As a novel that shifts from mode to mode, The World According to Garp illustrates the postmodern as a literature of replenishment: Garp recapitulates within itself a history of the twentieth-century novel, performing a tacit critique of the earlier forms. Irving starts in an early twentieth-century mode. Reviewing the fiction of this era, Irving Howe (Klein 124-41) says that whereas nineteenth-century realism studied social classes, early twentieth-century fiction studied the rebellion of the Stephen Dedaluses against behavior patterns imposed by social classes in a particular country. In this conception, the modern novel came into being when James Joyce reconstructed the existing form of the bildingsroman to create A Portrait.⁴ More than merely recasting the autobiographical novel into the "individuating rhythm" of Dubliners, Joyce helped form the modern consciousness itself. D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers shares this feature with Joyce's A Portrait; and although Lawrence's novel retains more of the trappings of nineteenth-century realism than Joyce's book, both create characters that do not fit into their own world but who express an aesthetic that is familiar in our intellectual climate.⁵ John Irving achieves similar effects in his bildingsroman.

The bildingsroman form is suited to linearity of narrative flow, reflecting the linear growth of a boy's life. In the McCaffery interview, John Irving claimed that he was "very conscious of attempting to make my narrative as absolutely linear as possible. . . . With my first four novels I was always troubled," says Irving, "particularly with Garp, about the convoluted flow of my narrative. . . . Garp was, in fact, a kind of minor breakthrough for me just in the sense that it was the first novel I managed to order chronologically" (11). Irving rejects the unreadable masterpieces of high modernist literature and implies that he is returning to the simpler forms of earlier days; however, no nineteenth-century author could have written The World According to Garp. John Irving is moving on into postmodernism, as the three-segment analysis of the novel can demonstrate.

As in the early works of Joyce and Lawrence, the opening section of Garp fits the genre's depiction of parents and childhood surroundings. In the chapter entitled "Blood and Blue," Garp's near fall from a roof and his being bitten by a dog parallel Stephen Dedalus's being shouldered into a playground puddle and having his hands smacked by his teacher. And similarly, the succeeding chapters fulfill other criteria for the genre, combining Garp's sexual initiation with an encounter with pain and death in the demise of a prostitute named Charlotte.

Garp's involvement with the death of this "whore," whom he had come to know better than Joyce's Stephen knew the prostitutes he visited, precipitates Garp's forming his working aesthetic as a writer. Combined with the play of Garp's imagination on the war damage at the Vienna zoo, the death of Charlotte ties Garp's emergence as an adult to his emergence as a writer: a creator and reflector of modern consciousness like Stephen Dedalus. Garp had been unable to finish the story that would make him a "real writer." "The Pension Grillparzer," as the story was called, consisted of two major elements that Garp was having trouble reconciling: a continuous line of hilarious, almost farcical action, low comedy, approaching slapstick that coexisted with a somber theme generated by a dreamomen of death. After Charlotte's death, Garp fell under "a writer's long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice" (118). Here, Irving's narrator emphasizes the importance of what Gerard Genette, following Tzvetan Todorov, has called "aspect," or "the way in which the story is perceived by the narrator" (29).

Visiting the zoo that still bore the signs of war damage, "Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else" (119). In the evidences of war Garp saw the connection between larger human history and each person's individual history and so was able to finish the story. His notion of modern, consciousness is that "the history of a city was like the history of a family—there is a closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other" (119). It may be that this is an aesthetic as appropriate for the post-Hiroshima era as Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic was for the era he heralded. Finishing the story after having formed his guiding aesthetic, Garp met Helen's standard for a "real" writer and thus "earned" a wife for himself. Thus, Irving completed the segment of the novel with the forecast that "in their stubborn, deliberate ways," Helen and Garp would fall in love with each other "sometime after they had married" (130).

Irving's implicit comment on the Joycean bildingsroman is ironic. By writing in the form, Irving is affirming the value of the early modernist mode, despite his rejection of excessively complicated modernist literature in the McCaffery interview (11). However, even an affirmation is a comment, and a comment on modernism is not modernism; by its nature, a comment on modernism must be something standing outside of modernism, viewing it, and implicitly judging it. The existence of bizarre violence and the associated vein of black humor, even in the first section of the book, contributes to irony. The novel opens to the backdrop of a war, and Jenny Field's brusque categorizing of the wounded into classes of Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners certainly contains an element of the blackly humorous. In its vividness, Jenny's slashing of a persistent masher verges on the gothic. Garp's being bitten by a dog is merely an element of bildingsroman, but Garp's biting off the ear of the dog verges on the bizarre. With their hint of antirealist absurdism, these elements provide a counterpoint to the modernist mode, repeatedly rupturing it, threatening to radicalize the novel into the postmodern, and foreshadowing the third section where the transformation does occur. Implict in these reptures is the notion that the early modernist mode has difficulty expressing a contemporary reality that itself has become postmodern.

A similar point and counterpoint arises in the second section of the novel. Here, John Irving introduces a mid-century novel of manners, a section of Garp that approximates the aura of an Updike novel or a Cheever story.⁶ The central characteristic of the cultural attitude found in mid-century can be illuminated by an insight Stanley Kaufmann drew from the words of a contemporary Italian filmmaker: "When Vittorio de Sica was asked why so many of his films deal with adultery, he is said to have replied, 'But if you take adultery out of the lives of the bourgeoisie, what drama is left?'"⁷ The middle segment of Irving's novel, which culminates with Garp's discovery of Helen's affair with Michael Milton, contains the tale of a suburban marriage, its fidelities and infidelities: Garp's sexual encounter with a babysitter, his resisting an attempted seduction by "Mrs. Ralph," and a temporary swap of sexual partners between the Garps and a couple named Harry and Alice—a situation like that with which Updike dealt in his novel Couples.

The suburban domestic tale fits Howe's belief that mid-century fiction, having abandoned the rebellious stance of a Stephen Dedalus, studied the search for values (looking for them, to some degree, in marriage) by a people who live in a world where social class may still exist but where it no longer dominates every detail of daily existence or predestines one to as limited a range of expectations as did the earlier class system (136). Fitting with Howe's analysis, the point of reference in the middle of Garp, as in the mainstream American novel in the middle of the century, is sociological; the question asked is whether monogamous marriage, as it is found in suburbia, can sustain or bring happiness to people of any sensitivity. What Garp said about his second novel might describe both the midsection of Garp and the American novel at mid-century: it was "a serious comedy about marriage," Garp said, "but a sexual farce" (160).

The central section is made ironic by isolated outcroppings of the bizarre, which implicitly undermine our belief in the fruitfulness of this modernist form. The marriage-comedy/sex-farce enclosed an episode in which Garp helps in the capture of a man who habitually rapes little girls, a sequence that takes on ominous implications when Garp happens to meet the rapist who has been released on a legal technicality, collecting tickets at a basketball game. Implicit in the counterpoint created by the intrusion of public and epochal violence into the private and personal is the conclusion that a mode, such as mid-century modernist realism, the Updike/Cheever comedy of manners, which exists to reveal the private and personal, loses its force.

The reader can guess at the historical moment recreated in Irving's implicit irony from a comment Saul Bellow made about novelists of the early 1960s who sought to "examine the private life." Bellow says that some "cannot find the [private] life they are going to examine. The power of public life has become so vast and threatening that private life cannot maintain a pretense of its importance" (25). Unhappy with the situation in which modernist fiction found itself, some authors began turning away, as Irving Howe has noted, from "realistic portraiture" to express their spirit in "fable, picaresque, prophecy, and nostalgia." Novels by these writers, Howe says, "constitute what I would class 'post-modern fiction.'" (137). Howe was identifying a trend that came to be designated, much more inclusively, by the term he used in 1959.

We are deeply involved in the serio-comic complications of Garp's marriage-comedy/sex-farce when an auto accident wrenches us into the postmodern mode—the accident that killed one of Garp's little boys and maimed the other. The transfer between modes comes from a shattering experience—the accident and its physical and emotional consequences. An analogy (with an important difference) can be seen in the work of Saul Bellow. Irving Howe says that when Bellow writes in Henderson the Rain King, "that men need a shattering experience to 'wake the spirit's sleep,' we soon realize that his ultimate reference is to America, where many spirits sleep." (Klein 22-29). Bellow, though he keeps his mode in the realistic mainstream, takes his character to Africa for the shattering experience; Irving keeps the scene in America, but this America has become a postmodern "zone" and is no longer the familiar scene of an Updike novel.