Until recently, many feminist critics have defined the feminist novel on the basis of theme and character. One such critic, for example, writes that a novel "can serve the cause of liberation" and "earn feminist approval" if it performs "one or more of the following functions: 1) serves as a forum for women, 2) helps achieve cultural androgyny, 3) provides role models, 4) promotes sisterhood, 5) augments consciousness raising." The importance of focusing on the relation between gender and narrative structure, rather than on character, can be shown through an examination of a novel that seems to make feminism a central concern, John Irving's The World According to Garp.

The hero of that novel receives this rave review for one of his books: "The women's movement has at last exhibited a significant influence on a significant male writer." Irving's Garp begs for a similar review. It sympathetically discusses feminist issues such as rape, single motherhood, the aspirations of women for political power, domestic role reversal. In a gesture toward androgyny, it provides characters who prove the viability of transsexuality. Its major women characters are strong and capable. One of them, Garp's mother Jenny Fields, is a champion of feminists, who authors her life and insists upon directing her own destiny. The other, Garp's wife Helen, is an exemplar of intelligence and cool professionalism. She supports the family while Garp minds the children, cooks and cleans—an arrangement that satisfies them both.

Yet surely even a cursory feminist analysis of this novel would reveal a strong ambivalence about feminism. All of the strong female characters are uncomfortable with the label "feminist," although, in their words, they are "not anti-feminist!" The narrator tells the reader that Jenny "felt discomfort at the word feminist. She was not sure what it meant but the word reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment" (the torturous treatment for syphilis in males). In the text, feminism always designates a simplistic ideology and those who embrace the term are extremists. But the deeper evidence of ambivalence about feminism is built, as we shall show, into the novel's form. Despite Garp's thematic performance of feminist criteria, the book ignores the fact that feminists formulate such criteria to challenge the male hegemony over writing and to end the silence of women. But though American feminists know that the male control of writing must be challenged, they rarely explicitly consider what The World According to Garp so self-consciously plays upon: the conventions of narrative and writing. We propose to open a feminist discussion of male control over writing by revealing how Garp protects narrative conventions and with them reinforces patriarchal power.

At first it seems that The World According to Garp defends women's right to claim traditionally male prerogatives. The book begins with a description of Garp's mother, Jenny. Jenny competently defends herself against "male lust" and staunchly commits herself to single motherhood, thus undercutting the male's traditional rights over her body and his place as head of the family. She is neither a dutiful daughter nor anyone's wife and we are encouraged to admire her because of this. Furthermore, she recounts her rebellion against traditional sex roles in an autobiography that "bridges the usual gap between literary merit and popularity." The book, entitled A Sexual Suspect, is popular because it speaks for a multitude of women who soon become Jenny's followers. All this seems to suggest that women can have control over themselves and writing—but what is the status of Jenny's writing?

Although she is an influential writer, Jenny's book is "no literary jewel." Garp puts it more bluntly when he says that the book has "the literary merit of the Sears Roebuck catalog." His metaphor points out what he considers to be the book's main flaws: a mundane prose style and simple-minded organizational scheme. The only way that Jenny can bind her story together ("the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape," the narrator tells us) is with this opening sentence: "In this dirty-minded world, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on the way of becoming one or the other." This sentence provides the book with a unity of tone—strident assertiveness—presumably appropriate to her thesis: the right of individual women to refuse their two traditional options. Garp's literary assessment of Jenny's style thus becomes an unspoken commentary on her thesis. We are led to believe that Jenny's literary prose style is evidence of a dogmatic and somewhat simple-minded view of the world. "Disharmonious," "rambling," "messy," Jenny's book is a testament to her failure to produce a truly coherent work that could capture the "complexity" of "human behavior." Unlike "art," A Sexual Suspect can only catalogue experience—it is "about me"—and render it in a literal-minded way.

Jenny is the central woman character in the novel, and A Sexual Suspect is the most powerful instance of women's writing. In order to limit the authority of this writing, the novel retains, in order to denounce, the idea of "literal writing." The notion that literal writing even exists rests upon the assumption that language is transparent so that words are able to represent accurately their referents—the world or the self. This assumption informs much literary criticism, including feminist literary criticism which valorizes women's writing that is somehow particularly close to life. Elizabeth Janeway, for example, writes in the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing that "If there is a woman's literature, it will derive from an area of experience, worthy of exploration which is known pretty exclusively to women and largely overlooked by men." She goes on to say that "authentic literature reflects actual life." Her second statement, less cautious than her first, binds her to a view of literature that Irving easily denounces in the name of "art," although, as we will show, his "art" also claims to represent the world. But it is in his interest to set up this false opposition to give his own writing a special value. Literature based solely on experience is proved to be shapeless and timebound through Jenny's book. Her messy story is timely but ephemeral: after Jenny's death, The Sexual Suspect is never printed again. Irving further critiques "literature that reflects actual life" by suggesting that the writer devoted to actual life cannot sustain the act of writing: having captured and depleted her subject matter—"me"—Jenny has no more to write.

In The World According to Garp, autobiographical writing is called the "worst" kind of writing. With this judgment, the most powerful form of women's writing in the novel is discredited. But to be fair, Garp does provide alternative forms of writing by "better" women writers, though these alternatives are withdrawn as soon as they are offered. One character, Alice, writes beautifully. She cares about language as a thing in itself, rather than as a mere tool for reflecting life, but she is unable to finish a single novel. Another, Ellen James, is a good poet. But her collection of poems, Speeches Delivered to Animals and Flowers, and her genre, the lyric poem, are made to seem peripheral in a novel whose very subject matter privileges the narrative rendering of complex human behavior.

The writing of the major male character, Garp, is set in opposition to the writing of all these women. It is imaginative rather than literal, beautifully written, complete and complex—in short, it makes Garp into what the narrator calls a "real writer." The opposition between male and female writing is set in sharpest relief at the beginning of the novel through the contrast of Jenny's writing with Garp's. Irving juxtaposes the ease with which Jenny steadily produces her 1,158 page life story with the difficulty with which T. S. Garp writes a short story that has very little to do with his own experience. While Jenny's story comes from memory, Garp's story, "The Pension Grillparzer," is drawn from an interior source that is privileged in the novel—imagination. "Imagination, Garp realized, came harder than memory."

Though serious reviewers "chide" Jenny for "her actual writing," her book becomes a "household product." Garp's story, on the other hand, "would first appear in a serious journal where nobody would read it." But even though he initially lacks an audience. Garp's is the more fecund mode of writing. "The Pension Grillparzer" is the first of several "serious stories" published in "a serious way" that culminate in a book, The World According to Bensenhaver, which wins him everything: it is both serious and popular. Still (because it is so "imaginative"), "The Pension Grillparzer" is considered his best work by everyone in the novel whose judgment seriously counts. This high evaluation of Garp's work, placed next to derogatory remarks about Jenny's book, is Irving's way of teaching us the importance of "imagination" in writing. And this lesson is repeated over and over in the novel.

All that is said about imaginative fiction in Garp invites the reader to admire rather than understand it. As in literal writing, language is transparent in the fictional world but its referent is different: literal writing reveals the "real world" whereas good fiction reveals "imagination." Claiming that a work that is "imaginative" is an important maneuver because distancing writing from the world elevates its status. The "imaginative" work is freed from the exigencies of history and thus enters the realm of eternal objects. Furthermore, the apparent autonomy of the imaginative work insures its "wholeness"—imaginative work is true to itself. This "inner truth" must be worshipped rather than articulated. Reviewers who use redemptive strategies of interpretation are the objects of Garp's scorn: he mutters about "The destruction of art by sociology and psychoanalysis." Immutable, whole, true, the work of art is "better" than the known and knowable world.

Yet for all of Garp's insistence on the separateness of the imaginative work, he also claims that it is "better" than literal-minded fiction because it is closer to the world. A leap of faith is required if we are to accept this paradox. Apparently the creation of an autonomous work requires such mastery and artistry that the work is assured of being mysteriously complex. And since life itself is mysterious and complex, the work is true to life. This logic bestows a god-like power on the author and helps us accept the thesis that art is a sacred ideal. For all his efforts to differentiate fictional and literal writing, the two forms converge: Garp insistently promotes a theory of writing that depends on his notion of "reality"—his writing, so we are encouraged to believe, is the "real" thing.

What is women's relationship to this valorized realm of writing? In the novel, women are destined to consume rather than produce "art." Garp, the incarnation of the active male imagination, is a "natural storyteller," while his audience consists of women, who like his wife Helen seem to be "natural" spectators for this writing. Jenny, a prolific "bad" writer, is simply awed by "real writing." Upon reading her son's first story, "Jenny marvelled at her son's imagination." She is not only awed, but silenced: she reads many books, but "she had nothing to say about them." Helen, too, is a voracious reader, but acknowledges she cannot write. Nevertheless, her fine critical intelligence allows her to appreciate fully works of imagination. In fact, all of the women readers—including Alice, the babysitter Cindy, and Mrs. Ralph—are cast into the role of born consumers and spectators, awed and seduced by the display of male authority.

Men, on the other hand, are active, productive readers and writers. Garp reads only to produce fiction and writes fiction to seduce women. When Garp's writing does not seduce women—be it Helen, Alice or Cindy—it still functions in a procreative way to increase his family. At the end of the novel, he attracts Ellen James by The World According to Bensenhaver and eventually adopts her. The World According to Garp clearly advocates, then, a familiar dichotomy between an active male principle and a passive female principle. This familiar sexual dichotomy, assumed by the novel to be a fact of nature, determines who will write and who will read. "Real" writing, in this novel, is intimately connected with the "active" male and his sexuality.

It is not only this particular novel, of course, that makes the claim that only men can produce "art." Men have long appropriated the power of writing by maintaining as natural and inevitable the metaphorical link between pen and penis, author and patriarch. In Garp, the thematic opposition between male and female writers serves this end. But finally it is the very structure of the novel itself, its narrative conventions, that most strongly defends the equation of author and patriarch. Several modern theorists have pointed out the ways in which the conventions of narrative, and particularly of the novel, give expression to and serve the interests of patriarchy. "The purpose of narrative," writes Dianne Sadoff, "including the narrative about purpose or vocation, is to seek the figure of the father, to write the paternal metaphor and to acquire paternal authority." This paternal authority is inscribed in narrative form through the structuring of a significant sequence of events that moves toward a conclusion which bestows both finality and integrity on the text. The conventions of the novel—sequence, finality, integrity—are therefore not neutral. "The novel," as Edward Said points out, "most explicitly realizes these conventions, gives them coherence and imaginative life by grounding them in a text whose beginning premise is paternal."

The story of Oedipus, which has become the patriarchal myth par excellence, is the paradigm for narrative structure. Without Oedipus, Roland Barthes tells us, story-telling is impossible:

The death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origins, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?… As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something: to make good novels, to tell good stories.

The passage from ignorance to knowledge, the familiar trajectory of the realistic novel, re-enacts the Oedipal drama. But this passage of discovery, it is important to note, is specifically dependent upon the discovery of sexual difference. In the Oedipal drama, the son moves from the naive assumption that everyone has a penis to the discovery of women's lack. This discovery of castration and the anxiety it provokes propel him towards reconciliation with the Law of the Father, the Symbolic Order.

The plot of The World According to Garp perfectly re-enacts the classical trajectory of the traditional novel. It is the story of the life and development of a male writer, who, by learning his craft, which entails writing stories that become more and more obviously the Oedipal story (My Father's Illusions is his last novel), finally acquires patriarchal authority. But Garp also literally represents what the structure of this dream depends upon: the fear of castration and the corresponding insistence upon sexual differences defined by "castration" (or lack). This fear is represented when Helen bites off Michael Milton's penis; but more threatening to Garp is the graphic equation of castration and silence in the figures of the Ellen Jamesians—women who cut off their own tongues. Here women seem to choose what the Oedipal drama makes necessary: women are defined by silence and by a lack that is perceived as mutilation. The familiar trajectory of the novel, then, depends as much upon the drama of silencing and castrating (mutilating) the female as it does upon reconciling the son to the father. It is the demands of the novelistic structure itself which inscribe, not only male authority and female silence, but the violence done to women as well.

Irving not only relies on this structure but defends it in a way that Roland Barthes does not. Roland Barthes poses his questions about the death of the father and its consequences for narrative as part of a meditation on modern writing that both performs and subverts the conventions of traditional narrative. In some sense, The World According to Garp is also a meditation on the death of the father and its consequences for narrative and the male writer. Certainly because it is about the development of a writer, the book has occasion to perform and comment upon the conventions of narrative writing. Garp opens with the death of the father (Garp's), like nineteenth-century novels which often begin by presenting the reader with fatherless orphans. But unlike the nineteenth-century novel, Garp connects the death of the father to the rise of woman, particularly the rise of the mother to power. In response to his shift of power, Garp, the hero-writer, becomes more and more adamant about protecting patriarchy, not only, as we have seen, by equating "real writing" with male writing, but also by protecting traditional narrative conventions.

One of Garp's early experiences demonstrates Irving's defensive response to challenges to traditional conventions. When the young Garp submits his first story for publication, it is rejected by one journal because the story "does nothing new with language or with form." Puzzled, Garp consults his teacher, Mr. Tinch, who taught him how to write by teaching him respect for "good old-fashioned grammar." But Mr. Tinch, who reeks of death and decay, is simply as puzzled as Garp. The rotting Mr. Tinch seems to embody Irving's awareness of the decay of "old-fashioned" standards and conventions; nonetheless, Irving valorizes Garp's adherence to them. When Garp's writing becomes more "successful," i.e., popular, the same journal requests one of his stories. Garp triumphantly shoots back a nasty rejection on the rejection slip he had received so many years ago: "I am still doing nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for asking me though." Success has vindicated Garp's inflexibility with form. Experimenting with narrative convention, we are meant to understand, is simply a fad. What really counts—to everybody—is success, which becomes a validation for the truth of traditional narrative form.

By adhering to conventions which meet expectations and insure our pleasure, a writer is likely to be successful. Unconventional writing sacrifices the pleasure of structuring meaning in familiar ways and by doing so, challenges the status of any particular meaning as absolute. Irving cannot acknowledge that conventions of writing create the impression of truth because that acknowledgement would threaten his belief in his truthfulness and his seriousness. For Irving, narrative structure is a natural way to achieve and reflect the truth. But narrative is not natural; Irving simply naturalizes an important narrative convention—the convention of narrative sequence, of the significant accumulation of events toward an inevitable "truth." Thus Irving's conventionalism, which parallels Garp's, becomes a way of defending his own seriousness and a success that accompanies his adherence to the familiar.

Garp achieves his success with a book entitled The World According to Bensenhaver. Both the book's title and its major concerns, of course, are meant to parallel The World According to Garp. The sequence of events in both books is generated by sexual violence: both depend upon erotic polarization and the violence that ensues from it to make things happen. In the beginning of The World According to Bensenhaver Hope Standish is raped. The World According to Garp is powered by a first sentence that sets men and women in opposition: "Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942, for wounding a man in a movie theater." A simple plot summary demonstrates that the rest of the novel continues to rely on the war between the sexes: Jenny does not want to have anything to do with men. She writes a book in defense of this position. Her book attracts a group of feminist extremists, the Ellen Jamesians, to Jenny and Garp. These women have banded together to make the raped and mutilated eleven-year-old Ellen James a political cause, and in the end kill Garp. The battle of the sexes is reproduced within Garp's family where sexual tensions between Garp and Helen lead to a catastrophe in which Helen sexually mutilates a man and Garp kills one of his own children. In sum, sexual violence is what happens in the novel.

In each book, the sequence of events seems contrived to fulfill the popular demand for violence, but Irving works to extol the "seriousness" of his violent narrative by defending the seriousness of Garp's novel. Jillsey Sloper, in her defense of The World According to Bensenhaver, acts as Irving's mouthpiece. Jillsey Sloper is a reader who has an intuitive access to what makes a work popular as well as a feeling for the deeper truths of literature. She finds "sick" (i.e., violent) books compelling; "This book is so sick. You know somethin's gonna happen, but you can't imagine what." But she dignifies this perversity by saying that "it feels so true"—the narrator comments later that Jillsey uses "true" in the "good way," not as in "real life." Here we have it again: Garp's writing is not like life and yet it is a perfect representation of it; as Jillsey explains, with "true" books one can say, "Yeah! That's just how damned people behave all the time!"

There are several "truths" being defended here. One is that Garp is a serious writer, who can capture the "truth" of human behavior. Another is that narrative sequence, what happens, is natural—there is a compelling human "instinct" to want to know what happens—and this narrative sequence is fully adequate to expressing human behavior. Finally, male power is necessary and inevitable, so sexual violence is as well. For their "truth," Irving and Garp depend upon the "naturalness" of an active male principle and a passive female principle, a polarization that is erotic, violent, hierarchical, and gives rise to women's victimization. Irving's narrator is clearly unhappy about this victimization and insists on decrying male violence in the form of rape. But it doesn't matter. Irving's explanation for rape, finally, is male lust, an extreme form of the active male principle. Rape, then, is another consequence of the facts of nature. And in the figure of the Ellen Jamesians, who cut off their own tongues in sympathy with Ellen James, Irving entertains the notion that the extreme of female "nature"—masochism—is also a cause of the victimization of women. This victimization in turn generates a "natural" sequence of events—a true narrative. Narrative is naturalized, is itself the truth.

Because in classical narrative it is so important to know "what happens," and to know the meaning of what happens, the conclusion is always privileged. "Truth, these (traditional) narratives tell us, is at the end of expectation." This truth is conventionally embodied in the hero's death—the moment when meaning is conferred upon his entire life, giving the narrative—normally the story of his life—coherence as well. "A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases" is the way Garp chooses to formulate this convention. Having naturalized narrative sequence by naturalizing violence between the sexes, Irving makes seemingly inevitable the novel's conventional momentum toward death. Our hero, Garp, must die as a result of sexual violence, and his death confers meaning upon the novel.

If we were to pay attention only to the subject matter, it would seem as though Irving were proposing something like the following: feminism is exacerbating the battle between the sexes, and bringing more violence into society. The best-intentioned men are becoming weaker, are less emotionally capable of dealing with this violence. They are mutilated or killed—they cannot endure. The best of women are stronger. They deal with violence wisely and they will survive, just as Helen and Hope do. But when we see the importance of the form of narrative, that death is what confers meaning on the whole of the narrative, we can see how, in fact, Irving is saying that the survival of women is insignificant since men will endure in more important ways. Garp's death serves only to make his life more important. In death, Garp becomes the all-powerful father that he could never quite be in life.

The last chapter, "Life After Garp," tells how the surviving characters of the novel devote the rest of their lives to making Garp's life more important and meaningful by remembering it. Helen, Roberta, Duncan, Jenny, various biographers and critics, all join in a chorus dedicated to singing Garp's praises. Having apparently conceded the loss of the father in the beginning of his novel, Irving reminds us here that the father, in his death, simply becomes more important.

An analysis of traditional narrative conventions teaches us how the death of the father can make him larger than life. Paradoxically, patriarchy can be served by assaults on it, and this means that feminism can be made the obstacle of its own ends. In Garp, not only does the death of the father at the hands of a feminist extremist dignify the hero at the expense of feminist ideology, but Irving can also use the feminist issue of rape to entrench patriarchal power by making sexual violence seem "natural" and by using it to generate and naturalize narrative sequence. Irving easily writes a book that meets thematic criteria for the "feminist" novel—he includes strong female characters who are attractive survivors—without ever jeopardizing the patriarchal power inscribed in traditional narrative conventions. So rather than concentrating on whether or not a work of fiction truthfully represents women—a critical focus which assumes that a transparent writing is possible—feminist critics should examine how writing creates the illusion of truth. In the novel, and in The World According to Garp, truth is structured in such a way as to guarantee paternal authority and to silence women no matter how much they seem to speak.