John Irving’s art is intricate and complex, and the task of reading his fiction perceptively is difficult. To react to an Irving novel with solemnity is to react inappropriately. Irving’s work, in its attacks on often unexamined cultural assumptions and habits, triggers laughter. It also elicits our deepest respect. Irving demands that we gasp with him, grieve with him, suffer with him, and then that we laugh with him, insisting on presenting his deeply-felt world as a painful comedy. For Irving’s laughter, sooner than later, demands to be taken seriously. Garp asks, at one point, "Why did people insist that if you were ‘comic’ you couldn’t also be ‘serious’"?¹ Irving adds, "Garp felt most people confused being profound with being sober, being earnest with being deep" (p. 232).

Profound, serious, and comic, Irving’s vision is one to which our culture powerfully responds. The New York Times of June 6, 1982, reported that the Pocket Book paperback of The World According to Garp had already sold over three million copies and that the paperback publishers anticipate selling a million more after the release of the movie. Irving’s provocative rendering of popular suspicions about the universe commands, at the least, our closest attention. Irving’s laughter seems to reflect a current cultural mood, a shared dream, and that dream becomes a whole world, shaped and imagined by Garp.

Soon after The World According to Garp begins, Garp is quoted, saying, "Writers do not read for fun" (p. 73). We might add that writers do not write for fun, either. No matter how much fun people have while reading Irving’s books, the books themselves are the products of sweat, craft, and necessity. They express a vision, laced by laughter. And while the mode is comic, the vision and the need to express it are full of guilt and anxiety—are menaced by the Under Toad, who inevitably wins. The vision which shapes the book, in fact, is articulated by words Irving quotes from Marcus Aurelius:

"In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors" (p. 126). Garp, digesting this vision, writes, "I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave—and nothing but laughter to console them with" (p. 223). He summarizes, "Laughter is my religion."

Religions exist to make sense of the world, or to give worshippers an avenue toward acceptance. If laughter is Garp’ s religion—or Irving’s—its purpose is the same as any religion’s: to allow people a means short of suicide to confront facts that can only produce despair. For example, in Garp’s world, normality is an absurd fiction, for nothing can be assumed. Neither conception nor marriage, neither childbearing nor death, proceeds predictably. Garp is fathered by a brain-damaged turret gunner already regressing to fetal or "vegetable" condition. Garp’s practical and humorless mother successfully engineers her pregnancy while refusing to share her body with a lover. Garp proposes by overseas mail and wins his wife with a well made short story. He loves his children so deeply and anxiously that he destroys them by protecting them too aggressively. He dies at the Christ-figure age of 33 by the design of a man-hating, self-maiming lifelong friend. He orders his wife to declare that his final words were: "I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit" (p. 562).

In such an unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable world, the most ambiguous of all forces will be the most basic: sex. According to Garp, "Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions" (p. 224). So we have here the splendid symbol of Roberta Muldoon, the six-foot, four-inch former tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. She has paid for her sex-change operation with lecture fees from men’s and boy’s club banquets. Further, she is pronounced by Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother, as less sexually ambiguous than most (p. 383). She retains, nevertheless, her instinctive ability to clip a menacing male in such a way as to produce the maximum knee injury—the kind that once would have earned her a fifteen-yard penalty. She articulates her discoveries about the sexes succinctly: "Oh, I didn’t know what shits men were till I became a woman" (p. 305). She alone dies perfectly, absolutely happy.

In this world in which clear sexual rules and distinctions constantly, absurdly, blur, a son goes "a grieving ex-wrestler in drag for his mother’s funeral" (p. 492). The most dutiful husband and the best father around still seduces babysitters and best friends and still yearns for the aging body of the worst mother in town. The wife who is usually faithful by choice still engages in two extended and disastrous affairs. Lust is followed by more lust, but deviance from straight-and-narrow monogamy is still punished as if by all the furies. In Irving’s most stunning and realistically explained episode—the very climax of all the carefully woven themes of the book—the wife’s adultery damages everyone severely. But as life imitates dreams, so

a jealous husband’s ultimate fantasy comes true. His wife’s lover loses his penis. All of it, eventually, after she accidentally bites it off.

Nothing in this world is sacred, safe, or intact for long. According to Garp. "Hope is . . . a strong survivor of a weak man’s world" (p. 447), but "Everything has really happened sometime" and "every story can be improved" (p. 458). So a public figure’s death becomes "an x-rated soap opera" (p. 485), and "Every business is a shitty business" (p. 442). In Jenny’s famous sentence, "In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other" (p. 157). In Garp’s world, a lusty young couple can feel they’ve skipped middle age and moved to retirement (p. 524), for they find that the world is a barely firm sponge (p. 526). "In the world according to Garp, an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous" (p. 565), and so they are. We are allowed to forget neither half of this last sentence. "In the world according to Garp, we are obliged to remember everything" (p. 576).

In the world according to Garp, however, we find important values, though not necessarily absolute or permanent ones. What Garp values most is art.

Irving, and Garp, work hard at their art. As their definition slowly emerges, art is a construct neither exclusively of "real fact" nor exclusively of "Pure Imagination." It is whatever combination of the two is most effective at a particular moment. Of Garp we read, "He was very ruthless as a story teller. . . . If the truth suited the story, he would reveal it without embarrassment, but if any truth was unsuccessful in a story, he would think nothing of changing it" (p. 271). When his wife asks how one tells fact from invention in his tales, Garp replies, "Every part she believed was true; every part she didn’t believe needed work" (p. 271). Art, then, is anything but simple and natural, something produced automatically by nature. For art must strive to approach the unnatural condition of perfection. Garp teaches, "Fiction has to be better made than life" (p. 457). In fiction, the parts must be more perfectly related to each other than is necessary in a naturally growing thing.

To illustrate this intricate relation of parts to whole in a real work of art, we can consider Garp’s first good short story, "The Pension Grillparzer." It functions, as all the included fragments of Garp ‘s later fiction also function, to comment directly on the larger concerns of the novel. The story begins in the chapter entitled "In the City Where Marcus Aurelius Died," where Aurelius’s summarizing

words also summarize Irving’s overall vision: "all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors (p. 126). When the short story is read in immediate juxtaposition to the passage from Aurelius, it seems to illustrate Aurelius perfectly.

Further, as the short story focuses our understanding of the larger novel, it also mirrors the novel’s structure. "The Pension Grillparzer" is Garp’s first extended fantasy or polished dream; but Johanna’s dream, within the story, is the polished essence of "The Pension Grillparzer." Her dream illuminates the meaning of the apparently zany and charming story, as the story in turn illuminates the meaning of the larger novel. Garp even explicitly summarizes this meaning at the end of the book, in his last public reading:

I think . . . ["The Pension Grillparzer"] is about death, which I didn’t even know very much about when I wrote it. . . . There are eleven major characters in this story and seven of them die; one of them goes mad; one of them runs away with another woman. I’m not going to give away what happens to the other two characters, but you can see that the odds for surviving this story aren’t great. (p. 560)

The odds for surviving in the world according to Garp are not great either; as few characters survive to the end of the book as survived in the short story or in the story’s dream of Charlemagne’s army. But that is, of course, the point.

The third thing to be observed about "The Pension Grillparzer" is that it illustrates Irving’s—and this novel’s—strategy and format. The first half of the short story is zany, comic, and bizarre. It hooks its reader by promising laughter. The second half of the short story gives the "application" or moral. And the two halves are so clearly separate that the ending appears in a different chapter. The second half turns serious and disposes of the characters. That half makes clear that all die, some more grotesquely than others. Only the dream itself, the vision, is imperishable and can be passed through generations.

Irving calls attention to this division into which his work falls by commenting, after the comic half of Garp’s short story has concluded, that Garp didn’t know how to end his story, didn’t know what it meant. In an even further parallel to Irving’s work, Garp’s story includes a bear who behaves like a human. The bear is Irving’s trademark or special signature on a work of fiction. In the larger novel, Garp is described as "bearish" or "like a bear" at least twice (pp. 248, 361).

The bear in Garp’ s story, in fact, brings up unmistakable questions

about the extent to which all this fiction is autobiographical, is directly related to the life of the writer. "The Pension Grillparzer" makes its comments as well on that major theme in the larger novel. In fact, the story serves as a kind of textbook study to provide answers to the question that teases readers throughout Irving’s work: what is the relationship of fact to fiction here? First we note that the writer Garp has spotted a performing bear in Vienna and has decided to include it in his story. Thus he gains a troop of circus performers for his characters. He also, of course, gains Austria as a general setting. And he has taken from his everyday life the kind of second-class tourist accommodations in which he has been living. Thus he takes from "real life" the specific places in which his action will occur.

Then Garp starts inventing wildly. But the story within this short story also makes some comment on the question of how an artist relates his dreams, or inventions, to real fact. For the dream man who seems to Johanna "a gypsy. . . a satanic being and a Hungarian" (p. 149) still includes in the dream he tells, the fact that the dreamer’s husband later died of a respiratory infection. Johanna’s husband, of course, has died just this way.

Garp discovers in his Vienna phase that learning to write is similar to learning to cook. What both activities require is developing judgment about the proportions one uses in blending different ingredients. One learns judgment about how much wild invention one’s concoctions can include and remain palatable. One also learns how much simple material one needs to begin cooking with, before one starts inventing.

As he looks around him, Garp admires European W. C.’s or water closets. Thus a W. C. becomes a major ingredient blended into his invention—the story he’s cooking up. He also discovers that the writer Grillparzer may have been a "complex and modern man" but that Grillparzer was also "an extremely bad writer" (p. 127). Mere life—mere raw material—is not enough to satisfy a gourmet.

As Garp discovers halfway through his story, "What I need is vision. . . . An overall scheme of things, a vision all his own. It will come, he repeated to himself" (p. 156). While Garp is trying to cook, learn, see, and write, he longs for a vision. At this fortuitous time, he also discovers the whores of Vienna. Three of them initially mistake his mother for one of them. Later, when visiting his hospitalized favorite, Garp claims the prostitute Charlotte as his mother. Thus he learns that neat visions incorporating clear distinctions—the distinctions between one’s mother and one’s favorite whore, for example,

or between what one dreams and what one discusses—all evaporate. People are people, visions are visions, and all are more or less bizarre, pitiable, and absurd. After Charlotte’s death, Garp discovers his theme: "In the beginning there is very little about death, either, although that is the subject the story would come to. In the beginning Garp had only a dream of death" (p. 139).

Next Garp must discover how to tell his dream. So he faces in the short story, as in the novel, the thankless task of the dream man. The task of telling the dream is thankless because the audience—like Johanna, the focal character of "The Pension Grillparzer"—doesn’t want to know any dreams. In Johanna’s view, "You don’t respond to just any dream that comes along" (p. 146). Once forced to acknowledge a dream she recognizes, however, Johanna is anything but grateful to her instructor. After striking him she declares, "He was evil and vile. . . . He knew terrible magic. . . . That man who told my dream. . . . That was my dream. . . . It is unspeakable that he even knew it. . . . And that vile evil magic man told my dream as if it were news" (p. 152). What the fledgling writer discovers through Charlotte’s dying, and what his character Johanna learns in the story, is that "Death happens to everyone" (p. 165). But even so, the comprehension of death can turn a whole city into a place "ripe with dying" and "reeking of decay" (p. 163). In this short story, in this novel, in this world, with this information, one can only stage "a doomed effort at reclassification" (p. 180).

Considering the way the inserted "Pension Grillparzer" clarifies the themes of the larger novel, then, we are at least safe in saying that Irving’s art is complex. By the end of the novel’s second page we know we are in a world in which people construct their own realities and in which all realities are elaborate constructions. Irving’ s hero will later marry a woman who teaches narrative point of view—a rather obvious clue to their mutual concerns. But from the beginning, Irving’s narrative point of view is a pyrotechnical extravaganza. The voice of his usually omniscient but sometimes limited human narrator alternates with the declarations of other authoritative analysts, thus allowing Irving to range freely in all directions—past, present, and future. For example, from the first pages Irving’s narrator establishes fact, then repeats the generalizations and distortions based on those facts, which are formulated later by two compelling writers with sometimes opposing points of view. Jenny Fields and Garp, the two writers who look back on the facts through the distortions of their memories, create fictions from Irving’s fictional facts. Then Irving insists that we derive from Garp’s fictions the "truths"

which Garp condenses from his own life, which is, of course, Irving’ s fiction. If ever a structure commented on its own content, this one does. It is one of the novel’s wryest ironies, then, that Garp’s first and best story is rejected because it does nothing new with language and form. Certainly placed in the context of this whole novel, "The Pension Grillparzer" does something wonderfully new with both.

Art, Garp believes, is never autobiographical. Yet Garp’s art is said to grow constantly more autobiographical as he ages. Further still, we realize that as Garp’s fiction grows more autobiographical, he distorts the facts of his emotional life in ever more extravagant flights of fancy. Sorting out the autobiographical content clearly present in his work, then, becomes for Garp’s readers an ever more subjective and speculative enterprise.

Irving seems to suggest here, through his several narrative tours de force, that the task of sorting out fact from fiction is not only hopeless but silly. For Garp has discovered that "when you are writing something everything is related to everything else" (p. 167). Thus the distinctions between what a writer does, and what he imagines, hopelessly dissolve. Everything Garp thinks or sees or hears becomes a part of him. Once a part of him, everything is autobiographical and is related to his work.

And what is his work? "A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories" (p. 167). Memories trigger dreams and dreams trigger fictions. But all art is a dream. Thus in Garp’s first story, a dream is passed from person to person and is shared by two people simultaneously. The dream itself does nobody any good, by any objective standards. Like dreams, Garp concludes, "Art helps nobody. . . . Art is a luxury item" (pp. 251, 252). Yet the dream which art includes does affect lives by affecting the way in which the dreamers feel about other people—even dead people like Charlemagne’s slowly starving soldiers. Dreams don’t help either the dreamer or the dreamed about. In fact, helping doesn’t help, either. At best, art and dreams can only enable one to feel a bit more intensely. As a character in "The Pension Grillparzer" says of the subjects of her dream, "Of course I wanted to help them! But we weren’t alive at the same time; how could I help them if I wasn’t even born? Of course I knew they would die! But it took such a long time" (p. 155).

That comment leads us to Irving’s main points about art. The first is that significant art may not lead to action, progress, or reform;

but art does create a situation in which everything comes to seem related to everything else. Significant writing also leads to a specific conclusion: "death eventually separates everyone from each other" (p. 167). Garp’s last pronouncement on writing is even more emphatic: "A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases" (p. 538). When Garp eventually realizes that death is the theme of his first and all subsequent work, we can no longer miss the fact that Death is John Irving’s main theme.

That art which approaches perfection through good-humored laughter helps its viewers to confront this theme: that death eventually separates everyone from each other. But this is not all that Irving has to say on the subject. For if death separates everyone, life also, as Garp writes his editor, simply "goes on" (p. 441). When the grandmother in "The Pension Grillparzer" hears her private, secret dream retold in public, she slaps the dream man. But he tells her, not too apologetically, "I was just trying to straighten you out. . . . I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a white, after all, and it’s about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You’re not the only person who’s had such a dream" (pp. 171–72). He adds, "Well, you ought to know."

In art, then, we confront those private dreams which leave us feeling special and also feeling helpless and isolated. We also confront our shared dreams that leave us feeling like everybody else—feeling human. We confront the fact of death, and also the injunction: Life goes on; get on with it.

The writer as dream man must tell our dreams for us, must describe to us the main facts of our lives. What the writer needs for that task, Irving tells us, are ability, passion, and stamina (p. 538). The ability is the ability to shape the story—to establish whom it’s about, what they do, where they’re going, and what it means (p. 123). The passion is the passion to find the meaning and then to insist on it, no matter how appalling it is. The stamina is the stamina to keep going on, just to keep on working, once the truth has been confronted, digested, and relayed artistically to others. And then to go on further, when nobody chooses to recognize your truth. To go on when your readers and reviewers are far more titillated with such an incidental fact as that all your work includes a red herring of sorts in the form of a bear. As the Grandmother in "The Pension Grillparzer" advises, "Don’t worry about the bear" (p. 155).

Since life goes on, what then does one do with and in it? Garp suggests that one can assume she can do something, as Jenny Fields

does, if she finds a direction. Garp is not a born writer, for example, but he learns and masters a craft because he has direction (p. 72). Direction, however, does not protect one from knowledge. In living, anyone encounters, as Garp does, much rape. One can reject the knowledge and its implications, as Garp initially does with the Ellen Jamesians who have cut off their tongues. One can object to the fact of rape itself, since the fact leaves all men and women feeling guilty and enraged by association. But once a real victim of rape appears, one can, as Garp does, pursue and punish the rapist. One can welcome the victims of rape into one’s home as representative family members—as Garp does with the real Ellen James.

In Garp’s world, so "rich with lunacy and sorrow" (p. 181), one can explain anything, and in a variety of ways. One can assume her genes are bad, as Helen does when considering her eyesight. One can deny that genes are a plausible concern, as Jenny Fields does in living as a sexual suspect. Or one can invent the right genes needed for the story he wishes to tell, as Garp does for himself. One can remember, as Garp suggests, that "you only grow by coming to the end of something and beginning something else" (p. 223).

You can remember that the end you come to may be the end of the most definitive part of yourself—your rage. When Garp finishes his rage, after his son’s death, he feels his life is trailing off in an epilogue. In his epilogue, however, he begins his best work. For nobody is ever left with absolutely nothing. Even a brain-damaged ball turret gunner who loses his last word, his last syllable, and then his last sound, still has in his last moments his first fetal position to return to. As Irving says, "All that’s left is memory. But even a nihilist has a memory" (p. 582).

Towards the end of this novel, the editor John Wolf says, "Well I like to see something that is what it says it is" (p. 464). Irving’s novel is exactly what it says it is: a lifeview created out of a single vision. But this vision, this dream, is one many can share through shared laughter. In this world according to Garp, there are no absolute values. There are many painful facts: confusion, rape, fury, lust, despair, and death. But this catalog does not exhaust the possibilities. For the world according to Garp includes positive facts as well, which also exist. In this world, these four things we have with us always: faith, however naive; hope, however childlike; love, however misdirected; and laughter. And the greatest of these is laughter.

DREW UNIVERSITY

NOTE

    ¹John Irving, The World According to Garp (New York: Pocket Books, 1978), p. 232. In view of the massive and current distribution of this paperback edition, I have used it in establishing page numbers, which will hereafter be cited in the text.

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