Dark Apprenticeships the Novels of John Irving
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Dark Apprenticeships The Novels of John Irving Matthew Fentem Dark Apprenticeships The Novels of John Irving INAUGURAL-DISSERTATION zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Neuphilologischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg ursprünglich vorgelegt von Matthew A. Fentem, M.A. im Mai 2010 Veröffentlicht im Juli 2012 Table of Contents Section Page Acknowledgements 3 Introduction Goals and Methodology 4 Chapter One The World of Initiation: The World According to Garp 40 Chapter Two Is Home Really Where the Heart Is?: The Hotel New Hampshire 72 Chapter Three Choice and Cost: The Cider House Rules 107 Chapter Four Finding the Way Back: A Widow for One Year 147 Chapter Five Beyond Skin Deep: Until I Find You 187 Chapter Six Putting Together the Pieces: Rebuilding John Irving 219 Bibliography 238 Cover illustration courtesy of Agnieszka Baraniecka 2 Acknowledgements There were plenty of chances along the way to give up on this dissertation – the lack of funding, taking on a full-time job, other priorities getting in the way, etc. – and I can honestly say the only thing that kept that from happening were the lovely, caring and supportive people I am lucky to have in my life. In Germany, Alexander Seiler and Thomas Iredale always had my back. My parents faithfully supported me, even though they had to send their love 4,000 miles across the pond. The Baraniecka and Geschinski families, which I’m glad to say have grown by two new additions since this dissertation was first written, lent me their unfailing kindness and confidence throughout the years. And last but not least, I finished this work because of Elżbieta Baraniecka, who never stopped believing in me. 3 Introduction Goal and Methodology The following dissertation proposes to investigate the major works and contribution to American literature of John Irving, particularly through the frame of the Bildungsroman genre. While a number of critics take it as a given that Irving is a crafter of modern Bildungsromane, hardly any of them1 has bothered to invest the time and effort needed for a further and deeper investigation of just how Irving carries on that tradition. In addition to this lack of closer research into the makeup and classification of Irving’s writing, there also seems to be quite a dearth of secondary literature once one gets up to A Widow for One Year (1998); The Fourth Hand (2001) and Until I Find You (2005) remain fairly untouched by the academic world.2 For the purposes of this work, the former will be largely ignored though certainly briefly discussed, as it seems to represent the only novel in Irving’s repertoire that is not “Irving-esque”; in attempting to break free from the mold of his well-honed style, he succeeded in creating something very different – a tribute to the discipline and hard work he values – but also created his worst-received book in twenty years and (in my personal opinion, though this view is sadly widespread) a thoroughly uninspiring novel. A major focus of the work is his second most recent3 novel, the aforementioned Until I Find You, a book Irving has openly described as his most deeply personal to date, and a mammoth novel (over 800 pages in the paperback). Here the theme of the missing parent – a hallmark in one shape or another, and in varying degrees of intensity, in nearly all of his novels – comes in its most intense and unadulterated form, showing distinct and clearly painful parallels to Irving’s own life spent wondering about a father he never knew and was quite intentionally never told anything about by his mother, and hence had to invent. Of similar impact is the issue of child molestation, of which Irving became a victim at the age of 11, a fact which tainted his relations with women for over two decades; according to Irving himself, it was only the experience of having his own children and wanting desperately to protect 1 A notable and excellent exception is Elke Weiß’s John Irving und die Kunst des Fabulierens (2002). 2 The key secondary works on John Irving include John Irving by Carol C. Harter & James R. Thompson (1986); Understanding John Irving by Edward C. Reilly (1991); John Irving: A Critical Companion by Josie P. Campbell (1998); John Irving, Harold Bloom, ed. (2001), and Elke Weiß’s book (see above). 3 While the dissertation was being written, Until I Find You was the latest novel. As of the time of this dissertation’s publication, Irving has since published Last Night in Twisted River (2009) and In One Person (Simon & Schuster, 2012). 4 them from such predations that allowed him to finally reveal the secret he had kept since childhood (and thus begin with the process of working through it). Such factors make a brief biographical sketch, which will comprise the first section of the dissertation, indispensable. Once this has been accomplished, some preliminary remarks (largely from Irving himself) on Irving’s unique approach to the writing process will help to round out the necessary background information before turning to the genre of the Bildungsroman and particularly its evolution from German prototype to the twentieth / twenty-first century Anglo-American “version.” Attempting to fill this gap in the research will necessitate, prior to addressing the evolution, closely re-examining the genre itself in terms of what does and what does not constitute a Bildungsroman. A question of key importance to this work is that of where Irving chooses to utilize traditional methods and where he deviates from and innovates upon them, as evinced in a number of his most memorable and, from a Bildungsroman perspective, most interesting novels. Here a total of five4 of his to date twelve novels will be discussed, starting with his breakthrough work The World According to Garp and ending with the aforementioned Until I Find You. Once these concrete examples have been thoroughly examined, the dissertation will continue with an overall analysis of his varied and evolving writing style and will address his contribution as Bildungsromancier and to modern American literature. Finally, this work will investigate and discuss what may be considered Irving’s “internal” Bildungsroman. Though Irving himself is extremely critical of taking authors’ biographies into consideration when discussing their work, the very themes and approaches he has chosen make doing so practically unavoidable; interestingly, this has had something akin to a “chilling effect” on academic research into his work: the biographical tinge has been taken as something of a given and as such never been thoroughly investigated. This being the case, the question to what extent Irving’s development as a novelist reflects his own personal, inimitable and appropriately skewed “coming of age” calls for closer examination. John Irving: Biography in Brief The man who would come to be known worldwide as John Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. on March 1, 1942 in Exeter, New Hampshire. Irving never met or knew his biological father, whom he for years believed had divorced John’s mother before his birth. As he would 4 These five are: The World According to Garp (1978), The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), A Widow for One Year (1998), and Until I Find You (2005). 5 later discover, they in fact did not split until he was two years old.5 His mother would soon remarry, and at the age of six young John was adopted by his stepfather, Frances Winslow Irving, becoming John Winslow Irving. Irving recalls his childhood as one with a number of trials and major traumas. An aloof child and one who enjoyed spending a great deal of time on his own,6 Irving also struggled with dyslexia, which at the time was still undiagnosed. As such, school was difficult for him; though he would succeed in graduating from the rigorous Phillips Exeter Academy, it would take him five years and not the customary four.7 Tellingly, these first difficult experiences with the world of reading and writing by no means deterred Irving from enjoying literature; instead they instilled in him a sense of discipline, of having to earn what others took for granted: reading and writing, understanding and being understood. Running deeper than these difficulties, however, was the constant “presence in absence” of Irving’s biological father, the result not only of the boy’s natural curiosity, but also and especially to the fact that his father’s identity, character, etc. were all taboo topics for his mother; quite simply, she (and the rest of Irving’s family) adamantly refused to tell him a single thing about him. While Irving has repeatedly emphasized what a gift this was to him as someone learning to develop and expand his own imaginative abilities, it also had the double effect of withholding from him crucial information as to his provenance and of providing him his first, formative experience with the adult world of keeping secrets.8 Nor, sadly, was this to be the last such experience. In 1953, when Irving was only 11 years old, he was sexually abused by a much older woman, a friend of his mother’s in her twenties. Though Irving claims that, at the time, he did not necessarily understand that a crime had taken place and was very fond of the woman, what hurt him more than the act itself was the fact that he had to keep it a secret.9 As he progressed through puberty, Irving was also forced to recognize that he had a fixation on older women. At the time Irving blamed himself for this fixation, assuming there had to be something wrong with him; in retrospect, he claims that likely what he felt (though certainly not consciously) was the urge to keep forming secret relationships, in keeping with his sexual initiation.10 The combination of these secrets, both as to “where he came from” and “where he had been,” i.e., of having to imagine the biological father he never knew and to conceal a crime, 5 Academy of Achievement (2005) for actual account; Irving still believed in his mother’s original version of the facts in a 1998 interview, cf.