A prologomena to all future 'Melissa Good' studies

by: jmm

The following are notes of the address of Professor X.W.S. Grytpippe-Thinne at last night's gala opening banquet:

Good evening. I am delighted to be here and honoured to welcome so many distinguished scholars to the 187th annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Xenalogical Research.

There can be only one subject for this address, in light of the recent bombshell. To quote from one of the leading reviews:

" The literary world is agog at the recent re-release of Melissa Good's early opus 'The Grocery List'. This fascinating exploration of the inner workings of a creative genius gives ample evidence of the motivation which powers this dynamic writer."

The literary world is agog, but the scholarly world is shaking their heads and smirking into their drinks. [laughter] What the 'critics,' in their rush to accept what they want to believe, have failed to consider is whether 'The Grocery List' is in fact a genuine writing of the mysterious twentieth century figure now known to the world as 'Melissa Good.'

In fact, five minutes inspection of the manuscript will leave the discerning reader with his own 'Grocery List' of problems. [laughter]

The most obvious, of course, is provenance. The earliest extant manuscripts have not come from the purported writer, but from 'fans' or 'pups' -- people whose only qualification is a rabid partisanship for all things Good. Admitted fans of fiction, whose response to the objects of their obsession is visceral rather than intellectual, these amateurs cannot be reasonably held out as reliable sources on any subject, let alone one so dear to their hearts. Scholarship is stricter than that, ladies and gentlemen. [applause]

Leaving aside the question of authenticity then, we turn to stylistic considerations. 'Melissa Good,' who ever he, she, it or they may have been, has certain characteristics that are universally accepted as indicia of the canon. These are absent from 'The Grocery List.'

The first of these is prolixity. Stories that Dickens and Tolstoy pleaded with her to end "Dark Comes the Morning" are probably apocryphal; there is no evidence that either of these writers (who undoubtedly *did* exist) ever corresponded or that they were even aware of 'Melissa Good' either as a person or as the literary force that the name undoubtedly came to represent.

'The Grocery List,' on the other hand, is terse to the point of obscurity. (What, for example, was a "rawhide treat[ment]," and what is the ailment known as "rawhide" that was it used to treat? Suggestions, based solely on its position in the list, that it had something to do with a dog named Gabrielle, can be discarded. An authenticated photograph of 'Gabrielle' survives to this day, and it is abundantly clear that, despite misfortunes of costuming and hairdressing, to say nothing of a tragic problem of cosmetic overuse, she was not a dog. But I digress.) [laughter]

'The Grocery List' has no sense of place, the characters are limited to 'the shopper,' whose character is not defined except by the most obscure implication. The thing is not even in complete sentences.

Alert scholars will already have noticed that the next shortest work in the canon is orders of magnitude larger.

Secondly, the notion that it is a draft or note for another work is untenable. Nowhere in the mass of works now ascribed to 'Melissa Good' is there anything as mundane as a grocery shopping episode. The "Dar" character in the 'Tropical Storm' cycle gets around the problem by having food delivered by a menial. That one passage makes it clear to the informed scholar that 'Melissa Good' was not experienced or informed on the subject of grocery shopping, and had to skate around it.

Even the dubious ending of 'Tropical Storm' (which does not appear in the preferred 'published version') carefully omits any actual making of a list or shopping in a grocery store, taking up the tale after the characters leave the store. While we may never actually know who was the actual writer of 'Tropical Storm,' we can safely say that grocery shopping was not a subject of interest for him.

Thirdly, the end of 'Tropical Storm' itself is a major problem for the proponent of the "One Melissa Good" school, rivalling the controversy over the "Johanine Apostrophe." Although the published manuscripts differ from the electronically stored and privately edited versions in many respects, none is greater than the "Kyle/Andy" problem.

It is now generally accepted, following Prof. Hassenpfeffer's seminal text analysis (which ultimately drove him mad), that the variations in spelling, punctuation and text between the two versions cannot be explained unless there are at least two people contributing to the writer we call 'Melissa Good.' Hassenpfeffer's conclusion that MG1 was responsible for the "cyber" versions of the stories and MG2 for the "published" version seems reasonable, although by no means certain. It is also suggested by the sibling team of Drs. Jarndyce and Jarndyce that the cyber version was a later, corrupted version, and was at least a generation after the published version.

This is a fertile area of investigation for a graduate thesis, but I have always harboured the suspicion that the published version was the result of over-zealous acolytes who took it upon themselves to "tidy up" the work of a great, but unsophisticated talent. This would suggest that the published version was at least a generation after the cyber text was generally received, as it is improbable that any tampering with the text would have been permitted during the lifetime of 'Melissa Good' or, as we may call her 'MG1'.

I would note in passing that the use of a single name by more than one person was commonly accepted in this era. Today's student may not be familiar with the brilliant psychiatric analysis done by Prof. G'deyemite of the the University of St. Louis Gonzaga, Wagga Wagga, on the writings of 'MaryD' and 'MaryDee.' His conclusion that they were two seperate people, one a driven, overachieving cybertechnician and the other a psychotic serial killer, may seem trite, but it at least offers an desperately needed alternative to the "One Melissa Good" school.

For there is simply no way that the legend can be true. If we are to believe the 'pups,' Melissa Good worked sixty hours a week in paid employment, cared for a house full of elderly relatives and canines, wrote novels at night, ran and cooked for massive social gatherings and maintained a busy correspondence with writers, 'pups' and others around the world. Those of us who have puzzled through her arcane language long enough to appreciate the mass of material that has survived simply cannot accept that there was a single person known as "Melissa Good." One might as well insist that she robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, or leaped tall buildings at a single bound.

The very least that can be determined is that there were a number of people, mostly working in the South Florida area, who collectively became known as "Melissa Good" sometime in the twentieth century.

It would appear that the simplest explanation is this: There were several distinct schools that produced an enormous cycle of Xena/Gabrielle legends, sometime in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Some of these were very high quality: the 'Melissa Good' writers were in the forefront of the movement. Some were less so: the 'Auckland School,' while prolific, is replete with inconsistencies and illogic.

It is little to be wondered at that the writings of the first Melissa Good were revived in the late twentieth century. The movement was sufficiently widespread that it triggered a revival around the world.

Even the much ridiculed 'Auckland School' was made the subject of a dramatic recreation during this period, although the surviving scripts and recordings show such a widely varied quality and direction that these must be seen as a later imitation of the accepted canon. Why the makers did not go to the accepted version is a mystery. It may have been that they got bad scholarly advice [laughter] or that the canon was not available in New Zealand at the time. The most likely explanation, given that the world was infested with lawyers at that period, [prolonged laughter] is that they could not get the performance rights to the Good cycle, and settled for another equally ancient, but demonstrably inferior, version in an attempt to make a quick buck.

At this time a second writer appears. MG2 wrote essentially a modern dress version of the original cycle. This is the famous "Dar and Kerry" version of the tale. There is no longer any doubt that the second cycle is an homage to the first. It quotes liberally from it, and the style is similar. It may even be that MG2 is a single person. This is unlikely, in view of the sheer size of the cycle, but is more reasonable than the old view that they were all written by one person within a single human life span.

Thematic analysis indicates that there were at least four distinct writers involved in this period, which we may for convenience call the "Deutro-Melissa" school. MG2 discovered and revived the original Xena cycle written by MG1. MG3, inspired by that revival, wrote much of the basic text of the Dar cycle. A generation later, MG4 revised the text and published a version that we now use as the basic text.

MG5, a much briefer writer, created anonymous parodies under the pseudonym "Merwulf." That anonymity is easy to understand, given the rage that one would expect from the 'pups' at the desecration of their monument. [laughter]

We may even go so far as to suppose a sixth writer, perhaps associated with one or more of the above, whose muse did not extend to novels or short stories, but confined itself to grocery lists and, if we accept the pups word, dry cleaning receipts. [general laughter]

Did 'Melissa Good' write 'The Grocery List?' we must first ask Mr. Nidanupdaet which of the 'grocery list' of 'Melissa Goods' he refers to. While we wait for his answer, let us spend the next week in scholarly study of the greatest writings the English language has given us, and have less of the romantic, wishful thinking of the 'pup' mentality. [prolonged applause]