Garp.

I have been introduced to John Irving’s works a bit late in life: I had developed a certain resistance to easier impressionability, or I would have liked to think so.  In many ways I am self-contradictory, and in more levels my recognition of this thrives.

Upon reading The World According to Garp I was hit with another level of how I am self-contradictory, and I write, more or less, from the first lines, with a consistent performative contradiction, as I do now. 

The realization hit the way only a hindsight hits:  thus I am somehow an impossible person, for all my realizations hit with the element of memory.  It is as if I am doomed over and over to say “I already know this, but it is just now that I know that I know this this consciously.”  My memory will be my undoing, perhaps.  Or my infuriating stubbornness, which can sometimes be the same thing.  Perhaps I have developed a resistance to impressionability so much that when I do learn, I do so more by a bastardized anachronistic osmosis and hence am now – and will be, I suspect strongly, retarded in my growth.

The realization was, characters in books are constructed like people, but only so.   Real people – and sparing my philosophical box its regular use – are rarely as directional and as definite as characters.  Characters have to be: else the story would not have a plot; the story would not end.  They are defined from the onset and throughout the book, which is limited to a number of pages, and by events that are worth telling.  The book disregards all else.  That is perhaps why we relate to characters, to so many different ones in different books, precisely because they are necessarily limited to a characteristic the complexity of which is lesser than a real person’s.  Perhaps this is why the Barnum effect exists.  People are more complicated than characters, and in relating to one at one point they manage to fragment themselves into categories, which is a more manageable way of looking at a thing so intricate and convoluted as a self.  

Perhaps this is also why the best-written books are those that have characters that are complex: at one point they remind us of how we are also self-contradictory more often than we think, and eventually frighten us how real characters can come close to resembling people, especially ourselves.  We can know ourselves, even without knowing that we do; but to see ourselves written on paper from another’s hand is unsettling.  It adds a knowledge that was not there before: now we know that we know.

The book is at once sobering and long, beautifully crafted and substantial in the way the ground is substantial.  Had I been in any other speed, the book would have been lethal, the way the ground is lethal, like Kundera had been lethal.  I appreciate it more for its sobriety than anything else: it reminded me of what it is like to be real, and be human again.  I have been too immersed in beer to read much.  I have held on to glass instead of paper for a long time to have not thought of myself as more complex than a drunk in a book, or a depressed victim suffering now from self-mangling.  It is a sobering book, and a lesson in contradiction delivered in hindsight.