Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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,
review
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
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.