49: Chicken Little and the World According to John Irving

49

Chicken Little Syndrome

And the World According to John Irving

“You don’t choose your demons, they choose you.”

John Irving

          It seems ridiculously tenuous, the connection between the article that I read on the novelist John Irving in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (October 21, 2015), and the thought that came to me for today’s spiritual musing, a thought that’s been brewing in the cauldron of my mind for two or three years now; but for some spooky reason, it made good sense to me.

I use the word “spooky” in the sense that the American novelist Norman Mailer used it in his book The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, because there’s definitely something spooky about writing; and even though Mailer (or any other writer that I’m aware of) may not have figured out what this spooky element may be, I’ve come to see it as that mysterious force that works behind the scenes that I call “the omniscient guiding force of life.”

But what was it about John Allemang’s article on 73 year old John Irving, titled “The world according to John Irving,” an obvious play upon Irving’s novel The World According to Garp that launched his brilliant career, that connected with the thought that’s been brewing in my mind for the past several years, a disturbing thought that can best be expressed by what Chicken Little frantically screamed when an acorn fell upon its head, “The sky is falling!”?

In his Globe and Mail article, 63 year old journalist Allemang confesses that he was not a John Irving reader, and Irving’s latest novel Avenue of Mysteries was the first of his novels that he read because he was asked by his editor to interview the best-selling author; so Allemang does some research on the writer and reads Avenue of Mysteries and comes away impressed by both the writer and the man; and even though I’ve only read one of Irving’s novels, The World According to Garp, I confess that I simply cannot get into this writer.

I’ve seen two movies based on his novels, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire (the former was moving but the latter just did not work for me), I’ve read the reviews of all his novels, and also read and seen a dozen or more interviews of the author on You Tube; but there’s just something about the writer’s novels and the man that I instinctively shy away from, and I could never figure out why until I read Allemang’s article in the Globe and Mail and the reviews of Irving’s latest novel Avenue of Mysteries that I went online to read, and it has to do with that tenuous connection that I made with Irving’s world and the Chicken Little Syndrome, and this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I trust my creative instincts, and when I’m given an idea for a spiritual musing I know that I’ve just been blessed with another opportunity to expand my horizons on the human condition; but for the life of me, I could not see where my Muse wanted me to go with the tenuous connection between Irving’s literary world view and the Chicken Little Syndrome, and I had no choice but to abandon to my creative unconscious to work it out for me.

As it so happens, one of the books that I’m currently re-reading is Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by Mary Ann Woodward and introduced by Edgar Cayce’s son Hugh Lynn Cayce, and when I came upon something that Edgar Cayce said in one of his psychic readings I saw what my Muse was trying to tell me with the tenuous connection between John Irving’s literary world view and the brewing idea of the Chicken Little Syndrome; but I have to quote the passage to make myself clear:

“While we are all at different stages of development and may be working on different lessons, we do not make much progress until we can recognize our problems as opportunities. We begin to grow when we face up to the fact that we are responsible for our trials and misery. We are only meeting self. Our present circumstances are the result of previous actions whether long removed or in the recent past. So if we are beset with problems, blame not God, for they are of our own making. Our miseries are the result of destructive or negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. We can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action” (Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, pp. 219-220, bold italics mine).

In effect, Cayce is saying that we can escape the prison of our karmic patterns by living a life of noble thought and action; and something that Irving said to Allemang, as he brings his interview with John Irving to closure, brought that tenuous connection between Irving’s literary world view and the Chicken Little Syndrome to light, because for me Irving’s novels epitomize what the short story writer Katherine Mansfield said about writing: “Literature is not enough.” That’s why I shied away from Irving’s novels, because my gut told me they would do nothing for me but take me deeper into Irving’s world which led nowhere but back into itself, an endless literary romp through karmic repetition that Irving reflects with his karmically flawed belief that we don’t choose our demons, they choose us. As Edgar Cayce said, “We are only meeting self,” which the mystic poet Rumi reaffirms: “If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self.” Hence Irving’s karmic connection with Chicken Little’s fear, which Irving unwittingly revealed in another interview at his home in Dorset, Vermont for his novel In One Person with his confession: “My novels are about what I’m afraid of.” Irving meeting Irving, if you will; hence, the world according to John Irving!

And to further confirm this tenuous connection between Chicken Little’s fear and Irving’s literary world view, here’s what he said to Allemang about himself: “As a writer, I don’t know if I got any better at anything, but I know I got slower. If you have any doubts at all, just wait and do something else. It’s never not happened to me that something you put away and take out again, when you take a second, a third, a fourth, and fifth look at it, you see possibilities you didn’t see before. At the very least you see something you can fix.”

The recurring criticism of Irving’s latest novel Avenue of Mysteries was the recurring motifs of earlier novels—orphans, dogs, strong women, transvestites, Catholicism, abortion, circuses, and writers as characters—as if he was looking for “possibilities” that he did not see before and exploit them for his new story, which in this case happens to be his new novel Avenue of Mysteries; and if not mine them for more literary gold for his new story, perhaps “fix” them for more literary merit—confirming my gut feeling that Irving’s literary world view is a closed system with no way out; which validates what Mansfield said about literature not being enough to satisfy the longing in our soul to be all that we are meant to be. But how exactly does this connect with my brewing idea of the Chicken Little Syndrome?

The Chicken Little Syndrome is a phobia of dread born of a mistaken belief that catastrophic disaster is imminent, and dangerously contagious today given what’s going on in the world—devastating climate change and terrifying social strife, to name the most obvious; that’s why Chicken Little runs around screaming “The sky is falling!” And as tenuous as it may seem, that’s what Irving’s literary world view silently screams at me with its spiritually moribund perspective on life that he re-creates in Dickensian “sprawling, phantasmagoric, elaborately imaginative, hilariously excessive even as they rendered unbearable pain” novels, conjuring in my mind a ghostly literary image of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. There’s no doubt that John Irving is a masterful writer who creatively reflects the anguished desperation of modern man and loved by many who share his fears, but he’s just not my cup of tea.

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