Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theater-Fiction

The first chapter of John Irving’s In One Person (2012) recounts the boyhood origins of two lifelong passions. Fifteen-year-old Billy is gradually ushered by his town’s transvestite librarian into the oeuvre of Charles Dickens, while his involvement with the local amateur theatrical society, where his mother works as prompter, gives rise to an obsession with acting. These focuses of Billy’s life have also been prominent aspects of Irving’s own oeuvre since his first novel in 1968. Time magazine’s claim, quoted on the cover of In One Person, that Irving is “as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens,” reflects an enduring critical tendency to compare the writers, as well as Irving’s own liberal acknowledgements of Dickens’s influence (Shostak 130). But while critics have frequently drawn attention to recurring tropes like wrestling, bears and writer-characters in Irving’s fiction, theater has gone generally unexplored, despite the fact that few novelists have engaged with that medium in so many books. In One Person places theater at its center as William becomes an actor, and several of Irving’s previous novels revolve around characters who have important experiences while acting and creating shows. Until I Find You (2005) begins with the sentence, “According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor” (3), and follows Jack’s journey with recurring attention to the boy’s stage performances and eventual stardom. Son of a Circus (1994) engages with shows of different kinds and casts an actor as a central character. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), Irving’s most popular book and the focus of this article, brings the Dickensian and the theatrical aspects of Irving’s oeuvre into direct contact. The community theater of Gravesend (a fictional New Hampshire town whose British namesake plays important parts in three Dickens novels) stages a production of A Christmas Carol in which the preternaturally small Owen plays the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

That a “contemporary Dickens” should frequently evoke theater is apt when we recall how often theater appears in Dickens’s own writings, including Sketches by Boz, The Uncommercial Traveler, and numerous novels. Memorable chapters of Nicholas Nickleby concern the protagonist’s time with a provincial company led by the inveterately theatrical actor-manager Mr. Crummles and populated by a range of remarkable stagers, from Lenville the tragedian to Crummles’s daughter the Infant Phenomenon. Great Expectations wanders famously into theatrical performances, from pantomime to a downmarket Hamlet starring Pip’s townsman Wopsle. For Dickens and Irving alike, such literary preoccupations seem partially engendered by early practical experiences with theater. In an interview about A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving directly links himself with Dickens apropos of their youthful ambition to act. “Like Dickens, my first love was the theatre. […] I first wanted to be an actor. I never desired to write for the stage, but to be on it. And gradually the writing, the novels, took over, and I realized I could be all the characters, not just one” (qtd. in Atlas). This realization is further actualized when Irving, like Dickens before him, delivers public readings of his works.

To state, however, that one of Irving’s most Dickensian features is his engagement with theater is to beg the question of what makes Dickensian theater Dickensian. This is no simple question and critical assessments have varied considerably, from those accentuating the great author’s “devouring passion” for the art-form and his sympathy for its working people (Barish 370), to Nina Auerbach’s analysis of his career-long “hostility to the actual theatre, his compulsion to expose its meretriciousness” (8). Theorists such as Jeffrey Franklin and Emily Allen have included Dickens in their analyses of the vital importance of theater to “novelistic self-definition throughout the nineteenth century” (Allen 8), revealing the medium’s role as a “mass-cultural foil” for the novel-form’s own purported refinement, moral supremacy, and association with “the rise of the private bourgeois individual” (Allen 9). Dickens, after all, would pen...