One of the best poems ever written in any style and my personal favorite is "Nirvana", by Charles Bukowski. It can be read here.

Nirvana, at its base, describes a young man finding utopia and leaving it. The utopia happens to be a diner in the mountains where everything seems to be magical yet real, no one has much to worry about and everyone is clean and calm and content.

When looked into a bit though, it becomes much more. Bukowski was a west coast poet for much of his life, and a city one at that. He thrived in cities, he became who he was living on skid row. North Carolina, rural and on the east coast, is a complete contrast to his normal setting. So, since the bus is mentioned which is normally a metaphor for travel and movement since, you know, it travels and moves, we can assume the young man is an outsider. It may be Bukowski himself, but without his normal self-referential style, it seems unlikely. He was never afraid to include himself or peers in his works by name, so I would wager that the namelessness of the young man makes it more of a representation of man as a whole.

So, the young man gets to this diner in the hills. Let's draw in a bit more outside reference now. The hills could represent two things, or possibly both at once. For one, they could be the ascendence of man to a higher plane. The young man moves up this mountain as he travels and reaches a place wherein he finds a sort of enlightenment. He becomes one with the people there, he witnesses the magic of ordinary life and the simplicity of everything. From here, we go into the second reference: Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. Siddhartha rejects the teachings of Gautama Buddha in the book under the idea that teachings cannot provide true knowledge of the world and only experience can. The growth of Buddhism in the hills of India and Tibet factors into this; this diner could very well be the idea of enlightenment as a teaching and not as a learning experience. The diner offers no chance for growth as everything is already perfect. What can the young man learn in Nirvana if he never reaches it on his own.

So to recap to this point, the young man travels to Nirvana on a machine not of his own creation, goes to hills and finds the enlightened people there, and will now travel down the hill. The young man rejects the men in the hills as Siddhartha rejected Gautama; they're lifestyle is great and it works for some, but it doesn't work for him. But at least he notices, unlike every other person on the bus. This shows he was looking for some kind of enlightenment, his nirvana, his travels mean something more than just rejection of his parents or society, they are a personal quest to find a real meaning in life.

So he descends from the hill and enters once again into society to learn and experience, and Bukowski goes back to writing about whores and drinking as Siddhartha became a merchant and learned worldly pleasure.

Gogo cross textual analysis.

In realism, or at least the realism I've been reading, much of the characterization is done through the casual conversations and actions of the characters. Take Last Exit; you've got these horrible situations happening, you've got rape and abuse and murder, you've got prostitutes and drug use, and what matters is how Tralala talks to the men she associates with. The actual insane moments, the times when society seems to be falling apart at the seams, they seem to be so much less important than a note that there was some lipstick left on a shot glass by previous prostitutes.

Look at The World According to Garp, that pivotal scene in Vienna where Garp's first real friend, if you could call her that, dies just before Garp comes to see her. We see Garp approach a morally upright nurse who objected to the whore's staying at the private hospital; she tells Garp matter of factly that the woman is dead. Garp says something to the effect of, "You too, mein frau, will be dead some day." This is just a natural response for him, there is no deep planning, it is casual yet it is probably the best line in the book. It shows Garp's growth as a natural writer, his ability to turn a phrase, his growing courage, his new sense of courage. It is a total transformation of character, and it is just a natural response. It's not even mentioned again.

What I mean is, character seems to be defined not by the extremities of a character, but they're actions in a normal situation. Garp responded to death as he saw best, Tralala talked about beating a man for money as a normal occurrence, and that is that. How casual it all is it what defines it; let's say a big deal was made out of Tralala's seeming ignorance of the atrocities she's a part of. If it was constantly noted, wouldn't it lose impact? If the characters saw it as a big deal, wouldn't we accept that they knew there was a problem with the whole situation? If the character doesn't actively fight against the constraints of society and even fails to notice them at all, we see true horror. We see how society has been turned on its head yet no one notices. If Last Exit is condemning of America at the time, it is because it portrays the horrid as casual, the death of a man as ordinary as going to work.

So casual conversation is used to portray a character's true feelings as represented by their social interactions. But why is it casual conversation? All of the most tense situations are used to move the plot and develop a scene, but it is conversations in coffee shops which define the characters. I would argue this is because we can only truly represent ourselves in a situation where there is no pressure, there is no tension, there is no horror. Sitting in a coffee shop or a diner, life seems to be occurring only outside the windows. There is no dread that the wrong word would hurt someone, there is only quiet discussion and stained cups.

While I will probably be writing an actual technical piece on Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower, I'm going to try to introduce some of the concepts that will be featured in the piece. Or something to that effect without me having to go find the book and do legitimate citations and revisions and whatnot.

One of the major concepts is the role of social interaction in adolescent development. The protagonist, Charlie, is exposed to many social extremes; gay bashing, group violence, rape, communal drug use, etc. While Chbosky fails at introducing these situations realistically (the effects of which will be discussed later), they still serve as talking points on the social interaction of young people, and as such, they are valuable to the novel. Chbosky argues in favor of realization of trauma as potential for growth; the supposed everyman Charlie was a molestation victim as a child, a fact he repressed until urged to enter into a sexual situation he could not deal with. While his breakdown provides the epilogue for the book and places him into a mental hospital, he comes out of the whole thing as a supposed fuller individual who is more self actualized than he would have been without realizing the sexual trauma of his youth or, more drastically, without ever having experienced it. The provider of Charlie's base drama, an aunt he looked up to and loved dearly, is a symbol of the death of loyalty; those who love you will inevitably betray you. This theme is brought up again as a fact of the relationship between Charlie and his girlfriend, Mary Elizabeth. Mary Elizabeth inwardly defines herself as a sexual object; she desires to be lusted after to gain validation as a woman. This becomes apparent to Charlie as Mary Elizabeth initiates various sexual situations and repeatedly asks if she is pretty; she is so desperate for the attention of a male who will both submit to her intellect and appeal to her skewed femininity that she becomes a living contradiction. After Charlie's realization of this, he breaks up with her, breaking her idea of self while making her realize that she does not need a submissive man, she needs someone to argue with. At a party a few months later, she speaks of Charlie, saying he had no personality and no soul, he did not challenge her. This betrayal of a friend by Mary Elizabeth acts a formative realization for Charlie; people see a situation as it effects them, they do not take into effect its impact on the people around him. With this realization in mind, we can dive deeper into the social meaning of Perks.

As a book about society and the aggregation social norm versus the outsider, Perks forces itself to thrive in conflict. With the idea of betrayal in mind, Charlie's social formation and its seeming oddity begins to be understandable. Charlie openly admires his aunt prior to his realization, while subconsciously suffering from the trauma, creating the idea that he has begun to associate sexual activity with love. While this is sensible in some regards, there seems to be no differentiation between sexual love and platonic love save for his own immediate family. The first evidence of this is Charlie's friendship with Sam, a girl he idealizes as a partner but with whom he is relegated solely to friend status. He cannot forget the idea of a sexual relationship even after putting it out of his logical mind; whenever she is mentioned, he speaks of their compatability as a couple and her physical appearance while insisting that she is just a friend. He willingly submits to her as a friend, not debating anything she says nor arguing for his own stance when it contradicts her. While this would seemingly be teenage infatuation, it all seems very off. Let's take into account Sam's brother, Patrick, Charlie's best friend and a homosexual. Towards the end of the novel, Patrick enters a bout of depression, causing him to drink more and act more openly gay around Charlie. Charlie willing submits to anything Patrick does or suggests, to the point of accepting multiple kisses from Patrick. In the context of American society, this seems strange and, most likely, homosexual. Charlie does not admit this, but he does say he doesn't mind and puts up no objection to being a surrogate for Patrick's ex-boyfriend. Even in the beginning of their friendship, Patrick's homosexuality was so commented on that he began to be defined by it in Charlie's mind; once again, a close friend defined by their sexual impact on Charlie's life.

The idea of loving submission is most likely a lingering element of Charlie's experience with his aunt. Not realizing the violation occurring at the time, he may have seen the molestation as an expression of platonic love, a closeness he would never have with his parents or siblings. He willingly took part, letting her control him for her own whims in the guise of the growth of a relationship. This idea would take root in his psyche; he would grow to define relationships by their intimacy and would choose to subvert his own desires to please the other, as this was what he did in his major formative relationship. His other major formative relationships, those with his immediate family, would also be skewed. While not dysfunctional, his family seemed a holdover from generations past, not willing to conform to modern ideas despite it being necessary for their growth in the world today. Charlie's mother was raised by a cruel and vindictive father who would often beat her and strip her of her own ideals. As a result, she grew up damaged, avoiding men like her father but never being able to cope with the emotional damage. She began to lack in expression, never able to voice her own opinion unless it was a truly worthy situation. She met Charlie's father and found support in him, a quiet man who opposed the physical nature of her father's parenting. The father is quiet and seen as strong, he is throwback to the stereotypical fifties father, voicing his own opinion and being the head of the household without ever saying anything. Raised by these two, Charlie gained the submissive tendencies and over drawn reactions to high stimuli experience of his mother and the quiet, observational tendencies of his father. He was raised to be a wallflower without anyone realizing it. His siblings are similar, taking after their respective gendered parent; his sister was hit by her boyfriend but continued the relationship, eventually dismissing him after he wouldn't support her getting an abortion of their unwanted child, the brother is a strong and quiet male who is an amazing football player but who is not really well known by most. The more important sibling to the story is the sister, who begins to develop like Charlie into her own well defined person. By the end of the novel, she has rejected her abusive boyfriend, made a pro-choice statement, and has started reading feminist literature. While this is stereotypical, it at least enforces the idea that abusive relationships can be ended and triumphed over through the strength of will alone. There is a cliche to this message, but it is presented effectively enough to overcome it and act as a real statement on the power of femininity in contrast to the weak Mary Elizabeth.

The social posturing of Perks is its style; a YA "realist" novel written to discuss modern issues. It fails as an example of lasting piece of actual realism; it makes no effort to denote days where nothing happens, slow mornings marked only by bad coffee and procrastination as opposed abortion and drugs. Instead every day must have an event and be dramatic; it eliminates the feeling of real life in the book. One week, even one month may be packed with dramatics, but certainly not nine months. The authenticity is ruined by the jam-packing of controversy into the novel. It is done to keep the attention of younger readers and to keep it on the best seller list, but it loses any memorable styles and methods in the process. As a result, it is a stylistic bore, it is the total middle of the line when it comes to YA and adult literature. If Chbosky had made some attempt to differentiate his writing from his peers outside of the controversy it created, it would certainly be a timeless novel.

I may continue this soon, but I have to go for the moment. I think this is a decent start though.

This is a revision of my metacognitive essay with refocusing on personal changes, name dropping and clarity. While it is not the best example of my work, it shows personal style, growth and influences while meeting the needs of the prompt it was responding to. For the record, the lack of cited works is due to the common app form not having space for a works cited and me not wanting to break the honor code for Gettysburg on my application. Anyhow, the literary influences it draws and comments on makes me feel it is appropriate to post here.

The True Expression of Art

James Z. Taylor III

At about one in the morning sometime during the winter of 2006, I was given an invite to a private online music community known as #it. After reading reviews in the pop category, I came across an album by a little known Seattle band called Math and Physics Club. It sounded wonderful, a warm and twee thirty minute record to sit by a fire and listen to. Intrigued, I queued a download. As the program popped onto my screen, I noticed an earlier download had finished; a digital purchase of Tom Waits’ quintessential work, Raindogs. My music player was immediately open and processing the album, playing it as soon as the ID3 tags were analyzed. It had been purchased for the exact opposite reason of the Math and Physics Club recording; this was supposedly a seminal experimental work, a Trout Mask Replica, an NYC Ghosts & Flowers. The album started playing, and I hated it. I hated the opening pseudo-polka of Singapore, the high moaning and low talking of Big Black Mariah. It was not experimental in the sense I was expecting, some sort of Metal Machine Music clone; it was instead experimentalism with older forms of music featuring modern augmentation. The idea of a door scraping against the ground accompanied by a man singing through a megaphone is never one of those musical ideas that sounds immediately appealing. So, at the time, I discarded Waits in favor of Math and Physics Club. I would return to Waits in about a month though, an urge to try him once more, and it was then something clicked. It was an ephemeral desire for his work, it was a newfound respect, and it was finding that perfect album of years of searching. I started hoarding Waits. Going through his entire catalogue, I became fascinated with his abstract personality and influences. I began examining them, the absurdist Beefheart, the realist Mailer, the counter-culturist Rechy. I became most intrigued however, by Waits’ most cited influence, the beaten down trodden realist Charles Bukowski. It would be the works of Bukowski and Waits that would define my perception of art, framing it in a never before realized way.

Waits has never achieved mainstream success, and perhaps it would ruin him if he did. A major label would never allow his human beat boxing and spoken word tendencies to be released, and Waits could never be limited in this way. He thrives as an outsider, a man more welcome at a junkyard than a music shop. In this way, he can write music representative both of his perspective of the world he can only look into and the outside world where he thrives. His music evokes emotion because it is emotion, primal urges put into notation. Waits’ ability to make people feel something, even if it is disgust, when they hear his music is more powerful than any piece of over-produced pop.

Bukowski works in the same vein, with the idea of music being replaced by the written word. It has been said there is no author who polarizes his audience more so than Bukowski. There is no middle ground in feelings towards him among those who have read his works; he is either despised as a misogynistic, tired man with a superiority complex or hailed as a brilliant poet who found a muse in the dark world around him. I agree with the latter. Again, the ability to evoke such feelings even on the first reading is more powerful a writing technique than will ever be known to the general public.

It is this idea of emotion as art that changed my entire view of art as a whole. It is with scorn that I now see generic works being hailed as great and timeless; if a piece cannot divide or unite a populace, it is rarely timeless, it more likely is a non-offensive best seller. While these pieces may have great formal writing (or perhaps a lack thereof), they lack the style that so marks seminal and powerful works. While it is wonderful to see great technical writing, technical writing alone should not be the voice of a generation. Technical writing strains itself to work in the past; it can never be modern as no modern style will be accepted as true technical writing until thirty years down the road. For example, it is only now that that the brilliance of Burroughs’ chopped up prose has become recognized by technical writers, before dismissed as stylistic masturbation by the forebears of those who declare its worth now. Burroughs set an idea for his peers, and slowly it is becoming standard modern technical writing for the abstract set. This causes it to now enter the mainstream, only because of wider acceptance of the source piece as technically powerful and not its powerful style. To me, this is a sin. Technical writing should be left in the places of learning where it is important, to businesses and colleges. To look at a book now, a piece of music even, and to consider it art, a new voice must be expressed. It is through the innovation of style and expression that an artist may call himself an artist; it is from these new voices that a generation may be defined.

It is the influence of artists who follow these ideas that has defined my own writing. Seeing technical prowess as being a matter reserved for grammar and punctuation, I attempt to focus more on presenting new ideas and theories rather than restating well-worn ideas in precise and calculated ways. While this meets with mixed success, I will always prefer it to writing in the rhetorical; the idea of using stylistic models seems a cruel joke. Inevitably a piece of mine will match up to an older model, primarily because in many assignments one way of writing becomes the immediate thought of everyone receiving the assignment. Perhaps this is because the rhetorical is so heavily spoken of in the educational system, causing our minds to jump immediately to the standard ways of presenting information based in various criteria. In an educational environment though, this seems best, as so much of what is assigned until the latter years of high school and college is retelling information, and in many cases there is no other way to present. In fields which do not ask a specific question though, or when the answer to the question varies immensely from person to person, the rhetorical only enforces the idea of technicality over creativity.

So Waits’ experimentation with banging on garbage cans and obscure allusions is for me a statement of the true power of art, the power to call emotion in people, the power to say something in a different voice. Without Raindogs, without What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire, I would still be pursuing a computer science major. I would still read only the only classic. I would have never found the brilliance of the modern Dickensian style of John Irving, or Joan Didion’s ability to tell a thrity-year-old story and make it sound new. Art is new expression, and art will always be in my mind.

One of Johnston's best written lines, taken from the spoken word King Kong, is "And he climbed up the Empire State Building / It was like a phallic symbol / And he took his woman / to the top of that towering temple". It's a jab at rudimentary analysis, the Empire State building is incredibly obvious as a phallic symbol, so much so that it is almost stated in the movie. This is hinted by the otherwise detailed plot summary of the rest of the song, indicating that the building is a phallic symbol not by analysis but by simple conscious thought, and that any sort of supposed great meaning derived from seeing the building as a phallic symbol is obvious and not all that analytical anyway.

The connection to Selby here is the disregard for symbology in Last Exit to Brooklyn. It is realist, but so is The Awakening, so is Bluebeard, both of which are loaded with symbology, along with various other realist examples especially in the case of poetry, meaning that symbology cannot be written out solely because of the genre. It is Selby who defies Chekov's "Gun Over The Mantle" Rule, making a bottle of pills on the table just a bottle of pills on the table. Selby does not subscribe to needless imagery, there are no women on ladders above men indicating female supremacy; supremacy is indicated through physical force, regardless of gender. The infighting of the drag queens during the night with the men, the rape of multiple "women" by Harry, the leader of the punks outside Alex's abuse of his wife; these are all obvious comments on the society of the time, but they are so much more powerful in that they do not hide behind symbology, they disgust the dark and awful in full light; as Georgette blocks out the sun through the windows, she's making everything too dark to see, not wanting to see everything in its own hideous glory.

The darkness of mankind abounds in Selby's work, and that is why he matters. Were he to write in the same general style but focus on latent symbols, his work would be trash. Selby is not afraid to kill a man with his pen, he does not need justification outside that it is what his subjects would do in real life, and as such it is only realistic to do it. Were he to hint and dodge around full exposure, there would be no power, no emphasis; he would be another unsuccessful Ginsberg clone. The way he writes though, he is the next step in beat, he puts more meaning behind Ginsberg's pride and Bukowski's sexuality and Kerouac's adventures, he merges them all into a truthful, discomforting and disorienting reality that is a true hell on Earth that too many people actually lived through.

So I'm digging on The Last Exit To Brooklyn. It's strange, the experimental style giving way to various misgivings on the part of understanding, but then again it's Selby who kind of got a raw deal by the legions of kids professing the merits of Requiem for a Dream then doing coke themselves.

But whatever, Last Exit. At this point I have only read the intro, wherein Alex's diner is examined along with the punk types who hang around by it. The major point of the intro is the point where the punks fight these rebel (read: confederate) soldiers and decidedly beat them. There is an incredible harsh quality to this; it is not a street fight, it is a man being almost tortured on a street corner. Frank, the leader of the punks, is doing some real damage before a cop breaks the whole thing up.

Now, here's where the point of the whole story comes in: the punks brutalized this dude, and no one cares. They care, but only for themselves. Everyone who saw anything is saying the rebel said something about Frank's lady friend (who Frank had beaten earlier) and beating the rebel was the only way to take care of things. So everyone supports Frank, the cops send the rebel back to the military base, that's that. An MP tries to speak up for the rebel, but the cop straight up accuses him of being a lawyer. By the time the MP tries to say anything else, the rebels are falling back to base.

But dig that, right, think about it. The rebels were being jackasses, true, but it's no reason to near kill a man. This is obvious though; violence is bad, etc, etc. The real what the hell moment is when no one says anything. Not one man or woman will defend another human being. No one cares, no one wants to be that guy; it's like what Irving says about the draft, that people will only act out against something if it affects them. This is the opposite, no one wants to get killed so they say nothing and let someone else die; no one wanted to go to Vietnam and so everyone protested. Even though I would like to believe in a higher moral order than that, it seems to be a fair statement that encompasses events that happen far too often. Read the modern parts of A Prayer for Owen Meany for a detailed list of most of those events.

The worst part of the whole thing is that this too seems obvious. Our culture is filled with cynicism and self-preservation that of course no one would stand up for the rebel; he stood for opposite political goals, he stood for repression, people would claim such things as the reasons for not defending him but of course these are not the true reasons. No one wants to have his kidneys kicked in. So no one would stand up for him because what's the point, it'll be two men quivering on the ground as opposed to one. We are so used to thinking this way that we have no guilt over not standing up for the men either, we just didn't want to die. And it's true, its very true, but there is just something inherently wrong with this, that our sense of self is so high we can't stand up for another.

And the lawyer thing. To accuse someone of being someone who knows and enforces the law as a professional is a hell of a thing. It mocks the law, it mocks the entire court system, saying the retribution is valid anywhere but in the court room. So the idea of being a lawyer is scorned; these men were brought up in lawless areas, the laws to them are what are keeping their friends from their families. So a lawyer is evil, even to an officer of the law.

Brooklyn is hell man.

And I was going to go into the absurdity of the snitches get stitches campaign, but I got work in ten minutes.

I'm digging Selby though.

Not finished, not sourced, not cited, etc. Not a good paper for real critique, but fine for discussion.

Arp
James Taylor

Sexual politics and religion are the most pervasive forces in all of modern literature. To be a traditionalist is to be outcast as a chauvinist and right wing hardliner; to be a social liberal is to be outcast as a dyke and pagan. Taking the middle ground only offers both these stereotypes and no support from one definite side. John Irving realizes this and still takes the middle ground. Forward in his politics and traditional in his style, Irving is the best of moderate; he makes no statement for one viewpoint without offering a criticism towards it. Why he is successful as a moderate is his criticism; he does not offer blind faith to any particular ideology, allowing him to entice the doubter and shake the believer. The defining factors of his success as a middle ground writer in A Prayer for Owen Meany and The World According to Garp are his style, characters, and politics.


Irving’s style is at its base Dickensian; he sees the life story as the truest form of story telling. The story often revolves around the lives of two characters, however, a differentiation from the usual style of Dickens. The life story of one of the two characters will be told in full detail as the subject of the narrative while the other character, having a close, personal relationship with the primary character, will have the majority of his life told as it interacts with the primary. T.S. Garp and John Wheelwright as the primary characters of The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany respectively, while Jenny Fields and Owen Meany act as the secondary characters. While the novels will often focus a great deal of pages on the secondary characters, it is usually only to portray how they affect the primary characters in their personal ideologies. This eludes to another stylistic tendency of Irving’s, the use of people as personifications of ideas.


Very few of Irving’s non-primary characters are dynamic. Once they get out of their teenage years, the characters remain virtually the same and hold the same traits throughout their lives. This is an obvious flaw in Irving’s own doctrine; in getting readers to consider new ideas, his own characters rarely reconsider their own. The characters become voice boxes for one idea; critical scenes are marred by a lack of impact on any character besides the narrative focus. There are marvelous exceptions in Garp including Michael Milton and Helen, but Prayer lacks any dynamic characters except John himself. Garp does however host the worst and least necessary unchanging character, Pooh. Pooh, simultaneously jealous of the sexuality of her sister Cushy while scared of becoming oppressed as a woman by a sexual relationship, becomes hostile toward Garp as he is in a sexual relationship with Cushy. Upon the death of Cushy, Pooh does not change; she instead becomes a magnified version of her former self; so scared of sex and so inexperienced that she believes the sexual relationship between Cushy and Garp was the reason for Cushy’s death. Pooh is only magnified as a voice box of extremist feminism, she is in no other way affected by the death of her own sister except in the rise of her own beliefs. This is incredibly flawed, especially in its suggestion that Pooh feels no sexual growth from the age of five to thirty. The idea that such an easily defined and static character causes the death of the narrative focus seems entirely too unsatisfying. Perhaps Irving was trying to break the traditional in having Garp’s death come not at the hands of a satisfying event, but in this way he made an otherwise wonderful book disappointing only to make the oft-stated comment that life is disappointing. It is an effective technique, but in the worst possible way.


The addition of new ideas to traditional form marks another element of Irving’s style. While the writing is rooted in traditional style, the concepts presented are very modern. Generally, this does not affect the overall technicality of the writing, but instead juxtaposes ideas that would be completely alien to Dickensian form with the classical writing. This creates a mood of contrast throughout the novels, as concepts of extremist feminism are played against Victorian writing. While not a crucial element to the formation of his ideas and themes, it is an underlying theme which works well with his treatment of less modern American society. The idea of writing about 1950’s America fits well with an antique style; an older generation of America combined with an older generation of writing.
It is through the modern element of Irving’s writing that his cutting edge begins to show. His thematic elements are primarily sexual politics and maturation, hallmarks of modern literature. It is his views on sex that define Garp; the influences of maturation of one’s self that influence Prayer.


The sexual politics of Garp are overwhelming, both explicitly and implicitly. One of the major themes is the effects of feminism on males and particularly Garp, with Irving setting Garp’s mother as a feminist icon. Jenny Fields is the voice of feminism past; she condemns men as the cause of women’s suffering and offers no solution except to blame men. She is a kind woman otherwise; she does her best to help society in the way she sees fit, but as a reluctant component of 60’s feminism she isn’t entirely sure of how to further the women’s movement except to try to take care of the damaged women. This comes at the exclusion of male feelings and ideas, making it distinctly dated in its concept. Jenny’s acceptance of all female ideas as true often angers Garp, particularly her embrace of the Ellen Jamesians. The idea of all feminine suffering being the result of men is often ridiculed; Garp feels sympathy for the truly damaged women, but feels hatred towards those who act as if they understand the suffering of those hurt. The novel itself indicates all destructive acts to be the result of both genders often misunderstanding each, a counterpoint to Jenny Fields ideology; the death of Garp coming from his emotionally lacking relationship with Cushy and Pooh’s misunderstanding of sexual feelings, the death of Jenny Fields being the result of her not truly understanding the minds of men and her assassin having no understanding of the minds of women, the amputation of Milton’s penis being the result of sexual craving on the part of Helen and sexual abandonment on the part of Garp. Irving seems to insist it is the ignorance of understanding triumphed by both feminists and chauvinists alike that is the true danger, that without understanding and embracing the differences of gender society will never be truly functional.


Despite the calls for acceptance, Irving does not speak highly for homosexuality.
It is often passed over in favor of heterosexual or transsexual men and women, even when homosexuality would be a more appropriate topic to the discussion. Irving often dismisses the homosexual community as self-minded and abrasive; portraying them as deterrents to the transsexual community and all lesbians as either “butch dykes” or as frail and weak, needing support but rejecting men for trying to control them through support. Irving poses the question of how minorities such as transsexuals and homosexuals can harbor so much hatred toward one another, but neglects to realize that there are incredible differences in these cultures; they are only similar in that they are disenfranchised minorities. This is as invalid of a statement as the feminist’s cry of all men being the same; all minorities are not the same and face different challenges, even in their individual lives each gay and transsexual is not the same, as all are men are not chauvinists and all women are not pure and good. Every man and every woman is different, and if there is a failing in The World According to Garp, it is its implication of sameness in all who share the same culture without venturing into the individuals involved in the culture outside of a stereotypical leader figure.


This goes along with his lack of dynamic characters, as these leaders do not do anything uncharacteristic of the extremist opinions of the people they represent; as such, they are personified ideas, they offer only what could be found in treatises and essays. They are unreal in that they do not even offer emotions, only ideas. This is wholly unreal, as without emotion about anything, ideas cannot be formed. Ideas take root in the emotion of their creator; they are not exact and unchanging, especially in the leadership of a movement. This would be forgivable if the characters Irving presents are witless followers, but they are declared as leaders, as new thinkers, but there is no definition of what makes them better than anyone else in the field. This could be a comment on the inherent idolatry of most political movements; the naming of a figure head who is only able to speak words of praise for the organization, but in context it is not so. Jenny Fields is a loving mother with strong willpower; she would not be made into a mindless idol without objecting to it. The fault then lies in a failing on Irving’s part either to execute a well thought out metaphor or a failing to realize his characters are people and not just props with voices.


A Prayer For Owen Meany falls into this same trap. Time does not even seem to pass outside of political events; ancillary characters do not even age, they are themselves for thirty to seventy years then die. Some are even meant to represent abstract thinking, the acceptance of new ideas, but even they are a measured amount from the mainstream, their acceptance of new ideas could be represented in a percent. To Irving’s credit, however, the idea of steadfast ideology is wonderfully presented in Owen Meany himself. Owen is characterized by his faith, by his stubbornness, if he does not change it is in his character not to change, unlike the other characters that seem to be stuck in one place despite changing times and eras. Owen Meany is unflinching in his belief and it is crucial to the novel; it is his hold on his own feelings that forms the emotional aspect of the novel.
Owen Meany, throughout the novel, is a modern Christ. He is a strict believer in religion, but does not feel a need observe every rule as set out by the church itself. He believes in following the moral standards of the bible and his own obligations to God, seeing religion as moral guidelines as opposed to strict yes or no laws. He willingly goes to his own death for his belief in God, losing his arms in the process. Owen saw himself as God’s instrument; it is only fitting for him to lose his hands with which he created beautiful granite sculptures in service to the Creator. Owen will do anything for his belief, and in that he is defined. He stands as a role model to John Wheelwright, who bases his own Christianity on his relationship with Owen.


John is one of Irving’s few truly dynamic characters. He is, however, stereotypically dynamic, a poor student becoming a teacher, a heathen becoming a church leader. This is only the natural course of events though, even if Irving does fall into stereotypical writing styles here, it is because he has to; no other character could have Owen’s faith without trivializing it. John’s life serves as measure of Owen’s own adolescence, acting as a growth surrogate, where Owen cannot change his character without ruining the entire idea of the novel, John can, and does, to represent the change in Owen that Irving does not make note of. It is John who rises from little faith to church council, representing Owen’s increasing duties to his God. John becomes a teacher and enjoys it, loving to express his opinions on novels and the world to his students as Owen grew to influence the students of Gravesend Academy as The Voice. John notes these changes in him, never seeing them in Owen, either forgetting them to make the story more powerful or that they were never there in the first place. What is natural to Owen is growth to John; John is every Christian who wonders how Christ could march forward into his own death. He is at best an apostle to Owen, questioning motives but still believing despite the sometimes-inherent insanity of it all. It is Owen who loses his life, but it is John who must lose his Lord.


The loss of Owen and particularly his arms is the final point in a theme of armlessness throughout the book. To any God or any leader, sacrifices must be made; not always physically, but to follow the rule of any man, woman or deity is to compromise something of your own. Irving proposes that a leader would take a man’s arms, God’s own tools for creating the world, and use them either to better serve him or to silence the man who had them. Owen does his work to serve God, through his righteous morals and his own death, but it is his arms that do the work. As he learns humility and the plight of the blue-collar worker in the quarry he uses his arms to excavate and carve, he uses his arms to write as The Voice and guide a generation of children, he uses his arms to save the lives of children in Vietnam. It is through his arms he serves the Lord and as he loses them in his final physical death, it seems only fitting that God would take back his means of creation before his servant himself.

So I will be updating this with the various things I write for indpeendent study and/or commentary on books and/or recorded discussions. At least until I finally buy some Bihira hosting.

Anyhow, Garp thing will be up soon.