Pastiche

Abstract

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, 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 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).