Psychology in the sentences of Jesus' Son:
Every year or two, I read Jesus’ Son, usually to teach to my undergraduates, who respond well to the very short, funny, and violent tales. Part of what I mean here is that the stories are readable. They’re easy to get, if you get it, if you know what I mean. What experimentation exists works slyly on the imagination, making the reader into an accomplice, a confidant, and most importantly a player in the world. Johnson doesn’t just treat you like a reader visiting this world, he allows the narrator to speak almost directly to you, as if you played a role in Fuckhead’s misfortune, as if you’re in the getaway car, at the Vine ordering from the nurse with the pitching arm, from the god herself. We’ll get back to this soon.
I want to turn away from some acceptable knowledge around the book, which I hate, which annoys me to no end, knowledge which poisons the imitators, from the famed winners of major awards to the freshly ambitious: Jesus’ Son
is not written from the point-of-view of a drug-addled mind. I have been taught this book as an undergraduate, as a graduate student too, and each time the professor said or agreed with a student who marveled at the imagery or perceptions, admiring Johnson for fundamentally capturing a “scrambled/drug-addled/delirous/choose-druggy-modifier” narrator, I agreed. However, as time has passed, and the more I have read and re-read this book, I think they are fundamentally wrong.
So what do I think is happening? Let’s skip to a story that nobody talks about: Happy Hour. Here’s the opening paragraph:
“I was after a seventeen-year-old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn’t her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way.”
What’s the read? “I was after a seventeen-year-old belly dancer” is the initial hook, the word chase having been erased from the sentence, burying the threat of that word into subtext, compounded by the threat of “the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother,” as if this offered some sort of protection from Fuckhead, although he sees through it, revealing immediately to the reader in a clause, “but he wasn’t her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her.” This rhetorical device is one of Fuckhead’s many acute perceptions, people who wear masks to conceal their desires, masks both easily accepted and dismissed, and Johnson takes time to ensure that Fuckhead describes both, calling the liars by the name of the mask and the name of their person, as made clear in both the name Fuckhead and the great lengths Johnson goes to expose the methods of healing undertaken over the course of the book.
That paragraph ends with “she let him hang around because life can be that way,” but what way is Fuckhead talking about? This is another of Johnson’s devices, the assumed set of knowledge, which verges on a kind of esoteric set of knowledge, but, in fact, explicitly involves a colloquial understanding, hence its propulsive effect: even if you can’t say exactly what he means by such a clause, you feel as though you implicitly understand it, invoking both the mysterious and obvious, in a single clause. It’s this tension, I think, that points some writers toward understanding Fuckhead as a drug-addled mystic, instead of considering him as a recovery mystic, speaking to other people in recovery, including those who may understand the sentence, maybe even some of you (“you people”) who could be able to create the same sort of wisdom, and those of us/you coming to this work with a mask of understanding, the mask of a reader, the mask of a seeker.
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The narrator of The Lookback Window, Dylan, sometimes will break into a second-person style address, and this voice will break the tense, speaking over the narration, which works both as an engine toward the end of the book, and as a clue to where in time the narrator is speaking. (If you haven’t read my violent, erotic, thrilling novel, called “an achievement of language, of style” by the New York Times Book Review… now is a great time to order, especially if you’re a fan of Denis Johnson… who the New York Times compared me to in their rave review. If it sounds like a rave, it was a rave.) Why does it matter where a narrator is speaking from?
Fundamentally, the distance in time that separates a narrator from their subject is the degree to which experimentation and play is allowed in a retrospective narrative. This, to my mind, is where the magic trick of fiction exists, the sleight of hand, because you are working with a narrator who has multiple sets of knowledge, as opposed to a single set, meaning direct experience. Take the opening of The Lookback Window:
I escaped to a resort of extraordinary beauty. This way when the news stories appeared, I’d be in such an otherworldly place I could act like I had only been dreaming. I pitched it as a vacation to Moans, a way to get away before our impending wedding. I showed him the site for The Monarchs, a luxurious oceanfront hotel in Florida, and we booked a room. Before we departed, I took a sedative to ease the
journey, and I returned to consciousness outside the wooden gates.
Scores of palm trees concealed a pool, two hot tubs, and dozens of naked men. The owner stood with his hands on his hips and surveyed his territory, telling us that he had planted these trees forty years ago; he hadn’t expected the foliage to grow so wildly, but with coastal life came onslaughts of rain and all that sustenance had shifted the foundations.
“Nothing can prevent the course of nature,” he said, so I took off my clothes and wandered the property until I found a spot in the shade to be alone.
The situation is simple: Dylan and Moans are taking a pre-wedding vacation to a resort in Fort Lauderdale. But the diction fucks up the plans for the reader before they realize the plans have been fucked up. Beginning the paragraph with “I escaped to a resort of extraordinary beauty” complicated the fact of the journey, which should be a “we” but isn’t, and escaped complicates the idea of a couples trip, even though such a phrase is common enough to not draw notice. The next clause, “this way when the news stories appeared,” has competing time structures, hinting that Dylan is narrating from a different point in time, although it mimics an anticipatory sentence, and reveals in the second clause that Dylan is aware of how he may act in the future, although it doesn’t yet reveal who is the person to receive his future self, his contemplated mask. The paragraph then moves through time, referring to the trip being “pitched” to Moans, the wedding as “impending,” and “a way to get away” rather than an actual getaway, allowing the psychic splitting to separate words themselves, foreshadowing the divides between what Dylan is pitching and what he is feeling, if it even is known to himself, which we learn isn’t the case in the moment of the story but is the case in the moment of the telling.
We see the way this kind of time-fuck in the imagery and other characters as well, as the “owner stood with his hands on his hips and surveyed his territory, telling us that he had planted these trees forty years ago; he hadn’t expected the foliage to grow so wildly, but with coastal life came onslaughts of rain and all that sustenance had shifted the foundations.”
Sustenance shifting the foundations is one of the major explorations of the novel, the ways that care is as destructive as violence, just not perhaps in the negative sense of destruction. We don’t have all this information at the outset of the novel, but what mirroring the mysterious methods of seeing within the imagery does is suspend the reader inside the dream of Dylan’s consciousness, in the world as Dylan saw it then, in the moment, without understanding it, leading to a kind of psychedelic submission of the reader. This is the suspension I crave as a reader, and this is the sort of work I do as a writer to create such an effect.
The last part of this section fully immerses the reader into the world of two colliding timelines and competing psychologies: that of Dylan in the moment, and Dylan many years later as he is telling this story: “‘Nothing can prevent the course of nature,’ he said, so I took off my clothes and wandered the property until I found a spot in the shade to be alone.” Dylan here seems to respond to the dialogue with an understanding, a type of physical dialogue, which may seem as if it doesn’t make sense, and jokingly makes its case that they were going to get naked anyway so Dylan just cuts through the social politeness of a continued conversation, but takes a larger significance than just the joke itself. This occurs in part because we know at this point that Dylan has motives unknown to the other characters, so while the joke of the nudity occur to the other characters, the psychologically revealing effect occurs only to the reader, who knows something else is occurring. In Dylan’s aloneness then, we get the liar revised away from his mask, the Johnsonian clause, where the reader is receiving knowledge from the hidden future of the character, the point of recovery in a trauma narrative, not the drug-addled mind of a sedated person who just “returned to consciousness outside the wooden gates.”
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This weekend, I’m teaching a two-day masterclass on Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, through my speaking agency, The Shipman Agency. There’s still time to sign up for the course, where we will go deeper into what I’ve written about here, and find the ways to apply the lessons to your own work, as I’ve shown through the opening of my novel. So join me if you love Denis Johnson, or if you’re curious about Jesus’ Son, or if you have any work that you want to improve.