10 - Popular Genre Conventions in Postmodern Fiction: The Case of the Western

by Theo D'haen

(This chapter discusses E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster (1974), and the Dutch author Louis Ferron's De ballade van de beul (1980) — The Hangman's Ballad)

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As to geographical and temporal location and plot, Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster, and Ferron's De ballade van de beul initially appeal to typical western conventions. All three novels take place around the turn of the century, in, respectively, the Dakota Territory, Eastern Oregon, and California. All three have opponents work their way through from an initial confrontation to a final duel. The first indication that Welcome to Hard Times, The Hawkline Monster, and De ballade van de beul are not traditional westerns is in the characters they parade. None of these novels has a traditional "hero".

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If The Man from Bodie in Welcome to Hard Times shows a close enough resemblance to the typical western villain, the same cannot be said of Brautigan's Hawkline Monster, in the eponymous novel. Moreover, even as monsters go, this one is a highly unusual specimen: it consists of a particular kind of light, generated by "The Chemicals", the result of an eccentric professor's experiments. It can change things at will: it has changed the professor into an elephant foot umbrella stand, and it plays strange tricks upon the appearance and the thoughts of the two misses Hawkline, the professor's daughters. These daughters hire Cameron and Greer, two professional gunslingers, to help them get rid of the monster. Which they do by pouring a glass of whisky into the jar with The Chemicals during the final confrontation.

Cameron and Greer are hardly run-of-the-mill western heroes. They do not fight for justice or for any kind of ideal, and although they are professional killers, they are also highly sentimental, as when they decide to give up on killing a man when they see him amidst his happy family.

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Greer and Cameron, too, are presented in such an offhand manner; they are so obviously "characters" that again there can be no question of reader-identification. Instead, the reader is made to reflect on the difference between these characters and the typical western hero.

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If the main characters, the hero and its opponent, in these three novels do not comply with typical western conventions, the same can be said of the other characters. In none of these novels do we find a clean spoken, god fearing, gentle and loving Eastern schoolmarm.

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In The Hawkline Monster we meet with not one, but two Eastern marms. Whatever they do, though, they certainly do not teach school, unless it be that of carnal love. The promiscuous misses Hawkline are a far cry from Wister's virginal miss Molly Wood.

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Obviously, the character inversions taking place in these three novels likewise affect their plot developments. Whereas the traditional western obeys Tzvetan Todorov's tenet that "tout recit est mouvement entre deux equilibres semblables mais non identiques," the postmodern western bluntly disobeys this same tenet. Or, if it does obey the tenet, the final equilibrium reached is a reductio ad absurdum of the original one.

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If the final confrontation between hero and villain in Welcome to Hard Times does not follow the typical pattern, this applies even more so to The Hawkline Monster and De ballade van de beul.

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The duels in Welcome to Hard Times and De ballade van de beul invert some of the western cliches. The whisky in the jar episode of The Hawkline Monster mocks these cliches. Yet, in some sense, this duel leads to the most traditional solution. The villain (The Chemicals) is destroyed. Professor Hawkline has been changed back into his former self. The "heroes" have won and can now enjoy their spoils: the riches of the diamonds The Chemicals have turned into, and the favors of the misses Hawkline. However, The Hawkline Monster does not end with this solution. There follows another chapter narrating the further adventures of Greer, Cameron, the misses Hawkline, Professor Hawkline, and even the lake the Hawkline house has turned into after the destruction of The Chemicals caused it to burn down and the ice caves under it to melt. From this last chapter it appears that all that seemed stable at the time of the plot's resolution is sheer disorder in times to come. This temporary solution is thus shown up as sheer artifice, pure conventions. In Wister's The Virginian the "coda" confirms the order reached in the plot solution and thereby upholds and underscores the conventional views articulated therein. In The Hawkline Monster the coda mocks the order adumbrated in the plot solution.

As in the traditional western, the postmodern western employs setting to express the mood of its characters, the wider import of their actions, and the importance of the issues at stake. To this end, the landscape of the traditional western impresses us with its spectacular majesty. The flatness and barrenness of the Dakota landscape in Welcome to Hard Times stands in sharp contrast to this traditional setting, just as Doctorow's characters and plot show up the emptiness of the views and values embodied by their paradigmatic counterparts. Brautigan has most of The Hawkline Monster take place inside a gothic mansion plunked down in Eastern Oregon. Just as Brautigan's gunfighters are not "real" western heroes, his villain is not a true "villain," and his plot is not a true "western" plot, his setting is not a true western setting. In fact, we read The Hawkline Monster only as a western because it is set in the West (which is different from a "western" setting), because its characters are dressed like characters from a western, and — perhaps most of all — because the subtitle to the books claims it to be "a gothic western."

(does it go on on page 171)

From Matei Calinescu, Douwe W. Fokkema (ed). ''Exploring Postmodernism: Selected papers presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism at the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress, Paris, 20–24 August 1985: pp 161-170.

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