Having already read Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards (New York: Tor 1991) once without falling for it Your Humble Blogger isn’t quite sure how it came to be in his hands upon leaving the library. I suppose, knowing that many people (Gentle Readers, some of ’em) adore the book, I decided that I would have been charmed rather than annoyed had I been in the mood to be charmed rather than annoyed. Upon re-reading it, it’s, well, I was neither charmed nor annoyed. Of course, the circumstances weren’t great this time around either.
The book is a pastiche, I suppose, of Dumas. That is, it’s written as if it had been badly translated from the French, there are duels every fifteen minutes, and there’s a good deal of ponderous humour involving cross-talk and things the Author knows but the characters don’t. At one point, I noticed that a paragraph consisted of two sentences and contained seventeen commas. I imagine it was a lot of fun to write.
And fun to read, I hear. Put it down to YHB’s anglophilia.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
The question is, do you like Dumas? If you don’t like Dumas, there’s no way you will like _Phoenix Guards_. It is not so much a pastiche of Dumas as a parody (not all parodies make fun of what they closely imitate, of course). If you like Dumas but you don’t like _Phoenix Guards_, then Mr. Brust must be faulted for insufficiency in his imitation of Dumas.
Now that the series has reached its fifth book (the sixth is coming out this summer, I think) I’m finding the style and the humor have flagged a great deal, but I find the first book unremittingly exuberant.
Hi, Chris—can you elaborate on “not all parodies make fun of what they closely imitate”? I think I would usually consider making-fun-of to be the dividing line between parody and pastiche, but I may be using “making fun of” differently from how you mean it, and anyway I’m a little muzzyheaded this morning. But regardless, I’m curious about people’s taxonomies for this sort of thing.
The dividing line I tend to draw (and in drawing the line I try to adhere to standard dictionary definitions and the _Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_) between parody and pastiche does not have to do with the intent of the imitation, but with the dominant mode of the imitation. A pastiche imitates a particular work, including its plot but also perhaps its style; a parody imitates a writer’s style. So one might say that _Phoenix Guards_ is a pastiche of _The Three Musketeers_, or one might say it is a parody of Dumas, but it could not be a pastiche of Dumas, being but one book.
Both parodies and pastiches can be satiric in intent — imitating a work in a way that highlights and exaggerates elements of work worthy of ridicule or contempt — but neither must be satiric. In the case of _Phoenix Guards_, the work is a close stylistic imitation of Dumas, especially as he was translated in the nineteenth century, and it exaggerates certain features of that style. This makes it a parody. The intent of the parody is not, however, to make the style of Dumas (or, if you will, the syle or perhaps the manner of Paarfi of Roundwood, the Dragaeran author Brust is translating) seem ridiculous or contemptible, but to entertain the reader with the uses of that style, which Brust finds both laughable _and_ admirable. Brust doesn’t expect his readers to know Dumas, and I think he hopes that, if readers like _Phoenix Guards_, they’ll go read Dumas (preferably by tracking down the 19th-century translations published by Little & Brown) and enjoy Dumas as well.
I would hesitate to call _Phoenix Guards_ a pastiche of _Three Musketeers_, although I think one could. It does borrow more than style from Dumas (though a parody can borrow plotting style as well as literary style), appropriating plot elements and character types as well, but its plot does not, taken as a whole, closely resemble that of _Musketeers_.
Given the chance to change my phrase, I think I would choose between takeoff, sendup, and hommage. Although ‘travesty’ is appealing as well.
Anyway, I like Dumas well enough, although I’m not a huge fan. Let’s say, I like Dumas enough to recognize the style, but not enough to either wish there were more of it, or wish to see it applied to other genres.
I’m not sure, now, about the usage of the word pastiche, which I’ve used and heard used mostly about Sherlock Holmes stories by people other than Arthur Conan Doyle. Is Doon (for instance) a pastiche, then, rather than a parody? Car Wars? What’s the appropriate term when you are sending up a genre, rather than a specific writer or a work, as in The Cheap Detective or Police Squad?
R.I.
-V.