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Page 88
a stylistic feature, a way of narrating typical of another authoreither as a form of parody or in order to pay homage to a great and acknowledged master. There are imperceptible quotations, of which not even the author is aware, that are the normal effect of the game of artistic influence. There are also quotations of which the author is aware but which should remain ungraspable by the consumer. In these cases we are usually in the presence of a banal case of plagiarism.
What is more interesting is when the quotation is explicit and recognizable, as happens in postmodern literature and art, which blatantly and ironically play on the intertextuality (novel on the techniques of the narrative, poetry on poetry, art on art). There is a procedure typical of the postmodern narrative that has been much used recently in the field of mass communications: it concerns the ironic quotation of the commonplace (topos). Let us remember the killing of the Arab giant in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the staircase of Odessa in Woody Allen's Bananas. What joins these two quotations? In both cases, the spectator, in order to enjoy the allusion, must know the original topoi. In the case of the giant, it is a situation typical of the genre; in the case of Bananason the contrarythe topos appears for the first and only time in a single work, and only after that quotation the topos becomes a shibboleth for movie critics and moviegoers.
In both cases the topoi are recorded by the encyclopedia of the spectator; they make up a part of the treasury of the collective imagination and as such they come to be called on. What differentiates the two quotations is the fact that the topos in Raiders is quoted in order to contradict it (what we expect to happen in similar cases will not), whereas in Bananas the topos is introduced only because of its incongruity (the staircase has nothing to do with the rest of the story).
The first case recalls the series of cartoons published years ago by Mad ("A Film Which We Would Like To See"). For example, the heroine, in the West, tied by bandits to the railroad tracks: the alternating shots show on one side the approaching train and on the other the furious cavalcade of rescuers trying to arrive ahead of the locomotive. In the end, the girl (contrary to all the expectations suggested by the topos evoked) is crushed by the train. Here we are faced with a comic ploy which exploits the presupposition (correct) that the public will recognize the original topos, will apply to the quotation the normal system of expectations (I mean the expectations that this piece of encyclopedic information is supposed to elicit), and will then enjoy the way in which its expectations are frustrated. At this point the ingenuous spectator, at first frustrated, overcomes his frustration and transforms himself into a

 
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