John Irving Discussion Essay
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.
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.