Garp-ing on about nothing: revisiting surreal dreams

Scene from Un Chien Andalous ( surreal nonsense film)

Garp is an endearing character from my young days. Sometime after Jong's Fear of Flying (and the first break up), devoid of angsty feminism and yet saturated with enough dryness about progressive politics. It somehow seems familiar and speaks to your own life, in a way few other books or movies have. Infact, to be shamelessly honest, the only other time such familiarity has twanged has been while watching Hazaron Khwayishein Aisi, but that was also when the world had become narrower, eyes squinted looking for exactitude. Way before that, Garp was almost real even though each story twists and resolves around a moment of gross and scary violence. Arms are sliced open like soft melons in throw-away paragraphs, tongues are literally cut off and not just metaphorically just to be able to laugh at a building of women who have been abused and have decided not to speak. It takes a course in advanced irony to be able to do this.

What previously produced a sort of should-I-be-smirking-at-this moment now produces a loud guffaw that resounds in my kinda disfunctional small toilet. Garp is also a writer and his second novel is a sexual farce about marriage, a comedy of manners. Ofcourse each character has a disability of some kind, one is blind, the other stutters making dialogue harder to read than the first chapter of Trainspotting (before you get into the swing of the twisted writing for the scottish accent). One of the women has uncontrollable muscle spasms in her arm, which keeps lashing out (a bit like that idiotic Rob Schneider movie where he's made up of different animals which I haven't seen except for the trailer- something tells me John Irving might like that movie actually) and the other woman ofcourse has uncontrollable flatulence (he must have read the Joke by Kundera, where the penultimate point is that the woman swallows pills to commit suicide and realizes that instead she had swallowed a laxative). At the end of this description of the foursome you are laughing out loud. Suddenly you see these attributes transplanted to your life and similar equations and you start wishing that there were such handicaps to make things more interesting than they are. Ofcourse you could also be thinking, but this is how it is - 'The farter IS married to the stutterer, the blind man is married to the dangerous right arm'.

Garp in a strange way is doing what Sexpot in Armpit says she's doing - surviving in a mostly queer world while being straight (and building underground movements that so far atleast I have not been invited to). Various characters walk in and out of his seemingly normal benign life - and they are transgender, prostitute, militant feminist, kinda lesbian - all macabre and human in their own strange way. Ofcourse he's married, and if he wrote that book obviously he's not doing too well now, is he? He's a writer and constantly navel gazing about that. The most brilliant character is his mother – a brilliant stoic woman who literally impregnates herself with a paralysed soilder because quite simply she wants a baby. One could wonder whether she was a lesbian, or queer in any way - but she simply is a difficult and far more non-categorizable being, understood only as a mother figure - or maybe an alien.

The first chapter grabs you and takes you into a world where narrative closure will only be provided by slicing, dicing and chopping of body parts (including a boy Garp biting off a dog's ear to avenge the dog biting off his ear. No soft, coy poetic bits that could be in lyrical Spanish for Garp). The book is a sort of literary Texas and the Chainsaw massacres, devoid of chain saws - except maybe one but no accidental loss of limb or tongue takes place in the same way twice.

Its hard to capture Garp unless you talk only about one aspect of it. Its also about writing and how hard it is, and about the kind of life that one thinks one should have to write. Its about a sexual farce about marriage and morals, its about being interested in odd people and in their eccentricities and its about doing strange unbelievable contorted things to yourself to get somewhere or to just not be bored. Its also a book that possibly should just go on seamlessly, what it laughs at most is the idea that there could be closure but ofcourse books should end because thats what books do, that life can't.