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

By carefully and expansively layering his presentation of character, Irving satisfies his own demand that philosophical issues be subservient to the ways in which people live. Characterscape functions as Irving's central ethic: the physical world of human activity - which he attempts to make as vibrantly alive as possible - must never be lost in a philosophical debate about notions of right and wrong.

As with William Carlos Williams, Irving dismisses the abstract and embraces the physical. In The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1989), Robert Coles explains that Williams's "repeated call to arms, the well-known phrase 'no ideas but in things,' is a prelude to distinctions he kept making between poetry and life; between ideas and action; between the abstract and the concrete; between theory and practice; and not least, between art and conduct" (193). In similar fashion, Irving also proclaims adamantly that fiction must originate in the concrete and the physical as opposed to the philosophical, and he offers a litany of complaints against those novels that seem more about a particular ideology than about the lives that transpire within a given text: "I guess another way to put this," explains Irving, "is that I don't like to see a thesis about life, or people, disguised as a novel. I don't think the greatest novels of our time or any other time are theses. Great novels succeed much better when they are broad expressions or portraits than when they confine themselves to the singularity of an idea" ("An Interview" 195).