It's easier to heckle Hemingway than fake Faulkner.
That's one lesson learned during the annual Faux Faulkner Contest, which for four years has been a sort of companion to the 13-year-old International Imitation Hemingway Competition.Faux Faulkner contestants compose humorous parodies of the unique prose of the bard of Oxford. Here's an excerpt from the winning entry, which was announced during this week's 20th annual Faulkner conference at Ole Miss:
"April First: The players yawned and peeked and scratched, a garrulous foursome of inability and device who, instead of savouring the challenge of insight and vigilance, needled each other's forgetfulness and failure so that, when the Grandbother clock crashed onto the table, they gave up. `Midnight!' deduced Dizzy. `Bid a trump heffalump,' Bluster said . . . "
Are your sides splitting yet?
"I don't think it's very accessible," admitted contest winner Peter Stoicheff of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada, whose parody is titled "Astoundin' the Tourney."
"I don't think you can laugh at it without knowing `The Sound and the Fury.' But for people who know `The Sound and the Fury,' they're going to think it's hilarious."
Compare that to the winning entry in this year's Hemingway competition by Owen McKevitt of New York, who was feted during a March ceremony in Los Angeles:
"A man should stand up to die. Lester did not stand up. He died in his chair drinking a pina colada. There were women at the table. A man should not die drinking a pina colada at a table with women.
"`He should have walked to the bar and ordered a whisky. A good Canadian like we had during Prohibition. That was a whisky to die drinking,' I said to my fourth wife who I loved with the love that is smooth and round."
Kathryn Warden, Stoicheff's wife, said Hemingway is easier to satirize because of "the whole macho thing, you know."
"I think when you're writing the Hemingway stuff, you're parodying the machismo he stood for - you're parodying the man, not just the literature," said Stoicheff, 36.
Or as Faulkner is alleged to have said of Hemingway, according to The Macmillan Dictionary of Quotes: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
The contests are sponsored in large part by American Way, the magazine of American Airlines. The top three parodies in both the Faulkner and Hemingway contests are printed in the current issue of the magazine.