SOURCE: “Like Water for Chocolate and the Free Circulation of Clichés,” in Latin American Postmodernisms, Rodopi, 1997, pp. 205–20.

In the following essay, Zapata examines the effects of clichés and metaphors in Like Water for Chocolate

Retrieval or recycling is one of the most generally accepted characteristics of what in the last decades of our century has been called the postmodern aesthetic. The term is applied as much to intertextual as to interdiscursive phenomena—parody, pastiche, citation—and encompasses the collapse of traditional borders between genres thanks to the new investiture it gives to texts from different contexts: popular and mass literature, paraliterature, technical writings, myth, and folklore. According to Fredric Jameson’s hypothesis, “The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche” (1991:16). It is precisely this...