Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (review)

Ingeborg Hoesterey brings her double disciplinary training in literary narratology and art history to bear on the postmodern topic of pastiche—a much maligned form which she aims to salvage from the postmodern scrap heap to which Jamesonian disdain had consigned it. She carefully contextualizes the negative associations that have accrued over the centuries, from the classical "cento" and the sixteenth-century Italian art "pasticcio" onward. The fact that this latter "stylish medley," with its creative but fake identity, was intended for the "mass market" of the time provides Hoesterey with a happy link to contemporary advertising and its pastiche techniques later in the volume. On her way from the early forms to the later, she canvases a wide range of (mostly contemporary) case studies from the visual, literary and cinematic arts, with brief asides on music and popular culture. What guides her survey is a strong conviction that pastiche plays a crucial role in the postmodern aesthetic of difference and hybridity, especially in its function as a tool of ideological critique that fosters critical thinking.

Often considered a low-status form, pastiche has always been defined as an amalgamating mode, an eclectic blending. The inevitable associations with appropriation, copying, and assimilating mean that this form is more likely to be considered acceptable in an age in which imitation signals respect—and cultural capital—and not a lack of originality and authenticity (in other words, before the romantic valorization of the latter). Postmodern challenges to romantic values have made room for pastiche to flourish, of course, as an inherently dialogic and intertextual form. While Arthur Danto's theorizing insights are said to inform the whole study, and Niklas Luhmann's concept of autopoiesis is claimed as a guiding structure for the final chapter, most of the book consists of historical contextualizing and analyses of specific texts, rather than any substantial or new theorizing of pastiche as an aesthetic form. The examples—both extensive and brief—are well chosen, if sometimes obvious. And the format of each chapter is a brief summary introduction of the use of pastiche in literature, film, or visual art (including architecture and design as well) and then a move immediately to specific analyses. The generalizability of the (often only implicit) theoretical insights is obscured somewhat in the process.

While insisting in her introductory glossary of "the semantic environment of pastiche"—alphabetically, from adaptation through to travesty—that pastiche is not parody, there is considerable slippage throughout the actual analyses between the two concepts. While it is true that both needed rescuing from Fredric Jameson's infamous dismissal of them in his negative assessment of postmodernism, there are indeed serious differences between the two forms of intertextuality, both historically and currently, that could have been addressed more clearly. One of the problems is that parody too reveals the major characteristic by which she defines pastiche: a powerful personal style that holds everything disparate together—"à un seul goût." The central role of irony in the critical edge of pastiche could also have been explored in more usefully generalizable terms, though the topic does come up in individual textual analyses.

The book's strengths lie in the high quality of those analyses of specific works and in the range of works tackled. While the "short takes" are often too short to be more than a catalogue listing, the longer descriptions and analyses are often insightful and illuminating. The highlight may be the discussion of the three pastiches of film noir (Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, and Lars von Trier's Zentropa) contrasted with that of two more sensuous and extravagant cinematic pastiches of the realm of the visual arts (Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Derek Jarman's Caravaggio). Less successful is the chapter on literary pastiche, because of the decision to eschew theorizing and instead to attempt a kind of "typological listing and description of selected...