Abstract
In the preceding chapters, we have examined individual works of art that move beyond form, defying what Michael Fried called “Objecthood.”1 These works subvert their own boundaries by transforming space over time, emphasizing process and interaction rather than self-containment. The author or creator of these works appears to situate the work within a greater interactive web of significance, as a stimulus to further development. These trends continue with the present chapter, which takes as its subject what might be called “remaking,” that is, the re-presentation of earlier works of art. This tactic is not uncommon among postmodern writers, of which those to be discussed in this chapter are simply examples. Critics of the postmodern aesthetic have condemned such efforts as nothing more than pastiche, implying an impoverished imagination. The postmodern aesthetic, by this account, is reduced to a long series of echoes. There is no longer any originality; the artist simply reassembles existing forms, a bricoleur in the cultural rubble. This judgment has serious theoretical underpinnings,2 but it has also been strongly reinforced by the culture wars.
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Notes
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 116–47.
For more extensive commentary, see the introduction. An exception to the general tendency to dismiss the value of postmodern pastiche is Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001). See also Margaret A. Rose, “Post-Modern Pastiche,” British Journal of Aesthetics vol. 31 (January, 1991): 26–38, and
Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), which is somewhat more hopeful than his Wake of the Imagination, discussed in the introduction.
Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1959]2003), 8.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, foreword by Maureen Howard (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace, [1925] 1981), 3,184.
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 9, 199–203.
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, New York and London: San Diego, 1988), III: 388.
For informing my treatment of the themes of death and literature I owe a general debt to J. Hillis Miller, “Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead,” in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1988), 79–101.
Albero Manguel, “An Endless Happiness: How Borges Throws Open the Doors of the Universal Library,” Times Literary Supplement (February 18, 2000), 12.
Czeslaw Milosz, “Against Incomprehensible Poetry”, in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, ed. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [1990]2001), 378.
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, [1979]1981), 181.
As Derrida has written about the cultural tradition, “one always inherits from a secret—which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’” Specters ofMarx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 16.
An earlier version of part of this chapter may be seen in Mary Joe Hughes, “Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Postmodern Artistic Re-Presentation” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45: 4 (June 2004), 349–61.
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© 2013 Mary Joe Hughes
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Hughes, M.J. (2013). Remaking. In: The Move Beyond Form. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329226_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329226_10
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