Relectures, réécritures, réinventions : Charmed ou l’art du recyclage postmoderne

• Main Author: Alexis Pichard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2014-12-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: Charmed; postmodern; recycling; intertextuality
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/319

This article proposes a study of postmodern aesthetics through the fantasy series Charmed. With the works of the French theoretician Gérard Genette as a basis, we will consider one of the major characteristics of postmodern works: intertextuality, which is to say, in the broad sense, the referential relationship that a text B maintains with a text A. Charmed is an intertextual series insofar as it recycles past works and abounds with references and nods to popular and elitist culture. Nevertheless, the series makes an original use of these past works that appear across the episodes by incorporating them into the diegesis and giving them a narrative role and sense. The reference is rewritten to introduce an echo, an additional depth. Beyond this intertextual recycling, Charmed undertakes its own rewriting and mobilizes another key figure in the postmodern aesthetic that Gérard Genette defines as well: the palimpsest. By its recurrent recourse to shifts in time and alternative endings, the series presents itself as a work that experiments with narrative frames, crossing out and rewriting itself. Finally, we will focus on the ambiguous relationship that Charmed sustains with influence, in other words the works that preceded it. From the concept of the “anxiety of influence” theorized by the American critic Harold Bloom, who situates the idea influence as not only a source but also something ardently sought (the double sense of the word “anxiety” in English), we will show that the series offers a dialectic resolution to this tension: it seems to argue that acceptance of influence’s origin permits, in the end, the emergence of originality.