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Richard Dyer, Pastiche. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2007, 222 pp.

STEVEN COHAN

Before reading Richard Dyer’s new book, I had never thought of pastiche
as being much more than a superficial aesthetic mannerism, a way of
evoking outmoded forms of representation through stylistic imitation.
Dyer, however, corrects such a commonplace yet limited understanding
of the term. Pastiche, he argues, not only has a robust, lively and varied
history in film, music, art and literature, but is a significant means of
representing historicity in terms of feeling.
Dyer recognizes that pastiche is itself a loose term to start with; hence
the difficulty in discerning it, let alone in identifying it categorically with
the eye of a critic. The looseness, he explains, is semantic. ‘Pastiche’ is
contiguous with many other terms for ‘copying’ and these are too often
treated as its synonyms: plagiarism, forgery, hoax, homage, parody. To
be sure, much like those other terms, pastiche involves imitation and is
often readable as a straightforward and uncritical ‘copy’. But pastiche
does not imitate in the sense of achieving an exact reproduction; in
contrast with, say, a plagiarism or a forgery, the point of a pastiche is not
to be indistinguishable from its source. The term’s looseness,
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furthermore, has to do with its origin in ‘pasticcio’, an Italian word that
initially referred to a pie combining various ingredients yet without fully
blending them together and hiding their distinctive flavours. From the
perspective offered by the pasticcio’s flavourful mixture, Dyer
demonstrates how pastiche involves combination as well as imitation –
or more precisely, it can readily and promiscuously combine imitations
without regard to formal wholeness or generic unity. A text that pastiches
can therefore be hybridic and heterogeneous, mixing modes, genres or
styles; or it can set off what is being pastiched by framing it within a
primary narrative that does not pastiche (as in the play within a play in

547 Screen 48:4 Winter 2007


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by Uniwersytet A. Mickiewicza - Biblioteka Uniwersytecka user
on 18 May 2018
Hamlet or the ‘Follies’ numbers in the Sondheim musical Follies); or it
can more seamlessly incorporate pastiche within another discourse (as in
the free indirect style of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary).
Equally, when combined with other styles, a pastiche can disappear
from view once placed in new contexts of reception. It thus follows that
‘the form of a pastiche’s likeness is subject to perception’ on the part of
the audience and the text alike (p. 55). To illustrate how a pastiche needs
to be cued textually if not formally or risk the danger of misrecognition,
Dyer points to the newsreel segment of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,
1941); this is less discernible today as a pastiche (as opposed to a parody)
of The March of Time (1930). Without clear-cut signalling, the attitudes
expressed by a pastiche can consequently seem uncertain, its ‘point’
difficult to pin down. Yet when a pastiche is instantly recognizable as a
‘pastiche,’ the tendency amongst contemporary critics and reviewers,
according to Dyer, is to dismiss the pastiche for its triviality, assuming
that it intends only to amuse as a rhetorical flourish or to mark the past’s
obsolescence in relation to the present.
The question of interpretability characterizes the terrain of pastiche.
Dyer stresses that there is always a significant gap between a pastiche and
what is being pastiched, between ‘likeness’ and ‘deformation and
discrepancy’ (p. 54). This is not to say that the point of a pastiche is
outright distortion but, rather, that it engages both resemblance and
remembrance, exploiting their dynamic interaction. Inevitably, and
usually intentionally, a pastiche brings into play a significant distance
from its source as much as it approximates a sense of closeness to it,
indicating why context and signals may be crucial. For insofar as ‘a
pastiche imitates its idea of that which it imitates’ (p. 55), it refers back
not to the source but to ‘perceptions [of the source] that are temporally
and culturally specific’ (p. 128).
One of the ways that Dyer shows how cultural memory intervenes in
and gives historical specificity to pastiche is through the revival of film
noir. ‘What neo-noir imitates,’ he explains, using Body Heat (Lawrence
Kasdan, 1981) as his prime example, ‘is not straightforwardly noir but
the memory of noir, a memory that may be inaccurate or selective’
(p. 124). Even more so than Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), at the
time of its release Body Heat exemplified for reviewers and audiences
how noir elements could be updated with considerable panache. The film
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was therefore seen as a superficial exercise in style on a par with retro


fashion, and the critical consensus today still assesses it in these terms.
Nonetheless, Body Heat’s pastiching of noir’s visual and narrative
conventions was bound to its own historical moment: to view Body Heat
as a noir pastiche enables one to recognize more sharply its significance
in imitating not classic film noir but the critical definition of noir that had
emerged after that cycle had run its course. So despite the seeming
presence of 1940s film noir as the ostensible referent of its imitation,
what is being pastiched in Body Heat is actually an ‘idea’ of what
constituted noir. At once contemporaneous with the film’s production

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on 18 May 2018
and reception, that ‘idea’ of noir determined this film’s fabric and
attitudes. Furthermore, as an inaugurating instance of neonoir, the ‘idea’
of noir pastiched by Body Heat helped to shape the cultural memory of
what 1940s film noir was ‘actually’ like, what emotions it generated and
how it did so.
Dyer is by no means the first critic to offer this account of neonoir’s
historical relation to classic film noir, but he is the first to read it in terms
of pastiche. ‘Pastiche noir,’ he states, ‘is able to recognise and mobilise
the structure of feeling it perceives to have been caught by classic noir’
(p. 130). Dyer demonstrates how pastiche aesthetically expresses such
historicity from a number of perspectives. He closes his book with a brief
overview of what is no doubt the one example of cinematic pastiche that
will most immediately occur to readers of this journal: Far From Heaven
(Todd Haynes, 2002). Dyer describes his own response: ‘there were
moments when I could not see the screen for crying’, even while ‘I was
fully conscious of the way the film was doing Hollywood melodrama,
was pastiche’ (p. 174). Enumerating upon the multiple ways in which this
film situates its twenty-first-century viewers in an affective relation to
what it is pastiching narratively, aesthetically and critically, Dyer
concludes, ‘the pastiche of Far From Heaven not only makes the
historicity of its affect evident but can also allow us to realise the
historicity of our feelings’ (p. 178).
Dyer is not claiming that such a realization amounts to a pastiche’s
universality; far from it, since he wants to account for the strong affect
that a pastiche like Far From Heaven can have upon a viewer without
discounting its historical basis. His point is that, in imitating shared and
historically contextualized perceptions of its referent, pastiche reveals
the process by which feelings are culturally shaped, ‘recognised and
mobilised’ by a work’s style as much as by its content. This is also why
affect alone does not necessarily stabilize or clarify the attitudes
expressed by a pastiche, as other examples in these final chapters make
fully apparent. For instance, Dyer audaciously, but also I think quite
rightly, reads against the grain of the contemporary critical consensus
about the appropriation of blackness by early twentieth-century Jewish
composers (Irving Berlin and George Gershwin) and performers (Al
Jolson). He points out ‘the elements of distance that account for the
pastiche quality of Jewish black music’, which is ‘music close to black,
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even on occasion mistaken for it, but never actually it and often signaling
the fact’ (p. 149). The uneasiness stirred by such musical pastiching –
‘a highly ambivalent strategy of survival, expression and evasion’
(p. 150) – becomes more undeniable and offensive once the framework
of ‘closeness and difference’ historically recedes from view and ‘the
pastiche itself is revealed as problematic precisely because of its role in
shoring up an unquestioned hegemonic cultural position’ (p. 156).
Turning the question of distance around, Dyer then considers how the
pastiching intent of Madame Bovary was in large part responsible for
Flaubert’s being charged with obscenity. Dyer speculates that the free

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by Uniwersytet A. Mickiewicza - Biblioteka Uniwersytecka user
on 18 May 2018
indirect style of the novel’s narration, which pastiches ‘the poetry of
adultery’ (p. 158) while obscuring the authorial stance towards the
inflammatory romances that have filled Emma’s head, encouraged and
even justified the prosecutor’s simplistic equation of Flaubert with his
heroine. Why did Flaubert not take the safer road of distinguishing the
pastiche from the authorial irony which more sophisticated readers sense,
yet cannot assign to a specific agent because of the style? His ‘using
pastiche in the free indirect mode,’ Dyer explains, ‘. . . allows us to
experience the fiction and the response to it while simultaneously
indicating its shallowness and showing its illusoriness. . . . Madame
Bovary suggests not just that pastiche can be used to be critical, but that it
is precisely by drawing close to what it critiques that it is able to convey
more forcefully why that needs to be critiqued, namely, because it works’
(p. 163).
As I hope this review indicates, Dyer argues throughout his book that
pastiche needs to be understood as the rhetorical expression of specific
historical affects which apply to the present moment as much as they
refer to the past. ‘The most valuable point of pastiche’, he reiterates,
‘resides in its ability to move us even while allowing us to be conscious
of where the means of our being moved come from, its historicity’
(p. 138). His book forcefully challenges the debased status of pastiche as
a trivial, ahistorical, and uncritical imitation which, especially because of
Jameson’s influence, now seems to determine the term’s connotations. In
order to show what such a limiting view ignores, Dyer further seeks to
demonstrate how pastiche historically and emotionally identifies what
amounts to a postmodern subject. ‘Pastiche becomes here,’ he comments
when discussing Julian Barnes’s 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot in his
final chapter, ‘the feeling form of what at the level of theory is endless
Derridean deferral or Butlerian performativity, the perception that
everything in the end is a copy of something else and we know it and can
never get out of it’ (p. 173). In making this claim, Dyer is not invoking
the philosophical trap of an infinite regress but, as he goes on to state in
the last page of his book, stressing how ‘pastiche articulates this sense of
living permanently, ruefully but without distress, within the limits and
potentialities of the cultural construction of thought and feeling’ (p. 180).
Pastiche is clearly a compelling and learned book. Dyer writes with
the flair, depth, and knowledge one expects from his many previous
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books, but here his scope is also more expansive, even more so than it
was in White (1997). In examining pastiche, Dyer’s range includes the
novel, drama, and music as well as film, and his examples, not limited to
English by any means, range from the Renaissance to the present day; nor
are his illustrations confined to a single genre (the Western is here as well
as melodrama and film noir) or medium. Regardless of what type of
pastiching work he brings into his discussion, Dyer handles it with the
same critical sophistication, attention to detail and intelligence that has
always characterized his analysis of film.

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on 18 May 2018

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