old Man (Chapman and Hall, 1966) p. 103.
Ibid., pp. 53–4, 33.
Ibid., pp. 98–9.
J. Fletcher, ‘Sartre’s Nausea: A Modern Classic Revisited’, Critical Quarterly, XVIII (1976) 11–20, p. 18.
Ibid., p. 12.
J.-P. Sartre, La Nausée (Folio edition, 1980) pp. 12–13.
Ibid., pp. 22–3 and 218.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., pp. 64–5.
Ibid., p. 42.
D. Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 213–15.
P. Axthelm, The Modern Confessional Novel (Yale University Press, 1967) p. 88.
H. Porter Abbott, ‘Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XCV, 1 (January 1980) p. 26.
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© 1989 Trevor Field
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Field, T. (1989). Parody. In: Form and Function in the Diary Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10209-9_5
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