"A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving

The warm thanks to Frederick Buechner in the Acknowledgments of John Irving's 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany first caught my eye. Then, not far into the book, I noticed Irving's carefully expressed theological and liturgically accurate descriptions of Episcopal (and Anglican) worship and piety in the childhood and adult life of the novel's narrator, John Wheelwright. Over the course of the novel, Irving unironically treats themes of divine providence, a seer’s prophetic dream, and active participation in the sacrificial death of Christ. Irving also deploys Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come explicitly but with just enough ambiguity to keep A Prayer for Owen Meany from becoming allegory. All the while telling an engaging story of two friends becoming adults as the seeds of the war in Vietnam ultimately bloom.

Of course, symbol, foreshadowing, plausible character development, and religiously serious characters (much less theologizing) simply may  not  be  done in modern literary fiction. Tediously detailed descriptions of settings are in; coherent accounts of profound internal lives are out.

All of which were mere personal observations until I read "Yesterday's Men: the death of the mythical method" by Alan Jacobs in the July 2024 issue of Harper's Magazine. Literary critic Northrop Frye is Jacobs's archetypal example of a "yesterday's man" but others include George Frazier (The Golden Bough), T.S. Elliot (The Wasteland), Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return), and Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces). In brief, these writers were shaped "by a fascination with the distinctive forms taken by various societies, as well as a syncretic interest of myths." The myth of a sacramental rather than a mechanical universe was the myth that provided coherence in a chaotic world.

But by the 1980’s, mere discursivity came to replace coherence. No longer should critics (and hence the primary objects of criticism, novelists) “conceive of [of their task to identify] myth, archetype, and symbol [ultimately forming] a cathedral-like structure.” Texts now came to be seen only as means to generate other texts. Providing a coherent account for meaning had been, it turns out, a disguised power play.

During World War II and while the credibility of Aryan exceptionality remained in play, the US government had commissioned a "myth" aimed at fostering belief in human equality among American soldiers. The Races of Mankind even made passing reference to humanity’s common ancestry in Adam and Eve as the ground for human unity and equality. But not until the 1950's did Northop Frye turn the mythopoeic vision of humanity's repeated accounts for its own sensed meaning into an exceptionally recondite but endlessly fecund framework for literary criticism. Quoting Jacobs,

Frye provided a theoretical scaffolding for these scattered insights into the great Romantic and post-Romantic artists. He would make literary criticism a “science”... built on a quasi-Jungian study of myth as intrinsic to the deep structures of human consciousness, where archetypes dwell.

Nonsense, wrote Terry Eagleton in 1983. Quoting Jacobs quoting Eagleton, “Frye’s work ‘is marked by a deep fear of the actual world, a distaste for history itself,’ and is primarily an exercise in nostalgia.” For Eagleton the 1960’s—the central decade of A Prayer for Owen Meany—had removed the cataracts from our eyes so that deployment of myth “came to be seen as an evasion of political realities.” Whatever one might say of A Prayer for Owen Meany, it does not evade political realities. Instead, it frames political (and personal) realities in a larger—dare I say—archetypal reality.

John Irving certainly knew of the critical theories that followed the passing of yesterday’s men. But such theories were ignored in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving’s novel is chock full of the mythopoeic.

The structure of Irving’s novel stands as a rebuke to the anti-mythologists. But Irving’s extensive deployment of Thomas Hardy in the high school English classes of narrator John Wheelwright undercuts confidence that such myths necessary be true. If Irving is channeling Hardy, then whatever their veracity, myths are simply the best ways of addressing questions of human meaning. If Buechner, then Irving intimates the fundamental veracity of the Christian myths at work in his novel. I have an opinion but will leave it to other readers of A Prayer for Owen Meany to form their own.

And other readers there should be. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a fine novel with gripping characters, serious themes, and several laugh-out-loud accounts. Take up and read.