The postmodern novel contains all the earlier modes of the novel, contains them intrinsically within the process by which a literature of exhausted possibilities replenishes itself. Such commentators as Albert J. La Valley, Herman Kahn, and Christopher Lasch may see causes of change in recent literature in deep cultural contexts. La Valley says that the new literature reflects a new consciousness that has been "inspired in part by the breakdown of our culture, its traditions, and its justifications of the American social structure," (1); Kahn and Wiener refer to our culture as being in the "Late Sensate" stage, our art, including literature, reflecting a culture in the state of decline (40-41); and Lasch argues that "Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas" and that there is "a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction" (xii). However, the originator of the expression "literature of exhaustion," John Barth, referred to it as "the literature of exhausted possibilities" and says that by "'exhaustion' I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral or intellectual decadence, only the usedupness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities" (Klein 267). Despair might be the reaction of a contemporary writer of fiction when he or she faces the realization that the limited number of possible variations in the form of fiction may have already been explored, but Barth has an answer. While today's author may panic at the idea of being condemned to merely repeat what a Flaubert, a James, a Fitzgerald, or a Joyce has discovered and what countless others have already repeated, Barth finds the situation "by no means necessarily a cause for despair" (Klein 267).

The escape from panic, Barth finds, comes in a story by Borges. In the story "Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote" Borges described his character Menard's astonishing effort of will in producing—composing, not copying—several chapters of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Borges's narrator points out that despite being verbally identical the recomposition is a new, fresh work: what for Cervantes was merely an everyday, workmanlike style of prose is for Menard a clever, playful use of quaint, semi-antiquated diction; what for Cervantes were mere commonplaces of conventional rhetoric can be for Menard a series of radical, exciting departures from the accepted wisdom of his day. Barth points out that it would have "been sufficient for Menard to have attributed the novel to himself in order to have a new work of art, from the intellectual point of view" (Klein 267). However, Barth feels that "the important thing to observe is that Borges doesn't attribute the Quixote to himself, much less recompose it like Pierre Menard; instead, he writes a remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. Barth believes that Borges's "artistic victory," emerges from confronting "an intellectual dead end," and employing it "against itself to accomplish new human work" (Klein 272).

In its reuse of earlier forms, we can see how The World According to Garp is related to postmodern works by John Barth and Robert Coover. In "Menelaiad," a story in Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth parodies the Greek epic form; and in The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth contorts the genre of the eighteenth-century novel. It would be a mistake to think that Barth is writing an epic or an eighteenth-century novel. Nor is Barth really writing a Richardsonian epistolary novel in Letters. Instead, Barth writes a postmodern novel that plays with the form. Similarly, Coover is not writing a mystery in Gerald's Party; instead, this novel, as William Gass is quoted as saying on the dust jacket, "sends up the salon mystery so far it will never come down. What comes down is a terrible indictment of our desires." Just so, The World According to Garp plays with the modernist forms of the artist's bildingsroman and the mid-century American comedy of manners and necessarily makes an implicit comment upon them, as I shall argue later. Garp, by its reuse of modernist forms, stands in the same territory as these works by Barth and Coover.

By reusing existing forms this new fiction opens for itself doors to endless opportunities for freshness. Borges's story, for example, is itself a parody of the critical article. The postmodern novel's parody reveals a literary form returning to its point of origin to renew itself. Barth points out that the Quixote is itself a parody of an earlier form—the poetic romance. One thinks immediately of Defoe's stories parodying news articles and his novels in the form of personal reminiscences. Richardson is said to have begun Pamela as a model set of letters for young ladies and to have thus invented the English epistolary novel almost by accident.