THE CREATIVE FUNCTION OF THE POPULAR ARTS IN THE NOVELS OF THOMAS BERGER

Unlike many other postmodern writers using the forms and conventions of the popular arts in their works, Thomas Berger has received little critical attention focusing on the method and meaning of such use in his ten novels to date. This dissertation places Berger in the self-conscious tradition of the novel, emphasizing Berger's blatant use of the forms of the popular arts, a use which points out the artifice of the work and which thus underscores literature as a man-made structure rather than as mimetic.;Although self-consciousness in the novel can be traced back to the genre's inception, the postmodern novelist differs from early practitioners in asserting that there is no absolute inherent in the universe and that man alone is meaning-giver. By using the easily discernible forms of the popular arts, such as the Western, science fiction, and the hard-boiled detective tale, as well as others, Berger forces his reader to acknowledge that what he is reading is a fabrication and in no way a substitute for reality.;On another level Berger uses the popular art forms in order to vary the traditional conventions so that a new meaning is produced from the variation. In this way Berger, like other postmodernists, is able to move beyond "the literature of exhaustion" and is able to create a new and vital form from the conventions of the old. In so doing Berger repeatedly depicts characters who are trapped in the banal world of contemporary society, characters who have little to work with other than the vast accumulation of worn out forms and ideas which they have inherited from the past. There is little in the milieu of Berger's characters which allows for vitality or originality. Ironically, Berger, who is using the forms of a literature that is similarly regarded as banal and hackneyed, demonstrates by his use of the conventions that the creative process can yet function from these received forms. The vitality lies in the self-conscious manipulation of the established conventions.;Although his characters are often incapable of successfully manipulating the structures from popular culture with which they are familiar and which they impose on reality, Berger's structuring is successful as he juxtaposes the old conventions with a new context thus creating a meaningful difference, a vital variation on a supposedly exhausted form. Therefore, this dissertation analyzes Berger's novels in terms of the forms and conventions used. It demonstrates the manner in which his variations on the conventions move beyond the hackneyed popular art forms and notes also that his use of the conventions differs from traditional parody, which is basically a method of ridicule. Rather than mocking the original, Berger uses the forms for the vitality they are capable of engendering.;This study concludes that Berger's use of the popular arts has been greatly misunderstood by a literary establishment which sees Berger as perhaps too eclectic and thus too difficult to treat critically. However, the popular art forms provide the key to an understanding of the works of Thomas Berger, works which posit the existence of "structural man" and which thus recognize the enormous creative potential of art to rise above the banality of much of contemporary society.