Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 11
A Peculiar Method of Literary Transformation
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actions. All he knows, Maclean answers, is that he just does what he
does. No one knows what really happens, is Maclean’s point, not even
Berkeley, the author of the Western series featuring his adventures.
One finds himself "in a situation" and where does he go, what does do
then? Answer: he doesn't go anywhere, and what he does is "all a
matter of invention . . . Man him self. . . is a fairly recent invention.
Does it pay to ask how he happened to be invented?" What can an
author do, with all the things that are always taking place, in even
the plainest tale? "Invent his way through it all . . . " But he can't,
any more than Shakespeare himself, understand all that goes on. He
had "some doubts himself about why his characters" acted the way
they did, about their actual wants, about "their darkest thoughts . . .
How [could] he know about these things except where his own
[entered] in as well?” MacLean soon repeats this notion: "The thing is
to recognize the author’s point of conjunction with his story"
(Greenberg, 1976, pp. 91-93).
Greenberg's world of the West is that of the writer, the reader,
the protagonist. Behind the narrative itself lie middens of
discarded, all but forgotten pulps—singles and serials: the Beadle
Dime Novels, the Hardy Boys, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis
L'Amour, and a corral of others. Greenberg's world, to be more precise,
is a series of cowboy novels featuring the great (if atypical) cowboy
hero, MacLean. The author of these books is a man named Berkeley,
whose style almost always derives from the familiar western genre
(not the best western, by any means). All the incidents have often
been used before, in some form, Greenberg informs us; the characters, in
their mannerisms and actions, are "as recognizable as the painted
scenery against which the usual rapid and violent sequence of events
takes place." The plot of Greenberg's novel, however, is in striking
contrast to the cliches which constitute the substance of the
narrative, if not the form. Most of the time Berkeley's own literary
talent is hidden, one exception being his treatment of MacLean, and
that too is generally "purely conventional."
Here Greenberg descends from spoofing to leg-pulling: denying
tradition, but admittedly for his own philosophical and artistic
reasons. In accordan ce with the principles on which the western
novel is based—we are told in The Invention of the West—no MacLean
novel by Berkeley includes a reference to whatever happens to
MacLean in one of the others novels. Rather, with every book, the