Irving's novel alludes to the phenomenon of metafiction when discussing the rejection note that Garp received for "The Pension Grillparzer": "The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form" (129). Tinch, Garp's former instructor, said he really did not understand the "newer fiction" except that it was supposed to be "about it-it-itself. . . . It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction," Tinch told Garp. Garp did not understand either and, in truth, cared mainly about the fact that Helen liked the story. But although Garp was not interested in metafiction at this stage of his career, we can see that Irving is to some degree practicing this aspect of the new fiction in the third section of Garp. While the accounts of Garp's earlier novels may bear a certain resemblance to Irving's own earlier works, these need not be considered metafictional manifestations; one merely suspects Irving of a certain wry humor of self parody, while he remains in the traditional mode of autobiographical fiction or even within the mere technique of an author drawing on his own experience for his fiction.⁸ In contrast, when we enter the third section we encounter Garp's novel The World According to Bensenhaver, with its obvious similarity in title to The World According to Garp. Although there are significant differences between the novel we are reading and the one we are reading about, the parallels and even the comedy of the differences cannot help but act as implicit comments upon the technique and compositional process of Garp.

"'Life,' Garp wrote," according to the novel, "'is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs where those who are meant to peter out have petered out"' (418). Such a metafictional comment in the third section does not surprise us. Indeed, we see this mode occurring repeatedly. When Garp's publisher, John Wolf, was dying he asked Garp's son Duncan "What would your father say to this? . . . Wouldn't it suit one of his death scenes? Isn't it properly grotesque?" (423). To the extent that we could ask this question equally of Irving as of Garp, the question has metafictional implications, as does what Wolf said about Garp's own grotesque mode of dying: "It was a death scene, John Wolf told Jillsy Sloper, that only Garp could have written" (414). When a character in a novel says that a death scene in that novel occurred in a way which "only" the dying character could have written, we are involved with metafiction.

The structure of the final chapter, which opens with a comment on Garp's fictional technique, has further metafictional implications: "He loved epilogues, as he showed us in The Pension Grillparzer.' 'An epilogue,' Garp wrote, 'is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future'" (407). And the final chapter—the nineteenth, identical to the number of chapters in The World According to Bensenhaver—ends with just such an epilogue. Irving's narrator makes the metafictional element nearly explicit: "He would have liked the idea of an epilogue, too," says the narrator after Garp's death, "—so here it is: an epilogue 'warning us about the future,' as T. S. Garp might have imagined it" (414). Thus the final twenty pages of the novel present us the interesting metafictional situation of an author writing the epilogue to his character's death as the narrator says the character would himself have imagined it. Metafiction, combined with the zone of the bizarre and the turn away from psychological depth makes the third section of the novel postmodern. While the first two thirds exhibit far less of these characteristics and more of those of earlier modes, these sections exhibit the postmodern reuse of earlier forms; thus, Garp is postmodern throughout.

In writing this novel, Irving stays true to his rejecting the spirit of the unreadable masterpieces of high modernism, but he is not returning to the mode of the nineteenth century; he is moving forward into postmodernism. In his desire to avoid the esoteric, Irving might find an ally in John Barth, who in "The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction" offers his "worthy program" in hopes that the postmodern mode may become a fiction "more democratic in its appeal" than the marvels of late modernism, reaching beyond the "professional devotees of high art" but perhaps not hoping to reach the "lobotomized mass-media illiterates" (Klein 70). In its best-seller popularity, The World According to Garp has at least fulfilled that aspect of Barth's program for postmodern fiction. This success may be described by the proposition that the postmodern novel, besides its special characteristics, also contains all earlier fictional forms, and John Irving's use of two of them opens his novel to a fruitful variety of combination and interaction.

NOTES

¹ Linda Hutcheon explores the specifically postmodern implications of genre manipulation in A Theory of Parody.

² Barth discusses the arguments of Gerald Graff, Robert Alter, and Ihab Hassan in "The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction." Events have proved Barth correct: writing in 1989 of the debate over a definition for the postmodern, Dietmar Voss and Jochen C. Schutze say that the participants "seem to agree on one thing: that there is the greatest possible disagreement as to what postmodernism is." The term "resists comprehensive definition," they say, and it "appears, at the same time, to accept content so arbitrarily that some commentators are deluded into regarding this arbitrariness itself as an essential characteristic of postmodernism" (119).

³ Linda Hutcheon examines the technique in her Narcissistic Narrative.

⁴ For a definition of bildingsroman, see Cuddon (78); Cuddon also defines kunstlerroman (246), an artist's bildingsroman, but Joyce was doing more than writing a kunstlerroman.

⁵ The expression "individuating rhythm" comes from Joyce (65) in an essay discussed by Litz (61). Among authors seeing the artist's bildingsroman as a specifically modern form are Scholes (18) and Sukenick (42).

⁶ Irving admires Cheever and feels "a great affinity with the class of people" that Cheever "writes about": upper-class people in trouble or pain, Irving (McCaffery interview 17).

⁷ The insight is attributed to Stanley Kaufmann by Howe in Klein (136).

⁸ In the McCaffery interview, Irving says that "there is a lot of self-parody" in Garp, "spoofs of my earlier works, games I'm having fun with" (7). Irving considers "autobiography as being merely a stepping-off point in fiction" (3).

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