The Aesthetics of Accessibility: John Irving and the Middlebrow Novel after 1975

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In John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978), the aspiring young author T.S. Garp submits his story "The Pension Grillparzer" to the scrutiny of his first love, aspiring literary scholar Helen Holm, and wins her hand in marriage. Thus made confident in the quality of his work, he also submits the story to a literary magazine, but receives a note of rejection stating that "the story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or form."  Upon reading this note, both Garp and his mentor and English teacher, Old Tinch, suffer from a hefty dose of puzzlement. The latter suggests that the magazine may be seeking "newer fiction" to publish, but he professes not to understand what this "newer fiction" — that is, fiction "about it-it-itself" or "fiction about fi-fi-fiction" — is "really about."1  "Old" Tinch, whose name is no coincidence, thus characterizes "newer" or modernist fiction as primarily, even narcissistically, self-referential; his stutter, moreover, simultaneously renders such an aesthetic program defective, if not grotesque.

When, fifteen years later, Garp has become a bestselling author and the same magazine asks for a contribution, he retaliates by replying that he is "only mildly interested" in the magazine and "still doing nothing new with language or form,"2 a defense of his writing that defies modernism's (supposed) imperative to "make it new" in formal terms.3 Thus, as T.S. Garp matures as a man and writer over the course of the novel, modernist aesthetics — or what is polemically misread as modernist aesthetics —evolves, in his own mind, from a form of writing of which he is hardly aware to a coherent movement that he considers "true" literature's adversary.  The rejection and ironization of modernism and, simultaneously, the formative power of modernism as the Other against which Garp defines his work are inscribed into his very name: his initials are those of one of modernism's most formidable figures, yet at the same time they are an abbreviation for "technical sergeant," the military rank of Garp's father. While the name "T.S. Garp" thus ironizes the fashionable mannerism of Eliot's use of the abbreviation, as well as the supposed ethereal refinement of his work, Garp — although transforming writing into a more down-to-earth technical craft — cannot do without the "T.S.," or without modernism.

Such "[s]cenes of opposition between modernism and the middlebrow," Tom Perrin has recently argued, "are characteristic, even defining, features of middlebrow novels" and "imply an opposition between modernism and maturity."4 Most importantly, by pitting itself against modernism, American middlebrow literature in the middle of the twentieth century defined its own aesthetic project consciously and coherently. Instead of striving to "make things new" on the level of language and form, middlebrow authors saw themselves as "remaking existing literary genres by adapting them to the conditions of modernity."5 One of the genres that middlebrow authors "remake" is the bildungsroman. Writing against modernist "anti-bildungsromane," epitomized by James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), these novels propose that "aesthetic experience might remain a guide to ethical life."6

John Irving's The World According Garp, I demonstrate in this essay, does exactly that. It can be read as a middlebrow bildungsroman — yet as a late-century postmodern one. Published in 1978, Garp does not simply emulate the midcentury middlebrow bildungsroman. The novel uses an indictment of modernism as a springboard, but it goes on to develop its own middlebrow aesthetics and ethics, and it takes on postmodernism, too. With regard to the present joint effort to "invent the middlebrow" — to freshly consider the middlebrow field of inquiry — the case of John Irving and his first bestseller allows me to make a broader intervention: I suggest that there is a distinct class of popular writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century that can usefully be described as middlebrow and that is also shaped by its relationship to postmodernism. Or, to put it another way: US American middlebrow writing did not "decline" after the midcentury, but in fact lived on, adapted to a new era.7

Outsiders to the field of middlebrow studies might not find it all that surprising that in a society with a strong middle class the middlebrow arts should have a perennial presence. The field of middlebrow studies at the present moment seems to suggest the opposite, however. The period between 1975 and the turn of the century has not been the focus of studies on the middlebrow and, in fact, Tom Perrin's recent, groundbreaking study on the aesthetics of the midcentury middlebrow novel may even — if inadvertently — suggest that the 1960s and early 1970s sounded the death knell for middlebrow literature. The middlebrow was first described as an emergent formation of the interwar period in England and the US8 and has been conceptualized in its midcentury formation, particularly in the US context, with studies usually breaking off in the 1960s.9 Perrin, taking his analysis into the year 1975, demonstrates how midcentury middlebrow aesthetics informed postmodernist writing and suggests that the middlebrow gave way to a popular postmodernism that had a similarly broad appeal. On the other hand, a lot of attention has recently been paid to what Beth Driscoll has termed the "new literary middlebrow" in the twenty-first century,10 a massive transformation of reading and book culture through digital technology and global media corporations that resulted in "the emergence of new literary institutions which at least superficially resemble aspects of the historical middlebrow."11

I read Irving's work as one piece of evidence that middlebrow literature continued to thrive between 1975 and the new millennium, when it was thought to have disappeared, and to sustain a tradition that can be traced back into the nineteenth century while remaking its aesthetic program for the conditions of postmodernity. My broad argument in this essay is that Garp integrates modernist and postmodernist techniques, as well as a progressive politics, into a realist narrative, but voids them of their function, which is usually to destabilize the relation between text and world and to undo the traditional social order. Instead, Garp contains such techniques in a grand récit of individual uplift and familial restoration governed by a strong authorial voice. The strand of middlebrow writing that I am tracing into the last quarter of the twentieth century is, hence, a strand that is characterized by middlebrow literature's most critically suspect trait: its oscillation between progressive ideas and a conservatism that ultimately leaves "social structures' legitimating belief system" in place.12 Given the conservative backlash that the US experienced politically in the 1980s, it may not be surprising that middlebrow literature from the late 1970s onwards captured and shaped these corresponding structures of feeling.

Middlebrow literature in the last quarter of the twentieth century remains a white spot on the map. Future discussions may find that Irving has predecessors, such as Joseph Heller or his mentor Kurt Vonnegut, who used postmodernist techniques to middlebrow ends; that contemporaries like Richard Brautigan or Anne Tyler engaged in ideological pursuits like Irving's, but within updated realist frameworks; or that he shares much with authors such as Barbara Kingsolver or Anita Shreve, who began publishing in the late 1980s — to sketch just a tip of the iceberg of middlebrow literature between 1975 and the advent of the "new literary middlebrow." In this essay I take The World According to Garp as one possible entryway into this uncharted territory — although there are surely a great number of others. I do so for three reasons.

First, the novel has a particular place in American literary history: Garp was not just popular but, as contemporary commentators had it, a "cultural phenomenon": it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1979, sold 3 million copies after its release as a paperback in 1980, won the National Book Award in paperback in that year, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 25 weeks, and was adapted for the screen in a 1982 film.13 Moreover, the country was swept by what has been described as "Garpomania," a cult of the novel that found its expression in Garp t-shirts and other merchandizing avant la lettre.14 It was culturally important, and my reading of it as a manifesto for the ongoing need for middlebrow literature may help explain why the novel resonated so strongly with a broad and passionately engaged readership.

Second, Garp may be the novel of the period that most self-consciously proclaims the ongoing relevance of an (updated) middlebrow aesthetic program. In the two scenes I related at the beginning of this essay, for instance, Garp declares its own aesthetics in opposition to modernism and thus very explicitly fashions itself both as an heir to the midcentury middlebrow tradition and as a literature very different from modernism's heir, postmodernism. Garp's career as a writer, moreover, mirrors Irving's own career up to and including Garp. Garp's bildung can thus also be read as a mise en abyme for Irving's — as I do in this essay.15

Third and relatedly, John Irving spelled out his own aesthetic program immediately after the publication of Garp in three essays, entitled "The Aesthetics of Accessiblity: Kurt Vonnegut and his Critics," "In Defense of Sentimentality," and "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed."16 While Irving never uses the term "middlebrow," he outlines and valorizes an aesthetic that exactly fits the bill of the middlebrow tradition.  Hence, he can be seen as one of the late-twentieth century's most eloquent spokesmen for the middlebrow. He defends "readability," declares entertainment and catharsis to be the goals of good literature, and argues for the need of a moral vision in any work of fiction.17 Novels should "make us wish we were better," and sentimentality — "bath[ing] the heart in tears" — should teach the reader to access her innate decency, kindness, and generosity.18 Most notably, Irving advocates for a novelistic form he dubs "responsible soap opera."19 Though Irving develops such aesthetic ideals in discussing and defending the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Dickens, his three essays can, in fact, be read as a summary defense of his own writing in Garp and his following novels. One of the reasons why Irving has never been discussed as a middlebrow author may be that he used his non-fiction effectively to align himself with Dickens, who wrote before the so-called "great divide"20 and is generally viewed as a "classic," as well as with Vonnegut, an author seen as postmodern.21

There are two possible reasons why Irving, at this particular moment in time, might have needed to explicitly assert the robustness of the middlebrow tradition, in fiction as well as non-fiction. One is autobiographical: trained at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, Irving had published three critically acclaimed but largely unread postmodernist novels since 1968. In the attempt to reinvent himself as a popular author of realist fiction, he may have felt the need to explicitly negotiate — and justify — his own shift from postmodernist writing to a middlebrow aesthetics adapted to postmodern times. His subsequent novels of the 1980s — The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) — can be characterized as more straightforwardly realist and do not employ or grapple with post/modernist techniques to the extent Garp does. In that sense, Garp and Irving's critical essays may be seen as the late-1970s manifesto that allowed him and other middlebrow authors to adopt an updated realist framework for writing after postmodernism. The second reason is that, as Tom Perrin has shown, works of popular postmodernism from Nabokov to Pynchon dominated the bestseller lists in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The publication of Garp in 1978 may be seen as the moment when middlebrow writers began a counterattack against a literary formation that had taken over what had previously been "their" segment of the market — by incorporating, even "cashing in" on, postmodernist techniques while at the same time re-functioning them to middlebrow ends.

In the remainder of this essay, I will describe Garp's re-functioning of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics for a middlebrow bildungsroman. In a first step, I look at what is middlebrow about Garp, and how modernism and postmodernism are conceptualized or, in Perrin's words, "productively misread" to serve as the middlebrow's Other within the novel.22 I then focus on its use of modernist and postmodernist techniques and its containment of progressive politics within a conservative master narrative, particularly in its treatment of feminism and feminists. In a last step, I will demonstrate that a symptomatic reading of Garp — as opposed to a middlebrow reading — can uncover the text's suppressed ideological maneuvers. As Garp is, indeed, trying to suppress its own patriarchal, conservative underpinnings, the novel does not subscribe to an "aesthetics of disavowal."23 The novel thus differs significantly from the midcentury middlebrow epics that Tom Perrin discusses and that, as he argues, give way to a popular postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s. Garp and Irving's oeuvre as a whole demonstrate that there is more than one strand of middlebrow literature that emerges after midcentury: middlebrow literature did evolve into popular postmodernism, but in another incarnation it also revitalized the bildungsroman tradition.

Garp as a Middlebrow Bildungsroman for Postmodernity

It is easy to see that Garp follows the conventions of a bildungsroman. It tells the story of its protagonist from his birth (even from his conception) to the end of life (and the end of the lives of his progeny). It models the successful integration of its protagonist into society and thus serves as a training field for its reader. The bildungsroman is a quintessentially middlebrow genre: it offers the reader a "sentimental education,"24 and this specific didactic impetus — the pragmatic advice on "the business of living,"25 brought home through the text's work on the reader's affects — is typical for middlebrow literature.26

But Garp shares a number of other characteristics with the middlebrow more generally. The novel centrally treats private issues like courtship, childrearing, and relationships between family members and is predominantly set in small-town New Hampshire, for instance. It thus displays an acute personalism and localism that been have described as hallmarks of the middlebrow.27 Because the novel's protagonist writes from a family home, is his children's primary caretaker, and oversees the domestic chores, it also resembles the domestic novel, the female bildungsroman. The middlebrow is typically both "female" (in subject matter and reader address) and "feminized" (in terms of extrinsic judgment).28 The World According to Garp also partakes in the middlebrow as a progressive tradition that harks back to political sentimental fiction of the mid-nineteenth century.29 To note only a few elements that challenge the traditional social order (though only to firmly reinstate it on another level), Garp features Jenny Fields, a single mother by choice; Robert/a Muldoon, a male-to-female transsexual; and, of course, Garp, who takes on a number of traditionally feminine roles, bends gender through cross-dressing, befriends Roberta, and, in consequence, defines "family" in terms of elective affinities rather than blood relationships.

The middlebrow aesthetics that Garp eventually embraces and that Garp embodies may be called, in Irving's own words, a democratic "aesthetics of accessibility."30 The ethics or "vision"31 that characterizes Garp's life and Irving's writing is one of familial belonging, "common decency," and hopefulness.32 The mature man and writer Garp, who eventually finds his place as an unalienated individual in postmodern times, is shown to be "full of sympathy," and he and his work have become "a soft touch in the real world."33 To become "a soft touch in the real world" is, moreover, an apt image for the goal of the sentimental education in middlebrow aesthetics and ethics with which the novel provides its readers.

Through confronting contemporary challenges to the social order, particularly to gender roles and boundaries, Garp thematically takes the bildungsroman into the postmodern era, but I also argue that the novel positions itself against a postmodernist aesthetics and ethics. As Tom Perrin has pointed out, the term "postmodern" might "no longer seem...like a critically useful category,"34 because categories that sought to differentiate modernism and postmodernism, such as Brian McHale's epistemological versus ontological dominant, have meanwhile collapsed.35 I am holding onto the concept, however, because Garp is clearly writing against an aesthetic formation that the text suggests is contemporary but that looks a lot like an extension of modernism.  Postmodernism in this essay, then, is a descriptor for the "other" aesthetics against which Garp pits its own aesthetic philosophy. This "other," contemporary aesthetic is seen in Garp as another stage in a tradition of ostensibly "difficult," inaccessible, and ethically irrelevant literature against which the middlebrow tradition has defined and continues to define itself.

Garp and Modernist Technique

I have opened this essay by citing two scenes in Garp where modernism is cast as the middlebrow's Other because these moments typify the way in which the novel engages with and integrates elements of both modern and postmodern literature. First of all, Garp and Old Tinch intuitively cast modernist aesthetics as opaque, and Garp eventually comes to reject the proponents of a modernist aesthetics for their pretensions. The novel has its characters discuss the opposition between post/modernism and the middlebrow on the level of plot: modernist as well as postmodernist aesthetics, it should be stressed, are more of a thematic than a formally manifest concern in Garp.

But second, the scenes show that Garp does integrate post/modernist techniques on a formal level, too, and thus occasionally goes beyond a discussion of post/modernism within the storyworld. The scenes also suggest to what end Garp employs such techniques, when it chooses to do so. For one, by including such meta-reflections on writing and the novel at all, Garp asks the questions of the modernist künstlerroman, even if to modulate the answers. Moreover, the naming of T.S. Garp and the title of his rejected story brim with intertextual references and meta-reflexive irony. In addition to the play with "technical sergeant," his controversial conception and naming are also connected to Randell Jarrell's poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Franz Grillparzer and his novella "The Poor Fiddler," moreover, function as young Garp's antipodes.36 Where Garp integrates such "modernist" intertextuality, however, it adds no layer of meaning to the text. Irving's novel, indeed, is postmodernist in this sense: for those readers who can decode the references, they create gratuitous postmodern textual "jouissance"37 and, simultaneously, middlebrow "reverence" for Irving's craft in weaving this intertextual web.38 For those readers who miss the references, however, no meaning is lost: the novel still functions as an effective sentimental education on the relationship between reader, characters, and author and on how to live a better life. And those readers who momentarily might have abandoned themselves to the pleasure of the "texte scriptible" cannot overlook or ignore the dominant structure of a coherent narrative of uplift that is adorned, rather than shaped, by post/modernist textual play. Modernist technique, in other words, is here employed inconspicuously: its elements potentially add a position from which the text can be approached through postmodernist textual "pleasure," but meaning and the novel's sentimental didacticism are carried by its realist narrative.

Another case where non-realist technique adds an entertaining rather than meaning-making layer to the text is Garp's use of Eliot's "mythical method" which, in Eliot's mind, superseded the "narrative method" of realism.39 Garp's various stories of rape, rescue, and subsequent transformation take Ovid's Metamorphoses as their structural pre-text; the story of Philomel relates directly to the story of Ellen James.40 Ellen James is raped and her rapists, like Philomel's brother-in-law Tereus, cut her tongue out — unaware that at eleven years old, Ellen can write and thus accuse them of their deed, just as Philomel could weave and thus communicate her story to her sister Procne. Towards the end of Garp, Garp adopts Ellen James, makes her part of his family, and enables her to express herself in poetry — and thus brings about an Ovidian transformation. Yet again, the reader does not need to understand the reference to the pre-text to understand Ellen James' story and her role in the novel, but can, if s/he recognizes it, take pleasure in the text and pride in her or his own learnedness. The connection of Garp to T.S. Eliot, which is once more underlined by the use of the myth of Philomel in both Garp and The Waste Land (in "A Game of Chess"), similarly creates intertextual complexity and a potential occasion for "jouissance" for the reader, without creating a surplus of meaning. Irving tips his hat to Eliot's "mythical method," but remains firmly loyal to realism's "narrative method."

An even more striking case of modernist intertextuality — or postmodernist pastiche, for that matter — is the inclusion of Garp's stories and parts of his novels in the narrative.41 Embedded in Garp, the reader finds Garp's first story "The Hotel Grillparzer," the story "Vigilance," with which he unsuccessfully tries to free himself from writer's block after the publication of his second novel, and the first chapter of Garp's third novel, The World According to Bensenhaver, which he writes after the accident that kills his son Walt and leaves his older son, Duncan, with only one eye. These fictions within the fiction, however, stand by themselves with regard to plot: they do not comment or relate to events — much less propel them — in the narrative of Garp's life. On the level of implicit meta-poetic commentary, these fictions within the fiction may be seen as having an important function within the novel, because they illustrate Garp's writing. However, the reader gets a rather precise idea of the different stages of his writing even without those samples: they are amply discussed by the narrator and in dialogues between Garp and other characters in the framing narrative.  In other words, Garp remains a fully transparent and effective narrative even if the reader skips over the embedded fictions. Once again, what Irving is doing here, with regard to modernist and realist aesthetics, is to "have [his] cake and eat it, too" within a middlebrow aesthetics that registers and integrates other literary modes that challenge it, but stays loyal to accessible, realist authorial narration and thus re-functions these modes towards its own ends.42

Garp and the Postmodernist Mode

Garp's registering and re-functioning of techniques that I would identify as specifically postmodernist are, once more, played out predominantly on the thematic rather than formal level. Raymond Wilson has argued that Garp is a postmodern novel because it reuses "previous forms" in the manner of a Barthian "literature of replenishment."43 He convincingly suggests that "Garp recapitulates within itself a history of the twentieth-century novel"— the education of Garp, in other words, is mirrored by what may be called the education of the novel.44 The text shifts from "an early twentieth-century mode" of the modernist bildungsroman to "a midcentury novel of manners, a section of Garp that approximates the aura of an Updike novel or Cheever story" to a "postmodern mode."45 Yet the "mode" to which Wilson refers is created by theme rather than formal technique.

The first part of Garp is set in Steering, the boarding school where Garp and his mother live until his graduation, and in Europe, where they start their writing careers. In virtue of these settings and stories of initiation — into sex, death, and literature — Garp resembles the modernist bildungsroman. Similarly, Garp and Helen's early married life and their infidelities characterize the middle section of the novel and make it thematically akin to Updike or Cheever. The last part, which begins with the car accident and ends with Jenny's and Garp's assassinations, represents Garp's world as full of fear and paranoia, allegorized by the figure of the "Under Toad." Garp's writing mirrors these stages in the history of the novel, too. As the reader can gather from narratives included in the text and the commentary on the ones that are not included, Garp's writing is influenced by these stages thematically, but — like Irving's — maintains a realist-mimetic technique and an overtly chronological narration throughout. Procrastination, his first novel, is set in Vienna during WWII and, according to one review cited in the text, "encompasses the longings and agonies of youth"; it is thus related to the bildungsroman and "European" modernism.46 Second Wind of the Cuckold, then, is a thinly disguised parody of Garp's and Helen's mid-marriage affairs — a comedy of manners. His third novel, The World According to Bensenhaver, tells the story of a detective whose wife was raped and murdered and who spends the rest of his life watching out for Hope Cavendish, who barely escapes murder after being raped.  Raping and killing are staged for the reader in spectacular, unsparing detail; in fact, the rapist's dead body, splayed out in the driver's cabin of his truck, is described in terms of a macabre piece of art. This third novel is thus set in a world seen through a postmodern lens in which images of violence become mere simulacra — while also hewing to the brutality typical of the genre of hardboiled detective fiction, thereby merging "high" and "low" in a postmodernist gesture.

With each novel, Garp suggests, Garp has consciously tried to amend previous shortcomings. He comes to see his first, historical novel as deficient because it strays too far from his own experience; his second, too close to autobiography, does not transform personal experience into a "better" story by the power of imagination and is thus, ultimately, doomed to irrelevance. In his own and most of his readers' view, The World According to Bensenhaver is his "truest" and most relevant novel because it is based on experience transformed by the imagination, but it lacks the "soft touch" of imagining the possibility of a slightly better world, or the "soft touch" of a hopeful ending — even though its main character is called Hope. Bensenhaver, which promises the reader masochistic pleasure but no redemption, may be seen as Garp's "popular postmodernist" novel. After Bensenhaver's best-selling success, Garp experiences his longest period of writer's block, precisely because he lacks access to humanity's shared goodness, which is necessary to imagining a hopeful ending.

In the remaining third of Garp, Garp eventually breaks free from his block by republishing his very first story. Irving performs with Garp an aesthetic and ethical return to "The Pension Grillparzer," which is also a return to the form of the middlebrow bildungsroman, updated to present conditions. "The Pension Grillparzer" is re-published with illustrations contributed by Garp's son Duncan. Not coincidentally, this piece of writing is instrumental in emotionally knitting together the Garp family throughout Garp's life. It first wins Helen's hand and then projects Garp into a future lineage of artists by providing ten-year-old Duncan with his first opportunity to go public as the illustrator and painter he grows up to become. The republication and filial rejuvenation of "The Pension Grillparzer" renew not only Garp, the writer, but also Garp, the man, husband, and father. Not coincidentally either, the story paratextually pays homage to Franz Grillparzer; thus — looking backward in history rather than forward — it makes Garp an heir to a genealogy of great writers. Garp then begins writing his fourth novel, My Father's Illusions, and finally achieves maturity as a writer, striking the balance between memory and imagination, despair and kindness, critical acclaim and commercial success. What Garp consciously writes against in this novel, which depicts a father's attempts to make the world safe for his children, is the postmodern fragmentation of the world that can no longer be held together by a grand récit and the fragmentation of the individual that can no longer attain wholeness through aesthetic Bildung.

The dynamics of Garp's development as a writer simultaneously make for Garp's postmodernity and middlebrowness. In providing constant commentary on Garp's writing, Garp implicitly critiques the twentieth-century novel at large and can thus be seen as postmodern "historiographic metafiction," recalibrating the history of the novel.47 Garp's development, however, goes beyond the postmodern and, as I argue, the mature Garp emerges as a postmodern middlebrow writer. Granted, Garp cannot finish his novel: he is killed by a radical feminist. In this way, postmodern violence and paranoia seem to call into question whether the creation of a successful middlebrow work of art in postmodern times is viable after all — whether a novel can, in fact, take on postmodernism and at the same time promise uplift and provide a sentimental education.

If, however, the character Garp is cut short before narratively overcoming postmodern violence and disintegration in My Father's Illusions, the author Irving programmatically offers a grand récit of an ordered world, individual wholeness, and successful sentimental Bildung with Garp itself — a fourth novel just like Garp's. By way of its title, The World According to Garp, Irving's novel paratextually reaches beyond Garp's popular success with The World According to Bensenhaver and his adoption of an anti-modernist stance.48 The World According to Garp is thus suggested to the reader as a counterpart to Garp's My Father's Illusions that leads Irving's work to its logical anti-postmodernist conclusion outside of the story world. Garp (almost) and Garp (successfully) develop a middlebrow aesthetic beside and beyond postmodernism. As Irving signals paratextually that his novel reaches beyond the character Garp's aesthetic vision in Bensenhaver so his narrator's story reaches well beyond Garp's violent, "postmodern" death: the narrator's omniscient power concludes the narrative, accounts for each character, and projects their lives into a hopeful future in a long epilogue.

One might argue, however, that Garp displays other postmodern characteristics that escape eventual containment within a middlebrow realist narrative. Kim McKay has demonstrated that the conflict between memory and imagination with which Garp has to struggle in his writing is mirrored by the conflicting voices that the narrator adopts — that of the biographer and that of the fiction writer.49 The voice of the biographer is characterized by dwelling on dates and historical facts of Garp's life and by quoting from a variety of sources: letters to and from Garp, reviews of his work, and excerpts from what is supposedly Garp's unpublished journal. The voice of the fiction writer or narrator is characterized by instances of interiority. It is clear from the start that this narrative voice is omniscient, as there are multiple internal focalizers. Moreover, the narrator employs what Elke Weiß has called the Dickensian "Dear reader" gesture: there are long stretches of overt "telling" and judging interspersed within a more covert "showing" of events.50 The explicit double-voicedness that Garp exhibits could be read as a way in which the novel, in postmodern fashion, questions the ontological status of fiction.51 Moreover, in representing Garp's bildung as a writer, Garp — as I have shown above — makes almost excessive use of fictions within fiction, and could thus similarly be read as undermining the novel's referentiality.

Instead of using these metafictional strategies to lay bare the text's artificiality and suggest its non-referentiality, I argue that Irving employs them to the opposite effect. The tension between the referential voice of the biographer and the imaginative voice of the narrator is, indeed, rather pronounced at the beginning of the novel. McKay and Weiß also suggest that, because the autobiographer's voice returns in the epilogue, the tension is sustained throughout the novel. The autobiographer's "quoting" voice, however, only returns at the epilogue's very beginning and, I suggest, does so only in order to showcase the way in which the novel resolves the potential separation of fiction and the real world.  "An epilogue," the narrator quotes Garp, "in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future."52 The narrator goes on to trace the life stories of all characters that played a part in Garp's life until their end and allows only the youngest member of Garp's extended family, Jenny Garp, to survive the end of the narrative. He provides this information in the mode of the omniscient, authorial narrator who can represent the interiority of all of his characters. By way of Garp's quip about epilogues and by "wrapping up the past" through projection into the future, the text suggests a relationship between fiction and the world that is less concerned with whether fiction can grasp and represent reality meaningfully than with its capacity to imagine a "future," better world. Garp's self-declared function, then, is not to represent a copy of reality, but to represent and imagine reality in such a way that it can model a better reality for the reader — or, in the postmodern paranoid version put forward by Garp, to "warn" him or her about the future. Sentimental didacticism rather than the truthful representation of the world as a novelistic goal is underlined by the narrator's "Dear Reader" mode. Fact and fiction, in this view, are not opposed, but in fact need to be integrated into both art and life: life, if lived according to Garp's sentimental education, will reward one with a good ending, just like it does characters in Garp's fictional world.

Similarly, the interpolation of fictions within fiction does not destabilize the status of the novel as a relevant intervention into reality. Specifically, Irving relates his novel (The World According to Garp) to the novel within the storyworld of Garp (The World According to Bensenhaver) by way of its title, a paratext that by its very nature is related to the "real-world" author rather than to the narrator. Moreover, Irving establishes parallels between his own writing and Garp's — My Father's Illusions, for instance, clearly anticipates Irving's own novel The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). Thus, Irving's fifth novel exists in the storyworld of Garp.  By nesting the real world into his fictional one in a gesture of postmodernist play while adhering, formally, to a mimetic-realist mode and authorial narration, Irving creates a seamless connection between the real and the fictional world rather than questioning their relation. In the same way, he also represents narrator, characters, author, and readers as part of one affective community — a hallmark of middlebrow literary practices.53

In The World According to Garp, the effects of modernist and postmodernist technique — such as the creation of more complex meaning through intertexts and a destabilizing of the referential character of narrative — are contained or neutralized by the "embracing tone of voice"54 and vision of the omniscient narrator who can "imagin[e ...] the whole"55 and weave it into one seamless, hopeful narrative. Garp is as "accessible" as it is, and can usefully be described as postmodern middlebrow, because post/modernist formal experiment never overwhelms or makes illegible the chronological narrative of bildung.

Garp's Progressivism and Conservative Containment

Progressive — rather than formally experimental — elements of Garp are neutralized in a similar fashion: through the ordering vision of the authorial narrator. Jenny Fields, for instance, becomes a feminist icon, but does so against her will, as the authorial narrator stresses while reporting her thoughts.56 She conceives of her best-selling autobiography A Sexual Suspect not as a feminist statement, but as a defense of her own, private choice to live without a husband and still have a child, and "never wholly understood how 'political' a book it was — or how it would be used as such as book."57 Similarly, Garp rejects political interpretations of his private life. When an interviewer suggests that Garp has learned a lesson from his feminist mother and adopted a feminine role for himself, Garp protests: "'I'm doing what I want to do ... Don't call it by any other name. I'm just doing what I want to do — and that's all my mother ever did, too. Just what she wanted to do."58 The authorial narrator does not undermine this statement in any way. Living out progressive gender roles is cast in Garp as a personal choice, not a political act. Testing out progressive "politics" in the private realm while disavowing their larger societal implications, or folding progressive politics safely back into a larger conservative narrative, has been seen as typical of middlebrow literature. Lauren Berlant's account of the project of "liberal national sentimentality" captures the exact ideological dynamics that Garp performs. Those subscribing to this sentimental and, I would claim, middlebrow project "become public on behalf of privacy and imagine that their rupture of individuality by collective action is temporary and will be reversed once the national world is safe, once again, for a return to personal life." Garp and characters such as Jenny Fields engage in a "sentimental politics" whose goal is, in fact, its own eradication.59

In Garp, the notion that living out alternative gender roles is a personal, unproblematic, unpolitical choice is made convincing because, as Marilyn French has stressed, "according to Irving [the world] is on the whole a lovely place... The important people in this world are essentially androgynous, capable of living out all parts of themselves...Since it is androgynous, Garp's world is also a place of sexual equality."60 In this world of sexual equality, Garp, Jenny, Helen, and transsexual Robert/a Muldoon do not meet with any rejection by their families or society because of their non-traditional choices. Their choices, in fact, become problematic for them only when they are instrumentalized politically by feminist activists: Jenny is killed by a husband who did not appreciate his wife's feminist awakening after reading A Sexual Suspect, and Garp is killed by a feminist because Garp is cast by activists as a misogynist who perfidiously uses his feminist mother as a cover-up for his sexual crimes. Feminist activism is rendered an extremist aberration, and it convincingly comes across as such in a world without apparent gender discrimination, which is imagined by Garp's narrator and evoked through realist aesthetics. This authorial narrator's vision thus invalidates the perspective of feminist activists in the novel, while allowing for progressive gender roles only within a clearly delimited field. As the epilogue suggests on the level of discourse, and as Garp's vision of a father making the world safe for his children suggests on the level of story, alternative gender roles can be lived out only in the realm of an elected, patriarchally oriented family, in which living out one's individuality always contributes to a familial sense of belonging for all.

Reading Garp Symptomatically

If we read Garp in the middlebrow fashion that the novel itself prescribes, the personal remains personal and signifies a realm of harmony and belonging. If we trust the authorial narrator's voice and take the "world according to the novel" as a meaningful representation of the real world despite all postmodernist ontological doubt, the political, in turn, becomes disruptive, extremist, and violent. Yet I want to suggest that Garp also allows for more academic ways of reading. Unlike the middlebrow epics of the midcentury, which Tom Perrin has claimed exhibit the chasm between reality and the texts' utopian hopeful endings openly and build on their readers' capacity for "disavowal," Garp works hard to conceal exactly that chasm. Because Garp integrates modernist and postmodernist elements and welds them together through a realist narrative, then, the novel cannot but create what Janice Radway has termed "ideological seams."61 Opening up those seams through more "academic" modes of reading, as I will do in a moment, can potentially undo the androgynous world according to Garp. Since the novel privileges a middlebrow mode of trustful reading, however, these seams should not be seen as automatically unravelling and "subverting" the authorial narrator's overall conservative vision.

Garp's use of the Philomel myth, mentioned above, is one example of the novel's integration of techniques that challenge the realist paradigm and may threaten the author's unifying vision of the textual world. The myth provides an intertext not only for the story of Ellen James, but also for the group of Ellen Jamesians — activists who have cut out their tongues in order to "speak" that which cannot be spoken and condemn the act of rape. These activists group around Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, and start to employ terrorist means as a response to rape. They live in a revengeful, murderous sisterhood similar to that of Philomel and Procne: they try to make men pay for sexual crimes, and Garp becomes their target. Yet while Ovid saves and transforms the sisters (along with the rapist Tereus) into birds, Garp does not save and transform the Ellen Jamesians. In a symptomatic reading, this emerges as a telling variation from the pre-text and may help critique Garp's problematic "feminism." The novel does not redeem the Ellen Jamesians — in fact, they eventually kill Garp. Hence, at the end of the novel there is no sense that anything productive, anything that positively transforms society, will ever come out of Ellen Jamesian activism — a fact that stands out harshly and reveals the exclusionary undercurrent of Garp's creation of a harmonious post-gender and, hence, post-feminist world if read against the Ovidian pre-text. The "mythical method" thus potentially does create new meaning in Garp as it does in modernist texts, but in doing so it pulls against the unifying voice of the authorial narrator that the novel urges the reader to trust and follow — and that a reader committed to middlebrow modes of reading will trust and follow. A similar case could be made with regard to the novel's excessive use of mise en abyme.

In the last analysis, however, Garp in middlebrow fashion provides readers with a sentimental education in how to read the novel: to take narrator and author as one's undeceiving interlocutors and the storyworld as the real world, in which characters model fulfilling ways of living. The novel ends with the narrator's epilogue, in which he accounts for every character in the novel and thus — like Garp in his last novel — "imagines the whole, sad histories of his fictional family."62 Because Garp purports to represent real life, each character eventually dies, but the novel concludes happily nevertheless. Its ending is not tentatively happy or open: it is overtly hopeful and assures the reader that if we have "energy" — that is, if we live purposefully and in contexts of familial belonging — death is defied: it is defied through lives lived meaningfully and through lives that beget new life, as that of Jenny Garp, who lives on as the novel ends. Meaning and belonging are within our grasp, the novel suggests, if we only try hard enough. Garp here rather overtly activates the middlebrow ideology of possessive individualism. Such optimism does not appear suddenly, as a deus ex machina to heal the wounds of the postmodern condition, but as the ethics toward which Garp has labored throughout the years of his bildung and which the reader finally reaches, too.

Tom Perrin has argued that the middlebrow bildungsroman of the midcentury features ambivalent but hopeful endings, which have been criticized as contrived because they allow for imagining truly happy endings. The middlebrow aesthetics of hopeful endings rested on the reader's willingness to disavow the complexity of the real world these novels were representing. Perrin has suggested, moreover, that due to the increasing tension between the representation of a complex world and hopeful endings, "disavowal" became more precarious, and the viability of the middlebrow insistence on such hopeful endings slowly disintegrated as the 1960s drew to a close. The middlebrow, in this reading, was replaced by "the full-scale fetishism of popular postmodernist fiction" by the likes of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth.63

My reading of Irving as a writer who integrates postmodern challenges into a narrative that is ultimately controlled by an authorial voice and that can still come to a hopeful ending has demonstrated, however, that there is another direction in which the middlebrow turns during the 1970s. Garp, I want to suggest, specifically works to overcome the tentativeness, the contradictions, and the fragile "aesthetics of disavowal" that characterize the midcentury middlebrow novel refracted through modernism.64 It does so by narrating its hero's successful "sentimental education" and his emergence as an unalienated individual within a clearly defined space in family and society, while incorporating and confronting the formal as well ethical challenges of postmodernism and the postmodern era. The novel thereby harks back to earlier twentieth-century incarnations of the middlebrow and updates them in the face of postmodernist fragmentation, despair, and paranoia.  In so doing, it proposes what Irving himself has called an "aesthetics of accessibility" that implies a moral vision.65 Instead of giving way to popular postmodernism, The World According to Garp remakes the form of the midcentury middlebrow novel to withstand relinquishment of the possibilities of novelistic referentiality and aesthetic education.