From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : online.wsj.com
The Sincerest Form of Ridicule
Henry James, Raymond Chandler, J.K. Rowling—no writer is safe from the literary satirist
Literary parody is often described as verbal caricature. It's true that both parody and caricature rely on the exaggeration of quirks and idiosyncrasies for satiric purposes. But their differences go deeper. Caricature plays on the monstrous for comic pay-off; it turns earlobes into wind-flaps, lips into gaudy sausages. Parody can be just as crude, but usually it is slinkier, more insinuating; there's something snugly parasitic in its intimacy. The parodist must inhabit his victim's voice down to its least inflections—with close and lingering attention to those very flourishes an author is proudest of—only to turn the voice to ridiculous effect. The trick is to yoke the unmistakable manner to a grotesquely disproportionate subject.
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