Parody

AVI found a song and the original it was a parody of and commented:

It was written as a parody of an American tune, My Nellie's Blue Eyes, which the songwriter found appallingly sweet, sentimental, and trivial. We can therefore suspect that the original would hang around here for decades after.

A song can certainly be incompetent--at some level all are; "the sad incompetence of human speech" never quite does justice to experiences like this:

But he never understood it as now, suddenly, he understood Rosamond's arm when she leant forward to pass a plate to her sister; somehow that arm always made him think of the Downs against the sky. There was a line, a curved beauty, a thing that spoke to both mind and heart; a thing that was there for ever. And Rosamond? Rosamond was like them, she was there for ever. It occurred to him that, if she was, then her occasional slowness when he was trying to explain something was there for ever. Well, after all, Rosamond was only human; she couldn't be absolutely perfect. And then as she stretched out her arm again he cried out that she was perfect, she was more than perfect; the movement of her arm was something frightfully important, and now it was gone. He had seen the verge of a great conclusion of mortal things and then it had vanished. Over that white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it. And in a moment all that lay beyond it was the bright kitchen, and Sir Bernard standing up to go into the other room.

or (same author)

bright as if mortal flesh had indeed become what all lovers know it to be. ... But no verse, not Stanhope's, not Shakespeare's, not Dante's, could rival the original, and this was the original, and the verse was but the best translation of a certain manner of its life.

The "sweet and sentimental" songs don't do it justice, but they at least express something that irony only does at one remove, when irony isn't mocking the experience completely. I wonder if the ironists never had that quick moment of surprise, or if it was tied to something that disappointed and they want to forget, or if they think only things they can repeat are real. They arrange another meal, or another romp in the hay, or another evening in the Grand Canyon, but not the moment of awe; so it must not have been quite real.

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It occurs to me that because Mickey Mouse was copyrighted and not trademarked, American readers are not supposed to click on the links to that Australian site.

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UPDATE: I should have been a little clearer with the title. I'm not deprecating parody as such: I've been generating parodies of one stripe or another as long as I can remember, and still automatically revamp lyrics. (The best I can do is a couple of lines before I have to stop and think a while, though.) (Maybe next Lent) And some parodies (Alice in Wonderland has quite a few) are so much better than the originals that they replace them.

What annoys me is the assumption that sweetness and sentimentality are appalling. Incomplete, yes. Worth mocking in themselves, no.

And yes, I have had a moment or three of the sort alluded to in the Williams quotations, but of course not exactly like them.