Lemony Snicket and Edward Gorey: A Comparison
Mar 25, 2019 2:27:17 GMT -5
Grace and Liam R. Findlay like this
Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Mar 25, 2019 2:27:17 GMT -5
Disclaimer - I have an embarrassing admission to make: Three years ago I created an Edward Gorey-themed proboards forum, thinking users would just turn up. Nobody did. Not a single soul. I've tried contacting Gorey fanpages to help promote the forum (since there isn't any other one around) but that didn't yield anything either. So I kinda have been using the forum for myself. Now I finally decided to cross-post one thread I've made when trying to piece together all the parallels between Snicket's & Gorey's work; afaik nobody's made an attempt at that here before.
Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) has widely acknowledged the influence of Edward Gorey on his immensely popular series A Series of Unfortunate Events (ASoUE) ("I am a complete rip-off" are his tongue-in-cheek words). You can hear him talk about The Curious Sofa and relate an anecdote on Gorey in an interview here.
As a fan of both Gorey and Snicket, I felt like starting a list of some of the more direct parallels between their work.
Let's start with V.F.D. and Q.R.V.: Both three-letter acronyms that stand for something unknown (VFD is unknown until the final books; and even then it's still shrouded in mystery). QRV is an amazing substance that can be very helpful and also potentially very harmful. VFD is a mysterious, secret organization that has two opposing sides: the noble side fights fire, and the villainous one starts fires. QRV is the title and subject of one book, but is referenced to in other works by Gorey (books, drawings, plays). VFD, the acronym, pops up throughout ASoUE many times in many forms (standing for things like Very Fancy Doilies, Vineyard of Fragrant Drapes, Verdant Flammable Device, etc). VFD, the fictional organization, continues to be a subject in Snicket's other work (like All The Wrong Questions).
Snicket is notorious for his sort-of catchphrase "a word which here means...", before he explains a certain semi-obscure (or other times well-known) word in a sarcastic fashion. Other, much more obscure words, on the other hand, are sometimes used and left unexplained (like lachrymose, quagmire, or penultimate). Gorey is known for his love of obscure words, which you can find in most of his work, like almost all of the words listed in The Nursery Frieze (1964). (You can sometimes also find an obscure word explained every now and then, like in The Izzard Book).
Snicket is very fond of alliteration, which is applied to every title in ASoUE but the last, and can be found all over the place throughout the books (f.ex. Damocles Dock, Hurricane Herman, or Lake Lachrymose--among others--in The Wide Window alone). Alliteration is also something that pops up throughout Edward Gorey's work. In The Strange Case of EG (p.115) Gorey is said to have had a penchant for alliterative names like Teresa Toscanini, Gertie Graves, or Enervating Edna.
In ASoUE, anagrams play an important role, usually in relation to VFD. In The Hostile Hospital we find a list of hospital patients where most of the names are anagrams, and indeed this is used as a plot point. Count Olaf is specifically made into anagrams on several occasions (Al Funcoot, O. Lucafont, Flacutono, etc). Edward Gorey's fondness of anagrams can be seen in the many pseudonyms he's come to adopt, like Dogear Wryde, Ogdred Weary, Regera Dowdy, etc.
The protagonists of ASoUE are orphans going through "a series of unfortunate events," in a pastiche of gothic/Victorian literature. This is something that also informs Gorey's work. Most clearly it can be seen in The Hapless Child, which is also about an orphan going through misfortunes (esp. the first half is similar to the first ASoUE books), as well as The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Orphans also appear in some of Gorey's other work (f.ex. The Fatal Lozenge). Furthermore, Gorey's work seems to share ASoUE's disdain for overly didactic children's books, which are made fun of and/or deconstructed in either of the authors' work with the same dryly humored approach (as in Gorey's post-modern ABC books; For one example from ASoUE, see this passage).
As a fan of both Gorey and Snicket, I felt like starting a list of some of the more direct parallels between their work.
Let's start with V.F.D. and Q.R.V.: Both three-letter acronyms that stand for something unknown (VFD is unknown until the final books; and even then it's still shrouded in mystery). QRV is an amazing substance that can be very helpful and also potentially very harmful. VFD is a mysterious, secret organization that has two opposing sides: the noble side fights fire, and the villainous one starts fires. QRV is the title and subject of one book, but is referenced to in other works by Gorey (books, drawings, plays). VFD, the acronym, pops up throughout ASoUE many times in many forms (standing for things like Very Fancy Doilies, Vineyard of Fragrant Drapes, Verdant Flammable Device, etc). VFD, the fictional organization, continues to be a subject in Snicket's other work (like All The Wrong Questions).
Snicket is notorious for his sort-of catchphrase "a word which here means...", before he explains a certain semi-obscure (or other times well-known) word in a sarcastic fashion. Other, much more obscure words, on the other hand, are sometimes used and left unexplained (like lachrymose, quagmire, or penultimate). Gorey is known for his love of obscure words, which you can find in most of his work, like almost all of the words listed in The Nursery Frieze (1964). (You can sometimes also find an obscure word explained every now and then, like in The Izzard Book).
Snicket is very fond of alliteration, which is applied to every title in ASoUE but the last, and can be found all over the place throughout the books (f.ex. Damocles Dock, Hurricane Herman, or Lake Lachrymose--among others--in The Wide Window alone). Alliteration is also something that pops up throughout Edward Gorey's work. In The Strange Case of EG (p.115) Gorey is said to have had a penchant for alliterative names like Teresa Toscanini, Gertie Graves, or Enervating Edna.
In ASoUE, anagrams play an important role, usually in relation to VFD. In The Hostile Hospital we find a list of hospital patients where most of the names are anagrams, and indeed this is used as a plot point. Count Olaf is specifically made into anagrams on several occasions (Al Funcoot, O. Lucafont, Flacutono, etc). Edward Gorey's fondness of anagrams can be seen in the many pseudonyms he's come to adopt, like Dogear Wryde, Ogdred Weary, Regera Dowdy, etc.
The protagonists of ASoUE are orphans going through "a series of unfortunate events," in a pastiche of gothic/Victorian literature. This is something that also informs Gorey's work. Most clearly it can be seen in The Hapless Child, which is also about an orphan going through misfortunes (esp. the first half is similar to the first ASoUE books), as well as The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Orphans also appear in some of Gorey's other work (f.ex. The Fatal Lozenge). Furthermore, Gorey's work seems to share ASoUE's disdain for overly didactic children's books, which are made fun of and/or deconstructed in either of the authors' work with the same dryly humored approach (as in Gorey's post-modern ABC books; For one example from ASoUE, see this passage).
Snicket's The Wide Window features some plot elements that can be found in The Gashlycrumb Tinies: leeches ('F' in TGT), a lake ('I' in TGT), and being swept out to deep waters ('M' in TGT). In Snicket's The Reptile Room Uncle Monty has a garden filled with topiaries of snakes (TRR, p.9 and several illustrations); Topiaries have appeared prominently in Gorey's work (like The Remembered Visit and, most notably, Tragédies Topiares). ASoUE's main antagonist Count Olaf is supposedly the Baudelaires' distant relative, and becomes their temporary adoptive father; Ill-meaning older relatives are also present in Gorey's work, very much like the Uncle who plans to have children come to harm in The Fatal Lozenge. Olaf is a failed theatre actor, and a theatre performance is used as a plot point in The Bad Beginning; Characters who are thespians recurrently appear in Gorey's work (f.ex. The Blue Aspic; The Gilded Bat; an untalented actress named Fleager in The Listing Attic), just like opera has a recurring presence in both of the author's worlds. The Carnivorous Carnival features a cast of characters who are circus freaks; Characters with unusual deformities appear every now and then throughout Gorey's work (f.ex. the children of Mrs Keats-Shelley in The Listing Attic; The Beastly Baby; The Bleeding Trunk).
The Edward Gorey quote "The helpful thought for which you look is written somewhere in a book" (from Verse Advice, 1993) has been paraphrased by Snicket on one or two occasions. Once in ASoUE: "All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk"; and once in ATWQ's Who Could That Be At This Hour?: "They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind." Literature and books have played a crucial role (if not the biggest role) in both Handler's and Gorey's lives, which is reflected in their work, encouraging their readers to read as much as they can.
A titular plot point in Gorey's The Lost Lions: Or, Having Opened the Wrong Envelope might have served as an inspiration for a technique used throughout Snicket's All the Wrong Questions. In Gorey's short story, the plot is set in motion with the sentence "One day he opened the wrong envelope." In ATWQ, each book opens with the narrator explaining what he's been wrong about ("Instead, I asked the wrong question--four wrong questions, more or less.") and a similar use of the word 'wrong' is employed throughout the series as a leitmotif ("(...) if I had not been in that roadster, I never would have ended up falling into the wrong tree, or walking into the wrong basement, or destroying the wrong library (...)"). Daniel Handler explains his usage of the word as such: "I like the word “wrong” a lot. Particularly when I’m writing books because I think wrong automatically makes a story. If he ate the wrong sandwich or she opened the wrong door, that’s already interesting."