Preface, Introduction, and Chapter One

MAKING MOCKERIES, MAKING CONNECTIONS: THE “REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL” OF PARODY IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ART AND LITERATURE A dissertation submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Nogojiwanong (Peterborough), Ontario, Canada © Copyright Sara Jane Affleck, 2018 Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program January 2019 ABSTRACT Making Mockeries, Making Connections: The Revolutionary Potential of Parody in Twenty-first Century Art and Literature Sara Jane Affleck Parody has been a strategy within cultural production since the ancient Greeks: “paraodia” referred to a song sung alongside the main narrative thread of a dramatic work; the prefix “para-” also signifies “against.” In A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon offers this core definition: parody is “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity … [with] tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference” (xii). This and other aspects of Hutcheon’s theory guide my interpretations of works by three contemporary artists working in Canada: Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb; Ursula Johnson’s (Mi’kmaq) threepart exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember); and Kent Monkman’s (Cree and Irish) exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. I argue that the presence of parodic elements in these artists’ works enables them to do two things: to claim spaces that enable recognition of their subject positions, and to critique an aspect of hegemonic norms in contemporary society. I read Lamb’s novel as a critique of the heteronormative gender binary via parody of the picaresque genre and of heteronormative discourse/language. Certain pieces in Monkman’s exhibition parody the epistemological and display strategies of traditional Eurocentric anthropological museums and archives, as can Johnson’s work; her sculptural-installations may also be read as parodying the traditions of Mi’kmaw basket-making. The work of both artists critiques colonial narratives that sought (and may still seek) to denigrate and/or erase Indigenous ii peoples; such narratives of cultural genocide were both tacitly and directly propagated by museums. I analyze these three artists’ works, considering key features of parody (ambiguity; irony and “double-voicedness”; trans-contextualization; and humour), and their effects (defamiliarization; ontological instability; complicity; and laughter). Parody challenges the post-structuralist emphasis on the “decoder,” (viewer/reader) reinstating the “encoder” (artist/author) as agent. Decoders recognize their complicity within the context of the hegemonic narrative, whether the heteronormative gender binary or colonialism, and may come to shift perception – as per Hutcheon’s “potentially revolutionary impact.” Keywords: Parody, satire, decolonization, trans-contextualization, irony, humour, performance art, performativity, gender, trans gender, trans women, picaresque literature, queer theory, literature by trans women, contemporary Indigenous art, museum history, museum dioramas, museum archives, Indigenous representation in museums, social responsibility in art iii Preface I would like to acknowledge that as a PhD student at Trent University in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario) between September 2014 and September 2018, I was an uninvited guest on the traditional territories of the Michi Sagiig Nishinaabeg (Mississauga Anishinaabe).1 I am grateful to have had the opportunity to study, work, and live on this land; while in Nogojiwanong, I learned about local Indigenous issues by attending events at the First Peoples’ House of Learning at Trent, as well as events organized by students in the Indigenous Studies program and by local Nishinaabeg groups. This has contributed to my knowledge of Indigenous issues, adding an invaluable layer of experience to the readings done toward completing this thesis. That said, I am aware of how much I have yet to learn, and I endeavour to continue learning. Also, during the summer of 2018, I returned to Mi’kma’ki, specifically Epekwitk, the unceded territory now known as Prince Edward Island, to work on the final chapter of this thesis. I have been an uninvited guest on this island on and off since 1971; though I was born in another part of Mi’kma’ki (New Brunswick, also home to Maliseet peoples) and grew up in Ottawa (the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nishinaabeg), both of my parents grew up on PEI, so I have family ties there, as I describe in the selfreflection segment of the final chapter. Wherever I reside after graduating, I intend to build relationships with local First Nations/Indigenous peoples, to continue working toward decolonization and reconciliation. As well, I would like to say a huge and heartfelt “wela’lin” to Ursula Johnson (Mi’kmaq, Eskasoni First Nation), whose work launched this learning journey – not only 1 These territories are covered by the Williams Treaty of 1923. https://williamstreatiesfirstnations.ca. Accessed June 13, 2018. iv with respect to my beginning to “decolonize” my mind and reconsider (and even relearn) Canada’s history and my own position as a settler-Canadian, but also, of course, this thesis. I had read about her work in local news publications after moving back to K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS) in the summer of 2010 (I had lived there before from 1990 to 2000), but going to her artist talk at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in late winter 2012 marks a turning point in my awareness and even the direction my life would take. As Johnson discussed her work, I experienced a mix of thoughts and feelings that continued as I left the gallery and in the days that followed, which prompted me to contact her with the idea of doing an interview for a feature article in C Magazine, for which I had been writing exhibition reviews since returning to K’jpuktuk. I cared far less about the article than simply knowing more about her work for myself, though I also hoped a feature would help enable her work to be recognized by a wider audience. When I pitched the idea to C Magazine’s then-editor, he was somewhat reluctant – one concern was that perhaps she had not yet established a large enough body of work to warrant a feature. He did agree, though with the caveat that it would not be published for a while, in part due to C’s production schedule. For close to three hours one afternoon in winter 2012, a couple of days before her birthday, Johnson graciously entertained my questions; the transcript then sat in a folder on my desktop until June 2014, when her first solo exhibition, Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) opened at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, K’jipuktuk. I spoke with her again at the end of that month – another long and fascinating conversation – in the Public Gardens over take-out from a nearby bánh mì shop (as I recall, Johnson insisted on paying), and then spent July writing the article and reading about decolonization. The feature was published in C Magazine’s Winter 2014 issue, four months after I had started the PhD. By then, I was already considering v changing the focus of my thesis; that November, I had gone to a book launch at a small bar in Nogojiwanong to hear Sybil Lamb read from her novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb, and subsequently devoured the copy I bought (and read again and again). As well, Johnson’s art and ideas were continuing to resonate strongly with me as she expanded her body of work, and socio-politically, Indigenous issues and neo-colonialism in Canada were becoming wider points of discussion, sparked in large part by the actions and protests organized by Idle No More, which had begun late in 2012.2 I decided I wanted to continue to be involved in that discussion, and some of what follows here is my attempt to do so. 2 The founding women of Idle No More are Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean, and Nina Wilson. vi Acknowledgements While writing a PhD thesis involves considerable solitude, this project wouldn’t have happened without the support of friends, family, and mentors. Starting with the latter, I couldn’t have asked for a better thesis committee: thank-you to Karleen Pendleton Jiménez for your kindness and helpful comments about gender and other issues; thankyou to Ihor Junyk for your insights about art and literary theory; and a huge thank-you to Veronica Hollinger for pretty much everything – I can’t adequately express the gratitude I have for your commitment to my project, and for your generosity in sharing your time and knowledge over the past four years. Thanks to the internal-external, Sally Chivers, Professor, Department of English, Trent University; and Kim Verwaayen, Associate Professor, Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at Western University, who has kindly agreed to be the external committee member. Thank you to other faculty members, with whom I worked as a teaching assistant: Michael Epp, Kelly McGuire, and in particular, Margaret Steffler – I’m grateful to all of you for your guidance and the ease with which you created a collegial atmosphere. Thanks to Jonathan Bordo for support in first year. Thanks to Hugh Hodges, chair and professor in the Department of English, for support and help. Thanks also to Sylvie Bérard for stepping in for the Special Field Bibliography oral exam and asking such thoughtful questions, and for being chair at the defense. And thanks to Catherine O’Brien, the most helpful and friendly administrative assistant (a.k.a. goddess of information, forms, and technical help) the Cultural Studies program could ever hope to have. Cheers to the other four fine humans in my cohort: Jessica Becking, Alison Fraser, Nick Overduin, and last but definitely not least, Anhiti Patnaik – seminars wouldn’t have been the same without you! Also glad to know others in the Cultural Studies program: vii Laura Greenwood, Amy Jane Vosper, Laura Thursby, Janelle MacDonald, Troy Bordun, and Gozde Kilic. Special thanks, hugs, and love to two incredible CUST friends, Katie Green and Nooshin Aghayan: without you two, I might have given up. Hugs and thanks also to Gillian Austin: our conversations about settler responsibility, decolonization, and reconciliation added another dimension to my experience and to my writing. Thanks to others I met in “Nogo” who have contributed to that journey: Brendan Campbell (Cree) and Keira Lightning (Cree); Emma Langley and Kay Ma at OPIRG; and Fynn Leitch, Celeste Scopelites, Bonnie Devine (Anishinaabe, Serpent River First Nation), and Spencer J. Harrison, fellow committee members at the Art Gallery of Peterborough. Thanks also to folks at NSCAD University, K’jipuktuk (Halifax): Sandra Alfoldy, Karin Cope, Ken Rice, Jane Milton, and Gary Markle. Thanks to everyone at the Fish Factory Creative Centre in beautiful Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland – a place of healing and inspiration. Other friends to whom I owe so much more than mere thanks for their support through thick and thin: Peter Dykhuis, Jessica von Handorf, Faye Harnest, Marwen Tlili, Claire McIlveen, Eryn Foster, Sharon Lax, Hilary Schaenfield, and Zarmina Rafi. Thank-you to Colin Rous, physiotherapist, who was indispensible in helping me survive nearly six months of debilitating pain. Thanks to the Bagnani and Whiteside families for generously providing awards to graduate students in need, including me, as well as the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) program for supplementing funding provided by Trent University. And thanks and gratitude to my parents, Jeanie and Deric, who have rarely questioned the zig-zagging picaresque-like paths my life has taken, and who have offered support both emotional and financial when I have needed it most, whether I asked for it or not. viii Table of Contents Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….vii List of figures ………………………………………………………………………….. xii Introduction …………………………………………………………………………... xiv “Why parody, why now?” ……………………………………………………… xv Methodology …………………………………………………………………. xviii Chapter summaries …………………………………………………………..... xxii A note on terminology ………………………………………………………… xxv Chapter One: Contemporary Parody – Amplifying the Voice of the Subaltern …….1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….1 Parody: Etymology & Basic Definitions ………………………………………… 7 Characteristics of parody ……………………………………………………….. 10 1. Ambiguity ………………………………………………………………. 10 2. Irony & the “double-voiced” nature of parody …………………………. 13 3. Trans-contextualization ………………………………………………… 23 4. Performativity …………………………………………………………... 34 5. Humour & Laughter ……………………………………………………. 37 Effects of Parody ……………………………………………………………….. 51 1. Defamiliarization ……………………………………………………….. 51 2. Ontological instability ………………………………………………….. 61 3. Complicity ……………………………………………………………… 69 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………... 73 Chapter Two: Altered Referents: Parodies of Signs/Language, Genre, & Heteronormative Gender in Sybil Lamb’s I’ve Got a Time Bomb …………………. 75 Introduction …………………………………………………………………….. 75 Self-reflexive statement on gender & gender identity ………………………...... 80 Brief history of the concepts of “sex” & “gender” in the West, and the use of “transgender” & “trans” ………………………………………………………... 84 Plot summary of I’ve Got a Time Bomb ………………………………………... 95 Parody of the Picaresque Genre (& Standard Novel Structure) ………………... 98 ix Parody of Language/Discourse ……………………………………………….. Part I: Changes in name and gender as parody of being “girled” ………..... 98 Part II: Textual parody of female morphology (gendered cues of bodies & their parts) ………………………………………………………………... 122 Parody of Standard English Signification: “Flipping the bird” at Realism & Representation ………………………………………………………………… 140 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….. 156 Chapter Three: A Mockery of Museums: Parody as Decolonizing Counternarrative in Contemporary Indigenous Art ……………………………………….. 161 Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 161 Self-reflexive statement on colonialism and being a settler…………………... 172 Western Museums: Natural History & “Naturalizing” Representations ……... 177 Kent Monkman: Shame & Prejudice: A Story of Resilience …………………. 190 Ursula Johnson: Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) …………………………. 210 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………. 237 Conclusion: Parody & “Delinquency” ……………………………………………... 242 Bibliography/works cited …………………………………………………………... 248 Appendices (Figures) ………………………………………………………………... 266 Appendix I: Photos of the author (and brother) re: gender fluidity …………... 266 Appendix II: Images from Lamb’s I’ve Got A Time Bomb …………………… 268 Appendix III: Images of works in Monkman’s and Johnson’s exhibitions …... 273 x List of figures Figure 1. Age 22, April 1994. (Expired passport.) Figure 2. Age 23~24, June 1995. (Photo credit: Katherine Pittman.) Figure 3. Rod Affleck (brother), age 21~22, July 1995. (Photo credit: Jeanie Affleck.) Figure 4. Age 27, October 1998. (Photo credit: Julie Lapalme.) Figure 5. Illustration for “Medical and Legal Disclaimer,” I’ve Got a Time Bomb: Sybil X. D’Lye. (© Sybil Lamb.) Figure 6. Illustration for “Tick 3,” I’ve Got a Time Bomb: Crudcakes (Cake) and Sybil X. D’Lye. (© Sybil Lamb.) Figure 7. Illustration for Tick 4, I’ve Got a Time Bomb: “Black Mountain Sally” a.k.a. Sybil X. D’Lye. (© Sybil Lamb.) Figure 8. Illustration for Tick 10, I’ve Got a Time Bomb: Mary-Belle (Maybe) Kurtz (left) and Sybil X. D’Lye (right). (© Sybil Lamb.) Figure 9. Cover of Dirty Plotte #7. (© Julie Doucet.) Figure 10. Scent of a Beaver (2016), Kent Monkman. (Photo: The artist.) Figure 11. The Daddies (2016), Kent Monkman. (Photo: The artist.) Figures 12 A & B. Starvation Plates (2016), Kent Monkman. (Photos: Jane Affleck.) Figure 13. Starvation Plates (2016), Kent Monkman. (Photo: Jane Affleck.) Figure 14. “Processing” (2014 and ongoing), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) Figure 15. “Processing” (2014 and ongoing), close-up A, Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) Figure 16. “Processing” (2014 and ongoing), close-up B, Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) Figure 17. “Museological Great Hall” (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) xi Figure 18. Detail, “Museological Great Hall” (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Steve Farmer.) Figure 19. Detail, “Museological Great Hall” (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Steve Farmer.) Figure 20. “The Archive Room” (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) Figure 21. Fishing Creel (database catalogue entry) (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) Figure 22. Kistele’k (baskets) (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) Figure 23. Kistele’k (database catalogue entry) (2014), Ursula Johnson. (Photo: Chris Smith.) xii Introduction In this thesis, I analyze examples of contemporary art and literature that I read as parody: Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb, Ursula Johnson’s (Mi’kmaq, Eskasoni First Nation) exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember), and Kent Monkman’s (Cree and Irish, Fish River First Nation) Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. I argue that the particular characteristics of parody, as well as the effects of these characteristics, enable two key things. One is that encoding agents (i.e., artists or authors) who are from communities often marginalized by hegemonic discourse may use parody to reclaim space and offer a counter-narrative.3 The second is that decoders (i.e., readers or viewers) may find the work alters their perceptions regarding those hegemonic norms, perhaps prompting an affinity for the encoder and/or the views expressed in the parodic artwork. My interpretations of these works are guided by Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms. By her definition, parody is fundamentally “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity … [with] tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference” (xii). This combination of similarity with difference produces five key features that in turn produce one or more effects. For example, trans-contextualization and ambiguity regarding the ways the parodic work repeats or represents elements of the precursor work may produce a defamiliarization effect in “decoders”; this may cause their perceptions to change, which may contribute to the overall revolutionary impact Hutcheon asserts parody has the potential to achieve. Another important aspect of her definition is that while parody offers a criticism or judgment via ironic difference, this criticism is not necessarily targeted at 3 Following Linda Hutcheon, “encoder” refers to the artist or author, and “decoder” to the viewer or reader. xiii the precursor work, but rather an ideology or an aspect of the social context as raised in either/both the precursor and/or the parodic work: Both satire and parody imply critical distancing and therefore value judgments, but satire generally uses that distance to make a negative statement about that which is satirized – ‘to distort, to belittle, to wound’ (Highet 1962, 69). In modern parody, however, we have found that no such negative judgement is necessarily suggested in the ironic contrasting of texts. Parodic art both deviates from an aesthetic norm and includes that norm within itself as backgrounded material. Any real attack would be self-destructive. (Hutcheon 43–44) This not only makes a distinction between satire and parody, but it also points to the fact that in parody, the aesthetic or formal conventions are not generally the target of attack or judgment, whether satiric or not. It further suggests that when the precursor artwork is indeed the target of the attack (as is arguably the case in a couple of the visual art works by Kent Monkman, as will be discussed), then this is due to the satiric humour present in the work and not due to the formal or structural elements of parody itself. “Why parody, why now?” Another way to phrase this question is to ask why many contemporary artists and writers are producing works that (in my view) can be read as parody. Most of Linda Hutcheon’s examples are from the second half of the twentieth century; why is parody relevant now, as the third decade of the twenty-first century approaches? How well do parodic artworks effect Hutcheon’s revolutionary potential; how might they fall short of this potential? While a full explanation for the continued (or perhaps renewed) proliferation of parody in contemporary art and literature is beyond the scope of this thesis, I offer a couple of possible causes.4 Parody’s presence in contemporary art might be due to its characteristics and effects, especially its ironic and self-referential “double-voicedness,” 4 This is my personal perspective; it is not based on any quantifiable data but rather on observation of various trends in a range of media, from news to art. xiv which invites the decoder to recognize the artist or author as encoding agent. Hutcheon describes this as parody’s “pragmatic range” (50), which includes not only the decoder’s interpretations but also the encoder’s intentions. Consequently, encoders who have been “othered” by hegemonic or mainstream society may find in parody a means of making their voices heard and of being recognized, of self-representing and claiming a political position; creating the parodic artwork then comprises an act of agency that may counter the way hegemonic society represents these “others.” This is perhaps increasingly important across Turtle Island (North America), where, since the 2016 election of a racist, sexist/misogynist, homophobic/transphobic, anti-immigration, anti-Islamic, rich, white male into the highest political office of the United States, myriad “others” have been denied rights (and would-be immigrants or refugees, quite literally, a place).5 Many people in Canada are becoming aware that this nation is not free of its own manifestations of right-wing backlash, which are increasingly framed within the right to free speech rather than identified as forms of hate speech prompted by racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. A professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto is now famous for asserting his right to refuse to use people’s pronouns of choice upon the passing of Bill C-16, which “prohibits discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act on the basis of gender identity and expression. The bill … extends hate speech provisions under Canada’s criminal code to transgendered [sic.] people” (Murphy). Several legal experts have dismissed the professor’s interpretation of this law (i.e., that he would be fined or jailed for not using people’s chosen pronouns); the professor further describes the law as imposing a kind of “silent slavery” that quashes free 5 Several policies, or alleged policies, have been implemented in the past two years, but the most recent at the time of writing this introduction (June 2018) is the “zero tolerance” “policy” that has been separating parents and children at the Mexico-US border. xv speech (ibid.). While his refusal to use people’s pronouns may not be hate speech per se, it is symptomatic of his larger resistance to “political correctness,” which he and others apparently see as rooted in a desire to stifle free speech rather than as a move toward equity. In another example, the July 2018 issue of Maclean’s magazine includes results of a poll about Indigenous issues in Canada; the majority of non-Indigenous Canadians reported that they think too much time/money is spent on these issues, and that Indigenous peoples should be assimilated and operate by the same laws as the rest of Canada (as though they do not already) (Hutchins 31). In the face of these desires to produce and defend hegemonic norms, artists and authors whose lives are impacted by the reification of such oppressive ideologies might find a strategy that reinforces their own right to “free speech,” and to a place in the world, more than simply appealing – parody may indeed be life-affirming or even life-preserving. Parody may also offer the potential to defamiliarize hegemonic norms and create ontological instability (loosely defined, a questioning of one’s self or aspects of one’s identity) in decoders by calling their attention to the position of the marginalized encoder and their critique of an aspect of the present social context, which may then help counter forms of right-wing backlash against so-called “political correctness” and “identity politics.” While I do not identify as either Indigenous or trans, I appreciate the potential that parody has toward effecting political change, in a time and place (2018 in North America) where social justice seems in some ways farther out of reach than perhaps at any other point in my lifetime (certainly, than only two years ago). Having said that, I must also state that I do not think that all parody has political potential. Some parodic artworks may simply prompt the “intertextual ‘bouncing’” that Linda Hutcheon asserts is xvi perhaps more important than humour (32). Other works may focus only on aesthetics and be little more than “blank parody,” or pastiche, by Fredric Jameson’s definition (16). Methodology One facet of my methodology has been to strive to use elements of anti-oppressive and anti-colonization and/or Indigenous research methodologies. Taking an anti-oppressive/ anti-colonization approach involves self-reflection and making position statements. At the beginning of the second and third chapters, I offer self-reflection statements regarding gender and colonialism, respectively. As a PhD student, I work within the context of academia, which has a role in the history and perpetuation of racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression; I must, then, try to understand my intersectional identity and, in the process, expose any biases I may hold regarding the people(s) about whom I am writing. For this very act – that of producing academic writing about the work of a trans woman writer and two Indigenous artists – comprises a specific kind of representation; consequently, I must be mindful not to replicate and perpetuate negative stereotypes, and thus perpetuate oppression. My aim is to support their work, to be respectful of their lived experiences, and to call attention to the effort yet needed to make our society more inclusive, safe, and caring. Margaret Kovach (Plains Cree and Salteaux), professor at the University of Saskatchewan, sees situating the self as a key part of the process of research involving Indigenous peoples: “we learn in relation to others, [and] knowing is a process of ‘self-inrelation’” (14). Anti-colonization and anti-oppression research methodologies encourage, even insist, that researchers recognize and understand themselves “in relation” to others. Such methodologies should be transferred to any field in which there is potential for the researcher’s subject position to influence, perhaps negatively, the interpretations and the xvii outcome.6 This may be less of a concern in research conducted in the humanities, as here, research is often qualitative rather than quantitative; in this, however, lies the very possibility that bias is overlooked, as humanities research is tacitly accepted as being more subjective than that done in the “hard” sciences. The techniques I use to analyze the works discussed in this thesis are rooted in part, rather ironically, in New Criticism, which privileges my readings of the text(s) and disregards authorial intention and biographical or contextual details about artists/authors; it eschews the “intentional fallacy” to focus on the reader’s interpretation. While New Criticism authorizes the reader to interpret, I am also indebted to post-structuralism and the notion that my reading is not absolute (premised on the notions that language is uncertain and language fluid and ambiguous), but merely one way of understanding the works under discussion. While I do consider various contexts, as part of parody’s “pragmatic range,” my interpretations of the works discussed in this thesis result from my particular viewpoints and potential biases (including but not limited to my background in art history and literature). When I make assertions as to the effects the works may have on decoders, I am basing this on my own experience as reader/viewer, assuming that other decoders may have similar experiences. That said, I recognize that not all decoders will understand the work in the same way, as I cannot assume we will have the same education; familiarity with past and present issues of colonialism or gender theory; or comfort with analyzing art. As noted, following from Linda Hutcheon’s theory, my concept of contemporary parody is that it displaces some of the emphasis on the text and 6 This is often referred to as “confirmation bias,” a term popularized with Peter Cathcart Wason’s 1960s research. He found that people choose number sets according to a pattern confirming their existing belief (partly because they do not like to be “wrong”), rather than test sequences that would “disprove” those beliefs. Wason showed that people are more concerned with the “costs of being wrong… than investigating in a neutral and scientific way.” https://explorable.com/confirmation-bias. Accessed Feb. 25, 2016. xviii decoder, through calling attention to encoders and their intentions. Parody also demands a consideration of the contexts, both that of the precursor work and the present parodic work, as well as my own socio-cultural context and that of the encoder. Regarding my intentions, in the context of anti-colonization and decolonization: I do not believe I am writing this thesis to seek the approval of Indigenous peoples, for example, by which I mean I am not expecting to be absolved of white-settler guilt, nor do I assume that writing the chapter on contemporary Indigenous art means I have done my part to decolonize.7 At the same time, I must acknowledge that this chapter may be viewed as an attempt to make a “settler move to innocence,” as Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang discuss in “Decolonization Is not a Metaphor” (1). As such, I also recognize that parts of this thesis may be seen as mere “lip service” to decolonization; these are, after all, just words and not actions. I understand that words are not enough and that writing this chapter is just one of many steps I must take.8 Nor am I writing to approve of Indigenous peoples’ resurgence efforts: they do not need settlers’ approval to engage in traditional activities, whatever colonialism and the Indian Act might dictate. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Sagiig Nishinaabeg, Alderville First Nation) writes, [Indigenous Peoples] need to rebuild our culturally inherent philosophical contexts for governance, education, healthcare, and economy. We need to be able to articulate in a clear manner our visions for the future, for living as Indigenous Peoples in contemporary times. To do so, we need to engage in Indigenous processes, since according to our traditions, the processes of engagement highly influence the outcome of the engagement itself. We need to do this on our own terms, without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory, or the opinions of Canadians. (17, Simpson’s emphasis) 7 I use “believe” to account for the fact that I may have an inability to fully identify my own intentions. Without going into detail, I will say that while living in Nogojiwanong, I participated in community volunteer work with a decolonizing aim (though sometimes in a clumsy, bumbling way). 8 xix As she asserts, “resistance” to colonialism is not a viable strategy; if colonialism did not exist, there would be no reason to resist (15). Colonialism requires continuous resistance, as the sustained effort of resistance ensures that little change happens, that systemic oppressions persist; as Simpson explains, the colonial state requires resistance in order to make its defences stronger. Resurgence movements do not engage with colonial structures perpetuating oppression; instead, they operate by their own rules of engagement (ibid). If white settlers have any role in Indigenous resurgence, it is to move out of the way. Ultimately, then, I write for settler readers who may have only an initial awareness of Indigenous issues in Canada. A note on history Another reason artists are choosing to create parodic artworks may be due to parody’s ability to enable these artists to make links between the past – art history or other specific facets, such as colonialism – and the present. This counters some theorists’ assertions that art forms in the post-modern period lack any connection to history, in simply replicating forms and genres from the past that ultimately signify nothing. Linda Hutcheon, in contrast, sees references to history as part of parody’s ability to challenge current norms: “Parody historicizes by placing art within the history of art; its inclusion of the entire enunciative act and its paradoxical authorized transgression of norms allow for certain ideological considerations” (110). She challenges the idea that any reproduction of norms is solely “conservative”; rather, she says, in parody’s “appropriating of the past, of history, its questioning of the contemporary by ‘referencing’ it to a different set of codes, is a way of establishing continuity that may, in itself, have ideological implications” (ibid.). Social justice or equity might also be considered ideological; I would argue, however, that it is precisely within the context of patriarchal, heteronormative, and xx colonial hegemonies that social justice and equity take on the qualities of ideology. As noted above, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asserts that “resistance” to colonialism is necessary because of colonialism; similarly, social justice becomes necessary only within a society that normalizes inequality and inequity. The artists whose works I discuss here are not only questioning the past but also the present – or more precisely, they are questioning a present ideology by holding up the past as frame, through parody’s ability to defamiliarize through trans-contextualization from past to present. Chapter summaries In Chapter 1, “Contemporary Parody: Amplifying the Voice of the Subaltern,” I discuss Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody, identifying what I have parsed as the primary characteristics and effects contributing to parody’s “potentially revolutionary impact.” Other theorists and historians of parody (whose work I also discuss) identify similar characteristics, though some challenge Hutcheon’s theory, particularly with regard to humour, which Hutcheon asserts is not essential to parody’s achieving its impact. I agree to some extent; all three examples discussed in the chapters that follow do indeed deal with sobering aspects of the ways that the heteronormative gender binary excludes those who are perceived as standing outside of it, or of colonialism’s impacts on Indigenous communities. Yet, all three examples have elements of humour, and as such, I think humour may be more important than Hutcheon credits it: as with parody’s other characteristics, humour may contribute to a renewed emphasis on the position of the “encoding agent”; the potential effect may be that humour aids decoders in feeling an affinity for the encoder and perhaps better understanding their marginalized position(s). That decoders may laugh in response to any humour in a parodic artwork is perhaps the surest sign of this affinity; laughter is a performative gesture that may transcend the xxi ambiguity of signs/words. Parody’s specific attributes, as well as the effects they may create, may contribute to marginalized artists’ using parody as a strategy by which to make a political point. Parody’s ironic or “double-voiced” nature, along with ambiguity, irony, trans-contextualization, performativity, and humour, may prompt decoders to experience defamiliarization or distance, while encouraging affinity with the encoder’s position. Parody, then, enables these artists to create and voice a counter-narrative. The second and third chapters comprise the hermeneutics of deconstructing several parodic artworks. Aside from considering Hutcheon’s theory of parody, I will also call upon Judith Butler’s notions of gender and performativity; Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection; Christopher Shelley’s research into the lived experiences of trans repudiation; Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and carnival; Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial mimicry and mockery; Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian analysis of Western museums; and others. In chapter two, “Altered Referents: Parodies of Signs/Language, Genre, and Heteronormative Gender in Sybil Lamb’s I’ve Got A Time Bomb,” I address the ways that parody in a novel by a trans woman may “denormalize” the heteronormative gender binary. As the title of this chapter indicates, I examine Lamb’s 2014 novel I’ve Got A Time Bomb, which I read as a parody of three things: the heteronormative gender binary; the picaresque genre; and hetero-normative discourse/language. The parodic elements, in defamiliarizing the gender binary, call attention to the fact that many trans women live on the margins of heteronormative society, and that a gender expression that is read as ambiguous may result in repudiation. Yet, partly due to humourous elements, the novel may encourage readers to feel an affinity with the protagonist, which may in turn alter perceptions of the heteronormative binary. Specific instances of language in Lamb’s novel parody standard English words or signs, further challenging hegemonic narratives xxii of normative gender. I refer to these as “para-logisms” – i.e., they are new signs/words that stand “beside” (as per the Greek meaning of the prefix “para-”) the old; with their similarity-with-a-difference, these para-logisms speak to the particular, possibly unstable position of the trans woman protagonist. Altered uses of language may be understood as comprising a “trans language,” perhaps offering one answer to Sandy Stone’s query in “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Post-transsexual Manifesto”: “How can the transsexual speak?” (12).9 Finally, in parodying aspects of the tradition of the picaresque genre, Lamb’s novel calls into question not only the stability of gender but also the self as an integrated, consistent subject. The picaro/a (or picarx) – protagonist, Sybil X. D’Lye, travels from one location to the next episodically, consistent with the original Spanish genre; yet, the novel also ironically departs from the earlier Spanish texts, suggesting that instability (of gender and the self) is the norm.10 In Chapter 3, “A Mockery of Museums: Parody as Decolonizing Counter-narrative in Contemporary Indigenous Art,” I consider Ursula Johnson’s three-part exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) and Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. Johnson’s work, and certain pieces in Monkman’s exhibition, can be understood as parodying the epistemological and display strategies of traditional Eurocentric natural history and/or anthropological museums and archives. Both artists also present works that parody traditional museum dioramas or “life group displays,” which participated in museums’ direct and indirect ideologies of “salvage anthropology.” These 9 This is also a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” This suggests Stone sees links between various kinds of “subaltern” voices, that her own experience as a transsexual woman may have commonalities with those of various colonized peoples, for example. 10 The traditional picaresque hero is called the “picaro” and the occasional female heroine the “picara,” as per the gendering of the Spanish language. Karleen Pendleton Jiménez has suggested using “picarx” to cover both, as well as other sex-gender identities (as “Latinx” is used for Latino/Latina, etc.). Here, I use “picarx” except when quoting another source and in the context of the original novels. xxiii installations defamiliarize the standard colonial narrative of Canada’s founding, reinserting Indigenous peoples at the centre. Elements of Johnson’s Mi’kwite’tmn can further be read as parodying the traditions of Mi’kmaw basket-making; in this, however, the target of any judgment or satirical humour is not these traditions but the effects of colonialism on these traditions (see the quote from Linda Hutcheon earlier in this introduction, which indicates that the target of parody’s critique is not always the precursor work itself nor its aesthetic qualities). Rather, the critiques these artists’ works offer are directed at colonial narratives that sought (and still seek) to denigrate and/or erase Indigenous peoples. Settler decoders who understand the parodic allusions and the critique may be unsettled and rethink their relationship to their “home and native land” – and perhaps their very identity as “Canadian.” A note on terminology While in chapter two I discuss the terms “sex,” “gender,” “transgender,” and “trans,” I do not explain the use of terms such as “Indigenous” in chapter three. Here, then, to clarify: I use “Indigenous” to refer to all peoples who were living on Turtle Island at the time of first contact with Europeans, and who continue to live here today, with the upper-case letter designating respect. Some people contest the term “Indigenous,” using the theory about the Bering Strait land bridge as proof that these peoples came from elsewhere, and as such they are not indigenous to this continent. In my view, however, such arguments deny or “whitewash” the effects of historic colonization and present colonialism, partly in tacitly justifying European imperialism and denying Indigenous peoples the right to a homeland. Canada’s national anthem includes lyrics that enable white settlers to call Canada “our home and native land” after only 150 years of official settlement – a far xxiv more specious notion than the idea that peoples who have been here for more than 10,000 years might call it home. I should also note that in the article about Ursula Johnson’s work that I wrote for the Winter 2014 issue of C Magazine, I used the term “Aboriginal,” not “Indigenous.” As I understand it now, “Aboriginal” is considered inappropriate by some Indigenous peoples – for one reason, because it has been the official term used by the Canadian government, and as such, has colonial connotations.11 It also excludes certain peoples who identify as Indigenous but who are not officially recognized as Indigenous (or “Aboriginal”) by the government.12 That said, I recognize that “Indigenous” as a blanket term does not account for the specificities of individual identities, and that some people may prefer other terms. In order to address this, when I know the particular tribal and/or First Nation affiliation of an Indigenous person, I include it (e.g., Ursula Johnson is Mi’kmaq and a member of Eskasoni First Nation, in Unama’ki). Specifically regarding the use of “Mi’kmaq” and “Mi’kmaw”: the former is the noun, used alone to represent the peoples themselves (i.e., the Mi’kmaq of Lennox Island First Nation), while “Mi’kmaw” is the adjective, used to describe or modify other nouns (i.e., the Mi’kmaw creation story). As for terms referring to non-Indigenous peoples: generally, I use “settler” to refer to people of white European descent, whether they arrived 400+ years ago or are the descendants of those people, or whether they are more recent arrivals. On occasion, I use “newcomers” to refer to the latter group and to all manner of recent immigrants, as well 11 It seems that this too has changed, as the federal department is presently called “Indigenous and Northern Affairs” (June 2018). According to a “notice” on the federal website, however, it will undergo further changes, to become “Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada” (a name that seems to double-down on the colonial nation-state imperative to strengthen its powers and influences). 12 Part of the reason I used “Aboriginal” was familiarity, having become accustomed to using it while working as a contract employee in an east coast university’s communications and marketing department between January 2011 and May 2014. The Canadian Press Style Guide was the editing standard, which, at that time, recommended using “Aboriginal.” xxv as those who arrived here as refugees. Some contention exists regarding the term “settler”: on one hand, it has been criticized for being too mild and reducing a person’s sense of accountability for issues related to colonialism; its connotations are similar to “pioneer,” which suggests historicity (thereby reducing present accountability), as well as entitlement to land and property ownership through hard work – an ethos that does indeed continue. More right-leaning people may think “settler” applies only to the historical situation of Europeans coming to the “New World” and has nothing to do with the present (i.e., we are now “Canadians,” not settlers). My view is that it is better to use “settler” than “Canadian” (or, to use settler-Canadian); “Canadian” alone is part of the familiar narrative of national identity that I believe needs to be defamiliarized as the nation works toward reconciliation. In the least, by describing myself as a “settler” I acknowledge my ancestors were not indigenous to this land but arrived here within the last 400 years precisely to settle it, and as such were tacit (and perhaps direct) participants in colonialism. Summary The current prevalence of parody in art forms, then, is perhaps due in part to a resurgence of “identity politics” and the recognition by some members of society that the narrative of “equality” espoused in democratic nations, such as Canada and the US, does not hold up under scrutiny. Parody helps illuminate that not all individuals are viewed nor treated as equal, despite lofty statements to the contrary uttered by some politicians and other leaders. Parody is presently a common and potentially useful strategy in contemporary art-making, as it insists that decoders recognize the presence and consider the intentions of the encoder. The encoder, then, assumes a vital position, as parody helps ensure that the voices of people often at the margins of the hegemonic narrative, or who are erased xxvi from it entirely, may offer a counter-narrative. As Linda Hutcheon asserts, the encoder’s voice is not only present but must be heard by the decoder for parody to convey its message and be parody; however, even when decoders do not recognize all of the parodic allusions to precursor text(s), I argue that marginalized voices and peoples may still be recognized. Regardless, parody counters the poststructuralist emphasis on the text and the reader’s interpretation; another way to phrase it is that the notion of “the death of the author,” with its emphasis on the reader, is rendered moot, or at least inadequate, with respect to the power that art can (and perhaps should, in certain contexts) have in critiquing an ideology.13 In this as well lies Hutcheon’s notion of the potentially revolutionary impact of parody’s difference, and while parody does place less emphasis on decoders, they are still very important. Through parody, an artwork becomes an opportunity for decoders to apprehend the encoder and their ideas, rather than become entrenched in a potentially solipsistic and comforting act of aesthetic appreciation. 13 This of course refers to Roland Barthes’ essay in Image-Music-Text, published in 1977. xxvii Chapter 1 – Contemporary Parody: Amplifying the Voice of the Subaltern Introduction The aim of this first chapter is threefold: 1. To outline Linda Hutcheon’s theory of contemporary parody, and to consider other late twentieth- and twenty-first century theorists and historians who engage with or critique her work; a brief etymology of the word parody will also be presented.14 Parody has sometimes been a contested topic; some theorists argue that it has (or ought to have) remained essentially the same over time, while others, including Hutcheon, see it as context dependent. 2. To outline the key characteristics of contemporary parody as identified by Hutcheon and the other theorists, as well as the primary effects of those characteristics. Most are based on Hutcheon’s theory, though in some cases I expand upon or reconsider her points so they reflect the particular examples of art and literature I discuss in the two subsequent chapters.15 Humour, for example, Hutcheon does not deem essential to parody, while other scholars argue it is. I agree with Hutcheon that an artwork may still be read as parody in humour’s absence; however, many of the works I examine include humourous elements, so I argue humour may contribute to parody’s impact on the viewer/reader. 14 I focus on theorists from this era because many of them provide a broad historical overview, so there is no need to reduplicate their work. Also, the artists and author whose work I consider are contemporary; given Hutcheon’s view that there is “no trans-historical definition of parody,” it is reasonable to focus on theorists who consider work from the postmodern/contemporary period(s). 15 Hutcheon asserts that “theory should be derived from (and not imposed upon) art” (Parody xi). 1 3. To argue, given its characteristics and effects, that parody departs from the poststructuralist emphasis on the text and the decoder’s interpretation(s) by highlighting the encoder’s position.16 Because of this, parody enables encoders who might be marginalized by hegemonic society to claim space and offer a counter-narrative; in other words, parody provides a discursive tactic through which the “subaltern” can speak.17 This recognition, which is of course on the part of decoders, is key to parody’s “potentially revolutionary impact” (Hutcheon xii). As noted, the majority of the characteristics and the effects I identify are based on Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms. Her core definition describes parody “as a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity … [with] tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference” (xii). These two aspects, similarity alongside difference, contribute to the characteristics and effects, as will be discussed below. One of parody’s characteristics is irony, which Hutcheon argues presents not only an antiphrastic element (that may contribute to ambiguity) but also a judging aspect; as noted in the introduction, this judgment is not always directed at the precursor artwork itself, or at least not its form/aesthetics, but rather at an ideology present in either the past and/or present social context(s). The historians and theorists whose work either complements or contradicts Hutcheon’s theory include the following: 16 As noted earlier, I generally use Hutcheon’s terms “encoder” to refer the artist, author, etc., and “decoder” to refer to the viewer, reader, etc. Other theorists use these terms as well, notably Margaret A. Rose in Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern, though not as exclusively or consistently as Hutcheon. 17 A reference to Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 2 - Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. Rose offers a thorough summary of key theorists from each historical period, as well as her own definition, which differs from Hutcheon’s in a couple of key ways – in particular, the insistence on the presence of humour. - Giorgio Agamben, “Parody,” in Profanations. In this essay, Agamben offers a less pragmatic and more philosophical or metaphysical view of parody than Hutcheon. He accounts for comedy as one of “two canonical elements” of parody, unlike Hutcheon; his philosophical engagement with the nature of representation sheds light on parody’s potential effects on “decoders.” - Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Hutcheon’s foil, Jameson sees no political potential in what has come to replace parody, which he identifies as pastiche, or “blank parody” (16). Theorists who compare Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s theories – notably, John N. Duvall in “Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson's Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody” – will also be discussed. - Seymour Benjamin Chatman, “Parody and Style.” Chatman argues that Hutcheon’s defining parody as having irony and “difference” is not enough; his view of parody tends to be more conservative, as simply copying another artist’s/writer’s style. Yet, his analysis of Hutcheon’s theory offers a useful frame in which to unpack and clarify certain of her key points. - Simon Dentith, The New Critical Idiom: Parody. While Dentith’s focus is literature, his post-structuralist viewpoint helps illuminate how Hutcheon’s theory presents a challenge to the notion of “the death of the author” through 3 reinstating the encoder in the process of communication, and why this is important with respect to particular contemporary artists who use parody.18 - Katrin Horn, “Camping with the Stars: Queer Performativity, Pop Intertextuality, and Camp in the Pop Art of Lady Gaga.” Horn’s preliminary discussions about gender performance/performativity and drag as a kind of post-modern camp engage directly with key points from Hutcheon and thus are useful in analyzing Kent Monkman’s drag performances as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Humour theory will be briefly incorporated into some of the above discussions regarding parody’s characteristic of “comedy” and the effect of laughter. In Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, for example, Michael Billig reinforces Hutcheon’s point that acts of cultural production cannot be considered apart from their social context. The characteristics of contemporary parody, as intended in the parodic work by the encoder, and the effects as experienced and understood by the decoder, may manifest as follows toward producing Hutcheon’s “potentially revolutionary impact”: 1) Ambiguity, created in part through the parodic artwork’s similarity to and difference from the original artwork, may invite the decoder to feel ambivalence, and may further prompt defamiliarization (which Hutcheon likens to Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremsdungeffekt,” or the “distancing effect”). This in turn may prompt what I refer to as ontological instability (i.e., a sense that one’s familiar 18 As noted above, “the death of the author” refers to the essay by Roland Barthes. No longer a spectral “scriptor,” in Barthes’ terms, the author is, in Hutcheon’s view of parody, an individual whose position is key. Barthes states that “[t]o give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). The notion that the meaning of the text must be perpetually open to readers is to deny any need to consider the subject position of the author; rather, I would argue that recognizing the author’s position is indeed important, particularly when that author is Black, Indigenous or a Person of Colour (BIPOC), or “disabled,” or trans gender, etc. Too often these people(s) are erased in/by hegemonic discourse; thus, that parody enables an emphasis on these authors is important. 4 state of being – an aspect of identity, for example, such as gender or nationality – is not certain). The effects or implications of this may be that, when previously certain aspects of one’s own identity are challenged, one may then begin to question normalized perceptions of marginalized “Others.” 2) Irony, as a “double-voiced” element, may also be ambiguous and contribute to defamiliarization and ontological instability, and possibly a response of laughter (depending on other factors, such as the decoder’s sense of humour). 3) Trans-contextualization is Hutcheon’s term for the ways that parody resituates (an) element(s) from the past parodied artwork into the present context via the parodic artwork; this also has the potential to prompt defamiliarization, ontological instability, and perhaps affinity with the subject position of the encoder (or with their political views). 4) Performativity, a concept used in speech act theory, refers to an utterance’s ability to manifest a state of being or a situation; in the context of parody, it refers to the way that parody enables the encoder to “bring into being” a situation or state via the parodic artwork, which functions as a kind of utterance that must be received by the decoder in order to be “felicitous” (to have its intended effect). The consequent effect of this on the decoder may be defamiliarization, ontological instability, and/or affinity. 5) Humour (or comedy) may be present in the parodic artwork; the effect of any humour is generally laughter (or at least amusement). When present, humour may contribute to the decoder’s affinity with the encoder; some theorists argue that humour is created through incongruity, in which case the parodic work may also defamiliarize, also prompting ontological instability. 5 Another possible effect is, in fact, on the encoder: complicity, as a consequence of the parodic work’s potentially “conservative” similarity to the precursor work (Hutcheon 67). As noted, also important is the potential affinity for the encoder that the artwork may prompt in the decoder, which I discuss in all three chapters. I begin by discussing parody’s characteristics, comparing theorists’ views as relevant (some ignore certain characteristics, while others challenge Hutcheon), making brief reference to the works of art and literature I discuss in more depth in the chapters that follow: Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb, Ursula Johnson’s (Mi’kmaq, Eskasoni First Nation) exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember), and Kent Monkman’s (Cree and Irish, Fish River First Nation) Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience. The section after that will deal with the effects of these characteristics; inevitably, some effects are discussed in relation to the characteristic that may produce them, but generally I will discuss them separately, as one characteristic may have more than one effect. The exception is humour and laughter, which I will discuss together. Though my work does depend on Hutcheon’s theory, I take her view a step further to posit that parody facilitates not only the “pragmatic” situation of communication between encoder and decoder (50), it also compels decoders to reconsider their own “situation in the world” as they come to realize that certain hegemonic ideologies are as much constructs as the artworks are, and that as such these ideologies may be subject to change (xiii). As well, as noted above, because parody shifts some of the attention that post-structuralism places on the text and reader back onto the encoder, parody may be a useful strategy for artists and authors who are marginalized in/by hegemonic society, as it creates a situation in which they have a visible presence as they critique aspects of normalizing, hegemonic culture. Parody may enable these artists to be recognized and 6 their “situatedness” better understood by decoders. As noted in the introduction, this is vital in a time when it seems the hegemonic voice continues to try to silence marginalized voices and erase certain peoples from the social and political sphere. Parody: Etymology & Basic Definitions Many theorists begin with the etymology of parody, as a term originating with the art practices of the ancient Greeks and extending to the post-modern period. Linda Hutcheon returns to the classical period in noting that the contemporary understanding of parody is derived from the Greek parodia, meaning “counter-song” (32). She elaborates: The textual or discursive nature of parody (as opposed to satire) is clear from the odos part of the word, meaning song. The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned – that of “counter” or “against.” Thus parody becomes an opposition or contrast between texts. (ibid.) This, she says, has led to the more recent notion that the parodying text must therefore be mocking the earlier one. “However,” Hutcheon continues, para in Greek can also mean “beside,” and therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast. It is this second, neglected meaning of the prefix that broadens the pragmatic scope of parody in a way most helpful to discussions of modern art forms. (ibid.) This also makes way for the potential affinity between decoder and encoder, if the former “gets” the irony and parodic allusions. Margaret Rose, in Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern, notes that translations of the word parody do not always account for both meanings: “the root term ‘para-’ … was not always translated as … both opposition to its subject and nearness by post-Renaissance critics: more usually it became either opposition or consonance …” (49). She suggests this often-overlooked dual meaning of “para-” lies at the heart of parody’s ambiguity: “most parody worthy of the name is ambivalent towards its target. This ambivalence may entail not only a mixture of criticism and sympathy for the parodied text, but also the creative expansion of it into something 7 new” (51). In other words, the dual meaning of “para-” contributes to (and may sanction) the encoder’s “complicity” with the previous form or genre of art. She also notes that this exists alongside criticism, though her implication is that this criticism is targeted at the precursor text itself. However, in noting the “mixture,” Rose aligns with Hutcheon, whose belief in parody’s “potentially revolutionary impact” lies in part in its emphasis on difference and in the creation of “new hybrid forms” of art (Hutcheon xiii). Subsequent to my own analysis of contemporary art and literature, I suggest that the scope of parody as Hutcheon defines it – as a “genre” (I prefer the term “device”) that offers both contrast and accord – holds true in the twenty-first century (19). Hutcheon is also clear that parody, based on this dichotomy as present even in the original use of the term, does not demand the presence of derision or mockery: “There is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of a concept of ridicule, as there is, for instance, in the joke or burla of burlesque” (51). Others disagree with this, including Giorgio Agamben. In his short essay “Parody” from Profanations (2105), Agamben indicates that his understanding derives from a related Greek word, rhapsode (rhapsody): Indeed, when the rhapsodes interrupted their recitations, performers entered who, out of playfulness and in order to spur the souls of the listeners, inverted and overturned everything that had come before…. For that reason, these songs were called paroidous, because alongside and in addition to the serious argument, they inserted other ridiculous things. Parody is therefore an inverted Rhapsody that transposes the sense into something ridiculous by changing the words. (38–39) He then explains that the notion of rhapsody “was similar to epirrhema and parabasis” (ibid.); the former, a component of ancient Greek comedy, is “an address … spoken by the leader of one-half of the chorus, after that part of the chorus had sung an ode. It was part of the parabasis, or performance by the chorus, during an interlude in the action” (Britannica, “Epirrhema”). During the parabasis, the chorus would “fac[e] and mov[e] 8 towards the audience” (Agamben 39) – a self-referential gesture that would have brought down the “fourth wall” – and was “used to express the author’s views on political or religious topics of the day” (Britannica, “Parabasis”). This gesture, then, may have denaturalized the play as well as the political topics raised. The gesture also establishes the two canonical features of parody: dependence on a pre-existent model that is subsequently transformed from something serious into something comic, and the preservation of formal elements into which new and incongruous contents are introduced. (ibid.) For Agamben, then, parody’s “difference” lies in the change in tone from sombre to humourous, a crucial departure from Hutcheon’s view. Yet, the potential to defamiliarize spectators (or decoder) remains, via comedy or incongruity, as will be discussed below. Simon Dentith also hearkens back to the Classical period, identifying Aristotle as the first to discuss parody. According to Dentith, Aristotle described it as a narrative poem of moderate length with epic meter and vocabulary; rather than dealing with traditional epic themes, it was light, satirical, or mock-heroic, with “everyday or ‘low’ subjects, to comic effect” (10). Dentith posits that parody was generally “playful” rather than satiric, suggesting the possible presence of the ridiculous but without the ridiculing intent (ibid.). Yet, Dentith seems to agree with Hutcheon that “no transhistorical definitions [of parody are] possible” (Hutcheon 10) in stating that “we must also recognize that ‘parody’ now alludes to a spectrum of cultural practices, and the specific ways in which individual parodies work will always require careful elucidation” (Dentith 19). First, this suggests contemporary parody need not be humourous, simply because Classical parody had comedic elements (though as I will argue, humour may add to the potentially revolutionary effects). Dentith’s point can also be applied more generally: that to understand the significance of each parodic artwork, the context(s) (of both encoder 9 and decoder) must be considered; each encoder’s lived experience will influence the creation of the work, as will that of each decoder with respect to apprehending it. This pertains to the analysis I do in this thesis: while there are shared characteristics amongst the works by the three encoders I discuss here, key differences also exist with respect to their identities and the particular social contexts critiqued in their works. In the context of this thesis, arguably only two similarities exist among them (beyond the fact that, in my view, they all display the characteristics of parody); one, as decoder of their works, my particular lived experiences influence my discussion.19 The other is that, in my reading of their works, all offer counter-narratives that challenge normalizing hegemonic “master” narratives (for Johnson and Monkman, colonialism, and for Lamb, the heteronormative gender binary). Characteristics of parody 1. Ambiguity Linda Hutcheon identifies ambiguity as one of parody’s key features, with its equivocal either/or / both/and potential meanings stemming in part from the similarity-plusdifference combination she asserts in her core definition. Ambiguity is also potentially an effect of irony, which may prompt decoders to feel “ideological ambivalence” due to recognizing the double potential meanings (Hutcheon xiv). This equivocation may be productive, however, in that it may prompt changes in decoders’ perception regarding whatever ideology is the target of the encoder’s critique. For example, one thread of my argument in relation to Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got A Time Bomb is that it can be read as 19 As noted, I will discuss my lived experience or “situatedness” with respect to both gender and colonialism at the beginning of the chapters that follow. As well, readers of this thesis are decoders; each will also bring to bear their own experiences in this hermeneutic process (e.g., each member of my thesis committee had somewhat different suggestions regarding edits I needed to make towards the final draft). 10 a parody of the heteronormative gender binary. That the narrator offers ambiguous descriptions of the characters’ morphological gender “cues” means that both – but also neither – binary gender identity is privileged; decoders may then see that identities beyond the binary are possible, and may then have a newfound ambivalence regarding the binary. As Hutcheon states, “[t]he ideological status of parody is a subtle one: the textual and pragmatic natures of parody imply, at one and the same time, authority and transgression, and both must now be taken into account” (71). Lamb’s novel both authorizes the gender binary (characters present gender codes that are both stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine”) while also transgressing it, as the two codes are expressed simultaneously by one character and one body. This may prompt decoders to confront their expectations as to what a “proper” gender expression or identity means. As Hutcheon discusses, parody’s ambiguity may result in decoders not perceiving all of the points of reference the encoder has made within the parodic artwork: “Parody depends upon recognition and therefore it inevitably raises issues of both the competence of the decoder and the skill of the encoder” (xvi). If decoders miss all of the references, then the parody fails and does not come into being.20 Yet, with regard to contemporary art, viewers are rarely left to interpret works on their own, as they are accessible through didactic panels, artist talks, curator’s tours, etc., which are designed to ensure audiences gain a sense of what the work is about.21 For a couple of the parodic works discussed in this thesis, the artists themselves provide materials that aid in decoders’ hermeneutic process. For example, the didactic panels in Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A 20 This can also be viewed as a form of “ontological instability” or “uncertainty,” as is discussed beginning on page 76. 21 Sometimes these didactic aids are also part of these institutions’ strategies to encourage membership and raise funds. 11 Story of Resilience, also published in booklet form, leave little room to misunderstand the contextual details.22 While the presence of such materials may seem heavy-handed – some viewers may feel that it imposes a single “right” or “correct” interpretation of the art – these materials increase the chances that the parodic allusions will be understood, thereby bolstering the encoder’s position. In his essay “Parody and Style,” Seymour Benjamin Chatman makes the point that parody’s similarity to and difference from the precursor work presents an ambiguous conservative-versus-subversive dichotomy: “Whereas satire aims only at ridiculing its target—and may do so with considerable ardour—parody concurrently pays homage to, or in [Hutcheon’s] term, ‘authorizes,’ the original” (33). For Hutcheon, the important element of parody by her definition is the “rebellious” critique effected by the difference (not unlike the effect of satire, as Chatman defines it). Homage honours the previous work; as I understand Hutcheon’s theory, however, she believes that parody is more than simple homage. The new parodic artwork may gain “authority” through its imitation of an aspect of the original; similarities thus may render the parodic work “conservative.” However, that the parodic work piggybacks on the authority of the previous work is partly how parody gains traction in its own socio-cultural context, and the one in which decoders experience it. As Hutcheon discusses, a parodic artwork may cast a degree of aspersion on some aspect of the previous work – though not necessarily its formal or structural aspects, for that might constitute an implicit self-critique: “Parodic art both deviates from an aesthetic norm and includes that norm within itself as backgrounded 22 As well, the proliferation of online interviews, reviews, and other texts for which readers can search on the Internet may augment their understanding of works seen in a gallery or museum. 12 material. Any real attack would be self-destructive” (44).23 The target of the critique in the works I consider is more often an ideology related to the social context of either the past work or the parodic one (or both). Yet, parody’s “similarity-with-difference” (and any attendant ambiguity) may compel decoders to ponder the intended meaning longer than other works, i.e., those that cater to rather than counter their expectations (and decoders who want a quick fix can consult the didactic materials provided by the institution or artist). Ambiguity, in creating uncertainty in the mind of the decoder, may also contribute to the defamiliarization effect, as will be discussed below. 2. Irony and the “double-voiced” nature of parody Ambiguity is very closely tied to irony, another of parody’s key facets: “irony is the major rhetorical strategy employed by [parody]” (Hutcheon 25). Irony is ambiguous, equivocal, raising uncertainty as to a single meaning; Hutcheon states that “[l]ike irony, parody is a form of indirect as well as double-voiced discourse” (xiv), indicating that two potential meanings exist simultaneously: the straightforward or denotative meaning (which she describes as the “primary”), alongside a “hidden” or connotative meaning (the “secondary”) (34). In other words, both parody and irony have “one signifier and two signifieds” (54); furthermore, parody is similar to metaphor, because “both require that the decoder construct a second meaning through inferences about surface statements and supplement the foreground with acknowledgement and knowledge of a backgrounded context” (33–34). Ideally, decoders understand both denotative and connotative “levels” of meaning: “The final meaning of irony or parody rests on the recognition of the superimposition of these levels” (34). Yet irony, says Hutcheon, functions beyond this double-voiced antiphrasis: 23 This quote appears earlier in this thesis on page 14. 13 [the] semantic contrast between what is stated and what is meant is not the only function of irony. Its other major role … is [that] irony judges.… The pragmatic function of irony, then, is one of signalling evaluation, most frequently of a pejorative nature. … Both of these functions – semantic inversion [antiphrasis] and pragmatic evaluation [judgment] – are implied in the Greek root eironeia, which suggests dissimulation and interrogation: there is a both a division or contrast of meaning, and also a questioning, a judging. Irony functions, therefore, as an attitude of the encoding agent towards the text itself, an attitude which, in turn, allows and demands the decoder’s interpretation and evaluation. Like parody, then, irony too is … a controlled interpretive act elicited by the text. (53) This illuminates the role of irony in the parodic artwork, as a vehicle for transmitting meaning between encoder and decoder. The dual nature of irony may, as decoders perceive the encoder’s intentions and thus grasp both “levels” of meaning, encourage the decoder not only to recognize the encoder’s position but also, perhaps, find affinity with it, in making the same judgment of the precursor “text.” (As I argue, however, irony’s judgment is more often of an ideology the text represents, and not of the text itself.) Hutcheon also makes connections between the “double-voiced” irony of parody and Bakhtin’s theory of the novel’s “double-voiced” nature, or what he has also termed “heteroglossia”: Postmodernist meta-fiction’s parody and the ironic rhetorical strategies that it deploys are perhaps the clearest modern examples of the Bakhtinian “doublevoiced” word. Their dual textual and semantic orientation makes them central to Bakhtin’s … concept of “reported speech” as discourse within and about discourse…. The two textual voices of ironic and parodic fiction combine dialogically... (72) Two “textual voices,” ironic and parodic, each with a different signification, function simultaneously; their self-referential nature reminds the reader that discourse is not monologic, and that other voices may indeed speak to counter the hegemonic.24 This, 24 This sense of various levels of discourse also relates to Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, in which the normative state of society is upended, roles reversed, and borders transgressed. This will be discussed further on pages 54, 66–67, and 87. 14 however, may create ambiguity regarding intended meaning. But it may also serve to reinstate the position of the encoder in the mind of the decoder. As Hutcheon explains, the counterpointed double-voicing calls attention to the presence of both author and reader positions within the text and to the manipulating power of some kind of “authority.” The subject position of the producer of parody is that of a controlling agent whose actions account for the textual evidence: in a sense, it is a hypothetical hermeneutical construct, inferred or “postulated” … by the reader from the text’s inscription. (88) While Hutcheon’s statements suggest that the reader hypothetically constructs the “controlling agent,” as though the author or artist were slipping back into that spectral sphere Barthes described, I would argue that in contemporary parodic artworks, parody’s double-voicedness (or irony) enables decoders to “postulate” that a particular encoder or “controlling agent” has created the work (as will be discussed further in the chapters that follow, each of the three artists I consider are present in their works in some capacity). Thus, parody becomes a potentially useful device for contemporary artists whose voices may be marginalized by hegemonic discourse. When viewing a parodic artwork by an Indigenous artist, for example, a decoder may become more aware of the encoder as an authoritative “controlling agent” who has deliberately infused the artwork with ironic references to colonialism. Parody, then, facilitates a situation in which these artists may claim space and voice a challenge to monologic white-/settler-colonial discourse. The ironic double-coding present in parody may then create doubt (perhaps ontological uncertainty) in decoders, in part because their role as creator of meaning in the solipsistic hermeneutics of New Criticism is called into question, as parody reinstates the encoder within the process of communication. The attention that the ironic double-voicedness of parody draws to the encoder of the parodic artwork may also contribute to what Hutcheon calls defamiliarization (of either the context of the parodied artwork or that of the present, 15 parodic work), resulting from the trans-contextualization of an aspect of the parodied artwork within the parodic. In other words, irony, through ambiguity, may denaturalize a familiar or accepted concept or state of being – perhaps with respect to the artifice of art itself (as the encoder’s position is emphasized); the slippage between the possibility that the work intends an homage and/or a critique contributes to defamiliarization. The “double-voicedness” may also have to do with decoders’ recognition of themselves as hermeneutic agents, who, now faced with irony and ambiguity, may not understand all of the parodic references or levels of signification (a sort of “I know that I don’t know” situation may be created). Though Margaret Rose does not confer the same degree of significance to irony as Hutcheon, she does discuss its role in relation to the encoder and the decoder: Both irony and parody may be said to confuse the normal processes of communication by offering more than one message to be decoded by the reader and this duplication of messages can be used, in either case, to conceal the author’s intended meaning from immediate interpretation. (87) Rose emphasizes the possibility that communication between the two parties may be thwarted, rather than enabled, noting that the “concealed message of the ironist” may be grasped only by an “‘initiated’ audience” (ibid.). Hutcheon also recognizes that the decoder may not grasp the “double-voiced” ironic aspect of parody, in which case the parody then may not come into being/exist. However, I would suggest that the multiple messages in the parodic artwork might more deeply engage decoders, who may spend more time attempting to “solve” the puzzles of the parodic references.25 Yet, “getting” all 25 Certainly this has been my own experience with the artworks discussed in the chapters that follow; I cannot, however, assume all decoders will have this reaction. It also supports Hutcheon’s idea that part of decoders’ pleasure comes from the “intertexual ‘bouncing’” as they discover the parodic references. 16 of the parodic references may not be necessary to understanding the overall decolonizing message of works by Indigenous artists, for example. Rose also brings up Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the novel. Referring to his work on Dostoyevsky, Rose states that Bakhtin considers “parody as both a double-voiced form and one which is based on contrast and dissonance” (126). Irony, which Hutcheon refers to as the “double-voiced” aspect of parody, does create contrast, in the two co-existing meanings (primary and secondary). Through parodic double-voiced irony and heteroglossia, as Rose quotes Bakhtin as saying, “‘…the author again speaks in someone else’s discourse, but … parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one’” (ibid.). In other words, parody extends the potential for criticism: in one of the two levels of discourse in a novel may be an implicit judgment of the other, just as in parody, the similarities to an earlier work do not signify a simple imitation of or homage to it – indeed, the differences signify its “opposition” (to an ideology, not a genre or form or aesthetic. Rose again quotes Bakhtin, who defines “heteroglossia” as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions, but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions....” (Rose, Parody 133–134) These different discourses or voices, combining – and, in the process, creating ambiguity – challenge the hegemonic voice. One example of how a parodic artwork can be considered “double-voiced”/heteroglossic, despite an absence of dialogue per se, is in Ursula Johnson’s “The Archive Room” and the digital catalogues entries for her “o’pltek” 17 baskets.26 The text of the entries replicates the form (and genre) of traditional anthropological museum catalogue entries, while the content is the artist’s own; what would otherwise be bland, generic content is augmented with personal details. In some entries, the descriptions pass ironic judgment on the colonial context in which both original and parodying object (i.e., both traditional museum displays of traditional baskets, as well as the present context of Johnson’s “hybrids”) are situated. One voice is that of the colonial museum archivist, which Johnson mimics to some extent; the other voice is that of the artist herself, which speaks in tacit judgment of traditional catalogue content and of colonialism. In effect, the two voices function not unlike a kind of reported speech, with Johnson’s additions serving “as discourse within and about discourse” (Hutcheon 72). The catalogue entries thus offer “two meanings and two expressions,” perhaps prompting viewers to reconsider the role of archives/archivists in perpetuating colonial narratives that erase, limit, or denigrate Indigenous peoples (133–134). The catalogue entries themselves can be viewed, like the baskets, as parodic hybrids.27 Giorgio Agamben illuminates a relationship amongst irony, the “double-voiced” nature of parody, and ontological instability.28 He suggests that parody has a “metaphysical vocation,” and as such, we can say that it presupposes a dual tension in being. In other words, the parodic split in language would necessarily correspond to a duplication of being – ontology would correspond to a paraontology. Alfred Jarry once defined his beloved child “pataphysics” as the science of what is added onto metaphysics. In the same way, one can say that parody is in the theory – and practice – of that in language and in being which is beside itself – or, the being-beside-itself of every being and every discourse. Just as metaphysics is impossible – at least for 26 Johnson translates the Mi’kmaw word “o’pltek” as “hybrid” (and as “it is not right”) on her website (https://ursulajohnson.ca/portfolio/2014-ongoing-mikwitetmn-do-you-remember/). 27 In effect, this kind of irony is closely related to trans-contextualization, discussed earlier in this chapter beginning on page 37. 28 This is also discussed in this chapter beginning on page 76. 18 modern thought – except as the parodic opening of a space alongside sensible experience (but a space that must remain rigorously empty), parody is a notoriously impractical terrain, in which the traveler constantly knocks against limits and aporias that he cannot avoid but that he also cannot escape. (49–50) Parody, in representing the “being-beside-itself of every being and every discourse” is like irony, in that the foregrounded and backgrounded meanings are “beside” each other and create (potential) aporia. Language, whether ironic or sincere, is a representation, and thus it is always “beside” the real thing, as Agamben suggests: signs can only allude to the referent, they cannot be the thing itself, and so a potential gap in meaning or lack of correspondence always exists. This possible gap created by the double-voiced nature of parody also may create doubt, not just regarding the intended meaning but perhaps also metaphysical doubt in the decoder. The linguistic aporia may cast into doubt not only the surety of signification but also the nature of being more generally (or, certain kinds of being). For example, in Kent Monkman’s exhibition, aporia may be effected with respect to the decoder’s self-identity, as the very ground upon which stands the idea of Canadian (as tolerant, democratic, etc.) may suddenly shift. Once settler-decoders recognize that to be Canadian is to be implicated in a system that sought (and still often seeks) to eliminate Indigenous cultures, they may feel doubt as to the perceived original concept of Canadian identity. This may prompt in these decoders a sense of standing “beside” themselves, as “before” and “after” identities now exist concurrently. Yet, neither identity fully exists: the “before” identity of the unknowing settler, naïve to details of colonial history, can never be reinstated, while the “after” identity is effectively yet a non-identity, premised on the negation of the former one. Thus, a kind of “paraontology” is created in the decoder – or, an “ontological instability.” 19 Simon Dentith joins the chorus of scholars who acknowledge parody’s ironic and “double-voiced” discourse. He nods to Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, saying “we can hear in … writing simultaneous traces both of the characters’ speech and the author’s attitude towards it” (7). Overall, Dentith aligns with Hutcheon, asserting that irony “unsettl[es] the certainties which sustain the social order… placing all final truths under suspension” (ibid.). In this he demonstrates not only an accord with Hutcheon’s theory but also knowledge of Bakhtin’s notion that novels, via heteroglossia, may challenge monologic discourse: “Ironic discourse is, to use a phrase of Bakhtin’s, ‘double-voiced’: it permits the reader to recognize that there are two distinct consciousnesses operating in a single utterance, and that their evaluative attitudes are not the same” (64). For Dentith, the consequence is that readers perceive “the distance between mystified ideas and ‘life as it really is’” – in other words, parody defamiliarizes (65). The double-voicedness, then, potentially enables decoders to see an ironic split between the author’s and the characters’ ideologies, toward challenging the hegemonic. Though the bulk of Katrin Horn’s essay has to do with postmodern camp as a form of gender parody, her arguments are bolstered with Linda Hutcheon’s discussions of both irony and parody.29 In defining irony, Horn quotes Hutcheon, who states that it is 29 Horn uses “postmodern” to distinguish somewhat from Susan Sontag’s theory of camp as discussed in her 1964 essay, “On Camp.” By Sontag’s definition, camp includes aspects of popular culture that are exaggerated, self-conscious, ironic, yet are detached and depoliticized. Camp has a “kitschy” sensibility, and is a kind of “good taste of bad taste” – i.e., it offers an inversion of high and low art and takes pleasure in what might be described by others as bad art; camp taste “identifies with what it is enjoying” (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html. Accessed July 4, 2018). As such, then, some forms of camp might be considered more sincere than ironic. Sontag notes what she sees as a connection between homosexuality and camp, i.e., that they have an “affinity and overlap.” Camp has often become equated with a theatrical demonstration of homosexuality, sometimes an exaggeration of femininity. So while some describe camp as being similar to Hutcheon’s theory of parody – at least when it is self-consciously ironic, the exaggeration is not always meant to critique; as Hutcheon states of the notion that parody launches an attack on the very forms it copies, “any real attack would be self-destructive” (44). Postmodern camp, in Horn’s discussion (as effected by Lady Gaga, for example), does indeed exaggerate in order to present a kind of ironic critique – but of the excesses of pop culture, of femininity, etc. 20 “‘structured as a miniature (semantic) version of parody's (textual) doubling’ (Theory and Politics of Irony 4)” (Horn np). Horn continues: Parody in general and postmodern forms of parody in particular can be defined as “extended repetition with critical difference” (Hutcheon, Theory of Parody 7). [Hutcheon’s] emphasis on the “critical difference” more than on the repetitive aspects of parody marks a decisive difference from the descriptions by other contemporary theorists, such as Fredric Jameson, who believes that postmodern parody has degenerated into “pastiche” [or] “blank parody” … and has thus become meaningless. Contrary to these pessimistic assumptions, Hutcheon claims “parody [is] a form of repetition with ironic critical distance” … (emphasis [Horn’s]). Through the use of this “ironic distance,” which always carries a distinct attitude towards and evaluation of what is ‘said,’ respective [of] the quoted pretext, “parody is transformative in its relationship to other texts, [whereas] pastiche is imitative.” (Horn np) Horn thus highlights one of Hutcheon’s key points, which is that parody can have a “potentially revolutionary impact,” specifically through the transformation of the precursor work in the parodic one stands to transform decoders’ perceptions (Hutcheon xii). In irony, Horn adds, the merging of the “said” and the “unsaid” may create subversive meaning; parody takes this further by emphasizing difference. Horn then argues that the ironic “double-voiced” meanings result in a blend of significations: Since irony expresses neither solely the said nor the implied unsaid but rather the combination and interaction of the two, camp also is not so much about the opposite of what is said and done but about what the surface statement has to say about what is hinted at and vice versa. This way the substance is no longer hidden beneath the surface, but the surface “becomes” the substance. (Horn np) Irony and camp, then, can be understood as hybrids of surface and substance, in which one aspect of meaning cannot exist without the other. This insight into irony also applies to parody: once decoders have recognized the double-voiced meanings, they cannot “unsee” one just because they’re recognized the other; both exist together. By extension, both time periods (that of the past, parodied work and of the present parodic one) now exist simultaneously, via trans-contextualization; the earlier time period effectively co- 21 exists with the present. This bears on both the parodic work and its historical referent(s). For example, with respect to Ursula Johnson’s “o’pltek” baskets in “The Archive Room,” many decoders will have an idea of what an archive is, as well as the kinds of baskets that might be stored in a museum’s vaults (perhaps based on the examples on display in the museum’s galleries). This image of a real-life archive may merge with what the decoder sees in Johnson’s installation; the baskets on the shelves inside “The Archive Room,” while quite different from traditional baskets, are still recognizable as a kind of “next generation,” and so the “o’pltek” forms also call to mind the earlier version and the previous context. Given that Johnson describes them as “o’pltek” (hybrid) suggests that the double and simultaneous significations are intended. One or the other meaning may function as a mnemonic device, summoning the other so both exist in the decoder’s mind concurrently. The alterations of traditional forms, in countering decoders’ expectations, also call attention to the artist as encoder; Johnson clearly intended these baskets to differ. Irony, then, with its double-voiced signification, stands to make decoders aware of the encoder’s position; it also may create ambiguity through these different and perhaps competing meanings. When a parodic artwork presents an ironic difference from the precursor, irony also contributes to trans-contextualization, as is discussed next. 3. Trans-contextualization Linda Hutcheon identifies “trans-contextualization” as one of parody’s key features (8). Although she occasionally uses the term synonymously with words like “revise,” “replay,” or “rework,” what she means by trans-contextualization is particular and demands analysis with respect to how it manifests in a parodic artwork, and the effects it may have on decoders. In brief, trans-contextualization is “a transfer and reorganization of [the] past” into the present via the parodic artwork, potentially resulting in the 22 defamiliarization of an event, of language, of ideologies – almost any aspect of the past context (4). In making reference to an earlier artwork (whether genre, form, or ideology), the parodic artwork takes the associations from the earlier work and reinserts them into a new context (or, two new ones: that of the encoder and of the decoder). These contexts may share facets, but given the intersectional identities of the individuals concerned, they will not be identical.30 As I analyze Ursula Johnson’s work as parodies of earlier forms, genres, etc., I must consider a minimum of three contexts: 1) the history of colonialism in Canada, as it manifests in her work; 2) the present situation of Johnson as a Mi’kmaw person in the places now called Nova Scotia and Canada, which is still a colonial nationstate, the policies of which affect her and her community (and by extension, all Indigenous peoples); and 3) my own situation as a middle-class, overeducated, seventh/eighth-generation white settler of European descent, whose ancestors came to “own” unceded land that is the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaw peoples of what is now Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.31 Other contexts may also be relevant (e.g., the ethnographic museum as an institution that tacitly supports colonialism). In her preface to the most recent edition of A Theory of Parody, Hutcheon connects trans-contextualization with hybridity, noting that parody has “ideological implications” in part because of its “worldliness” (being situated in a particular context): 30 For example: Ursula Johnson, who grew up as a member of Eskasoni First Nation in Unama’ki (Cape Breton, NS), would see the climate, geography, politics, and other facets of life in NS differently than I do, as my knowledge is based on my experience living in K’jipuktuk30 (the Mi’kmaw name for Halifax, meaning “at the great harbour ” [Sable and Francis 44]) for a total of 14 years as an adult and as a settler of European descent. And although we both have a bachelor of fine arts (BFA) from NSCAD, I graduated in 1995 and she in 2006, and so this will impact our experiences; furthermore, her being Mi’kmaq will have impacted her experience in ways that my being a European-settler did not impact mine (and vice versa). 31 In the Mi’kmaw language, PEI is “Epekwitk,” meaning “cradled above water”; some of my ancestors settled in the region known in Mi’kmaq as Sipekne’katik, “area of wild potato/turnip,” Anglicized to Shubenacadie (Sable and Francis 21). 23 We need only think of the important feminist work on what Adrienne Rich called women’s “revisioning” of previous writing or recall the insightful theorizing of “signifying” in African American literature and art. In the queer rethinking of a newly politicized version of Susan Sontag’s idea of camp, parody took on the kind of edge that was also evident in theories of both how postcolonial texts have “written back” to Empire and also how indigenous artists in the Americas have resignified and adapted dominant discourses to create new hybrid forms. What this … new work has reinforced … is the importance of considering the parodic text’s entire “situation in the world” – the time and the place, the ideological frame of reference, the personal as well as the social context – not only of the instigator of the parody but also of its receiver. (xiii) In a sense, these contextual details become hybridized via the relocation of forms, genres, materials, and ideologies from past into present; various forms, genres, etc., may also be combined within an artwork and contribute to its hybrid status. The encoder’s intention, vis-à-vis trans-contextualization, is an important facet of what Hutcheon calls the “pragmatic dimension” of parody, i.e., the communication between encoder and decoder. As noted, parody can disrupt the post-structuralist focus on the decoder’s responses and disavowal of the encoder’s intentions. The “contextdependent” nature of parody thus contributes to reinstating the encoder: The entire communicative act needs be taken into account; like its rhetorical miniature, irony, parody is intensely context- and discourse-dependent. Even in a theoretical age like our own that has cast deep suspicion on the concept of intentionality, the experience of interpreting parody in practice forces us to acknowledge at least an inference of intention and to theorize that inference. (Hutcheon xiv) Parody, due to its formal and contextual qualities, demands that encoders and their intentions be acknowledged; again, this is especially important in regard to artworks by members of marginalized groups. The role of the decoder, however, is still important: “texts do not generate anything – until they are perceived and interpreted” (23). This relates to parody’s “potentially revolutionary impact” and the notion that decoders may respond to the encoder’s intentions via perceptual or behavioural change (the encoder’s 24 intentions are “generated” within decoders, which in turn stimulates a reaction). We might then consider the relationship between encoder and decoder as a hybrid process of communication that ultimately produces or performs the parody: As readers or viewers or listeners who decode parodic structures, we also act as decoders of encoded intent. In other words, parody involves not just a structural énoncé but the entire énonciation of discourse. This enunciative act includes an addresser of the utterance, a receiver of it, a time and a place, discourses that precede and follow – in short, an entire context ... (Hutcheon 23) Again, the contexts of both encoder and decoder are vital. As Hutcheon states, “although my theory of parody is intertextual in its inclusion of both the decoder and the text, its enunciative context is even broader: both the encoding and the sharing of codes between producer and receiver are central” (37). This also supports my inclusion of self-reflexive statements in this thesis: I identify myself as a decoder situated in a particular time and place, with my socio-cultural context past and present contributing to my interpretation of the artworks discussed in this thesis, and so I must account for how my viewpoint has changed due to the defamiliarizing effect of trans-contextualization. Indeed, one of the key effects of trans-contextualization is defamiliarization. Once decoders have understood the parodic artworks’ allusions, their perceptions may be altered. Hutcheon explains: Consciousness about form … by its deformation … through parody is one possible mode of denuding contrast, of defamiliarizing “transcontextualization,” or of deviation from aesthetic norms established by usage. The implied questioning of these norms also provides the basis for the phenomenon of counter-expectation that allows for the structural and pragmatic activation of parody. (35) Firstly, the “contrast” or difference from the previous form or norm is emphasized, contributing to defamiliarization. I would add that parody might challenge not only 25 aesthetic norms, but also any naturalized norms (as I read them, the parodic works discussed here defamiliarize ideologies – of heteronormative gender, colonialism, etc.). The trans-contextualizing aspect of parody may enable two things. One is key to my argument that the positions of marginalized encoders are emphasized: transcontextualization may encourage them to voice opposition to the hegemonic, to assert “‘a possession of history in order to ensure [their] place in history’” (Hutcheon 107, quoting Bruce Alistair Barber). The second, tied to the first, is that in challenging the decoder’s assumptions about history and the present, parody’s “appropriating of the past, of history, its questioning of the contemporary by ‘referencing’ it to a different set of codes, is a way of establishing continuity that may, in itself, have ideological implications” (110). For example, some settler-decoders may come to realize, as I have, that colonialism is not a past event but one that has present-day repercussions on Indigenous peoples. Margaret Rose’s key contribution to the literature on parody is in summarizing concepts by key theorists from three historical periods, including the post-modern. Of particular interest in this period is her synopsis of Ihab Hassan’s theory, which ties parody to hybridity – specifically, through a merging of the past with the present, which he calls “‘post-modern Hybridization’” (Rose 212). Rose quotes from Hassan’s 1986 essay “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective”: After stating that an “…image or replica may be as valid as its model” … and “may even bring an ‘augment d’être,’” Hassan continues: “This makes for a different concept of tradition, one in which continuity and discontinuity, high and low culture, mingle not to imitate but to expand the past in the present. In the plural present, all styles are dialectically available in an interplay between the Now and the Not Now, the Same and the Other. Thus, in postmodernism, Heidegger’s concept of ‘equitemporality’ becomes really a dialectic of equitemporality, an intertemporality, a new relation between historical elements, without any suppression of the past in favour of the present – a point that Fredric Jameson (1983) misses when he criticizes postmodern literature, film, and architecture for their ahistorical character, their ‘presentifications.’” (213) 26 “Intertemporality” suggests that in the parodic artwork, past and present combine or resonate with each other, rendering the work hybrid. The parodic work becomes a node where both past and present are not only perceptible but also may, in being combined, have new signifying potential. Hassan’s notion of “post-modern Hybridization,” then, with its characteristic “intertemporality,” can be understood as a theory that is parallel to Hutcheon’s “trans-contextualization.” As noted in Rose’s quote from Hassan, Fredric Jameson’s view of the ways that postmodern artworks incorporate the past in the present is somewhat less optimistic than Hutcheon’s. He asserts that this “historicism” reduces art’s political potential, in making references to the past that are absent of any irony or intent to defamiliarize, which then suggests that any trans-contextualization of this kind of parodic allusion has little to no effect (17). As Katrin Horn notes (also discussed above in relation to irony), Jameson “believes that postmodern parody has degenerated into ‘pastiche,’ that is, ‘blank parody’ (Jameson 16), and has thus become meaningless” (Horn np). In contrast to Hutcheon’s “trans-contextualization,” then, Jameson’s “historicism” (and the lack of irony in postmodern art) means that the potential to challenge the ideology or cultural ethos of the present is also absent. As an example, consider Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn (1962), a portrait of Marilyn Monroe that features the actress’s face, based on a publicity still from the 1953 film Niagara, silkscreened onto a canvas painted gold. Warhol’s reference to the precursor artwork – the film – lacks irony: though the Museum of Modern Art states that “[e]ven as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public persona as a carefully structured illusion,” the portrait may signify as an homage rather than a critical commentary on the parasitic cult of celebrity that pushed her to commit suicide (MoMA). 27 The work is a replication of her image that hardly differs from the publicity still on which it was based; the gold paint alone (or the bright red and blue slashes of paint over her lips and eyes respectively) does not signify enough difference to suggest a subversive meaning, as would be the case in a parodic artwork by Hutcheon’s definition. Thus, Warhol’s work could be considered a pastiche of historical references (to the film and to the actress herself, who had committed suicide shortly before Warhol created the piece) that simply presents Monroe as an icon, as did the publicity still; indeed, that Monroe’s face swims in a sea of gold alludes to the gold paint or gold leaf used in 13th- and 14thcentury iconographic images of the Madonna and Christ, further implying that Warhol’s painting signifies uncritical adoration. Parody, then, must do more than transcontextualize the past in the present; it must also have irony’s judgment of the social context. Though Simon Dentith is familiar with Hutcheon’s work, he does not use the term “trans-contextualization” even when he directly references her theory of parody. Instead, he focuses on intertextuality, which can be considered a type of trans-contextualization (albeit not necessarily with parodic intent), as it also involves placing a previous “text” in a new context, within the current work. Dentith describes intertextuality as “the myriad conscious ways in which texts are alluded to or cited in other texts: the dense network of quotations, glancing reference, imitation, polemical refutation, and so on in which all texts have their being” (5). Thus, parody “is one of the many forms of intertextual allusion out of which texts are produced” (6). In using the word “conscious” in the longer quote above, Dentith tacitly acknowledges the encoder, implying that the allusions are on purpose. Yet, his use of the passive voice suggests that intertextuality displaces attention from the encoder’s intentions. Dentith allude to the author’s intentionality elsewhere: 28 Developing that distinction between different kinds of intertextuality—between the deliberate and explicit allusion to a precursor text or texts on the one hand, and a more generalised allusion to the constitutive codes of daily language, on the other—allows us to distinguish between different kinds of parody. (6–7) With “deliberate,” Dentith indirectly attributes intention to the encoder of the “precursor” text. Yet, he avoids taking the point as far as Hutcheon, with respect to the decoder’s acknowledging the encoder’s position, and what the implications of this might be. More problematically, in Dentith’s rather general version of intertextuality, in which the “codes of daily language” may be the referents/allusions, is a potential departure from parody’s specific ability to trans-contextualize – and thus to defamiliarize. The focus is on the present rather than what sort of relationship the present has to the past, or vice versa. The full potential to defamiliarize and spark a change in perception or behaviour in decoders may be more limited. Dentith alludes to the idea that parody calls attention to itself as a construction: [f]ollowing the French theorist Roland Barthes’ notion of “the death of the author,” … parody emerges as a formal practice in which the densely allusive intertextual nature of all writing is made especially transparent, so that its “authorship” becomes problematic. (15) This, along with Dentith’s note about “daily” intertexuality, alludes to Jacques Derrida’s notion of citation.32 However, I suggest that rather than making authorship “problematic” per se, intertexual allusions permit the author/artist to reappear from the deconstructionist ether, while enabling decoders to become self-aware of their role as interpreter. Indeed, in the context of a parodic artwork (one that also employs irony and ambiguity), intertexual allusions do make “transparent” “the allusive intertextual nature” of writing: when 32 In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida suggests that all instances of language use are, in effect, citations of earlier ones. Taking this larger view, then, every utterance has been said before, in some way, shape or form. However, to suggest that this means that “authorship becomes problematic” in the context of parodic allusions to earlier texts is to shy away from attributing the intentionality to the author that Dentith implies. 29 decoders are reminded of another text, they are brought outside of the diegetic world of that text and back into the real world, which (particularly in the context of parody) contains both the parodying and the parodied works. Furthermore, parody can illuminate the ontological instability of writing and of interpretation (by which I mean that both activities are denaturalized and revealed as constructions), and hence of the decoder’s position in the world in relation to the parodic artwork. Dentith also addresses socio-historical context, which is easily linked to transcontextualization: “We have to recognize… that parody’s direction of attack cannot be decided upon in abstraction from the particular social and historical circumstances in which the parodic act is performed, and therefore that no single social or political meaning can be attached to it” (26–27). While this acknowledges the socio-historical context(s) of encoder and decoder, as well as implying the encoder’s desire to “attack” a target, Dentith’s statement suggests that the decoder’s position overrides the encoder’s, as an intended parodic allusion could be interpreted in various ways by different decoders. Hutcheon’s theory suggests that the various socio-historical contexts have equal weight in determining meaning(s); the “situations in the world” of both encoder and decoder are important. Dentith does not particularize context(s) to the degree that Hutcheon does; I would argue that doing so is necessary in order to understand how contexts contribute to meaning(s) – and to intentions – and by extension, how parody “trans-contextualizes” intertexual references in the present text to defamiliarize. For Katrin Horn, trans-contextualization is also significant to drag and camp. One of her points is that because gender is recontextualized on/by the body of the drag performer, then the notion of originary genders is revealed as false and gender an ideological construction. The term “recontextualized” is Judith Butler’s, from whose 30 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Horn takes some of the following: The potential transformation as opposed to simplistic imitation of norms, behavior, roles, and values makes parody interesting for gender and queer studies. Judith Butler for example sees gender parody as a powerful tool in the deconstruction of gender norms and normality. In its original context gender parody is mainly connected to practices of drag and described as “subversive repetition” … in which “genders can … be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible” ... The point, however, is not so much to make certain forms of femininity or masculinity incredible, but a much broader one, namely that “the parody is of the very notion of an original” ... (Horn np) The notion that gender has been transformed, by virtue of the drag performer assuming an identity that does not conform to the expected one enforced by the disciplinary powers of the gender binary, is to suggest that gender may be fluid, that there is no natural or essential connection between gender and an anatomically sexed body, as Butler also posits in Gender Trouble. That gender becomes “incredible” lies in the idea that if the “original” drag performance, for example, with its makeup, wigs, and other devices of exaggerated femininity is beyond credibility, then what makes “normal” femininity so credible, given its lack of referent? This perhaps ties into the notion that drag, and other attempts to reify femininity, may be understood as “feminine mimesis” – a self-referential and ironic copy of an ideal notion of the feminine that challenges patriarchal oppression; feminine drag, then, may further make the “sign-referent model of mimesis … excessive to itself, spilling into a mimicry that undermines the referent’s authority” (Diamond 62).33 Or, another way to say this might be that it calls attention to the very lack of referent. 33 The notion of “feminine mimesis,” in Luce Irigaray’s theory, has to do with the idea that when women “do” (or, perhaps, “redo”) femininity, the stereotypical tropes are not faithfully replicated – or exaggerated – which then may create a kind of aporia with respect to gender norms. Such “performances” are not meant to be parody, but there is indeed an element of self-consciousness if not irony. 31 The transformation of femininity in and/or through drag, then, is in its being recontextualized – or trans-contextualized – from its position as “normal” within the heteronormative gender binary into the context of drag, in which performers deliberately exaggerate or make excessive the stereotypical tropes of femininity. As Butler states, [t]his perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. (Gender Trouble 138) That gender has a new context, as drag performance, suggests that the meanings attached to gender are not single or permanent: they can be “resignified” depending on who performs them, as well as who sees them and where. In Kent Monkman’s painting The Daddies, for example, a parody of the two original paintings titled The Fathers of Confederation, Monkman’s drag persona, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle – seated before the “Fathers” wearing little more than black high-heels – can be understood as effecting a kind of double recontextualization.34 Not only does she reveal gender as a construction but also Canada as a nation. Miss Chief, as present-day drag persona of the artist, has been trans-contextualized from the present and into the past, from the historical group portrait of the “Fathers” to the present parodic one. She is trans-contextualized again into the present as the parodic painting is exhibited in different contemporary galleries and museums. First, viewers may see Miss Chief’s drag as denaturalizing gender through the “feminine” tropes appearing on her anatomically male body. Miss Chief, then, in this painting with these settler men who abide by the codes of heteronormative “masculine” 34 The first, by Robert Harris, painted in 1883-84, was destroyed by fire; Rex Woods was commission in the 1960s to paint the second based on Harris’s original. 32 gender in dress and comportment, challenges the notion of normative gender through her non-normative gender performance: if her drag calls into question the stability of femininity and “feminine” gender, then the men’s “masculine” gender identities are similarly unstable. Likewise, their patriarchal authority as “fathers,” rooted in their “masculine” identities, is unstable. Consequently, while the original paintings were intended to pay homage to the men’s roles in engendering (ironic pun intended) Canada as a nation, Monkman’s parodic painting challenges the notion of normative gender, revealing it as an unstable ideology that may differ according to context; in so doing, the painting reveals the patriarchal foundation of colonialism to be similarly fraught and calls the nation of Canada into question as anything other than a construction, the ideological brainchild of these white male settlers. The word “fathers” as part of the title of the original paintings suggests that they were Canada’s progenitors, as though the nation had come about in a “natural” way, as a man might “father” a child.35 In Monkman’s parody, however, the naturalized concept of “nation” is revealed as a construction, as gender is; no longer does “fathers” convey that Canada sprang to life through their efforts as progenitors, but rather from their efforts to perform their identity as settlers with the right to dominate/conquer the “empty” “wilderness,” as though no one stood in their way. In this counter-narrative, Miss Chief stands (or at least sits) in their way, a reminder not only of the contingency of their masculinity but also of their white male power, and that the nation of Canada was brought into being in part because of notions of what constituted right or title to land that were constructed by European men.36 Miss Chief, as a kind of metonymic figure, may also remind decoders of the presence of Indigenous peoples in 35 This also suggests that a “mother” or “mothers” were not needed, only the “fathers,” negating the importance of women more generally, not just in the political sphere. 36 See discussion of terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery in chapter three, pp. 197–98. 33 this land, and that colonizers chose to erase them further via policies of cultural genocide – and, that colonizers also aimed at erasing Two-Spirit people, who were now seen as wrong and unnatural. The denaturalizing effect of this trans-contextualization of both gender and the ideology of nationhood in the context of Canadian colonialism may then produce instability for decoders regarding their own identities as Canadians. 4. Performativity That the “Fathers” of Confederation effectively produced Canada as a nation-state (and that Monkman’s work may produce a sense of ontological instability in decoders via the presence of Miss Chief) is closely connected to performativity, which can be understood as the “bringing into being” of a situation or state. The concept stems from J.L. Austin’s speech act theory: in How to Do Things with Words, Austin explains that speech acts or utterances may effect particular changes by virtue of being voiced and received; such utterances are “performative” rather than “constative” (6–9).37 Performativity may also exist in a representation, either visual or verbal; a novel, for example, brings into being a particular world (albeit one not necessarily based on reality; regardless, the representation may reify ideas or ideologies that have bearing on the real world). Museum displays of Indigenous “artefacts” or material cultural objects might also be viewed as performative, in that they manifest ideas or ideologies held by anthropologists and museum workers about the Indigenous peoples who made them; these ideologies then have bearing on the ways that museum visitors conceptualize, and perhaps behave towards, these peoples.38 At the surface or “foreground,” a museum exhibit is generally understood as a display of 37 The classic example of a performative occurs when a justice of the peace “brings into being” spouses as married when stating “I now pronounce you...” 38 See the brief literature review in Chapter 3, in particular Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum, and pages 245-46 for my discussion of Candace Greene’s article about the “Smithsonian Effect.” 34 objects presented “objectively”; it also has a “backgrounded” or connotative meaning, in being the representation of an ideology. This lends support to my argument that parody can have particular effects on decoders. In other words, if museum exhibits have tacit effects on visitors with respect to the ways they conceptualize and behave towards the peoples and objects represented, as the work of Ames, Bennett, et al. suggests, then it is not unreasonable to propose that, given the guiding authority of the encoder of a parodic artwork, that decoders might respond in a parallel manner – i.e., the parodic work is performative and might influence decoders’ perception. Parody as a device performs, in a manner of speaking, the ideologies embodied by/ represented in an artwork by trans-contextualizing them in the present work; it may also create a relationship between encoder and decoder, when the latter identifies and responds to the intended intertexual references. As noted, the parody may fail and these relationships not develop: “If readers miss a parodic allusion, they will merely read the text like any other: the pragmatic ethos would be neutralized by the refusal or inability to share the necessary mutual code that would permit the phenomenon to come into being” (Hutcheon 94). The utterance intended by the encoder must be received as such by decoders for the speech act that is parody to “come into being” – to have “force” and be “felicitous,” as J.L. Austin phrases it (12 and elsewhere). If a decoder fails to “get” the parodic references, these references are not felicitous and the parody does not exist; instead, it is simply an artwork to be judged on the basis of other criteria, such as aesthetics. The parodic work may be described as “performing” parody; if the parody is “felicitous,” it is because the decoder has interpreted the encoder’s message (at least in part) as intended. Consequently, the parodic text can be understood as an extended 35 intertextual and meta-textual performative speech act that can be evaluated as being felicitous or infelicitous. As noted above, the novel as a form can also be understood as performative. Within the form, there may be significant differences (depending on genre etc.): the typical realist narrative brings into being a fictional, diegetic world that enables the reader to suspend disbelief; a self-referential or meta-fictional narrative, however, performs itself as artifice, calling attention to its creation. For example, the prefatory “Medical and Legal Disclaimer” and “A Note from the Author” in Sybil Lamb’s I’ve Got a Time Bomb are self-referential, deliberately exposing the novel’s status as a novel, asserting the fact that the subsequent narrative and its characters are Lamb’s constructions; as such, these “paratexts” inhibit the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief (Genette 37). They are then performative with respect to the author: through them, the author brings herself into being for decoders, reminding them that the novel is her construction, her representation of a world and its characters. By extension, the author brings into being her own authority, in that she controls her identity as the author. As I argue, this is significant for authors who have been “othered” by/in hegemonic society. Novels with self-referential components thus may enable authors to control how normative members of society perceive them, readers who may otherwise have understood these “othered” individuals on the basis of stereotypes perpetuated within hegemonic discourse. This kind of self-reflexivity, as manifest in parody, “could be seen, then, as an act of emancipation: irony and parody can act to signal distance and control in the encoding act” (Hutcheon 96). In other words, parody allows the encoder to assert agency in resistance to hegemonic discourse, through controlling representation and self-representation, distancing readers from the novel and making them aware of the novel as a construction and her role as author. 36 5. Humour & Laughter Since the connection between humour and laughter is perhaps more direct than ties among other characteristics and effects, they might logically be discussed together. The presence of irony in a parodic artwork, for example, might prompt several different effects in decoders (ambivalence, defamiliarization, ontological instability), while humour is likely, first and foremost, to prompt laughter or amusement (though humour might not be to a decoder’s taste and instead evoke a sniff of irritation, or no reaction if decoders do not “get” the joke). Decoders’ responses to humour can indeed vary, which has bearing on the notion that parody encourages decoders to reconsider the encoder’s position; whether decoders “get” the joke or not, a kind of insider/outsider situation may be created, not unlike with parody itself (re: irony and/or ambiguity and the potential that the message(s) is/are [not] received). Responses to humour may manifest in one of several ways. “Insiders” might feel a sense of satisfaction or even smugness as a result of “getting” the joke; they might also feel an affinity with other decoders who “get” it; they might even be prompted to feel affinity with the encoder. This latter might also be combined with smugness, due to feeling like an “insider” in understanding the humour. In contrast, “outsiders” who do not get the joke or who do not find it funny may feel excluded, which could prompt alienation from the encoder and the intentions (though this exclusion may indeed be intended by the encoder). Yet, depending on individual decoders, a lack of comprehension may also prompt curiosity, or a desire to understand what they did not “get.” Humour historians/theorists show that such responses are tied to social context, as will be discussed. 37 As noted, Linda Hutcheon stands nearly alone in her assertion that humour is not essential; this seems to be based in part on her view that parody has changed over time in response to different social conditions. I agree that parody can succeed whether or not it contains humour; however, I do think she could have spent more time considering the function and effects of humour when it is present, as from my perspective, humour may offer a valuable contribution to parody’s “revolutionary impact.” One reason Hutcheon is not concerned with humour seems to do with her privileging irony and intertextuality: “[t]he pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humour in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual ‘bouncing’ … between complicity and distance” (32). While the parodic artwork might be humourous, readers’ responses, for Hutcheon, are founded in feeling satisfaction with their ability to “get” the intertextual “jokes,” rather than being amused by the jokes themselves. This is perhaps too subjective on her part; not all decoders will take the same delight in their ability to decode. Further to the quote above, we might consider “complicity and distance” in relation to humour in a couple of ways. First, I suggest it is better to use the term “affinity” in this context instead of “complicity,” in order to distinguish decoders’ responses to parodic works (including those that are humourous) from the kind of complicity Hutcheon discusses with respect to the encoder’s “conservative” references to an earlier artwork, form, or genre (i.e., that encoders are “complicit” in preserving the status quo through conservatively repeating some aspect of the precursor artwork). If decoders “get” the jokes, affinity may occur as they enter a circle of tacit understanding with the encoder; part of this may stem from recognizing how the parodic work critiques a previous work, genre, or ideology via trans-contextualization (and which might also be satirical or otherwise humourous). Yet, distance may be created if decoders feel detached from the 38 received ideas/norms to which the parodic artwork alludes, and which may be the target of the work’s humour, particularly if derisively satiric. Hutcheon seems to consider this conceptual engagement with the parodic artwork (or “intertextual bouncing”) as more important than a response to humour; while humour may have other effects (i.e., contributing to either affinity or distance), for Hutcheon, it is the act of recognizing the parodic allusions, and not the humour itself, that stage parody’s “potentially revolutionary impact.” That humour can be a means of establishing affinity and/or distance is, however, significant, in part because of the social context in which any instance of humour occurs, not just within a parodic artwork. The context frames both the type of humour and the response, or the “social effects,” as Michael Billig discusses in Laughter and Ridicule: Toward a Social Critique of Humour (122). From the point of view of twentieth-century sociology, humour may have two functions: it may be “ridiculing,” with a conservative or “repressive” effect, in that it maintains the social order; or it may be “rebellious” or “contestive” (“revolutionary” in Hutcheon’s terms), thus potentially effecting a change (203). Billig explains that “[t]he notion of rebellious humour conveys an image of momentary freedom from the restraints of social convention. It constitutes a brief escape, or, to use the terminology of Peter Berger (1997), a moment of transcendence” (208). Humour may help create a space in which individuals oppressed by ideology-based, hegemonic social constraints may find temporary freedom (perhaps only freedom of expression, rather than liberation from oppression). For decoders who “get” the jokes and/or parodic allusions in such encoders’ works and who may already feel affinity (or begin to do so), this reinforces an “in-group” sentiment that may also provide a sense of transcending hegemonic norms. 39 Yet, Billig challenges the simplistic binary of the conservative or “repressive” and the “rebellious” or “contestive” forms of humour, suggesting that the latter, particularly in the context of late capitalism, may also be conservative and induce complacency (203). Ridicule, he explains, can be conservative rather than rebellious: Ridicule lies at the core of social life, for the possibility of ridicule ensures that members of society routinely comply with the customs and habits of their social milieu. Of course, humour can be rebellious, kicking against the dictates of social life. But social theorists have often concentrated on the rebellious aspect to the exclusion of the disciplinary aspects. Those who are motivated to believe in the goodness and creativity of laughter’s rebelliousness turn their heads from the more problematic aspects of ridicule. (2) Whether the humour and resulting laughter are conservative or rebellious depends, perhaps, on the nature of the ridicule itself (the intentions of the encoder), as well as the decoder. Depending upon one’s point of view, that humour is conservative may not be problematic; marginalized authors or writers seeking to challenge the hegemonic would perhaps use forms of humour they believe are “rebellious” and “creative.” They might, as Bakhtin posits Rabelais did in his novels, seek “to destroy the forces of stasis and official ideology through … parody” (Holquist xvi). While Hutcheon has an equivocal view of comedy, Margaret Rose seems to believe that parody is not complete without it, though she does concede its effects may vary. The “modern designation of ridiculing parody as something negative or destructive” is perhaps overstated, she says, and returns to F.J. Lelièvre’s scholarship on ancient parody; he “suggest[s] that even when something like ridicule is used, it does not mean that the parodist is completely negative about the target” (24). This possible ambivalence towards the target is perhaps important in relation to Sybil Lamb’s and Ursula Johnson’s work. In Lamb’s case, to read her novel as parodying gender is not analogous to ridiculing a trans women’s gender identity. Likewise, to read Johnson’s work as a parody of Mi’kmaw 40 basket-making is not to suggest that this equates to deriding the traditions; rather, the target is the social conditions of colonialism that have influenced basket production. Regardless, as Bakhtin has theorized in relation to carnival humour, laughter, even that prompted by ridicule, “offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world … and to have a completely new order of things” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 34).39 A new outlook, for some decoders, might mean taking on the perspective of the encoder. Rose also differs from Hutcheon with respect to the “pragmatic range” in humour (as in parody). Rose concedes that some decoders may not “get” the humour and so will not find the parodic work funny; however, she states that the parody is still comedic, even in the absence of a response of laughter (31–32). This perhaps supports my assertion that parody strengthens the encoder’s position; the humour exists in the work whether or not any given decoder understands it – primarily, because it still exists for the encoder, who intended it. This does prioritize the joke (or the “text”), but it also emphasizes the encoder’s intentions over the response of any dull-witted decoder. As noted, Hutcheon repeatedly acknowledges parody’s potential to “fail” precisely because the decoder does not see the parodic allusions. But if we can accept that a joke is still a joke, whether or not a particular receiver snickers knowingly, then we might extrapolate and say that parody still exists in the absence of a decoder’s apprehension of intertexual allusions, because the encoder still knows they’re there. That said, if the decoder does not “get” these allusions, the parody is not felicitous. As a consequence, the “revolutionary potential,” with respect to changing the decoder’s perception or behaviour, may not occur, and the parody (and any joke) does indeed fail. 39 Bakhtin’s theory of carnival will be discussed in a bit more detail on pp. 66–67. 41 If the humour is incongruous, perhaps stemming from the work’s difference(s) from the precursor, the possibility that it causes discomfort or bemusement rather than laughter may be greater, though this may also amplify its potential to have a defamiliarizing effect on decoders. According to Rose, surprise is a probable response to parodic incongruity; in a section titled “Reader Reception,” she offers a list of categories and sub-types of “the signals of parody” that readers may “recognize” (36). The effects of incongruity are twofold: the reader may experience “[s]hock or surprise, and humour, from conflict with expectations about the text parodied”; the second is a “change in the [reader’s] views” (38). The implication, given Rose’s assertion that comedy is essential to parody, is that the decoder must experience both surprise or shock and humour. Yet, this brings her view closer to Hutcheon’s, in that shock or surprise might be understood as parallel to “defamiliarization.” Furthermore, that readers’ views might change is not so dissimilar from Hutcheon’s idea that parody’s difference produces a “potentially revolutionary impact” in perception or behaviour. Simon Dentith’s view of humour aligns with Hutcheon’s, in his saying that parody “need not be funny” (37). However, he adds that parody “works better if it is [funny], because laughter, even of derision, helps it secure its point” (ibid.). Humour, he adds, might be for its own sake (the decoder simply appreciates the joke) or part of the overall critique (yet perhaps softening the blow of satirical derision). He sees a range of value in humour: “sometimes… the laughter is the only point, and the breakdown of discourse into nonsense is a sufficient reward in itself” (37–38). While there is truth in this – many of Edward Leary’s limericks fit into this category – that the humour has no meaning potentially precludes the possibility of any political or “revolutionary” impact. 42 Several humour theorists lend support to the idea that humour and its effect of laughter may contribute to decoders’ reading the critique effected by the parodic artwork due to laughter being a “social emotion, occurring most often in interactions, where it is associated with bonding, agreement, affection, and emotional regulation” (Scott, Lavan, Chen, and McGettigan np). From this perspective, decoders of parody might laugh to show agreement with the encoder and establish concord. Scott et al. suggest that laughter “may also simultaneously function as an essential behaviour for helping to ‘de-escalate’ negative emotional experience, with a positive role in both the short-term affective state of the interaction, and the longer-term state of relationships” (ibid.). Thus, when parody is humourous and elicits laughter, the effect beyond the immediate chuckle may be twofold: on one hand, as noted, the humour may help dull the edge of any sharply derisive satire, particularly if directed at a target with which decoders identify. Or, humour and decoders’ response of amusement may contribute to affective bonding with the encoder, and possibly becoming more open to the encoder’s views. A scene in “Tick 0,” near the end of Lamb’s novel, features several examples of humour, which may contribute to reader engagement and potentially strengthen readers’ “bonding” with Sybil, despite her status as rogue picarx. I identify three types: irony, incongruity, and word play. Incongruity occurs in the first two lines of dialogue, as Sybil and a man she just met are about to have sex in his apartment: [T]hen he took her top off and then her pants and then he was like, “do you got a condom??” And Syb had answered, “Of course, Who’s goin’ first?” He looked confused for a minnit, lookin’ at her, the little cogs in his head whirring…. And then he shouted “AH!!! OMIGAWD!! What the fuckin’ hell?!?!?” Sybil was impossible to startle even before she got so drugged. “You picked me up in a bar and took me back here for a quickie and I obliged.” “Yeh, but I didn’t know you were one of THEM.” 43 “Dude, you picked me up in Call Your Mother. We’ve been having sex for 15 minnits. Try to pay attention.” … They really had been fooling around for almost 20 minnits before the guy freaked out at her. (336) Heterosexual, cis-gender readers may assume, when a man asks for a condom, that he will be the one to use it. Sybil’s response, however, implies she too has a penis and will also need a condom; this creates dissonance and defamiliarizes, particularly for readers whose attention has strayed (though it may also produce humour alongside shock or surprise, as Margaret Rose posits). The man’s response may amuse readers who have been paying attention, and who may feel he deserves his own shock; if readers respond in this way, it implies allegiance with Sybil’s point of view. The judgment of irony lies in Sybil’s sarcastic tone as she points out clues the man obviously missed.40 There is also dramatic irony, as attentive readers will have already suspected what he did not. The mild derision, for these readers, may further help to align their views with the protagonist’s. Sybil continues to try to get the man aroused, but he pushes her away: “‘You can’t walk around letting people get misled in their assumptions. You gotta be clear about what you got going on’” (337). Sybil’s response involves amusing word play; her tercet, with its school-yard meter and rhyme, as well as picaresquely coarse content, is direct: “‘Fuck you. Thought you knew. Lie back down before I spew’” (ibid.). That “people get misled in their assumptions” is arguably one of the key points the novel makes; the ambiguity of this scene for Sybil’s potential male sexual partner further calls readers’ attention to their own process of making similar assumptions, and that any dissonance between these assumptions and reality (in this case, the “reality” of Sybil’s world – specifically, her sexgender identity) is on readers/gender attributers/decoders and not on the trans person. 40 That the man was not aware that Sybil is trans is odd, given where he picked her up (the bar, Call Your Mother, is renowned as a place where trans sex workers find clients), and that he’d just disrobed her of a crucial garment (pants). 44 This scene may suggest to cis-gender people in particular that they ought not to assume anything about trans people, and also that it is not the trans person’s responsibility to ensure that they inform everyone they meet as to whether or not their gender expression aligns with their genitals, as per the heteronormative binary.41 The scene may also highlight that ambiguity may not be a useful strategy “in the field” for trans women; though no harm comes to Sybil this time – other than the relatively mild verbal repudiation of being called “one of THEM” – the possibility that she could have suffered another beating at the hands of a less tolerant (or less drunk and incapacitated) man is all too real.42 The scene may indeed compel some readers to feel anxiety for Sybil, in anticipating that the tension may escalate, if the man decides to attempt to define the “boundary” between himself and the abject other (“THEM”) that Sybil apparently represents to him.43 Sybil’s derision for the clueless man is mild, compared to some forms this kind of humour may take. Responding to even the most derisive of humour is potentially a signal that decoders’ thoughts regarding the target of derision align with those of the encoder, who intended the humour. This laughter too, then, suggests a possible affinity with the encoder. Humour – the characteristic Hutcheon downplays – may be crucial to parody’s revolutionary impact, in contributing to a change in the decoder’s perceptions. However, the effects of any humour still depend on the target and the context. Referring to a certain trend in contemporary humour theory that posits that humour ought to be “positive,” Michael Billig states: “beliefs about humour’s goodness do not stand outside of history. 41 Nor does this ambiguity means that trans people ought to field a barrage of questions regarding the state of their genitals, simply to satisfy either the curiosity or lack of certainty experienced by the gender “attributer” (see my discussion of Kate Bornstein, pp. 126–128), etc. 42 See chapter 2, pp. 155–157 for a discussion about the lived experience of trans repudiation. 43 See chapter 2, pp. 124, 147, and 150 for discussions about trans repudiation in relation to Sybil’s beating. 45 What seems natural and so full of common sense in one era will appear strange in another” (2). Billig argues that in our late capitalist period, theories of humour as “positive” or “good-natured … currently predominate” over those that consider humour’s “negative” characteristics and effects (3). Satirical humour, understood as “negative,” is thus devalued and deemed counter-productive to some vague notion of well-being (10). Billig’s term for this is “‘ideological positivism,’” which “represents an optimistic, cando outlook in a society that offers its inhabitants the dream of constant, positively productive pleasures. The cruelties of this social order are overlooked, as if there is an imperative to wish away negatives” (ibid.). This perhaps suggests that some artists (to whom I have referred as marginalized) may find it more difficult to employ “negative” humour, such as satire, that judges the very society in which it situated, as these types of humour will not be understood as producing “pleasure.” The encoders might be judged in return for trying to upset the status quo in ways deemed “harmful” or “hurtful”; as a consequence, their parodic artworks, and the underlying political intentions, may be rejected. For example, some settler-decoders visiting Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice may find the satiric humour “negative,” its criticisms of colonialism too pointed; some may take a defensive position in response to the implication that they are complicit in colonialism. This would perhaps be a version of what Robin DiAngelo refers to as “white fragility,” a term describing a range of responses that may occur when white people encounter a challenge to their social position and privilege: we might “withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium” (np). However, in such cases, though decoders are not amused, they still perceive the parodic intent; whether any revolutionary impact will occur is another matter. 46 While in some cases, ridicule may indeed harm, I argue that not every instance of satiric derision is directed at a “victim” per se.44 The word “victim” suggests weakness or haplessness in the face of aggression or fate; however, in many of the periods in which satire and parody with a derisive element have prevailed, ridicule has often been aimed upwards at figures of power, such as the monarchy, the clergy, and the nobility. This holds true today in various contemporary art forms, including those considered “popular,” which similarly often aim “upwards” in making certain powerful members of society their targets or ostensible victims.45 At the heart of this kind of satiric critique is the recognition that these powerful people abuse their power and victimize others, and so deserve the attention they receive in the form of this so-called “negative” humour. Similarly, with regard to Canadian colonialism and works by Indigenous artists that aim upwards at colonial figureheads and institutions, any derisive humour arguably turns the “negative” into a positive: while these works may employ a “negative” or satirically mocking humour, the goal is to interrupt the expected narrative of colonialism, to defamiliarize events both past and present, and place at the forefront the views of the encoder, which have been (and may still be) ignored within hegemonic neo-colonial discourse. This “negative” humour may have a positive outcome, as decoders may alter their views about nationhood and the oppressive powers of colonialism and its presentday impacts.46 As Simon Critchley states, “Satire stands resolutely against the self-images of the age” and its truth is meant “to warn us against a danger implicit in our selfconception” (36). Satire may shock settler-decoders into seeing themselves in a new way, 44 Michael Billig offers examples of satiric humour that border on bullying (p. 107 and elsewhere). For example, television programs such as Saturday Night Live, which, before and after the 2016 election in the United States, have been satirizing the president and his staff. 46 As discussed, some pieces in Kent Monkman’s exhibition offer this kind of “positive-in-negative” humour, as do certain descriptions for the “o’pltek” baskets in Ursula Johnson’s “The Archive Room.” 45 47 perhaps recognizing that the criticism the parodic artwork makes is justified. Again, however, the social context of individual decoders is a factor in any potentially positive effect of “negative” humour. Some settler-decoders may not be amused at seeing the “heroes” of Canada’s founding made the butt of a joke in The Daddies. Other decoders may not appreciate being implicated in upholding colonial values (though this is the default position, if they reject the painting’s humour).47 I hesitate to speculate why Indigenous artists might be motivated to use “negative” satiric humour, other than what I have outlined above. Surely it is not too much of a stretch to think that aiming “upwards” at colonial powers is considerable impetus. Artist Caroline Monnet (Algonquin, Quebecoise, and French) from Quebec, suggests that many Indigenous people use humour as part of a “shield” to protect against colonial oppression: “There has been so much trauma and hardship in our history,” she says in a CBC video (2018). “How come we’re still [here] and we’re still able to have humour and laugh and be present, today more than ever? Is resilience a part of our protective shield?” If it is part of that shield, then humour perhaps fortifies it. Multi-disciplinary artist Adrian Stimson (Siksika, Blackfoot Nation), who also uses parody in his performance and other work, offers a similar perspective: “Indigenous people use humour a lot – not only as a survival mechanism, but it’s built within our culture” (Klein 2018). Perhaps the humour in contemporary Indigenous parodic art could be considered as a kind of “counting coup” against/with the settler-colonizer. Originally, counting coup, or “striking an enemy,” was an aspect of the “intertribal wars” of the Great Plains area, as Anthony R. McGinnis Lyons explains. It 47 As noted above, this may have to do with individual decoders’ “white fragility.” 48 was the highest honour earned by warriors. … Killing was part of war, but showing courage in the process was more important for individual status. This was best accomplished by risking one’s life in charging the enemy on foot or horseback to get close enough to touch or strike him with the hand, a weapon, or a “coupstick.” (np) The gesture was also aimed at humiliating the person touched by the coupstick, as it demonstrated that “they were not worth the ammunition needed to kill them” (ibid.). Lyons adds that “[c]ounting coup carried over into the battles against American troops” in the mid- to late 1800s and offers an example: at the Battle of the Little Bighorn the Northern Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg, with his friend Little Bird, “chased a soldier across the river, counting coup on him with their whips and grabbing his carbine. They did not kill him, said Wooden Leg, because after counting coup it did not seem … brave, and besides, it would waste bullets” (np). According to Dr. Brian Noble, associate professor in Dalhousie University’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, counting coup can take other forms: “In archival images of Plains Cree or Blackfoot [peoples], you’ll see men … wearing the garb of … the colonizer, the settler: the cowboy hat, the buckled belt, the mounted police shirt…. If you take their shirt and wear it, you’re actually taking on some of the rival’s power. But you’re also inviting them to answer back, to join into a good relationship with you.” (Affleck 2014) Taking the rival’s power in this way is effectively gaining a kind of authority through similarity or repetition. Thus, humour, particularly that which “strikes back” at the colonizer, is a way of taking power, or taking it back – replaying, in Hutcheon’s terms. The humour “touches” the “enemy” by mocking or deriding, without causing physical harm. Humour in parodic art is thus a means for the encoder to be resilient but also to claim space or reclaim power – as well as acknowledge relationship. For settler-decoders, the parodic humour in artworks by Indigenous peoples thus requires a response: to 49 consider their relationship to the parodic artwork and its trans-contextualized ideologies, as well as to the Indigenous encoding agent. To further extend the metaphor, then, parody as used by contemporary Indigenous artists can be understood as a kind of counting coup that operates in a couple of ways. Counting coup and parody are both “appropriations” of something from somewhere else – the shirt of the colonizer, European and American sublime landscape painting – and both establish a concomitant “complicity” through this appropriation or repetition. In other words, Indigenous artists who use Western art historical or anthropological traditions are taking (back) via complicity some of the colonizer’s power, of the authority that parody may enable more generally. Trans-contextualization also comes into play: if an Indigenous person wears the shirt of the colonizer, it is “trans-contextualized” from the colonizer to the colonized, and thus has different significance, both to the wearer (attributee) and to those observing the wearer (attributers).48 In Kent Monkman’s work, the borrowing of specific archival materials from Canadian museums can also be viewed as a kind of counting coup, an act of assuming power through the new signifying form that results, as these historical artworks and material cultural objects (not just from Indigenous cultures but also the colonizer’s) are displayed alongside Monkman’s own work. Also, and significant to the notion of decoders’ affinity with the encoder, the transcontextual use of these archival materials (as well as Ursula Johnson’s borrowing of certain formal aspects of museum archives) can be understood an “invitation” to the colonizer to answer back, “to join into a good relationship,” which might comprise part of the “potentially revolutionary impact” of parody’s difference. Perhaps this is what 48 It may even be a form of colonial mimicry, as per Homi Bhabha’s theory, as I discuss briefly in the final chapter (pp. 216–18) in relation to Kent Monkman’s drag performances as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. 50 reconciliation means at its heart – that settlers accept the challenge of the symbolic coup strike to join in a good relationship with Indigenous peoples, not merely acknowledging or apologizing for past wrongs but acting to redress them, both individually and collectively. All settler-decoders of Monkman’s and Johnson’s exhibitions, whether given works are humourous or not, should answer the call and seek ways to repair and maintain the bridges of relationship established at first contact, centuries ago. Effects of Parody 1. Defamiliarization This is perhaps the most important – or at least the most likely – effect of parody that Linda Hutcheon identifies. In explaining defamiliarization, she refers to Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt,” often translated as the “alienation effect” or the “distancing effect”; parody, she says, is similar, as it “works to distance and, at the same time, to involve the reader in a participatory hermeneutic activity” (92). Like Brecht’s theatrical interventions, aimed at calling attention to plays as constructions, parody’s characteristics of ambiguity or trans-contextualization similarly might jar decoders out of comfortable spectatorship. As Brecht describes it, the Verfremdungseffekt “consists in turning the object … to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected” (143). The political aim at the heart of Brecht’s distancing effect is pivotal, as Hutcheon argues is the case with parody: the distancing effect was meant “to transform [the spectator] from general passive acceptance to a corresponding state of suspicious inquiry” (Brecht 192). Similarly, through its difference from the precursor work, says Hutcheon, a parodic artwork “foregrounds irreconcilable opposition between texts and between text and 51 ‘world’” (101–102).49 The distancing effect in parody, then, may also contribute to decoders’ becoming aware of themselves as actively engaged in interpreting the encoder’s parodic allusions and other intentions, in a particular time and place. That the distancing effect has the potential to contribute to decoders’ “suspicious inquiry” into norms is also vital to Hutcheon’s theory: “parody is one possible mode of denuding contrast, of defamiliarizing ‘trans-contextualization,’ or of deviating from aesthetic norms established by usage” (35). This denaturalization of norms (of a style, genre, or ideology) functions as the catalyst for decoders’ potential change in perception (or even behaviour): “The implied questioning of these norms also provides the basis for the phenomenon of counter-expectation that allows for the structural and pragmatic activation of parody … by the decoder” (ibid.). In other words, as decoders account for the parodic work’s similarities to and differences from the precursor work, the expectations prompted by the similarities are then countered by the differences, which may give decoders pause to question why they are there, and how they counter norms: “parody [can act] as a consciousness-raising device, preventing the acceptance of the narrow, doctrinaire, dogmatic views of any particular ideological group” (103). Parody does this in part by denaturalizing – ambiguously juxtaposing “conservative” similarities to an earlier work, alongside provocative differences. Defamiliarization occurs in part because the parodic work’s similarity to an earlier artwork prompts expectation in decoders that the differences then counter; in effect, an anticipated certainty becomes uncertainty. A.M. Simon-Vandenbergen and Karin Aijmer, 49 This departs, however, from the Russian Formalist view that a text exists independent of its context (Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt was rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of “making strange”). In Brecht’s philosophy, the formal considerations were important, as were and the political and social context(s). Similarly, parody, which likewise emphasizes form, also has the potential to heighten decoders’ awareness of the larger culture and social situation in which they stand. 52 editors of The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-based Study of English Adverbs, explain that within any act of communication is a potentially “problematic relationship between certainty and uncertainty” (26). The tension between expectation and counter-expectation is a “central concept”; certain linguistic signs flag “‘expectations of some kind, against which knowledge may be matched’ (1986: 270)” (ibid.). Though their research focuses on the function of adverbs, the concepts can be transferred to other units of signification, those in language, as well as the visual signs or icons in an artwork. In a parodic work, any similarities to the precursor may cue recognition in viewers, thereby setting up an expectation as to the conclusion of the work’s message; instead, the work’s differences from the precursor then counter viewer expectation and interrupt the communication flow. This is likely to then cause aporia and uncertainty, as decoders realize that meaning is not certain. Expanding on her concept of defamiliarization, Hutcheon refers to Bakhtin’s theory of carnival to draw parallels between carnival’s parameters and parody’s: This paradox of legalized though unofficial subversion is characteristic of all parodic discourse insofar as parody posits, as a prerequisite to its very existence, [that] a certain aesthetic institutionalization entails the acknowledgment of recognizable [and] stable forms and conventions. These function as norms or as rules which can – and therefore, of course, shall – be broken. The parodic text is granted a special licence to transgress the limits of convention, but, as in the carnival, it can do so only temporarily and only within the controlled confines authorized by the text parodied – that is, quite simply, within the confines dictated by “recognizability.” (74–75) Without some form of “recognizability,” then, communication, whether via linguistic or visual signs, would fail. But the differences, the departures from conventions or norms, as Hutcheon stresses elsewhere, are what matter – at least with respect to parody’s transcontextualization of norms and its denaturalizing effect. This effect might last only as long as decoders are in the gallery with the art, but given the vagaries of individual 53 cognitive and emotional responses, it could last longer – defying the notion that parody, like carnival, has a set parameter in time and space. Hutcheon reiterates the idea that the work (and the encoder) is on some level complicit with the values of “high culture” but then asserts that “parody can, like the carnival, also challenge norms in order to renovate, to renew. In Bakhtin’s terminology, parody can be centripetal – that is a homogenizing, [hierarchizing] influence. But it can also be a centrifugal, de-normalizing one” (76–77). Fredric Jameson’s view of the ways that postmodern art forms deal with history – and by extension, how parody might defamiliarize historic codes or conventions – differs considerably from Hutcheon’s. For example, Jameson problematizes the postmodern “historical” novel for disassociating readers from history, as it can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about the past…. Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject but rather that of some degraded collective ‘objective spirit’: it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present … If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach. (25) With this, Jameson ascribes to history the notion of truth, which other twentieth-century theorists have derided or at least challenged. That the historical novel as a genre (which is still fiction, even if possibly based on certain “facts”) might have represented some true or authentic past is generally accepted as a fallacy, particularly in the context of poststructuralism; history has always been putative and “out of reach,” and to assume that one overriding “truth” about the past exists is to subscribe to monologism (for example, that the colonizer’s view of what happened in any number of colonized countries is the only “truth” conveniently elides the point of view of the colonized, thus perpetuating colonial 54 oppression). Thus, that postmodern and/or parodic novels do not represent this ostensibly “authentic” past is perhaps not problematic, or not for the reasons Jameson posits. John Duvall similarly questions Jameson’s position: Does he mean to suggest that there was a time … when history was in reach, when one grasped history in some unmediated fashion? Even if Sir Walter Scott believed he was representing the historical past, the work of New Historicism revealed the illusory nature of such belief through the following inescapable logic: the past is always textually mediated and texts are always historical. (np) Another way, then, to consider postmodern “historical” meta-fiction – and by extension, parody – is that they are mediations that trans-contextualize the past in the present and defamiliarize both, thus potentially engaging decoders to think critically about norms and conventions – perhaps even those related to representing the past in historical fiction. Dean Felluga compares Hutcheon’s view with Jameson’s: Hutcheon insists… that such an ironic stance on representation, genre, and ideology serves to politicize representation…. Parody de-doxifies, to use a favorite term of Hutcheon’s; it unsettles all … accepted beliefs and ideologies. Rather than see this ironic stance as “some infinite regress into textuality” (Politics 95), Hutcheon values the resistance in such postmodern works to totalizing solutions to society’s contradictions; she values postmodernism’s willingness to question all ideological positions, all claims to ultimate truth. (np) Felluga hints at the possibility that parody may prompt decoders, when they see the historical artwork’s conventions or ideology trans-contextualized in the parodic one, to be newly critical of ideologies past and present, and question their “truth.” Duvall concurs with the division Felluga establishes between Jameson and Hutcheon, stating that for Jameson, “postmodern narrative … [plays] only with pastiched images and aesthetic forms that produce a degraded historicism,” while for Hutcheon, “postmodern fiction remains historical, precisely because it problematizes history through parody, and thus retains its potential for cultural critique” (np). Parody, then, as defined by Hutcheon, can 55 indeed be a helpful strategy for marginalized artists who wish to comment on hegemonic norms that carry over from past to present. As Duvall states, [f]or Hutcheon, postmodernism remains historical and political precisely through its parodic historical reference; through such parodic reference, “postmodernist forms want to work toward a public discourse that would eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism” (Postmodernism 23) (np) Encoders of parody are able to take space via re-politicizing the present through transcontextualized references to the past. Postmodern art forms, particularly parodic ones, have “revolutionary” potential precisely because of the ‘de-doxifying” effects of transcontextualized history and ideologies. Of postmodern meta-fiction, Hutcheon says that such works do not rewrite, refashion, or expropriate history merely to satisfy either some game-playing or some totalizing impulse; instead, they juxtapose what we think we know of the past (from official archival sources and personal memory) with an alternate representation that foregrounds the postmodern epistemological question of the nature of historical knowledge. Which “facts” make it into history? And whose facts? (Postmodernism 71) Parodic artworks (one form of postmodern self-referential art) defamiliarize “what we think we know” about history; this may result in epistemological uncertainty – the “doxa” we thought we knew and accepted as normal is now “de-doxified” (Postmodernism 3). Johnson’s and Monkman’s parodic artworks may, then, prompt viewers to realize that the “facts” of colonial history in Canada have been from the point of view of the colonizer alone and presented so as to bestow glory upon the colonizer while denigrating Indigenous people; settler-colonizers’ “historical knowledge” is then “de-doxified” and we feel unsettled (pun intended). Simon Dentith does not identify “defamiliarization” as an effect of parody per se. Rather, he uses Jacques Derrida’s notion of “writing under erasure” to examine the effect(s) of trans-contextualization (as discussed earlier, he sees intertextuality as a means of bringing the past into contact with the present). Dentith says “writing under erasure” 56 [s]uggest[s] the impossibility of doing without the very words one recognizes as inadequate, as a metaphor for the activity of parody: … all parody re-functions pre-existing text(s) and/or discourses… these verbal structures [are] called to the readers’ minds and then placed under erasure… Parodic erasure disfigures its pre-texts in various ways that seek to guide our re-evaluation or refiguration of them. It is dialogical and suggestive as negatively deconstructive, for it (at least potentially) can achieve controlled and meta-fictional commentary ... (16) What Hutcheon calls “difference” Dentith calls disfiguration; either way, this is what may counter viewer expectation and prompt “suspicious inquiry,” in Brecht’s terms,” into the context. Similarly, Dentith suggests that “parodic erasure” is like the past-in-presentness of trans-contextualization and has a similar denaturalizing effect: “parody can invite the reader to examine, evaluate, and re-situate the hypotextual material” (16).50 Dentith further notes parody’s ability to defamiliarize and prompt ontological uncertainty in decoders: “the function of … [parody] is not normative but destabilizing, for if one discursive form can be parodied, perhaps all discourse can be, and there is no secure ground of knowledge on which we can rest” (78). However, as noted elsewhere, this destabilization is on the decoder’s end, as parody’s potential ability to prompt the decoder’s recognition of the encoder in fact helps to secure the encoder’s position. Our knowledge of ourselves as beings is perhaps what is truly insecure and unstable. Seymour Chatman offers yet another way to consider defamiliarization: he uses the term “‘parody’ to refer primarily to stylistic imitation for satirical effect, whether the satiric target is inappropriate content or style” (30). This idea of “inappropriate content or style” warrants exploration, as it alludes to trans-contextualization. Chatman is referring to situations in which the satiric target of the parodic work derides the style or content of the precursor – which, as many theorists of parody note, is often assumed to ensure the continuity of what is deemed to be appropriate style or content; in other words, the 50 Dentith often uses the term “hypotextual” to refer to allusions in the parodic artwork to the previous one. 57 parodic work attacks the precursor in order to reinstate a conservative status quo (whether of form, genre, aesthetics, etc.) – what Hutcheon refers to as complicity. However, it is also possible that the parodic work presents an element of the precursor’s content or style in a new situation that illuminates it as inappropriate for other reasons; when transcontextualized into this new situation, the content or the style is defamiliarized not in order to uphold the status quo but to depart rebelliously from it. Kent Monkman’s paintings provide a useful example, particularly those in which he imitates, and perhaps even lobbies a criticism at, the style and content of large-scale eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American landscape paintings, such as those by Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830–1903).51 While the historical depiction of a sublime and pristine landscape is trans-contextualized to the present day in Monkman’s landscapes, this content – sublime “Nature” in the “New World,” as viewed by white Europeans – is juxtaposed with other content, and in the process both may be deemed “inappropriate” by viewers who might judge the merits of an artwork solely on its aesthetic qualities (such as the sublime). Or, in contrast, these Eurocentric aesthetic qualities might be considered inappropriate from the point of view of an Indigenous artist, who would have an entirely different perspective on nature and humankind’s relationship to the land. Consider Sunday in the Park (2010) – a kind of self-portrait in which the artist is present as his drag alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, who stands at an easel en plein air, mountains in the distance.52 However, Miss Chief is wearing an outfit a typical nineteenth-century European male painter would never have worn: thigh-high Barbie51 In a talk at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, on January 20, 2018, Monkman stated that at first, he simply wanted to “imitate” Bierstadt’s painting style as “a new challenge”; he notes that other painters influenced his process, including Thomas Cole and John Mix Stanley. 52 This painting was not included in Shame & Prejudice: A Story of Resilience when I saw the exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in March 2017, nor more recently at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery on June 24, 2018; it is simply a good example of the point under discussion here. 58 pink boots, pink scarf loosely draped over her shoulders and fluttering around her otherwise nude body.53 Serving to emphasize the “inappropriateness” of Miss Chief in the act of painting within this landscape is a group of spectators; they resemble the leisureseekers in Georges Seurat’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), to which Monkman’s title (and content) alludes. The bourgeoisie in Seurat’s painting, concerned with their status and propriety, so as not to be mistaken for the lower class, would not have remained so placid at the sight of Miss Chief in drag.54 On closer inspection, the spectators in Monkman’s painting are fellow Indigenous drag queens; or, perhaps they are simply sporting brightly coloured, revealing clothes (thigh-high boots in hues of green and lilac; Speedo-style briefs in pink and green) antithetical to those of the bourgeois spectators in Seurat’s precursor. This similarity-with-difference, and the combination of “low” with high culture – which, vis-à-vis the art history canon, would be considered “inappropriate” – de-doxifies the traditional style of historical landscape painting. A closer look at the painting on Miss Chief’s easel adds to the already multi-dimensional parody of Monkman’s piece. Viewers might expect that the subject of Miss Chief’s painting is the landscape; however, rather than mimetically reproducing the lake and mountains, she is painting the other “inappropriate” figures to her right. The painting further problematizes history, not just art history, in offering this critical commentary on the European colonizer’s concept of terra nullius, which deemed the land of the “New World” to be empty of Indigenous peoples, an ideology that was reified in these painted depictions of the land as vast, sublime, and needing to be conquered in the name of “Manifest Destiny” – that empirical expansion and resource development were both justifiable and 53 The modernity of the outfit also prohibits its existence in the 19th century, as such accessories as Miss Chief’s boots did not then exist. 54 See chapter 3 re: Tony Bennett’s discussions of nineteenth-century museums (pp. 221–224 and later). 59 inevitable.55 Via Miss Chief, Monkman doubly reinserts the Indigenous subject into the “empty” landscape paintings, de-doxifying aesthetics to call attention to history, thereby critiquing not only the colonial ideology at the heart of terra nullius but also, in this case, the painting tradition that helped propagate and naturalize it. Sunday in the Park refigures the notion of what is “appropriate” not only with respect to history, the art history canon, and the land, but also gender identity. The representation of Miss Chief in pink drag is parody and camp (if not, strictly speaking, a performance).56 Parallels between parody and camp drag performance are, as noted earlier, Katrin Horn’s focus: “camp has emerged as a parodic device, defined by the four basic features, ‘irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor’ … and capable of questioning a given pretext’s status as ‘original’ or ‘natural’” (Horn np). Horn addresses the criticism that camp is conservative, for using and thus “perpetuating stereotypes” of the dominant discourse, even as it subverts them (parallel to Hutcheon’s theory of parody). Indeed, following from Hutcheon, Horn posits that it is the transcontextualization of stereotypes that enables the subversion and denaturalization: [I]nstead of viewing this dependence on hegemonic texts as a weakness of camp, I want to suggest that this is actually its strongest feature. By incorporating them, camp performances serve as constant reminders of how powerful and ubiquitous dominant discourses and texts are while simultaneously pointing out their gaps and incongruities, thereby undermining their claim to totality and truth. A similar claim has been made by Linda Hutcheon concerning “irony’s intimacy with the dominant discourse it contests”: “‘[The intimacy] is its strength, for it allows ironic discourse both to buy time (to be permitted and even listened to, even if not understood) and also to ‘relativize the [dominant’s] authority and stability,’” in part by appropriating its power. (Horn np) 55 Kent Monkman, speaking at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown on June 24, 2018, confirmed that Bierstadt et al. intended their paintings to promote settler expansion into the mid-west. 56 Arguably, it is performative, as it “brings into being” an Indigenous person in a landscape previously deemed empty of Indigenous peoples by European colonizers of the 19th century. 60 As with the close relationship Hutcheon sees between irony and parody, here too is a parallel situation for the effects of parody and its inclusion of a “dominant discourse” that it may also critique. In relocating the hegemonic “text” (i.e., the signifiers or codes of feminine gender) in another context, camp as parodic drag performance defamiliarizes gender norms. Horn’s notion of “buying time” speaks to the need to communicate in certain recognizable ways, so that camp’s (or parody’s) difference from the hegemonic text will be all the more evident and thus more likely to interrupt communication.57 Both camp and parody thereby defamiliarize and render unstable the hegemonic, as both Horn and Hutcheon assert.58 I should perhaps note that the emphasis is on the possibility for a parodic artwork to “de-doxify”; no one theory can possibly encompass all art, and not all instances of contemporary art are parody. Depending on the context – that of decoders, along with their individual ability to identify intertexual references to the past – parody may have “revolutionary potential” due to defamiliarization. 2. Ontological instability On one hand, the notion of the “death of the author” has contributed to emphasizing an individual’s interpretation of a text. However, the “linguistic turn” in post-structuralist theory has also called into question the ability of signifiers to enable the production of meaning. Hutcheon attempts to link this to the prevalence of parody in the twentieth century: parody “[p]erhaps … reflects what European theorists see as a crisis in the entire notion of the subject as a coherent and continuous source of signification” (4). This perhaps suggests that encoders of parody, who turn to parody as a device in their works, 57 58 See discussion earlier in this chapter on page 67 re: expectation and counter-expectation. This was also explained above in relation to Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s presence in The Daddies. 61 are suffering from this crisis of the subject; perhaps, as pointed out above, this is because they recognize their marginalized position in society and see parody as a means of asserting a more stable or certain identity (though arguably, never an entirely stable or certain identity). Parody’s characteristics and effects may enable encoders to be more visible in the process of communication prompted by the parodic artwork; rather, parodic artworks may spur a crisis in decoders, prompting them to question themselves in relation to the works and their social contexts. Leaning on Timothy Reiss’ discussions about how each socio-cultural period has a dominant “discursive theory” that enables the creation of meaning, Hutcheon elaborates: The dominant theory since the seventeenth century, Reiss argues, has been variously labelled as positivist, capitalist, experimentalist, historicist, or modern; Reiss calls it analytico-referential. Its suppressed practice is that of the ‘enunciating subject as discursive activity’ (42). … According to Reiss, science, philosophy, and art have all worked toward the occultation of the act and responsibility of enunciation (énonciation); however, all three are now also becoming the site of the surfacing of that same practice and its recent subverting of notions of objectivity, of linguistic transparency, and indeed of the concept of the subject. Today’s parodic art forms are one such locus of subversion. (Hutcheon 85) Contemporary parody, then, does not permit the “enunciating” agent to hide behind a veil of discourse; indeed, parody reminds decoders of the encoding agent as an individual “speaker” who has produced an “utterance,” an individual who may intend to create situations in which received meanings are be destabilized.59 Of course the encoder uses aspects of hegemonic language/discourse: the parodic artwork, in its similarity to the precursor work, replicates the forms, genres, etc. of that precursor, thus implicating the encoder to some extent in those particular discourses. So perhaps it is not that the encoder 59 A sense of ontological instability might be partly what prompts the encoder to make the parodic art; creating parody may be an attempt to assert the self in the face of a monologic hegemony that seeks to erase the encoder, for example. 62 becomes an indisputably stable subject who stands 100% in opposition to all aspects of hegemonic discourse(s); rather, parody enables the encoder to gain a kind of authority and thus be recognized by subjects who are familiar with, and perhaps uphold, the hegemonic. The decoder as a subject is not entirely negated through/in the process of comprehending a parodic artwork’s similarities to and differences from the precursor work; the decoder does not disappear, but rather an aspect of their received identity becomes somewhat less certain, as an aspect of the encoder’s position becomes somewhat more certain. Perhaps both can be said to newly exist as hybrids – as subjects who are both implicated in and potentially opposed to the hegemonic. The ironic, ambiguous, and/or self-referential aspects of a parodic artwork, and the attention the work calls to the subject position of the encoder, may contribute to decoders experiencing some kind of crisis of being. For example, self-referential and ironic parody calls on decoders to remember the source of the narrative voice in a work of fiction. Likewise, parody’s intertextuality may make decoders aware of the controlling presence of the author, as references remind the reader of the existence of other works in the real world; metatextual frames indicate that the novel is a construct, and as such that the reader is not the sole creator of the parodic text’s meaning, as New Criticism and post-structuralism (the “discursive theory” still dominant today) would dictate. Hutcheon once again emphasizes that, while every text (or artwork) involves an encoder and decoder, parody renews the emphasis on the encoder’s position: Parody is one of the techniques of self-referentiality by which art reveals its awareness of the context-dependent nature of meaning, of the importance to signification of the circumstances surrounding any utterance. But any discursive situation, not just a parodic one, includes an enunciating addresser as well as a receiver of a text. … The Romantic creator, as originating and original source of meaning, may well be dead, as Barthes argued years ago … but the creator’s 63 position – a position of discursive authority – remains, and increasingly is the self-conscious focus of much contemporary art. (85) This point, that parodic artwork calls attention the “discursive authority” of the encoder, is key to understanding both the artwork and the significance it may have in a given context. Of course, a live performance, such as Ursula Johnson’s “Processing” – in which the artist labours in a gallery space for several hours as visitors drift in and out, perhaps engaging in conversation with her – is an immediate and embodied reminder to visitors that the artist is the encoding agent. Even in other media, including paintings and sculptural installations, parody’s most significant features may emphasize the encoding agent: “the position of the textual producer, banished by the anti-Romanticism of modernism, has been reinstated, and I would argue that the omnipresence of parodic forms in art today has played its role in this reinstatement…” (Hutcheon 86–87). In Sybil Lamb’s I’ve Got A Time Bomb, the “discursive authority of the author” is established in the “Medical and Legal Disclaimer” and “A Note from the Author” preceding the main narrative. These paratexts signify to the reader that the protagonist and narrated events are the author’s constructions; Lamb thus performs her role as author, particularly in the author’s note. Lamb’s direct address to the reader in these sections also calls attention to the author as encoder; the self-referential aspects may also, as Hutcheon suggests, compel decoders to consider the encoder’s intention and position. In addition, because of the more-than-implied presence of the encoder, any political content is streamlined: in the case of Lamb’s novel, the subject position of trans women in heteronormative society is foregrounded, while the multimodal artworks by both Johnson and Monkman spotlight the position of Indigenous peoples in Canadian settler-colonial society, and may also call attention to the marginalized position of Two-Spirited people. 64 Parody thus enables a connection between “enunciating addresser” and “receiver” in ways that other strategies of art-making may not permit, or not to the same extent. In that way alone, perhaps, parody is revolutionary. But its revolutionary potential truly lies in its ability to invite decoders to consider other points of view (the encoder’s, but perhaps also those of the novel’s characters, for example). Analogously, decoders may also come to see that the identity they may have believed was the product of their own intentionality is likewise a construction; they may recognize that they are not the sole “author” of their reality and that instead they have been subject to a range of other “authorities,” from the tacit social disciplinary codes of acceptable gender identity to the narratives of identity performed by colonial institutions such as the museum. Thus, parodic artworks may also invite decoders to view themselves, and the social and ideological contexts in which they stand, in new ways. Towards the end of A Theory of Parody, Hutcheon alludes to the ontological instability of parody itself: Since I believe that there are no completely transhistorical definitions of parody possible, it follows that the social or ‘worldly’ status of parody can also never be fixed or finally and permanently defined. But the ‘world’ does not disappear in the ‘inter-art traffic’ that is parody. Through interaction with satire, through the pragmatic need for encoder and decoder to share codes, and through the paradox of its authorized transgression, the parodic appropriation of the past reaches out beyond textual introversion and aesthetic narcissism to address the “text’s situation in the world.” (115–116) The world continues to change, and so does cultural production in response to changing social conditions; parody may continue to change forms, as it has since the ancient Greeks, in order to address the contexts in which parodic works are created, and to express the political and other intentions of encoding agents. Parody, as an art-making 65 strategy or device, will likely continue to shift as it engages with the social, historical, and ideological contexts of encoder and decoder alike. To Giorgio Agamben, the nature of meaning and epistemology is tied to ontology through language. Discussing parodic novels, he states: parody not only does not coincide with fiction but constitutes its polar opposite. This is because, unlike fiction, parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance. To fiction’s ‘as if,’ parody opposes its drastic ‘this is too much’ (or ‘as if not’). Thus, if fiction defines the essence of literature, parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold of literature, stubbornly suspended between reality and fiction, between word and thing. (48) At first, his statement that parody, unlike fiction, “does not call into question the reality of its object” is a bit confusing – is fiction (realist fiction, at least) not meant to draw a veil over the construction of reality within and parody, in contrast, to unveil the author as manipulator of that reality? However, we might understand the statement to mean that in parody’s calling attention to the novel as a construction, the novel thus becomes a real object rather than a spectral, almost imaginary entity (through the act of reading, as the narrative comes to exist in readers’ imaginations). Parody, then, pushes the novel towards “reality” – towards the status of “thing” – unlike a realist novel, as parody compels the decoder to acknowledge the entire context of the novel’s production. As Elin Diamond states in regard to realist theatre: Because it naturalizes the relation between … setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on, a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of the knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces … the arrangements of that world. (61) Parody, then, in existing on a threshold is not fully in that realist, fictional world, but has distance from it, which enables defamiliarization. Furthermore, if parody is the “polar opposite” of fiction, and the opposite of fiction is understood as “truth” or “reality,” then 66 parody must be tied more closely to reality, or the real world, than a realist novel is. As Agamben continues, the “object” of parody is “intolerably real” and so must be kept at a distance; by “object,” he might mean its target, whether a form, genre, or ideology in real life. The irony in parody creates this distance, according to Hutcheon; in so doing, parody then calls into question the “reality” of the decoder, whose previous conception of this reality perhaps now is rendered as a construction that is in some ways not so different from a novel. Or, to phrase it another way, the “as if” of fiction means that the decoder is meant to buy into a hypothesis of reality – the speculative “let’s pretend this is real” premise on which fiction is based. Agamben’s “as if not” postulation does not mean that parody is not real, but rather that it is not not real: in other words, it is closer to reality/the real world than fiction, which is “not real.” Perhaps this results from decoders’ being prompted to acknowledge the encoder’s intentionality, and that decoders comprehend the “words” of fiction as only references to reality/the real world, rather than allowing themselves to be duped into accepting the realist, diegetic world within the novel as reality. However, what Agamben says next challenges the entire relationship between sign, signifier, and referent: If ontology is the more or less felicitous relationship between language and world, then parody, as paraontology, expresses language’s inability to reach the thing and the impossibility of the thing finding its own name. … And yet, in this way, parody attests to what seems to be the only possible truth of language. (50) Here, he reveals his alignment with post-structuralist ways of knowing – or unknowing, as the case may be, given that language is accepted as an inadequate conveyor of meaning. Yet, the notion of being (“I am”) is in some sense the product of the collective acceptance of language’s ability to name. Furthermore, that in a realist novel language 67 effectively performs the world (brings it into being) means, as in speech act theory, that utterances are “felicitous,” performative statements that fulfill their aim. According to Agamben, however, parody – in contrast to the felicitousness of language’s ability to “bring into being” a world (in the realist novel, for example) – challenges the ability of language to account for a thing, for its being in the world. A word or a name is not, after all, the thing itself; parody, in its self-referential irony, draws attention to the aporia between a name and its referent (for one thing, the parodic artwork resembles in some way but is not, in actual fact, its referent – the precursor artwork). And so in this way, parody, as “paraontology,” does offer a kind of “truth” in that it reveals how signs, and language, may fail (this is also evident in the aporia created by the decoder’s failure to “get” the irony or the parodic references, as discussed above). With respect to the heteronormative gender binary, for example, the inability of language to fully name or account for identity is evident in Sybil Lamb’s parodic use of signs/words that create ambiguity and aporia, thereby calling attention to the inherent gap between word and thing (or place or person); the use of the word “love” spelled with a slashed “o” (ø) is one such word, as I discuss in some depth in chapter two. However, even that the protagonist changes her name several times throughout the novel points to the instability between sign and referent; Sybil X. D’Lye; “Shitty Delight” (89); “Black Mountain Sally” (127); “Sterile Amerika” (168) – all refer to the same individual woman. However, given the changes that Sybil episodically undergoes as the novel progresses, she effectively does become a different person in various chapters, which only serves to underscore the lack of stability between sign (or name) and referent. Simon Dentith would seem to concur with Agamben’s analysis of parody, in saying that “… parody throws some of the very fundamentals of writing into doubt” (15). The 68 only “truth of language,” as Agamben has stated, is that it is unstable and will never completely account for reality; somewhat paradoxically, this is the reality (or one aspect of it) that parody reveals to the decoder. 3. Complicity In this chapter, I have already discussed indirectly some of the ways that parody enables complicity, with regard to how the parodic artwork may be read as a conservative repetition of previous forms, genres, etc., which may be taken as an indication that the encoder is supporting the status quo or the continuity of a norm. Yet, as noted, marginalized encoders’ choice to repeat earlier tropes or forms may be justified in a couple of ways. Hutcheon, quoting German art historian Benjamin Buchloh, addresses one reason encoders might choose to adhere, at least partially, to previous conventions: “Parodistic appropriation reveals the split situation of the individual in contemporary artistic practice. The individual must claim the constitution of the self in original primary utterances, while being painfully aware of the degree of determination necessary to inscribe the utterance into dominant conventions and rules of codification; reigning signifying practice must be subverted and its deconstruction placed in a distribution system (the market), a circulation form (the commodity), and a cultural legitimization system (the institutions of art)...” (Parody 110) In other words, for their works to be “recognizable” and understood, encoders whose works aim to subvert the hegemonic must adopt, to some extent, aspects of hegemonic “signifying practice.” Language that is completely neologistic, for example, will fail to find an audience (or will likely fail to find a large or receptive one). With the intention to communicate and to have and speak to an audience, artists and authors must find and participate in a “market.” For example, Sybil Lamb’s novel was published by Topside Press, a small New York-based publisher that focuses on “transgender + queer + feminist” writing; Topside’s books may not get much notice from the New York Times, 69 but they are available online through Amazon and through LGBTQ+ booksellers, such as Glad Day in Toronto.60 While its market share may be small, Topside is still part of the larger book market. In this way, Lamb and other trans authors are “complicit” in the capitalist literary trade; however, publishing a book with an ISBN is a strategy for their voices to be heard more widely.61 Almost by default, then, authors and artists who are marginalized by hegemonic discourse must elements of use that discourse and its related institutions in order not to be further marginalized. The potential of parodic art to critique hegemonic institutions is perhaps all the more piquant when that critique happens inside the institution itself. I argue this is true of work by both Ursula Johnson and Kent Monkman; their exhibitions, which parody the display and epistemological strategies of museums, are themselves displayed in art and cultural institutions (whether museums or “high-brow” art galleries), many of which have traditionally presented narratives that denigrate Indigenous peoples or deem their material cultural production as inferior to that of Europeans. Presenting their work in the context of these institutions, arguably a form of “complicity,” may indeed contribute to trans-contextualization’s denaturalizing effect, as viewers’ expectations regarding what constitutes a “normal” museum display is interrupted. Margaret Rose also discusses the encoder’s possible complicity with earlier forms and norms: “Unlike satire, the parody makes the ‘victim,’ or object, of its attack a part of its own structure, and its reception is thus to some extent influenced by the reception of 60 See Topside’s twitter account: https://twitter.com/topsidepress?lang=en. Accessed April 18, 2018. Lamb had previously published parts of the novel as a series of ’zines, a DIY form of publication that has underground “cred” but is less likely to reach a wide or diverse audience. Lamb’s ’zine diverged even farther than her novel from standard English as well as readable form: it employed several fonts, some nearly legible, often on the same page; some pages feature a couple of columns of text as well as call-out boxes, randomly placed headlines/subheaders, and other means of breaking up the flow of reading. (A ’zine is a type of self-published magazine; it is an abbreviation of “fanzine,” which arose in “alternative” subcultures, particularly science-fiction, in the mid-1960s [OED]). 61 70 the object of its criticism, the text which is made a part of the parodist’s text” (79). Rose asserts that the precursor text, which the parodic text incorporates into itself, is the object of criticism; as noted above and discussed in the chapters that follow, I argue that the parodic work does not always make the precursor text the target of any criticism – with respect to its genres, forms, materials – but rather the ideologies that the precursor work may represent. That said, Rose does call attention to the context, specifically what the decoder’s attitude is towards the precursor text, which will influence the response to the similarities – and particularly the differences – in the parodic work. Hutcheon, however, does not view parody as launching an attack on itself, i.e., the form that it employs: “Parodic art both deviates from an aesthetic norm and includes that norm within itself as backgrounded material. Any real attack would be self-destructive” (44). Rose suggests that parody is effected only via the formal or generic resemblance(s) to the precursor text; Hutcheon’s view enables a wider scope for the critique of an ideology, rather than merely the formal elements of the precursor work. As an example, Sybil Lamb’s novel parodies the genre of the picaresque; however, the target of her “attack” is not the picaresque per se, nor is it exactly the conventions of realist novels (including a linear timeline and other formal “norms” of narrative), but rather the ideological norms often represented by such novels.62 As well, I do not view the parodic elements in Lamb’s novel as “attacking” trans women’s gender expressions or their right to do so, but rather the heteronormative gender binary itself. Later, Rose does suggest that parody’s repetition may either “defend” or “attack” norms (with “attack” suggesting a lack of complicity), as compared to satire, which attacks the norms themselves or, in contrast, other texts that make those norms a target: 62 See Elin Diamond’s commentary, p. 109 of this chapter. 71 the satirist may be concerned with attacking either that which is considered normative or distortions of the norms which they wish to protect, but … the parodist may also recreate or imitate certain norms or their distortions in order to attack or defend them in the parody text. If the perspective of some parodists may seem to be anti-normative or distortive, much parody has served to renew norms by recreating them in a new context before making them the subject of a new critique and analysis. (82) Rose’s statements are somewhat ambiguous as to whether parody’s primary function is to imitate and thus validate norms or whether it is to enable “new critique and analysis”; she likely means that parody (and the parodic encoder) “renews” the norms, which are then potentially made the subject of someone else’s “new critique and analysis” (presumably the decoder’s). In contrast, Hutcheon might argue that by virtue of being in this new context, the parody itself is a new form, a hybrid comprised of past references presented in this new context, and thereby creating a dialogue between encoder and decoder (and, as discussed above in relation to humour and other characteristics, the new hybrid form may prompt an affinity between the two interlocutors). Because Hutcheon emphasizes the ironic difference the parodic text marks from its precursor, parody not only renews but also is itself new, in de-doxifying the old. Thus, while complicity is one of parody’s potential effects (vis-à-vis encoders), the complicity suggested by any similarity is less important than the ironic and subversive differences. In fact, complicity might be described as being the grease to parody’s wheel, as the similarities are likely what first compel the decoder to engage with the parodic artwork. Conclusion Based on Hutcheon’s theory, I have presented several central characteristics of contemporary parody that produce one (or more) possible effects towards bringing about the “potentially revolutionary impact” Hutcheon claims is parody’s ultimate result. 72 Performativity, humour, trans-contextualization, irony, and ambiguity may invite responses of laughter, defamiliarization, and/or ontological instability in the decoder, which might also, depending on various other factors (such as the decoder’s sense of humour) produce in the decoder feelings of affinity with the encoder. Parody may often produce a sense that the encoder is somehow complicit with the norms of style, genre, etc., which in fact, as Katrin Horn notes about camp drag and gender, is one of parody’s strengths, due to the presence of subversive difference and its transformative abilities. These effects in turn produce two key alterations in the flow of communication between encoding agent and decoding spectator. One is that parody reinstates the position of the encoder: the ironic and self-referential aspects of parody encourage the decoder to confront the artwork as a cultural entity created by a specific individual, illuminating aspects of the encoder’s identity and perhaps political views. The other is that the parodic artwork, in part through this emphasis on the encoder but also due to semantic aporia, may prompt a destabilization of the self or identity for/in decoders. As noted above, parodic artworks by Indigenous artists such as Ursula Johnson and Kent Monkman may compel settler decoders to confront the narrative of Canadian identity that had been accepted as “truth” and, by extension, to question their own identity as Canadian. While it should be clear by now that I agree with the vast majority of the points Hutcheon presents in her theory of twentieth-century parody, I wish to build upon her text through recognizing and presence and significance of humour. As I have noted, humour has the ability not only to prompt laughter but also to defamiliarize and thus provoke decoders to reconsider earlier forms, genres – and more importantly, ideologies – in new ways. Humour may also be the primary means by which the parodic artwork encourages decoders to begin to have an affinity for encoders and their socio-political views, perhaps 73 through softening the blow of any sharply satiric element the artwork may contain. Laughter, as Bakhtin posited in relation to the medieval carnival and its upending of social hierarchies and states of being, “degrades and materializes” – in other words, laughter has the potential to render abstract ideologies concrete, or to take the sacred and make it profane – or perhaps “relatable,” as young people say (Rabelais 20). This might also be applied to any number of contemporary secular ideologies, such as settlercolonialism and the heteronormative gender binary – ideologies that are “sacred” in another sense, perhaps, but no less persistent (and that are, to some extent, also based on faith). As Bakhtin asserted of medieval parody, “laughter was as universal as seriousness; it was directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology” (84). Laughter, then, may enable a new view of the contexts in which decoders stand. In the chapters that follow, I will consider in more depth how the formal structures of parody contribute to the effects discussed above, building on Hutcheon’s theory as I also briefly analyze how elements of humour function and what their potential effects might be. Ultimately, all of the characteristics discussed above contribute to parody’s “potentially revolutionary impact” on the decoder, in emphasizing the role of the marginalized encoder and inciting new perceptions about old ideologies. 74 Works cited / Bibliography Affleck, Jane. “Keeping the Beat: Aboriginal Art and Hip Hop at the Dalhousie Art Gallery.” Dal News, April 25, 2014, www.dal.ca/news/2014/04/25/keeping-thebeat--aboriginal-art-and-hip-hop-at-the-dalhousie-ar.html. Accessed April 19, 2018. -------- . “Wrongs Can Make It Right: The Performance and Sculptural Installation Work of Ursula Johnson.” C Magazine, issue 124 (Winter 2014), pp. 28–35. Agamben, Giorgio. “Parody.” Profanations, Zone Books, 2007, pp. 37–51. 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