Formal Men: On Parody and Character

abstract:This essay argues that character is a form of parody; or, conversely, that parody is the device that discloses the formalizing logic of character. It does so by surveying a range of parodic characters—from the Theophrastan portraits of Joseph Hall, Thomas Overbury, and John Earle; the comic types of Ben Jonson's drama; the amphibious personae of Thomas Nashe's fiction—that thrived in England around the turn of the seventeenth century, when social changes called for new forms of classification. These characters, the essay suggests, draw out an impulse to self-classification at the heart of character generally. The first half of the essay examines the parodic logic of character as a device of typology: a way of construing persons, of making them readable, and of enacting them through habitual action. The second half turns to Nashe's Jack Wilton and Jonson's Mosca in order to consider a kind of character that disrupts this account of character—a kind defined precisely by its aptitude for parody. In treating the kinds that character articulates as alienable, such parodic subjects aim for an elasticity that eludes and dissolves characterization.