Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 15

A Peculiar Method of Literary Transformation

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the horrible fate awaiting him (suicide, apparently). Hence the
other discrepancies in Berkeley's series of novels mentioned in
Greenberg's book: MacLean's cover illustrations being out of sync with
their corresponding volumes and with the hero's process of aging:
with the result that each novel is autonomous. No one knows what is
really going on, in the all-the-world's-a-stage drama of art and of
life; the leading player simply has to continue to invent his role to
the very end.
What is remarkable about Greenberg's transforming of the old
into the new, his recycling of the cowboy-hero westerns, is that he
invokes so many technical philosophical concepts in doing so. He
gives us existentialism (one makes oneself over, as if there were no
fixed and familiar order of things), phenomenology (simply stated,
the view that things are what the individual perceives them as),
ontology (an inquiry into the nature of existence), and epistemology
(an inquiry into what knowledge is and where it originates)—to name
only four areas of philosophy. Then, too, he takes away from us our
complacent notion that a contemporary cowboy western composed of
the trite-and-true familiar features of the genre is basically just
another version of the same old story.
California State Polytechic University

Samuel I. Bellman

References
Eichenbaum, B. (1926). "The Theory of the Formal Method."
(Trans.) In H. Adams (Ed.). (1971). Critical Theory Since Plato (pp.
829-846). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Greenberg, A. (1976). The Invention of the Wesf. New York:
Avon Books/Equinox.
Holman, C. H. & Harmon, W. (1986). A Handbook to Literature
(p. 212). (5th ed.). New York: Macmillan.