“The World According to Garp” by John Irving (post 1): In first third, Garp writes a short story, while Jenny, his mother, writes her autobiography

Nineteen-year-old Garp and Jenny are aspiring writers.

“And then what? Garp wondered [after beginning to write his short story]. What can happen next? He wasn’t altogether sure what had happened, or why. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?…Garp knew he did not know enough; not yet…now he had to trust the instinct that told him not to go any further until he knew much more…He put ‘The Pension Grillparzer’ aside. It will come, Garp thought” (1, p. 132). [The title of his short story, written when he and his mother are on vacation in Vienna, is the name of a boarding-house.]

Meanwhile, “Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a higher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her…it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly began the book that would make her famous.

“ ‘In this dirty-minded world,’ Jenny wrote, ‘you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other’…

“ ‘I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone,’ she wrote. ‘That made me a sexual suspect.’ And that gave her a title, too. A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale…

“ ‘Then I wanted a baby, but I didn’t want to have to share my body or my life to have one,’ Jenny wrote. ‘That made me a sexual suspect, too’ ” (1, 133-134)…

 

When Garp felt ready to resume writing his short story, “What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer’s long-sought trance…” (1, p. 140).

Comment

As quoted above, “He wasn’t altogether sure what had happened, or why. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up…But what did they mean?…It will come, Garp thought.” He doesn’t understand his own story, because it comes to him from storyteller alternate personalities.

And the rest of the story will come to him when he goes into a “trance”: “What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer’s long-sought trance…” Trance facilitates a transfer of the story from one personality to another.

Things also come to Jenny: “She had found the sentence that had been boiling in her.” Who had kept that sentence boiling in her, and who now provided it to her in a timely fashion? She didn’t think of the sentence. She “found” it. 

Similarly, as quoted in past posts, Stephen King describes his stories as “found objects,” which he finds by going into a “trance.”

See links (2, 3, 4) for a general orientation to this novel and its author.

1. John Irving. The World According to Garp [1978]. 40th Anniversary Edition. New York, Dutton, 2018.

2. Wikipedia.The World According to Garp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Garp

3. New York Times. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/irving-garp.html

4. Wikipedia. John Irving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Irving