![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My favourite literary joke.
Jan. 30th, 2014 01:23 pmBack when I was reading Cassius Dio's Life of Augustus, one thing which kept jumping out at me was how much time Augustus spent running round the Empire firefighting. Just when he was back in his palace whooping it up with Levantine dancing girls when Livia wasn't looking, some tinpot tribe with a palisade on top of a hill in Iberia would decide to rebel and, as he couldn't let some military commander put them down, grab the glory and pose a threat, off Augustus had to go to slaughter them in person. I just could never understand why these tribes kept trying it on. There's you with a couple of hundred guys and you say to them "Hey, let's rebel against the entire Empire! I know it didn't work out for the Belgae, the Aquitani, the Narbonensi, the Allobrogi, the Osismii, or the Eoitani, but it's bound to work out for us. Who's with me?" and all that happens is that Augustus misses out on a couple of months of Levantine whoopee and your missus becomes a slave in his kitchen. As a chain of thought it never made sense to me.
I finally twigged when I visited Maiden Castle in Dorset, which is the largest iron-age hillfort in Europe. If you were the lords of that place you would think yourselves invulnerable. From your perspective, nobody could challenge you. You were lord of all you surveyed from sea to sea. In fact, there wasn't a single cloud on your horizon right up until the day when Vespasian showed up with the second Legion and slaughtered every last one of you. It's all a question of perspective really.
Anyway, I've lately been reading Caesar's narratives on the Gallic and Civil wars, and something I didn't expect is what a good writer he is and the way he's possessed of a dry sense of humour about just that sort of minor tribal rebellion which so confused me in the life of Augustus. It turns out that Julius Caesar was, as well as being a shameless self-propagandist, a pretty funny chap in a sarcastic sort of way. I liked him much more than I thought I would.
The other thing which jumped out at me was the fact that the Gallic War commentaries open with the words "Gaul was divided into three parts", which are also the opening the words to the Asterix books and I appreciated the discovery of this little literary joke long after I read them.
Of course, literature and pop culture is full of that sort of in-joke and reference. PG Wodehouse and Dorothy L Sayers were friends and fans of each other's work, and so Bertie Wooster would read Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and exclaim how clever her was, whilst Wimsey would read the Wooster books and exclaim how funny they were. Demolition Man is essentially a love letter to Brave New World. The entirety of Rosenkrantz and Gildernstern are dead is a Shakespearean in-joke.
The list is huge. I could go on. I lob in-jokes into my own writing all the time because I think it's funny. However, my favourite is an Agatha Christie joke by Enid Blyton - and it's not a well-known one at all.
About ten years or so ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sesquipedality recommended I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. "It's great", she said. "You'll never get the twist". Inevitably this meant I got the twist on page 6 and spent the rest of the book waiting for the inevitable denouement, but by coincidence the next thing I read was The Mystery of Holly lane by Enid Blyton.
Blyton is best remembered now for the Famous Five and maybe Noddy, but she was astonishingly prolific in her production of children's stories and one series she wrote was the Five Find-Outers. The Find-Outers were a group of child detectives who solve small crimes in a village somewhere like Hampshire. The books are tremendously well-written; the crimes are sufficiently well-constructed that it's believable a group of inquisitive children could solve them (at the expense of the incompetent village policeman), and the children have clearly defined characters and roles. I loved them when I was little and I sometimes go back and re-read them even now.
Anyway, as I re-read Holly Lane, something struck me. The setup for The murder of Roger Ackroyd is that Poirot is convalescing from an illness in a little village when the murder takes place and there in Holly Lane is a peculiar foreign gentleman with a round head convalescing who befriends the child detectives and helps them solve the crime. But more than that, it's pretty clear that as the Find-Outers set about catching the thief who stole £100, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is going on in the background and they never even notice. As soon as you see it, it's like one of those pictures where it's either a lampshade or a fat man and you can flick your perception between the two. As a joke it's great - the detectives are children and so solve the childlike crime whilst never seeing the bigger, adult world of serious violence and death about them. I loved it. Blyton paying a tribute to the master whilst displaying her own skills as a storyteller. Good for her.
Googling round this link the relationship between the books doesn't appear well known, but I liked it so much I thought I'd share.
I finally twigged when I visited Maiden Castle in Dorset, which is the largest iron-age hillfort in Europe. If you were the lords of that place you would think yourselves invulnerable. From your perspective, nobody could challenge you. You were lord of all you surveyed from sea to sea. In fact, there wasn't a single cloud on your horizon right up until the day when Vespasian showed up with the second Legion and slaughtered every last one of you. It's all a question of perspective really.
Anyway, I've lately been reading Caesar's narratives on the Gallic and Civil wars, and something I didn't expect is what a good writer he is and the way he's possessed of a dry sense of humour about just that sort of minor tribal rebellion which so confused me in the life of Augustus. It turns out that Julius Caesar was, as well as being a shameless self-propagandist, a pretty funny chap in a sarcastic sort of way. I liked him much more than I thought I would.
The other thing which jumped out at me was the fact that the Gallic War commentaries open with the words "Gaul was divided into three parts", which are also the opening the words to the Asterix books and I appreciated the discovery of this little literary joke long after I read them.
Of course, literature and pop culture is full of that sort of in-joke and reference. PG Wodehouse and Dorothy L Sayers were friends and fans of each other's work, and so Bertie Wooster would read Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and exclaim how clever her was, whilst Wimsey would read the Wooster books and exclaim how funny they were. Demolition Man is essentially a love letter to Brave New World. The entirety of Rosenkrantz and Gildernstern are dead is a Shakespearean in-joke.
The list is huge. I could go on. I lob in-jokes into my own writing all the time because I think it's funny. However, my favourite is an Agatha Christie joke by Enid Blyton - and it's not a well-known one at all.
About ten years or so ago,
sesquipedality recommended I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. "It's great", she said. "You'll never get the twist". Inevitably this meant I got the twist on page 6 and spent the rest of the book waiting for the inevitable denouement, but by coincidence the next thing I read was The Mystery of Holly lane by Enid Blyton. Blyton is best remembered now for the Famous Five and maybe Noddy, but she was astonishingly prolific in her production of children's stories and one series she wrote was the Five Find-Outers. The Find-Outers were a group of child detectives who solve small crimes in a village somewhere like Hampshire. The books are tremendously well-written; the crimes are sufficiently well-constructed that it's believable a group of inquisitive children could solve them (at the expense of the incompetent village policeman), and the children have clearly defined characters and roles. I loved them when I was little and I sometimes go back and re-read them even now.
Anyway, as I re-read Holly Lane, something struck me. The setup for The murder of Roger Ackroyd is that Poirot is convalescing from an illness in a little village when the murder takes place and there in Holly Lane is a peculiar foreign gentleman with a round head convalescing who befriends the child detectives and helps them solve the crime. But more than that, it's pretty clear that as the Find-Outers set about catching the thief who stole £100, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is going on in the background and they never even notice. As soon as you see it, it's like one of those pictures where it's either a lampshade or a fat man and you can flick your perception between the two. As a joke it's great - the detectives are children and so solve the childlike crime whilst never seeing the bigger, adult world of serious violence and death about them. I loved it. Blyton paying a tribute to the master whilst displaying her own skills as a storyteller. Good for her.
Googling round this link the relationship between the books doesn't appear well known, but I liked it so much I thought I'd share.
