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Victoria Mixon emailed me to let me know that she’s posting the  literary mash-up submissions. If you’d like to read them along with three essays on “Making FunnyFunny,” please visit www.victoriamixon.com.

 Due to a strong response on the subject of literary mash-ups from Victoria’s essay, Victoria is inviting readers join her in a Literary Mash-Up Extravaganza.

Please use two (or more!) literary sources to come up with titles and brief descriptions for possible literary mash-ups. She’ll post as many as possible of the ones that make us laugh the hardest on her website, www.victoriamixon.com in about a week. She’ll consider posting entire flash fiction pieces if she gets one or more that totally knock us out.

Below are examples of mash-ups:

Don Juan S.S. Valdez Quixote: A slightly mad coffee merchant spends 800 pages attacking windmills and making love to women all over Spain. Then he spills thousands of gallons of oil in an Alaskan sound.

Brokeback to the Future: Doc and Marty experience a love they never knew was possible. In the sequel, they do it in the Old West, but no one watches it.

Leave your mash-ups in the comments section or email them to gotheca@mcn.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

The idea of this essay came about by a thread on literary mash ups on the Writing Forum at the Internet Writing Workshop concerning Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. After reading some of the comments, I thought it would be interesting to have two essays, one pro and the other con about mash ups.

Contributing writer, Victoria Mixon, penned the essay analyzing (leaning on the pro side)  the genre. The writer who started the thread and was stridently against it, never responded to my note asking her to write the “con.”  Below is Victoria’s essay, and I’d like to add that Wide Sargasso Sea is now on my reading list.

Literary Mashing, or Zombies Don’t Dance by Victoria Mixon

One of the best-known and most beautiful literary mash-ups in the literature of any language must be Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys, if you don’t know, was a writer of peculiarly lovely prose and desolate perspective. She was born and raised in the Caribbean in the 1890s in a generations-old British colonial family and traveled to England in her late teens to more or less “start her life”. She tried to establish a career in the theater and wound up in traveling stock, working hard and earning peanuts. When she became the mistress of a young professional man in London, it took no great brains to realize this was a far more comfortable life than that of an itinerant chorus girl. This was around 1910. You can guess what happened when the young professional man got tired of her.

Rhys’ life followed a predictable trajectory, punctuated by her sporadic attempts to get a grip on it. She drifted in and out of relationships with young professional men who supported her for as long as they felt like it and dropped her when they lost interest. Her finances were never even faintly secure. She married and for a few years lived the high life in Vienna and Paris, had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and was unceremoniously dumped back into poverty when her husband was arrested and banished from the country. The marriage wasn’t working, she wanted to be a writer, but she had no profession. The powerful British writer Ford Madox Ford and his wife took her under their wing and, in short order (according to Rhys), into their marriage.

It was Ford who helped Rhys get the first of her four slender early novels published. But it was a much later fan of her work who, in the 1960s, tracked down the alcoholic and reclusive Rhys and learned that she’d written but never published a literary masterpiece, the gorgeous and bleak Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the unforgettable story of a woman much like Rhys, born Creole in the Caribbean in the 1800s and taken to England with no real concept of the 19th-century English, of their prejudices against their colonial families and particularly those of mixed race, or of what life in England was really like. Rhys’ heroine, like herself, is immediately taken advantage of by a man born to all the privileges of upper-class masculine British dominance. She is first romanced, then rejected, and finally brutally controlled, entirely through her female lack of social power, even though her weakness doesn’t include lack of money. She is, in fact, used for her inheritance. Eventually–unlike Rhys–her heroine is psychologically destroyed by the cruelty of her life. In the end it makes perfect sense to both writer and reader that she chooses suicide as her only escape.

The authenticity of Rhys’ voice, her chilling understanding of her heroine’s history and doom, and the beauty of her language make Wide Sargasso Sea a milestone in the ranks of literature.

Now, you might well wonder what this has to do with literary mash-ups. Rhys was an original, a genius, someone to be mashed. All of which is indubitably true.

But she was a masher.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Jane Eyre’s famous competition for the hand of Mr. Rochester, the original madwoman in the attic, the violent and lunatic Caribbean-born Mrs. Bertha Rochester.

Jean Rhys mashed Charlotte Bronte.

Interestingly enough, Charlotte Bronte herself was a masher. She mashed her brilliant (and superior) sister Emily Bronte when she rewrote sections of Wuthering Heights for its re-publication after her sister’s death. She even rewrote Emily’s extraordinary poetry, over Emily’s vehement opposition, after Emily was dead and could no longer object. Charlotte “clarified it”, meaning she altered lines and added stanzas of heavy-handed explanation to what Emily left ephemeral. Then Charlotte re-published it under Emily’s name. How’s that for mashing with a vengeance?

Admittedly, the vast majority of literary mash-ups are garbage, many of them puerile and insulting garbage.

Believe me, I’ve got no fondness for the staggering amount of porn out there masquerading as “sequels” to beloved classics like Pride and Prejudice, and I certainly haven’t made up my mind whether or not to even bother reading the recent version involving zombies. I’ve decided to wait and let Rebeca advise me on that. I read Wicked, the mash-up of the inimitable The Wizard of Oz, and lived to rue the day. And don’t get me started on the subject of laziness and fan fiction.

But Shakespeare mashed both popular and lesser-known stories of his time, and everyone from Tom Stoppard to Gus Van Sant and Billy Morrissette has since then mashed Shakespeare, often with brilliant results.

Robert A. Heinlein mashed The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver’s Travels, and Doc Smith’s Lensman series, among other great literary works, many of them in the single classic science fiction novel, The Number of the Beast.

Edward Eager deliberately mashed seven well-known children’s books in his own children’s classic Seven-Day Magic as a technique for encouraging children to read his favorites.

Literary mashing has produced not only invaluable additions to the literary canon, but also vast numbers of parodies, many of them outstanding.

Kurt Vonnegut actually mashed himself.

Flannery O’Connor (who, so far as I know, never mashed anybody) coined one of the most inarguable aphorisms in literature when she said, “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”

Mash if you must. Mash if you dare. But understand before you begin that mashing a beloved classic earns you the automatic opposite of a fanbase: a hatebase. You must overcome not only readers’ indifference to you as an unknown or only-marginally-known writer, but also their active hostility toward anyone who messes with their beloved.

Readers are not to be trifled with.

In mashing—as in so much of life—some aspiring writers need to learn this the hard way.

~~~~~~~

Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor who has worked in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, Prentice Hall, 1996, and has published pieces in various literary magazines. She freelances as an editor for fiction authors and writes articles on the art of fiction at www.victoriamixon.com

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.–Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Surely, my dear, you must have heard the expression meaning that something is not a true picture, or has it quite died out nowadays? ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’.” –Agatha Christie, “Strange Jest”

Christie’s indubitable Miss Marple solves the mystery of the “Strange Jest” by knowing more than one antiquated saying. The other is “gammon and spinach” which, according to her, means “nonsense”. There is no way that a reader unfamiliar with these terms could draw the conclusions that she draws, that the recipe for ham and spinach is a nonsense recipe, that the dying man who tapped his eye and left behind love letters from Betty Martin was pulling someone’s leg.

Like Dickens, whose Tale of Two Cities chronicles the fall of the French monarchy, without history Christie would have had blessed little to go on.

At first glance, though, it seems that history has blessed little to do with fiction. Fiction is pretend. History is real. Fiction is entertainment. History is inevitable. Fiction falls from the fingers of its author, willy-nilly, without interference from outside source. 

History is the outside source.

If you were Samuel Beckett, you could claim to write in a historical vacuum. Poor Estragon and Vladimir wait and wait for Godot, completely cut off from the world around them. It seems they could be a couple of everymen from any land, in any human epoch.

And yet you’d be lying. Waiting for Godot clearly owes homage to King Lear and just as clearly influenced Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. History moves on, reflected in the parade of literature, from corrupt Elizabethan politics to the ennui of post-WWII shellshock to the absurdity of anti-establishment psychedelia. In every era, the little guy faces down the powers that be. In every era, the little guy’s expectation of failure or success — the expectation of the manner of failure or success — alters.

We are the children of our times. I was born in the 1960s, when dingaling hair-sprayed go-go girls dancing in cages could exist alongside hippies in rags staging love-ins against war. I grew up in the 1970s, amid the cacophony of disco and fear of OPEC. I was a young adult in the 1980s, when Reagan’s Trickle-Down Economics brought us the homeless and the adult children of ’60s radicals brought political activism into mainstream American culture.

There’s always a little guy. There are always the powers that be.

And through this we find our fiction, the imaginary universes that writers dream up, where average flesh-and-blood characters grapple with the mocking forces of fate — sometimes gaining ground, sometimes losing it, sometimes on top of the wheel of cosmic fortune, sometimes dragging through the muck and slime at the bottom. They put on their go-go boots and spray their beehives and march out there to contend with life to the best of their abilities. Will they fail? Of course they will. Life is infinitely bigger, stronger, smarter, and better equipped than a dippy dancer with hair-spray. Life is going to kick their butt.

Do we want to hear about it? Of course we do. That’s us in the go-go boots. That’s us carting around those towering beehives. We long to be righteous, ethical, innocent, and courageous. Our hearts yearn for meaning. At the same time we desperately need to be accepted. If everyone we knew were wearing shoes built inches up from the ground and blindingly-bright rayon shirts and leaping around a lit-up plastic floor posing momentarily and staring gloomily straight ahead and flinging our arms from one compass point to another as though guiding an airplane into the hanger — we’d do it too.

Don’t you know how to do the Funky Chicken? Don’t you know how to Hustle?

So do fictional characters. They know all about living heartfelt among the debris of the ridiculous. That’s what history does to human beings.

Write it down, testify to the real history of the human race. We will always remember.

About Victoria Mixon:

Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor who has worked in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, Prentice Hall, 1996, and has published pieces in various literary magazines. She freelances as an editor for fiction authors and writes articles on the art of fiction at www.victoriamixon.com.