As part of my adjudication in Writing School I get to write book reports! Actually they are called "Critical Response Papers" and so far in my case they read like papers that require Emergency Medical Response. Oxygen! Nurse! Get me some oxygen for this sentence I think it's about to shrivel up and die! Truth is I'm just trying to be clear and straightforward for a change, since these papers are not about how fucking clever I can be with the turn of a phrase, never mind the turn of an entire Limboland experience. But, after writing up a relatively serious observations about the self-publishing phenomenon and some real opinions I have about the great leveling of the quality of fiction, and then deleting that post in fear that it would be misinterpreted as critical of my own work, I am sick and tired of trying to act my age.
So. I'm publishing the book report, as you can see, mainly 'cuz I think Denis Johnson deserves the attention of everybody that might wander through Limboland. But I promise after I push the publish button, I will ingest a few barrels of Orange Sunshine and return to our Limboland adventure in progress...because the Lap Doggy never sleeps.
This is The Writer’s Mind. This is
the Writer’s Mind on Drugs.
Jesus’
Son, by Denis Johnson – 1992 - Picador
On the cover of Jesus’ Son it clearly states that these
are “stories”, so you assume that’s how the author intended to position them.
Certainly they “work” as stand-alone pieces. However as I writer in the nascent
stages of putting together a new work of fiction, I was far more fascinated
with the idea of the stories being loosely connected chapters in a novel. As a
reader, I also found the experience more satisfying and fulfilling when I
followed the common threads through the stories and pulled those threads
together to form a single whole. Then, and only then, does this work become a
complete and meaningful depiction of the life the professional substance
abuser. (Interesting to note that the narrator, known only as “Fuckhead”, doesn’t once use the phrase “substance abuse”,
either because it’s too clinical or simply wasn’t a popular phrase when the
book was written.)
I also felt that these pieces were
not what we would call “short stories”, as they lack many of the
characteristics that are traditionally attributed to that genre. Instead I
reacted to them as vignettes or a collection of scenes that when read in order
form a somewhat linear story of a guy hitting bottom, going through detox, and
finally in the last story riding the pink cloud of recovery. Most of the
stories depict the narrator’s spiraling descent into drug-induced chaos, first
in Iowa and then in Seattle, and ending with the ingestion of a “horse pill”
that seems to put him in the hospital and the road to a shaky recovery.
Regardless of how the collection is
viewed or read, each story is in itself a stark and vivid description of the
world of the addict: his self-loathing; his visionary escapes; his
objectification of women as just another drug that, in the end, become another
addiction. Johnson is so masterful at embodying the life of the addict in the
architecture of his writing, I find myself looking at words, sentences, paragraphs,
and punctuation in a new, and different light. There are so many striking
passages – some beautiful, some terrifying – that it’s difficult to choose
those that exemplify all of Johnson’s unique inventiveness.
Johnson employs a consistent,
singular point of view that is focused purely on events that the narrator – aka
“Fuckhead” - experiences first hand,
either past or present. Fuckhead’s
direct involvement varies as well, from bystander to primary
protagonist. This all results in a diary-like effect that feels very natural,
except that in every vignette save the last, Fuckhead is either opiated,
psychedelicized, amphetamined, drunk, and/or stoned.
So not surprisingly there is vivid
description is of the drug-induced experience in almost every story, but my
favorite was in Emergency, with the
amiably dangerous “Georgie” at Fuckhead’s side:
“We bumped softly down a hill
toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows
and rows of austere, identical markers over soldier’s graves. Id’ never before
come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the
curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a
brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.
The sight of them cut through my head and down the knuckles of my spine, and if
there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.
Georgie opened his arms and cried
out, ‘It’s the drive-in, man!’” (Emergency,
p. 67)
While it’s possible to imagine that
one could mistake a drive-in theater for a military graveyard in a heavy
snowstorm, what “Fuckhead” describes is a “pants messing” hallucination that is
as frightening as it is hilarious.
Johnson is also the expert at characterizing
sudden flashes of heightened perception: “What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as
I imagined and eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it!
I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere”. (Car Crash While Hitchhiking p. 9) What’s really odd about the
narrator’s reaction here is that the women is shrieking to learn of her
husband’s death, and the narrator feels “wonderful to be alive to hear
it”. Powerful juxtaposition such as this
characterizes Johnson’s finely tuned, honed and stark presentation throughout Jesus’ Son.
Johnson puts women in the same
category as drugs –drugs that can be good, for awhile, but then backfire. After
“fuckhead” punches his girlfriend in the stomach on the sidewalk and she is
picked up by the car full of college kids, his description of the feeling of
losing her is similar to what he might feel going cold turkey: “I remember
lonliness crushing first my lungs, then my heart, then my balls.” By the last
story he has become addicted to women, and he likens his OCD behavior to his
days on the street:
“The spring was on and the days
were getting longer. I missed my bus often, waiting to spy on the wife in the
town-house apartment.
How could I do it, how could a
person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you
kidding? That’s nothing. I’d been much lower than that. And I expected to see
myself do worse.” (Technically page number goes here. Oh shit. My teacher is going to kick my ass!)
There are a couple of things going
on in this passage that grabbed me. First is the recognition that a while a
Peeping Tom may be disgusting, it’s not nearly as disgusting as what he had
done in the past and what he expected to
do in the future. “Fuckhead’s” is a fucked up recovery, that, like band
aids applied to seething boil, is sure to erupt in a dramatic and possibly
final denouement. The second is how innocently and naturally he brings the
reader into his story. First it seems he’s talking to himself: “How could I do
it, how could a person go that low?” Then, almost as if he has stepped outside
of himself: “And I understand your
question, to which I reply, Are you
kidding?” The out of place capital A in Are suggests that there should be a new
sentence with quotations. But there isn’t. It’s left dangling. He’s talking to
himself. He’s talking to you. Are you talkin’ to me? I can help but think of
Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver when I
read this passage.
Finally, Johnson’s use of metaphor
is consistently striking and unusual, because he stays true to the POV of
“Fuckhead”, and “Fuckhead” as we know is on drugs. Part of the appeal of drugs
is, as with the military graveyard drive-in theater, their ability to help one
see beyond the surface. “…we drove out of town where the fields bunched up into
hills and then dipped down toward a cool river mothered by benevolent clouds.”
Would not the opiated, encased in the pillowy safety of dope, see the river as
safe, welcoming, well-intentioned, like Mom?” A warm and fuzzy opiate high
would to produce warm and fuzzy images: “Willows stroked the water with their
hair.” Almost corny but perfectly
fitting.
As with Train Dreams, there is much for the writer to learn from Johnson.
First, rather obviously and like all good fiction, his stories operate on many
levels. This speaks to the power of the content, in and of itself; the events
and actions that comprise the scenes; the characters, whether they are human,
animal, or natural; the multitude of meanings. Johnson then takes this amazing
content and delivers it so that it arrests the reader and forces his attention.
My theory is that it is primarily through careful choice of resonant language,
constructed into sentences the way Miles Davis might construct a solo: long,
slow, cascading, then short, fast and punchy, that Johnson distinguishes his
stories. It is also his frequent use of mind-bending juxtaposition, often
within the same sentence (see example from Car Crash While Hitchhiking p. 9)
With Jesus’ Son, I was so enthralled
by the content that I hardly noticed the writing, which to me is what happens
when the author gets it right. The words create images so vivid in your mind
that the type on the page falls away and, as if dreaming, you become part of
the story; the witness standing in the shadows with his hands in his pockets,
watching. This may be because, as an
avid drug enthusiast in high school and later a professional musician, I could
see the world that Johnson describes from where I sat, but never actually went
there. It’s far better from this even safer distance: the middle-aged family
man, starting to look askance at the peach on the windowsill, weighing the
risks of a second glass of wine. I assume Fuckhead is perhaps Mr. Johnson
himself, and all I can say is I’m glad he made it out alive.
Wasnt' that just fucking fascinating?" Don't you want to rush out and read
Jesus' Son this afternoon?
