Saints, sinners, and the Dickensian novel: the ethics of storytelling in John Irving's 'The Cider House Rules.'

Style, Summer, 1998 by Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

The intention of a novel by Charles Dickens is to move you emotionally, not intellectually; and it is by emotional means that Dickens intends to influence you socially.

- John Irving, "The King of the Novel"

In addition to affording readers the critical machinery for exploring the nature of concepts such as community, stylistics, and goodness in narratives, ethical criticism provides us with a useful rhetoric for examining the function of storytelling in literary works. The act of narration - or what Adam Zachary Newton refers to in Narrative Ethics (1995) as the "performative function of storytelling" (58) - can itself offer significant insight into the ethical properties of a given text. Ethical criticism presupposes that through their depictions of so many morally disparate heroes and villains, works of art necessarily implore us to render value judgments based upon our experiences as readers and members of the larger human community. Yet the act of storytelling - the manner in which writers deliberately construct their narratives so as to register moral or social impacts upon their readers - remains largely unexamined in the considerable and growing literature devoted to the interpretive mode of ethical criticism.(1) In Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (1998), Ian Marshall notes that literary criticism's purpose "is not simply to help us understand literature but to help us understand our lives, and sometimes our lives and the literature we read help us understand critical theories" (8). Marshall's observation about the reflexivity of literary criticism underscores one of ethical criticism's principal functions: to provide readers not only with a mechanism for comprehending the vicissitudes of human experience, but also with the interpretive tools for recognizing the ways in which writers create meaning through storytelling.

In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us that "a central role of art is to challenge conventional wisdom and values" (99). In his novels, John Irving continues to experiment with a narrative voice that seeks to thwart deliberately his readers' expectations, to upset our notions of conventionality, and to blur the boundaries that linger between good and evil, right and wrong. From the life-affirming presence of the "good, smart bears" in The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) and Owen Meany's shrill voice of reason in A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) to the convoluted sexual politics of The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) and the conspicuous proximity of the "Under Toad" and the tragedy of the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (1978), Irving adorns his fictions with a host of ethical signifiers that challenge readers at every turn throughout his labyrinthine, deliberately Dickensian fictions. Irving makes little secret of his affinity for Dickens and in particular for the Victorian writer's eye for complexity of narrative and literary character. In "King of the Novels," Irving writes that "Dickens was abundant and magnificent with description, with the atmosphere surrounding everything - and with the tactile, with every detail that was terrifying or viscerally felt" (364). As with Dickens, because Irving loads his own narratives with considerable detail and description, he makes it virtually impossible for readers to render facile ethical decisions in the face of so much information about a given character's humanity. Irving self-consciously adopts the literary form of the Dickensian novel - with its multiplicity of characters, its narrative mass, its overt sense of sentimentality, and its generic intersections with such modes as the detective story - as the forum for constructing the fictions that intentionally challenge his readers' value systems. In short, for Irving the choice of the narrative form of the Dickensian novel itself represents an ethical move.

The essential formulation of the Dickensian novel as a narrative form finds its origins in Dickens's dynamic approach to literary character. In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), Nussbaum remarks that Dickens endows his characters with "physical and moral attributes that make it possible for us to distinguish every one from every other. We are made to attend to their ways of moving and talking, the shapes of their bodies, the expressions on their faces, the sentiments of their hearts. The inner life of each is displayed as having psychological depth and complexity," she adds, and "we see that as humans they share certain common problems and common hopes" (27). Yet Dickens's characters are far more than mere vessels of transport for the essential elements of genuine human behavior. The effectiveness of Dickens's characters as human representations lies in their peculiar lack of ethical certainty, in their capacity for mimicking the elusive qualities that often define human nature. Dickens's "characters do not so much recreate actual individuals as re-create the reactions to actual individuals, and particularly the difficulties and dilemmas," Brian Rosenberg writes in Little Dorrit's Shadows: Character and Contradiction in Dickens (1996); "his doubts about the potential for understanding others capture a nearly universal uncertainty, and his struggle to make sense of conflicting, unreliable pieces of information mirrors a struggle we undergo daily. Shunning the rounded and definite, he leaves the reader," Rosenberg continues, "like many of the figures in his novels, always contending with the elusive and irreconcilable" (30).