North American Fiction and Film
Chapter 7: John Irving's
The World According to Garp
This chapter will provide a set of pointers for your reading of The World
According to Garp.
Table of Contents
The World According to Garp: Discussion
The text as overt metafiction
The World According to Garp is a piece of overt metafiction. Rather than
bringing the author himself into the text, this novel operates as self-conscious
fiction by thematising the art of creating the "real" through
"stories."
Patricia Waugh provides a useful account of The World According to Garp:
In The World According to Garp (1976) John Irving uses an array
of strategies, but the apparently everyday world in this novel is even more
bizarre and surreal than the overtly fictional worlds also presented. The
final authority here is only T. S. Garp himself. He is a "war baby"
born of the last act of wounded ball-turret gunner Technical Sergeant Garp,
"an idiot with a one-word vocabulary" (33)-"Garp!" .
. . [T]he base tense of the novel, the past historic, is continually broken
into by forms of the future tense, which act as constant reminders of fictionality.
The impersonal narrative version of events uses simple flashforwards itself:
"Jenny's only other brother would be killed in a sailboat accident
long after the war was over" (22). This base narrative is counterpointed
at intervals by Garp's mother's version-"In her autobiography Jenny
wrote: 'I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual
suspect'" (26, 154)-and by Garp's version (inserted into the narrative
at intervals well before Garp has ever been conceived in the order of the
plot): '"My mother," Garp wrote, "was a lone wolf"'
(14).
Jenny Fields, his mother, publishes her autobiography and becomes a feminist
cause celebre. Garp, worried at "becoming a public figure-a leading
character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his
own," decides also to write. The novel contains several of his stories,
surreal distillations of the absurd and equally grotesque events of his
"real" life in Irving's novel. Garp's wife, Helen, suggests that
his fiction is, in fact, no different from autobiography: "'You have
your own terms for what's fiction and what's fact'," she tells him.
"'It's all your experience-somehow, however much you make up, even
if it's only an imagined experience'."
This is not surprising, given the bizarre world in which he lives-the context
which, in the novel, is supposed to approximate in its "realistic"
presentation to our own everyday world. Irving reiterates Roth's view of
the American writer's relation to "reality'-there's no outdoing it.
The novel, however, also suggests that any history, any autobiography, is
always a reconstruction, a fiction. The individual recounting his or her
life is a different individual from the one who lived it, in a different
world, with a different script. "Jenny Fields" is fictional not
only because she is created by John Irving but because as soon as any of
us put ourselves on paper we create fictional characters of ourselves. And
as soon as any of us put fictional characters on paper, we write our own
autobiographies, the "scripts" of our lives. (122-123)
Try and apply Waugh's account of The World According to Garp to your
own reading of it. Here are some major "headings" and relevant
page numbers which you may find interesting and helpful.
Return to: [ Top ]
"Devices"/elements of textual self-consciousness:
Look here for such things as deviation from traditional narrative authority,
stories within stories etc.: pp. 19, 24, 40, 43, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66,
67, 69, 75, 80NBB, 84, 86, 88NB, 90, 92, 95NB, 98, 108NBB, 136NBB, 143,
144, 145, 148, 149, 161, 166, 169, 175, 176, 177NBB, 216, 220, 226, 259,
265, 294, 303, 310, 372, 374, 412, 424, 542, 547.
Remember, these devices set the novel up to question the notion of fiction
as a window onto reality and make it instead an "instrument" of
interrogation. The examples on pages 80, 95, 108 and 136 are particularly
noteworthy.
For example, the third person narrator refers to one of the wrestlers as
the "hapless puker" (80), which is contrary to the high moral
tone usually adopted by omniscient narrators (unless, of course, they are
the narrators in Swiftean-type satires).
Also, we get a convoluted story about murdered lovers and grave robbers
(95) which resembles some of the fictional puzzles of the South American
writer, Borges. In this instance, attention is clearly being drawn to the
process of writing stories and to the relationship of those stories to the
"real."
Also, we have a return to the a-typical "mocking" omniscient narrator
with something of a vengeance: "The Vienna that Tinch would send Jenny
and Garp to was a city whose life was over. Its tiredness could still be
mistaken for a c-c-contemplative nature, but Vienna was hard-put to show
much g-g-grandness any more" (108). Here, the "stuttering"
serves also to draw attention to the text at the level of its very linguistic
constitution.
Finally, we get Garp's story-"The Pension Grillparzer" (136-152)-literally,
a story within a story. Nested stories such as this further direct our attention
to the frame story-The World According to Garp-as being itself nothing more
than a fictional construct.
Return to: [ Top ]
General areas of interest in the novel
The world as construct:
pp. 166, 173, 215, 219, 404, 545NBB.
Nature vs nurture:
pp. 42, 64, 69, 83, 85, 87, 95, 96, 115, 425.
The creation of self through language
One of the issues repeatedly raised in metafiction(s) is the notion of the
construction of the self, specifically, the construction of the self within
language and its codes. We find an example of this in the progressive reduction
of Gunner Garp's one-word vocabulary:
"Ar," he moaned. He had lost the P.
Once a Garp, then an Arp, now only an Ar; she knew he was dying. He had
just one vowel and one consonant left. (36)
A little later, even this is reduced: "'Aaa,' said Garp. Even the r
was gone. He was reduced to a vowel sound to express his joy or sadness"
(37).
The self as non-unified or dispersed/dispersable:
pp. 34, 37-38, 61, 79, 97, 158, 364.
Garp as a writer:
pp. 122, 152, 153, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 179, 182#183, 184, 187, 188,
189, 190, 191, 215, 241, 247, 248, 250, 264, 302, 314, 417, 432, 447, 449,
490, 523.
Jenny Fields:
pp. 35, 39, 42, 44, 60, 77, 79, 101, 111, 114, 127, 129, 132, 134, 154,
180NB, 181, 186, 451, 453, 494.
Female excess:
p. 247.
"Determinations" of sexuality/sexual identity:
pp. 18, 31, 40, 80, 114, 156, 202, 204, 205, 212, 214, 216, 219, 231, 243,
244, 245, 266, 269NBB, 275, 357, 366NB, 391, 413, 415, 454.
The Ellen James society; feminist "extremes":
pp. 475, 493.
The interrogation of wealth and power:
pp. 62, 65.
Interrogation of racism:
p. 68.
Absurdity/black humour:
pp. 147, 150, 174, 175, 218, 223, 267, 287, 352, 402, 498.
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Review questions
- Choose one of the (larger) categories mentioned above and trace this
category through the page numbers listed. What do you make of the significance
of the category for our overall reading of the novel?
- What makes this novel a metafiction? What effect does this have on our
notions of the text as reflective of "reality"?
- Trace Jenny's career as a writer, and compare it with Garp's. Are there
significant similarities? differences? In what ways do their careers as
writers feed back into the metafictional structure of the novel?
Works Cited
- Irving, John. The World According to Garp. London: Corgi, 1978.
- Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. London: Methuen, 1984.
Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia