Cultural Conflicts And Ethnographic Approach In John Irving’s The World According To Garp

Abstract

The unstated premise of many “cultural” readings of The World According to Garp is that Irving’s novel can be read as a “thick description” and also of Irving’s Mississippi, something like an ethnographic account of a group of people and a way of life no longer available to us, except through the stories they told about themselves or that others told about them. This anthropological approach in the novel The World According to Garp follows James Clifford’s observation that “much ethnography, taking its distance from totalizing anthropology, seeks to evoke multiple (but not limitless) allegories”. Reading The World According to Garp as something like an ethnographer’s field notes, these cultural critics have produced some startling observations about the governing myths of Frenchman’s Bend; its political and social organization and division according to kinship, race, class, and gender; and its evolving modes of communication and exchange, from storytelling, trade, and barter to Hopeman’s calculated profits from interest loans and credit capitalism.