1990: Mallard and the Myth of Modern Misapprehension
By Horatio Bludgeon, Senior Cultural Correspondent, The Scurrilous Rag
It is a universally acknowledged truth, now beaten into the public ear like an over‑practised piano étude, that any book burdened with a preface is self‑important, but any book burdened with two or more has delusions of philosophy. The Collected Curiosities of The Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks‑on‑Ponds—now reissued with a preface to the preface, an introduction to the family, an epilogue to the author, and a eulogy to the act of reading—suffers precisely from this florid disease of self‑reflexivity.
I am told that the modern reader must now accept the “meta” as moral progress: that when a writer admits to illusion, the admission becomes profundity. Yet repeated confessions of cleverness do not create intelligence, they merely exacerbate smugness. In this latest edition, Dr. Fenella Vorpel’s grandiloquent commentary performs an act of excavation so noisy that one cannot hear the corpse she claims to exhume. She digs, she dusts, she explicates, until the original Bishop—and indeed the unfortunate Euphemia Mallard whose preface she has commandeered—collapse under the academic equivalent of carpet‑bombing.
The result is an indulgent metafictional hall of mirrors in which the reader sees nothing but reflections of the author’s conceit. We are told this is feminist recovery; I contend it is narrative insurance fraud. The supposed resurrection of female voices merely disguises yet another act of literary taxidermy performed by modern scholarship upon the past. The Bishop’s gay extravagance, once charmingly improper, is now flattened into a “gendered discourse on faith.” Euphemia’s wit, delightful in small doses, becomes a holy relic hauled into the lecture theatre for ritual vivisection.
The whole exercise mistakes self-reference for insight. Mallard writes as though commentary were creation, and creation commentary, and all of it a sophisticated joke that the rest of us are too provincial to enjoy. I assure her the joke is clear—we are simply tired of hearing it repeated with footnotes.
Consider the absurd genealogy of narrators: the Bishop, whose sermons already winked at their own irreverence; the Great‑Niece, Euphemia, who introduces him with mock‑devotion; and now Dr. Mallard, who introduces her with the solemnity of a liturgical procession. It is a Russian doll of vanity, each smaller voice claiming to deconstruct the larger while feeding it supper. Everyone is related, everyone speaks, and no one is accountable. The result is a chorus line of mirrors applauding themselves for their intelligence. One is reminded less of literary innovation than of a family luncheon at which all present are authors and none have readers.
Mallard’s essay, while marketed as analysis, functions as public therapy disguised in syntax. Her academic sentences march with the confidence of a dictator and the rhythm of a migraine. She insists upon the instructive power of Euphemia’s feminism yet ignores the fundamental point: everything she praises was invented by someone else. Indeed, it is now impossible to say who has authored whom. Is the Bishop an invention of Euphemia? Is Euphemia a ventriloquism by Mallard? Is Mallard, perhaps, a hallucination suffered collectively by the Faculty of Literature at the University of Sydney? One begins to suspect that the only real entity is the typesetter, and even he needs a cigarette.
We are, apparently, invited to celebrate this confusion as subversion. I have always found that the word subversion, in academic use, means that something isn’t working but everyone has agreed to call it deliberate. Mallard congratulates the text for its so‑called “dialogue between submission and wit.” I find it more accurately a negotiation between boredom and irony, the outcome of which suggests a stalemate.
Let me be clear: I am not opposed to cleverness in women writers—indeed, I expect it. I merely object to cleverness as a tax deduction for talent. The Mallard book has become an object of holy citation precisely because it defeats comprehension. No one is responsible for meaning because meaning has been declared tyrannical. Thus the work remains comfortably unread and therefore—by modern standards—profound.
The Bishop, that rococo lunatic of Ducks‑on‑Ponds, would, I think, have loathed this canonisation. He wrote for amusement, not for footnotes. He worshipped sensation, not semantics. To transform his mischievous sermons into a graduate seminar on “the erotic dialectics of sacerdotal voice” is to embalm a peacock for the sake of a feather catalogue. Euphemia, for her part, brought charm to blasphemy; Mallard brings bureaucracy.
All of which leaves the reader with a closed system congratulating itself for being closed. It is literary narcissism mistaken for family therapy: the Mallards speaking of the Mallards about the Mallards to the Mallards. I have read genealogical charts with more suspense. I am told this is metafiction. It feels more like metafatigue.
In the end, I must conclude that The Collected Curiosities and its academic reburial prove one thing only—that an echo chamber, if lined with the correct feminist citations, will always be mistaken for enlightenment. The entire edifice, from Bishop to Professor, stands as a cautionary monument to our era’s inability to separate irony from intelligence.
I await, with resigned horror, the next edition—doubtless accompanied by a postface, three rejoinders, and a holographic symposium in which the Bishop’s duck delivers its own commentary on gender.
Until then, we should all take this as the moral it inadvertently teaches: never trust a preface that outlives its subject.
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