Parody and Identity in Chesterton

Abstract

IN ‘MR. YEATS REVISITED’, an article written for the Daily News (19 April 1901), G. K. Chesterton indignantly addresses certain amendments recently made by the poet to his early verses: ‘Mr. Yeats has simply no right to alter a poem; it was not he that wrote it, but another man, the man of a moment, who will never live again. The moment a poem has really passed out of him, it no more belongs to him’. 1 In criticising ‘the destructive character of the poet’s improvements’, Chesterton implies that the older Yeats has achieved such distance from his younger self that he is unable any longer to engage sympathetically with his own work. This schism between the two Yeatses results in a curiously circular misreading, in which the poet’s misidentification with his earlier self leads him to corrupt the integrity of the original text, producing an inadvertently bathetic self-parody. A parodic context is particularly highlighted by Chesterton’s reference to destructive improvements: in parody, minor alterations are carried out with the mischievous purpose of rendering the ur-text absurd. A prime example occurs in Chesterton’s picaresque novel, The Flying Inn (1914), in which the hero, Patrick Dalroy, improvises a derisory parody of Yeats’s ‘The Rose of Battle’: ‘“‘Cheese of all Cheeses, Cheese of all the world’”, as my compatriot, Mr Yeats, says to the Something-or-other of Battle’. 2 In another of Chesterton’s journalistic articles, he notes that ‘Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of matter taking on vitality’. 3 If Dalroy’s parodic recourse to cheese draws attention to the way parody takes an apparently stable textual entity and invests it with a new vitality, elsewhere in The Flying Inn Chesterton has another character elaborate an important point about the limits to which this principle can be taken. In order to maintain integrity and coherence, ‘“you can [only] distort up to a certain point: after that you lose identity … Don’t you see this prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things?”’. 4