Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 12

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hero "is born anew, a man without a p ast. . . whose skills, needs,
fears, ideals—whose very saddle sores--we must be introduced to as if
for the first time" (Greenberg, p.19).
MacLean first appears in a cowboy novel called Riders East,
Riders West; his role is trivial, almost comic: a nameless figure, he is
shot accidentally in a sensitive place by one of his companions just as
they are finally capturing the villain. But the other sixteen or so
MacLean titles deserve more attention: Vanity Fair, for example, a
tale of the Honduran jungles; Passage to India and Swann's Way,
which depict, sympathetically, a lumberjack-villain of FrenchCanadian origin; The Golden Bowl; The Man Without Quality;
Death in Venice; Lord Jim;,etc. Our MacLean is a far-ranging cowboy
with red-lingeried seductresses, fur smugglers in northern North
Dakota, and Bengal tigers in the Mexican mountains near Tampico
Bay.
MacLean, in Berkeley's self-centered novels, but particularly in
Greenberg's novel, is both stereotype and anti-stereotype. Possessing
the familiar attributes of our famous movie cowboys, he is neverthe
less deeply introspective and philosophical, articulate and sophis
ticated . . . a seasoned gourmet who requires the best food and w ine. . .
a rider who hates horses and suffers from saddle sores . . . finally, a
writer and illustrator of autobiographical cowboy fiction. In his own
peculiarly American way, Greenberg has clearly pushed the
"defamiliarization” (ostranenie) process practically to the limit,
except insofar as language is concerned. Whereas an American poet,
E. E. Cummings, has actually defamiliarized his poetic utterances by
creating his own grammar, syntax, and signifiers (as in "anyone lived
in a pretty how town"), Greenberg's language is standard English,
straightforward and familiar as a country breakfast of pancakes
with fried eggs and sausage, hot rolls and all the strong coffee you can
drink.
Bill, the narrator, whose obsession with the fictional and reallife MacLean gives the novel its raison d’etre, finds on going through
the MacLean canon a curious tie-in between the author and the
illustrator of the covers. He has in fact never seen anything like this
at any other time. Each MacLean novel, except for the "deviant"
Riders East, Riders West, has on its cover a close-up "in sharplyetched primary colors . . . [of] a scene which appears. . . in some other
MacLean novel." Now, there are two time scales or patterns. Our