Book Review: The Hunger Pains: A Parody, by The Harvard Lampoon

This article was first published at Blogcritics

I suppose it says something about contemporary American culture that some of the most popular works of fiction among adults in recent years are book written for children and young adults.  First there was Harry Potter.  Then there was Katniss Everdeen.  Between the two I would guess they've outsold all the serious adult fiction that was published over the same period.  It would be a lot easier to find an adult who has read The Hunger Games than one who has even heard of let alone read A Visit From the Goon Squad.  With the motion picture version of the first of the books in the Suzanne Collins' trilogy ready to fill the gap left by the retirement of the Harry Potter franchise sometime in March, The Hunger Games is about to find an  even broader audience.  After all there are always those who wait for the movie. 

The time then, it would seem, would be ripe to take another look at this particular manifestation of the phenomenon—a look perhaps a bit askew.  And who better to take that look than the authors who have previously done the job for Harry Potter, the staff of the The Harvard Lampoon?  It may be that parody is not the sincerest form of flattery, but it surely is the sincerest recognition of popularity.  Why bother writing a parody of something nobody is familiar with?  Parody only works when readers know what is being parodied.  Harvard Lampooners know a target when they see it: thus The Hunger Pains.

Like The Hunger Games, The Hunger Pains is the story of a teen age girl, Kantkiss Neverclean, who replaces her younger sister as one of her district's combatants in an annual duel to the death between youngsters from all regions of a dystopian future world ironically  called Peaceland.  Unlike Katniss who is both smart and resourceful, Kantkiss is both silly and clueless.  She stumbles from one absurdity to another, in an environment where the absurd is the norm, and she stumbles her way to victory, all the time playing up to the cameras that are, in typical reality show fashion, following the contestants around.  

Most of the cast of The Hunger Games is here to be ridiculed as well.  Peeta Mellark, the son of the local baker and her partner in the games, becomes Pita Malarkey, a tubby dependant glutton.  Haymitch Abernathy, the last winner of the Games from her district and her mentor, becomes Buttitch Totalapathy, a compulsive gambler.  Effie Trinket, her liaison with the games organization becomes Effu Poorpeople.  There's no point giving away all the jokes. You get the idea, and if you like this kind of thing, you'll like The Hunger Pains.  It is filled with puns, one liners and non sequitors.

Unquestionably there is a lot of funny material in this book, but parody works best in small doses.  At 157 pages, it loses some of its zest.  Still, fans of The Hunger Games, with a sense of humor, will probably gulp the whole thing down in a couple of hours, just as they romped from cliff hanging chapter to cliff hanging chapter in the original.  One thing for sure, The Harvard Lampoon has captured and skewered all of the ticks that have endeared Suzanne Collins' trilogy to adults young and not so young.  So let the games  begin, or as the Notalks might say: "Ah se, leh ah Gaes bega!"

Intentions: Good and Otherwise

A week ago I wrote an essay, "A Most Modest Proposal," intended to be, note the allusion in the title, satire, and I thought when I had finished, that it actually was satire, in fact very good satire, indeed. The article suggested that one good solution to the brouhaha over same sex marriage would be to get rid of the word marriage: that the problem was simply a question of semantics and could be easily solved linguistically. The editor's response when he looked at was that he felt the proposal was indeed modest and perhaps even serious. Moreover, he didn't find the piece particularly funny. Leaving aside the problem of whether there is some necessary relationship between humor and satire as well as the question of who finds what funny, I decided that although I may have intended to write satire, if my reader didn't see satire, there was a problem. In the end, I decided to change my satire to opinion and let readers decide what they were reading.

The article was published and several comments were posted. One commenter questioned the allusion in the title, after another comment had (perhaps tongue in cheek) suggested that the proposal might well have been a good idea. I responded—perhaps inconsistently given the point I am going to try to make in what follows—that I, in fact had intended satire, but had acceded to an editorial suggestion. Then, the other day another comment, wanted to know what it was I intended to satirize. Clearly, if this reader couldn't tell where the satire was directed, there was a problem, and I should have kept my big mouth shut.

However, since some tricks are never learned by old dogs, once more into the breach.

Back in the middle of the last century, when the dominant critical stance informing the study of literature was something called New Criticism, it was fashionable to assert that the only thing that should concern the critic as well as the reader of a work of literature, indeed any piece of writing, was the work itself. This in reaction to a lengthy period in which criticism was concerned with such things as the time in which the work was written, the impressions the readers reaped form the work, and indeed most important to the present discussion, everything one could gather about the author of the work, his life, his psychological make-up, all of the other things he's written. The New Critics pointed out that none of these concerns, although they may have been interesting topics of investigation in and of themselves, were really relevant to understanding the work of literature or making judgments about it. The only relevant concern war the analysis of the work, itself.

One of the classic and most influential essays of this period was William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy." Essentially, the thesis of the essay is that despite what an author may have intended in a given piece of writing, the only important thing is what he did. A writer may well have intended one thing and actually accomplished something quite different. A lack of skill may have subverted his intention. I may intend to paint a horse, but, given my drawing abilities it is not likely that anyone would recognize anything I could draw as anything remotely resembling Citation. He may have intended to do one thing and done other things as well. Henry James said of The Turn of the Screw that he was trying to write the best ghost story ever written; many readers have found that while he may well have done that, he also managed to do something else, something perhaps even more important and more interesting.

A writer's subconscious may affect what he produces. Again an example from art: Norman Mailer in his book on Picasso quotes the artist as saying: "The picture comes to me from far away. Who can say how far away? I have guessed it, seen it, done it, and yet the next day I myself cannot see what I've done. How can one. . . grasp what I may have put in in spite of my own will." I think it was Robert Browning who said when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant; now only God knows.

In effect, Wimsatt and Beardsley make a very convincing case for the idea that the writer may well be the best judge of what he intended to do, he is not necessarily the best judge of what he has actually done. After all, knowing what he meant to do may well color significantly what he sees in the final product. People do tend to see what they want to see. The writer is not in any sense the most objective of observers.

In the end, it is the work, the New Critics conclude, that must speak for itself; the text on the page is the author's intention made manifest. It must speak for itself; the author cannot speak for it. And though modern literary theory has gone in new directions, and the New Critics are no longer held in the highest repute, to those of us geezers who studied back in the dark ages, they still have their appeal. So then, back to my 'satire' on same sex marriage: while I know full well what I intended, the comments of those who took the trouble to read it suggest, I may not have had the foggiest notion of what I produced.

Stockwood on Dickens1: a satire

Charles Dickens did not write fiction.

I begin categorically with the conclusion I have reached after many long years of study, the ongoing perusal of the work itself, the intensive investigation of the personal record–epistles private and epistles public, diaries, journals, account books, memoirs, drafts rough and drafts polished, editorial annotations, as well as the exhaustive examination of dusty periodical archives and journalistic ephemera, not to mention the many anecdotes and mots bon and otherwise, perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not handed down orally from generation to generation.

Charles Dickens did not write fiction.

If fiction is invention out of slender air,2 if fiction is that which has never existed but in the imagination of its author, if fiction is that pleasant falsehood which beguiles its readers into the suspension of their skeptical reluctance to believe,3 then I say, with complete and uncompromising confidence in my assertion–Fiction, Charles Dickens did not write.

It is not so much a question of the actual occurrence of the events he describes, or even he actual existence of those–the Pickwicks, the Copperfields,4 or even the Chuzzlewits–who people these events, historical record demonstrates with authority that these are indeed events that never happened to people that never were. Never was a Pickwick imprisoned for breach of promise, indeed never was Pickwick. Never did a Copperfield meet a Murdstone. No Chuzzlewit foot ever touched American shore.

Yet if there weren’t ever a Dorrit bundled off to the Marshallsea, a Magwitch hidden among the gravestones, a Gradgrind bound in chains of fact, if, in fact, they never were, it is demonstrable to any and all thinking readers, that they have, despite that fact, become. They are. Incontrovertibly and without the slightest of doubt, they are. Who is there who is not aware of their being? Who is it who has not heard the words of the orphan Twist asking for more, smelled the reek of Fagin’s lair, cringed with terror at Bill Sykes? Who is it who does not know of Scrooge surnamed Ebenezer visited upon a Christmas Eve by that trio of spirits as real in their unreality as the man himself? And is this man’s Christmas song5 etched so finely into the collection of consciousnesses that define the modern psyche in the modern world to be dismissed as mere spanish castle simply because it was birthed on a page and suckled at the breast of the muse rather than the midwife.6

If this Scrooge be not reality, are we to conclude then that reality lies in some long forgotten Ebenezer Somebody–some Ebenezer Doe–who ate his Christmas turkey surrounded by whatever family and friends he had managed to accumulate over his years, are we to conclude that reality lies with this Ebenezer Somebody, of whom we have never heard, of whom we know nothing whatever, of whom we are certain that if indeed he ever were, he might just as well never have been. Ebenezer Somebody is fiction. Ebenezer Scrooge is.

There are worlds of Ebenezer Somebodies. People who were, but are no longer; gone and forgotten, it is they who are the stuff of fiction. Puffs of smoke, it is they who have no reality. Truth is that which lasts. Truth is not here today and gone tomorrow. Truth is what remains when the ephemera is washed away. Ebenezer Somebodies are fictions written by God. They along with their works are writ in water.7

Moreover, the lives that Dickens creates beget the life of the world in which they live: Boffin begets dust heaps. Mrs. Jellyby begets telescopic charity. Mr. Bumble begets the workhouse. The Infant Phenomenon begets the theatre.

Without Dickens the nineteenth century in England would exist on a forgotten back shelf in the stacks of some little used library.

There would be no Yorkshire schools for the twenty first century were there no Nicholas Nickleby; no poor laws, were it not for Oliver Twist. There would be no Court of Cancery were it not for Jarndyce and Jarndyce; no dying brickmakers and stricken crossing sweeps, were it not for Esther Summerson. Old Krook’s spontaneous combustion is no more a fact to be debated than the opening of the Crystal Palace, and surely an event with a wider currency.

Again, Charles Dickens did not write fiction. Charles Dickens birthed living beings, living then and living now.

------------

1Being the transcript of a lecture delivered by Professor Sumner Stockwood of the University of New Thermopylae to the annual meeting of the Associated Dickensians of Eden in 2004, with annotations by Dr. Farber L Fenwick. Adjunct Instructor, Coketown Community College.

2The reader must forgive Professor Stockwood’s less effective attempts at humor (ed.)

3I here paraphrase the comments of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1798 letter to Dorothy, the sister of his erstwhile colleague in that year’s publication of the Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth. [Since as of this date, no such letter has come to light, conjecture has it that Professor Stockwood may well have in mind the more famous statement about “suspension of disbelief” in Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria (ed.)

4Some scholars may quarrel with this assertion with reference to such events as young Copperfield’s sojourn in the boot blacking factory. Such quibbles would seem to be mere matters of semantics (ed.)

5See note 2 (ed.).

6The reader will forgive my use of what some may consider a cliche metaphor for the production of art, but in the light of my contention, it does seem fitting.

7Stockwood’s reference is to the inscription on the grave of the young Romantic poet.

Goldstein Strikes Back: An Epistle and A Half

The following was slipped under my door after yesterday's post:

Mr. Jack Goodstein
%A Flasher’s Dozen

Dear Mr. Goodstein:

Your whining diatribe against me in a recent issue of the above publication having come to my attention, I should like to take the opportunity to set the record straight.

You accuse me of appearing from out of thin air to claim credit for your own less than stellar performances in literature, on the stage and lord only knows where else your deranged imagination might fancy, and then somehow vanishing back into that slender ether to avoid confrontation with your righteous wrath. Leaving aside the question of why I, or anyone else for that matter, would want to take credit for your rather paltry productions, I would suggest the very notion of appearing from and disappearing into the cliche thin air is laughable at best, delusional at worst.

I am there, you say.

I am not there, you say.

You, Goodstein, are perhaps indulging in some hallucinatory substance.

What is it, other than your own paranoia, that would explain any sane person spending his life playing Jekyll to your Hyde?

Jealousy? Of what? A performance in a community theatre production of “Fiddler on the” goddamn “Roof?” Inane ramblings posing as fiction in internet journals little noted nor long remembered?

Nonsense.

Persecution, you say.

Piffle, I say.

Goldstein is above such things. Goldstein wants no credit for Goodstein garbage; Goldstein takes no credit for Goodstein trash.
The phenomenon to which you allude in your libelous calumny is nothing more than your own attempt to garner credit for my–I repeat–my work, to bask in the glow of the gold of Goldstein.

Who, having seen, excrescences from the pen of Goodstein, could ever confuse them with the gems of Goldstein? Goodstein, your own words belie you. The proof is there for anyone with eyes to see. Read anything of Goodstein and compare it with the work of Goldstein. Could the work of the one have possibly been the work of the other?

I think not.

Now let me turn to the nonsense about your acting career, if unpaid, unnoticed performances in the hinterlands can be called a career. Again, the accusation is ludicrous.

Goldstein, sir, is not, nor ever has been of the thespian persuasion. Moreover, if he were, he, I, would never stoop to step upon any stage the boards of which had been trodden by the likes of you.

I know you Goodstein. Your puny talent has not escaped me. I have had the ill fortune to sit benumbed in the audience while you strutted your painful hour upon the painful stage. Trust me, Goldstein takes more pride in himself than to wish credit for or confusion with any such agonies inflicted on an unsuspecting audience.

You, Goodstein, are a victim of some mental disorder, and if you continue to employ my name in your delusional fantasies, I shall be forced to take legal action.

Yours truly,

Goldstein


P.S. I have attached a copy of the letter I have sent to the editor of the publication (a term I use very loosely) in which your insane rantings were printed. I have also sent him a copy of the above.


Dear Sir:

Any further publication of the bipolar ravings of Jack Goodstein which include references to myself will force me to turn the matter over to my attorneys.

I have enclosed a copy of a letter I have written to said Goodstein. You have my permission to make what use of it you will.

And I may say, in conclusion, You should be ashamed to have your periodical serve as a vehicle for the lunacies of that madman. Your readers deserve better.

Sincerely,

Goldstein

My Doppleganger

Goldstein has haunted me for years. From nowhere he comes. One minute he’s there, the next? Who knows? One minute he’s there, the next? Who knows? I go to a new place, meet new people, and he is there. From nowhere, he appears. People see him; call him by name. “Goldstein,” they say, “a pleasure to meet you.” I look around, nothing. He’s gone. Disappeared. Scrammed. Vanished.

The son of a bitch, I have never seen.

This is how quick he is. Last week, at my audition for–I’m an actor, did I mention? Last week, I walk out on the stage at the Playlab, to do my monologue, and the director says: “Whenever you’re ready Mr. Goldstein.” I turn around, and he’s gone. I look in the wings–right and left, no one.

“Mr. Goldstein?” says the director.

Again, I turn. Again no one. He’s quick, that son of a bitch.

I can’t even remember the first time he showed up. In grade school, teachers would see him sitting in my seat on the first day of class. He’d be standing next to me when we lined up in size places at the side of the room. He would be playing dodge ball in the school yard. In the fourth grade, he took credit for the American Legion essay I wrote, somehow getting his name inserted into the bulletin that announced the winners, instead of mine. At home, I’ve still got a certificate with a gold stamp and the name Jack Goldstein hand lettered where my name should have been.
On the first day of Little League tryouts, he shows up in the outfield to catch pop ups only to disappear when the coach shouts for him to come in and get on deck. Three times the coach calls him, but just like at the audition, he is gone. Finally, the coach, probably upset by Goldstein’s shenanigans, points at me. “You’re waiting for what?” he shouts. “An invitation? Engraved?”

In high school, he never once shows up for baseball practice; I show up every single day–I’m there early and I stay late–and on the list for the varsity team posted in the locker room, there is Goldstein. Goodstein doesn’t even make the second team.

My freshman year in college, when I played Sebastian in the fall production of Twelfth Night, who somehow managed to get his name inserted into the program? Who was it that got his name in the review in the student newspaper? And if this was the first time it certainly wasn’t the last. If I had, for every time, he got credit for one of my performances, fifty cents. . . you get the idea. It was Goldstein who played Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace at the South Hills Community Theatre. It was Goldstein as Happy in the Barebones Players’ production of “Salesman,” Goldstein as Sam Craig in. . . . Goldstein in this; Goldstein in that. Here a Goldstein. There a Goldstein. Everywhere a Goldstein.
Once I read a story, in college probably, I don’t remember the name, but it’s the same thing. A guy tells a story about his own Goldstein. It wasn’t Goldstein of course, it was another name I can’t remember, but everywhere this “Goldstein” also shows up, every time something important happens this “Goldstein” is there ruining everything. In the end, he decides to get rid of him, kill him. What happens, I don’t remember, but I can understand how he feels.

Last week I got the program for the production of my first one act play–I am also a playwright–did I mention–and sure enough, in big bold letters, there he is again.

If I could get my hand on him, if my Goldstein would stick around in one place long enough, I, sure as hell, could be tempted to get rid of the son of a bitch.

Appeared originally in A Flasher's Dozen, eds. KR Mullin and Sandra Seamans, vol.1, no. 1, Autumn, 2005, pp. 10-11.