Parody Displacement / Literature

• In the early chapters of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice is trying to "sort her head out", she recites two children's verses, which she names "How Doth the Little..." and "You Are Old, Father William." Contemporaries of Carroll would have recognised these as parodies of "Against Idleness and Mischief" by Isaac Watts and "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them" by Robert Southey. These days, while many people know Carroll's parody of Southey's verse, fewer know that it is in fact a parody, and fewer still could name or recite the original. Some verses that Carroll parodied even scholars aren't sure of because they are now so obscure. In fact, the only one that hasn't caused Parody Displacement is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" ("Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star").
  • Speaking of Southey, his poem "The Battle of Blenheim" originated the familiar album cover trope of the kid playing innocently with a skull.
  • And few modern readers of Through the Looking-Glass would know the tune^note "My Heart and Lute" the White Knight's "A-Sitting on a Gate" is supposed to be sung to, even though Alice points out that "the tune isn't his own invention."
  • Much of the wording in Alice in Wonderland was meant to be surreal and strange, but has actually made its way into common parlance so that it seems perfectly normal to a modern reader ^note (not unlike the Bard's contributions to the English language). For instance, Alice says "Let's pretend," in the beginning. At the time, "pretend" meant "to lie or deceive", so "Let's pretend" sounded very odd. Now, thanks to Alice in Wonderland, the meaning of the word has changed quite a bit. A few words, such as "chortle", were coined outright and would have been nonsense to Alice's first readers; today, we think nothing of them. Because of their origin, they could be considered a double instance of Parody Displacement — very few people will realize they came from Alice, and further, even if they do, they won't realize that the original references in Alice were parodies themselves! Alice in Wonderland is its own Parody Displacement, one could say.
  • Check out the wonderful book "Annotated Alice" where famed mathemagician Martin Gardner takes the time to annotate virtually every cultural reference made. Suffice to say there are at least as many words in the annotations as there are in the original stories. One particularly in-depth aside takes up a full two-page spread, written in 8-point font. In a large-format hardback.
  • The Mad Hatter was already a trope before Carroll came along. Hatters used mercury to cure felt, and would sometimes lose cognitive function from inhaling the fumes, so mad hatters was a Victorian trope somewhat analogous to the modern trope of insane postal workers. Though "Mad Hatter's disease" is still used occasionally as an informal term for mercury poisoning, the book has the only surviving use of the character concept. Though interestingly, while he was a hatter, and mad, he was never outright called "The Mad Hatter" in the actual story, just "The Hatter".
  • The phrase "grinning like a Cheshire cat" has been dated to the late 18th century, eighty years before the novel, although no one is entirely sure what its origins are. It is thought that it may be connected to the dairy farms of Cheshire, and the past reputation of the area for its "abundance of milk and cream". It was the pre-eminent milk, cheese, and cream producing county of England for several centuries. Others have pointed out that Lewis Carrol himself was born and raised in Cheshire, and may have been inspired by the 16th-century sandstone carving of a grinning cat, on the west face of St Wilfrid's Church tower in Grappenhall, a village adjacent to his birthplace in Daresbury. A photo of Grappenhall's grinning cat is available here◊.
• An even older literary example is Cervantes' Don Quixote, which parodied a number of Chivalric Romances from the time period, especially one called Amadis Of Gaul. None of these are read any more, except by scholars. The original version of Amadis of Gaul had been written by an anonymous writer in the 14th century, but the work was thought to be incomplete. Throughout the 16th century, several different writers (Spanish, Italian, German, and French) added new volumes to the story. By the 1590s, there were about 24 volumes of Amadis in circulation around Europe. They were of varying quality and full of internal contradictions due to the different styles and backgrounds of the writers involved. There were also other Chivalric Romances which copied tropes and ideas from Amadis. Writing in the early 17th century, Cervantes decided to satirize both the genre and its main source.
  • Miguel de Cervantes was the victim of a trope misunderstanding when an anonymous writer calling himself "Avellaneda" published a false sequel to Don Quixote. The sequel completely missed the cleverness of Cervantes' references that mocked tropes of the chivalric genre (the noble knight's Unlimited Knapsack, the magic Healing Potion), instead choosing to write a slapstick and completely unfunny book that no one ever reads now. The book is signed as "Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, born in Tordesillas", but that is a fake name, and the prologue is riffed with insults to Cervantes and unashamed flattering to his main rival, Lope de Vega. Apparently at the time the book came out the writing style was famous enough to identify the author without need of giving his real name. Given the volume of Take That! in Cervantes' canon sequel, it is more than likely that Cervantes knew perfectly well who he was. However, precisely for this reason nobody bothered to ever write down Avellaneda's real identity. Now, 400 years later, Cervantes and Don Quixote are as famous as ever, while we only know the other as "that guy that insulted Cervantes in a Fan Fic". Interestingly, in Cervantes Part 2 of Don Quixote, Quixote is infuriated that an imposter is using his name. At one point, Quixote meets Don Alvaro Tarfe (a character created by Avellaneda) and "gets him to swear an affidavit that he has never met the true Don Quixote before".
  • Another case of this in Don Quixote is that both books were a satire and, as such, contained a lot of references not only to now disappeared chivalry books (the second part contains extensive parodies of Tirant lo Blanch, one of the better chivalry books and a Cervantes favourite) but to Spain's popular culture at the 17th century: (respectful) caricatures of then-famous celebrities, unrespectful caricatures of contemporary writers, quotes from Cervantes's favourite poets, popular proverbs, then contemporary Urban Legends, phrases that can be taken in at least two different ways, all of them completely unknown for the modern reader if not by the notes provided in the reprints. Cervantes's book was incredibly funny when he published it, but it is very difficult to see it like this now.
  • Another of the difficulties of the novel is that at some points, Quixote and his squire are merely listeners to someone else's story. A number of secondary characters narrate at length their own past experiences and adventures, which often have nothing to do with chivalric romance at all. They are Cervante's takes on other genres.
• Voltaire's classic Candide is a harsh satire aimed at the optimistic teachings of Gottfried Leibniz... who is now largely remembered as a mathematician. And they have forgotten the more likely target of Voltaire's satire, the now still more obscure Christian Wolff, who combined views as optimistic as Leibniz's with a career nearly as random as Pangloss's.
• In Agatha Christie's collection of stories Partners in Crime, each story is a Homage to a different crime-writer. While many of them are still famous today, a few are now hopelessly obscure. (Anyone familiar with the blind detective Thornley Colton? Anyone?)
• Stella Gibbons's comic novel Cold Comfort Farm has outlived the rustic romances it parodied.
• Gulliver's Travels was a parody of the then-popular genre of journeys to distant lands. It is now a standalone classic. It contains innumerable digs at people and ideas of Swift's time, which go right past modern readers. This has led many people to think of Jonathan Swift as nothing more than a writer of a whimsical children's tale, when in reality he was a vicious and biting satirist who regularly savaged society in his writings. One of his other better-known works is "A Modest Proposal", where he satirically suggests that the best way to handle all the starving children in Ireland was to simply eat them, reasoning that since the British had already exploited Ireland in every other way, the only thing to do now is go humanitarian.
  • Certain sections of Several Voyages to Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver are also parodying other works. His Laputa and Balnibari more directly mock Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. And, strangely, the ideas of each of the 4 places he goes may have been taken from an old Japanese story, or collection of stories, that talked about tiny people, giants, and horses. Whether this is truth or an extraordinary coincidence unclear, but considering how Japan is the only place Gulliver goes to that Swift treats with any kind of reality (in addition to being the only real place Gulliver goes, and the only place where he doesn't learn the language) there may be something to it.
  • When Hayao Miyazaki made a film called Laputa: Castle in the Sky, he apparently didn't understand that Swift's floating island of idiot-savants was meant as a scathing satire of scientists and the British crown, so he simply presented it as a place of advanced technology and learning. He also had no way of knowing that the name of "Laputa" was derived from one of the worst possible epithets in Spanish, for the sake of a joke about etymology at the expense of the scientists Swift was lampooning. Consequently, most foreign releases of the anime elide the first word of the title. "Laputa" literally means "the whore" in Spanish.
  • Most of the Laputa chapter is devoted to mocking scientists and other would-be intellectuals of Swift's era. The male masters of Laputa have devoted their entire lives to astronomy, mathematics, music, and technology, but they have little to no skills in any other area. They are complete failures when it comes to designing buildings or designing clothes, to the point that none of their clothes fit and none of their buildings have any symmetry. They are often so lost in their own thoughts, that they have to employ servants just in order to bring them back to reality for a few minutes, or to remind them that they have to eat, or urinate. These "intellectual" masters are married, but pay little attention to their wives or their needs. So their wives have to find lovers among the people who visit Laputa, and adultery is actually widespread in their society. The husbands don't pay attention, even when the adulterous act happens in front of their eyes. Lost in their own world.
• One interesting detail in The Great Divorce is that Heaven is so "solid" that souls coming directly from Earth or Hell are unable to move anything—even leaves or blades of grass. In the preface, C. S. Lewis credits a Sci-Fi short story for giving him the idea: the protagonist of the story time travels to the unchangeable past and finds "raindrops that would pierce him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength could bite". Lewis couldn't remember the name of the story or its author, but it has been speculated to be the "The Man Who Lived Backwards," by the never-famous Charles F. Hall, and thus, the only reason why some might even know of his name.
  • The title and purpose of The Great Divorce serve as a Take That! against the now obscure-in-comparison The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell by William Blake — which was itself a Take That! against the doubly obscure Heaven And Hell 1758 by Emanuel Swedenborg.
• Although the modern vampire dates back to Lord Ruthven of John William Polidori's 1819 short story "The Vampyre", Dracula is still the archetypical vampire. Even then, it is the Dracula in adaptations people think of rather than the original book character.
  • For instance, many people reading Dracula will be surprised to see the title character walking around in daylight.
  • For that matter, many people familiar with Lord Ruthven might not realize that this tragic Romantic figure was a none-too-kind dig at the author's boss, Lord Byron. And Polidori borrowed the name "Lord Ruthven" from the novel Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb, where Lord Ruthven is a rakish villain who seduces and corrupts innocent women. Both Polidori and Lamb's Ruthvens are unflattering depictions of Lord Byron, because they both felt that Byron betrayed their trust. Byron had spent quite sometime trying to romance the (already married) Lamb. Once she fell for him, he quickly broke off their affair and rejected her increasingly desperate attempts to get him to bed her again, leading to them publicly quarreling about their love life, and making their relationship one of the worst kept secrets in the British Empire. Lamb gained a rather scandalous reputation in the process. Polidori dreamed of becoming a famous writer like Byron and initially viewed Byron as his friend (and possible role model), not just as an employer, until Byron started publicly mocking any work written by Polidori, stressing his superiority in physical, combat, and literary skills over Polidori, and getting impatient with Polidori's periods of ill health. He fired the young physician after about a year of service. A Broken Pedestal-process changed the way Polidori perceived Byron.
• Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey seems to be more widely studied and read than the gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe which it parodies. In fact, for a long time scholars weren't even sure that the works she parodied even existed. The novel was published in 1817, but had actually been written in the late 1790s. Austen had chosen to include humorous references to seven then-recently published novels, most of which were soon out of print and forgotten due to the changing preferences of the 19th-century audience. Soon neither scholars, nor readers could understand what Austen was referring to. In the 1920s, two literary historians tracked down the forgotten works and revived interest in them. All seven have seen reprints in the 20th and 21st century, mostly because Austen happened to mention them.
• A number of 18th-century poets such as Colley Cibber are mainly known even to academics for being mocked and parodied by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad and other works.
• 1066 and All That, a 1930 parody of the patriotic Whiggish school history books of the early 20th century, has long outlasted the works it is parodying.
• A good number of elements in the Harry Potter series are meant to parody aspects of British culture that are little-known beyond it. A classic example is the rather funky conversion method for wizarding currency (seventeen sickles to a galleon, twenty-nine knuts to a sickle), which confuses most foreigners but was a pretty apt parody of the incredibly convoluted pre-decimalisation coinage that Britain phased out in the 70s.
• Few people remember that the character of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower was an homage to and Affectionate Parody of, at the time, well-known British naval officers, particularly Lord Horatio Nelson. Many of Hornblower's adventures, as well as his career progression, closely parallel Lord Nelson's. These days, all but Nelson are largely forgotten by those who aren't historians or military strategists, and Nelson himself is little-known outside of Great Britain.
• Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Trope Maker for Dystopia, was written because the writer found so much Fridge Horror in one of H. G. Wells's later novels (written long after Wells had jumped the shark) that Huxley considered that novel to depict more of a dystopia than a utopia. Today, Brave New World is considered a classic, and practically no one knows or cares about Men Like Gods or any of Wells's other post-1922 novels. Partly justified by the nature of these novels and their relative lack of impact in comparison to Wells' earlier works.
• The 1966 novel Mott The Hoople by Willard Manus is only remembered now because of the band who named themselves after it.
• The Satyricon, a satirical epic spoofing the aspiring middle-class through a group of poetry-Fan Boy criminals Walking the Earth, contains multiple occasions where characters will break into poems that are parodies of poems of the day, often with plenty of Stylistic Suck applied. Even the prose contains numerous Shout Outs to contemporary pop culture and memes. The thing is that the work was written during The Roman Empire, and almost all of the works it references are long lost. In most cases, The Satyricon is the only record that they existed at all.
• Robert Michael Ballantyne's 1857 novel The Coral Island features three boys living in harmony on an island after a shipwreck. The novel used to be a real classic in the early 20th century. However, it also used to really annoy a certain William Golding, so he wrote a Deconstruction of it, complete with names ripped out of Ballantyne's work. Now, which is better known today, The Coral Island or Lord of the Flies?
  • Lord of the Flies is in a similar situation to The Cold Equations, in that it's essentially a Deconstructive Parody of a genre that was widespread at the time, but doesn't really exist anymore. There were countless novels about British schoolboys going into hostile environments with no parental support, and using basic survival skills, the power of teamwork, and their stiff-upper-lip courage and wit to become the masters of their surroundings. (It also doubled as a sort of pro-colonial narrative, since the message was essentially "Brits are better than the savages and can build civilization anywhere!", which was obviously popular at the time.) Lord of the Flies turned out to be the Genre-Killer by arguing that the boys would actually quickly descend to the level of "savages" and break down into factionalism, infighting, and murder, and nowadays no story plays the original tropes straight anymore.
• A Swiftly Tilting Planet features St. Patrick's Rune, which the protagonists use to fight against evil. Many readers may believe that the rune was the author's own invention or (if they are familiar with St. Patrick's Lorica/Breastplate) that it was her own variation of the original. The truth is that the exact wording of the rune was taken from the longer "St. Patrick's Hymn Before Tara", written by James Clarence Mangan, a nineteenth-century Irish poet.
• The Cold Equations was written as a subversion/deconstruction of Invincible Science Hero people who Ass Pulled perfect solutions to everything using SCIENCE. It was a character archetype that plagued science fiction and other literary genres at the time, so the Downer Ending of Cold Equations was meant to be a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome moment where the scientist can't magically save everyone thanks to a mixture of incompetent engineering and pure bad luck. However, the archetype ended up dying out relatively soon after, while Cold Equations has been reprinted often as a sci-fi classic. As a result most people who read it nowadays don't have the context behind the story and are just astounded by the laughably short-sighted spaceship design.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night has been parodied so many times, most people have no idea that it comes from Paul Clifford (1830) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or that that phrase is the just the start of a very long opening sentence. The phrase was: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. It was supposed to be "atmospheric" and gave the novel a Gothic Horror-tone.
• Many people think the phrase Something Wicked This Way Comes originated with Ray Bradbury, not realising that the line is acknowledged in-universe in both the book and the movie as a line from one of the Weird Sisters' songs in William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Even more odd, some experts now believe the Witches' songs were not written by Shakespeare but by his pupil Thomas Middleton.
• Discworld has as one of its many settings the Unseen University where most if not all of the Wizard characters reside and as such is the most respected (read: oldest) institution of magical academics that wasn't destroyed by the Mage Wars. What many readers may not realise is that its name is a parody of the Invisible College, a group of like-minded scientists and natural philosophers in England formed around the mid-17th century.
  • Likewise, Ankh-Morpork is itself a parody of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar series.

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