SOURCE: Parrish, Timothy L. “Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son: To Kingdom Come.” Critique 43, no. 1 (fall 2001): 17–29.

[In the following essay, Parrish examines the recurring themes of transformation and redemption in Jesus' Son, drawing attention to Johnson's preoccupation with transcendence.]

At the end of Denis Johnson's first novel, Angels, the lawyer whose client is about to be executed for murder experiences a revelation about his future career and, ultimately, his identity. He recognizes that he is still young enough to be the elected official “to something or other” that he had assumed he would eventually become, but he realizes that his client's death has changed him. Instead of achieving respectable political office, he knows that he will “probably continue the rest of his life as a criminal lawyer because, in all honesty, a part of him wanted to help murderers go free” (209). Although there is reason to believe that his client's character has been transformed into a redeemable soul during his brief jail term, the moment is nonetheless disturbing because we are unsure whether Fredericks identifies with his client's potential redemption or with the act from which his client must be redeemed. The moment is an emblematic one in Johnson's fiction, revealing an almost obsessive interest in characters who have degraded themselves and others while nonetheless pursuing an ideal of transcendence and even grace. In Johnson's fiction murder is often a seductively appealing and even morally desirable act, because through it his characters strive at once to fulfill and to abandon their destinies in a single moment. In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Leonard English seeks this self-consummation through his search for a dead man who he thinks might be his double. He finds his double but fails in his quest, which ends with his dressing as a woman and vainly attempting to assassinate a bishop. In terms of the novel, his crime is not the attempted assassination but the failed self-transformation, a point that is reinforced by his comical disguise and his admission that he chose the wrong victim to murder. The novel concludes with English condemned to enact a debased sacrament: he is on his knees gratefully consuming mouthfuls of Wonder Bread, realizing that “he liked being hungry and in prison” (257). His terrible fate rivals that of a character in The Stars at Noon whose “time on Earth” causes him “to be put here with his dreams, but not himself, made substance” (181). In Johnson's fictional universe, whether one is slayer or slain, the least desirable fate is to remain who one is.

Johnson's work consistently explores how an act of destruction can become an act of creation. His ambitious novel Fiskadoro, portrays this process as if it were the principle of civilization itself. The narrative enacts this principle: It is told from the perspective of the future that looks back on how the past (our present) was destroyed to create a world that the readers cannot fully comprehend. Offering itself as a kind of replacement for texts that we would know as the Koran or the Bible, Fiskadoro's central wisdom is that “to concern ourselves too greatly with the past is a sin, because it distracts our mind from the real and current blessing being showered down on us in every heartbeat out of the compassion and mercy and beauty of Allah” (12). That passage accommodates Fiskadoro's reader to the destruction of his or her world, but it also provides a perspective crucial to understanding Johnson's work as a whole: the destruction of the past or even the present is not to be feared but embraced as the transformation necessary to the completion of one's being. Whether it be Nelson Fairchild, Jr. in Already Dead or the nameless narrator of Jesus' Son, the narrative motivation for Johnson's characters generally involves confronting the sensation of feeling that they are between lives.¹ Believing that their acts of violence presage the desired new beginning, Johnson's characters intuit the sort of connection between violence and the sacred that Rene Girard describes in Violence and the Sacred. For Girard as for Johnson, violence and the sacred are inseparable. Neither writer understands the desire to commit violence as something that can be escaped; rather, we learn to contain violent acts, ironically, only through other self-consciously violent acts. Over and over again Johnson's characters enact Girard's dictum that “violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine” (135).

If Girard helps in understanding how Johnson's aesthetic interest in transformation aspires to reach what must be described as divine, then perhaps the most remarkable thing about Johnson's work thus far is how little critical attention it has received.² Indeed, the preceding critical summary of Johnson's prose work to date is meant to provide a critical context for considering his beautiful, disturbing collections of stories, Jesus' Son.³ Despite receiving positive book reviews, various prestigious grants, and the imprimatur of Harold Bloom, who includes three of Johnson's works—Jesus' Son among them—in his Great Western Canon, Johnson's work remains unknown to most academic readers. Possibly, his interest in wasted, lost, drug-addled Americans who often turn out to be killers may scare away some readers. The reception of his work thus far points up the irony inherent in the fact that although what has become literary criticism originally began as a theological activity—an act of making sense of the word—contemporary critical practice is insistently secular. This is not to say that contemporary readers are uninterested in religion as a historical or even spiritual fact, but that many readers are likely to be made uneasy by contemporary narratives of redemption that demand participation and consent. Thus, I suggest that it is not the specter of drug use that vexes Johnson's fiction and perhaps even his readers, but the possibility of an unauthorized, alternative form of salvation outside the ingrained secularity of contemporary life. Johnson's fiction is unlikely to attract political readings not because an implicit critique of American culture cannot be derived from it, but because his “wasted” characters are so blissfully ignorant of their existence as social creatures. In Johnson's work, metaphysical identity invariably takes precedence over social identity.

Jesus' Son explores Johnson's basic theme of transformation, but it does so to reflect on why the author writes the kind of stories that he does. Johnson's narrator thus confronts his audience as a way of confronting himself. At one point, a character asks the narrator if he has ever walked past a row of houses and thought, “Behind those windows, behind those curtains, people are living normal, happy lives?” (151–52). Although the work could be read as a gesture of conciliation toward an audience who does not and will not know him, it is also a kind of justification of Johnson's own aesthetic of transformation. In “Steady Hands,” for instance, the narrator asks a character to speak carefully because “someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem” (130). Even if one must assume that the narrative persona of the book is invented, it nonetheless invites the reader to imagine the work as an autobiographical gesture. Just as the narrator moves from addressing his audience as “ridiculous people” perversely requiring the narrator's help to acknowledge his membership in “a place for people like us,” so does Johnson imply that in writing this work he has come to accept the kind of storyteller that he is. From that perspective, the book enacts the author's own reconciliation with the person (called “Fuckhead” by the other characters in the book) who was transformed into the artist of these stories. In “Beverly Home” the narrator's description of his relationship to the “circular hallway” in the hospital where he once worked may also be Johnson describing his relationship to these stories. They mark “the place where, between our lives on this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls waiting to be born” (151). Jesus' Son is a portrait of the artist on the verge of being born.

Focusing on the scattered doings of a younger, hopelessly lost, drug-addled narrator, the stories in this book are constructed of fragments, partial views, unexplained actions, and mixed-up chronologies. One story is entitled “Two Men”; but when it ends, the reader has met only one man. Several stories intervene before we are belatedly introduced to the other man of the title. The stories themselves never quite catch up with the perspective from which they are being told. Instead, an almost mysterious distance separates the action of the stories from their telling, one that the narrator seems to experience along with the reader. As in Fiskadoro, the narrator addresses the audience from a future that cannot be predicted by the content of the stories themselves. What holds the collection together is the narrator's ghostly, transcendent voice. Floating in a kind of limbo between the time of the stories and the occasion of their telling, the narrator seems to speak from somewhere beyond Hart Crane's “broken world” as if to bring to his audience vital messages that might have been lost forever. He writes as one who has been redeemed but is unsure of how to account for his redemption. Although we may wonder how the protagonist of the stories became the poet of their utterance, we also come to understand that the narrator's redemption depends on his convincing his audience to recognize the miracle of his arrival.

Throughout, Johnson employs a double-voiced technique that draws its force from the way the stories seem to be jumbled together. Instead of simply recalling the past from the present, the narrator insinuates the future into the past. Here I am not referring to the conventional narrative approach that creates a disparity between the present of the narration and the past it describes—to explain how then became now. In Jesus' Son the future and the present mingle in every sentence, creating a strange sense of alternative worlds coexisting, but we never see the moment of the narrator's resurrection. In “Dundun” the narrator looks across a bleak midwestern landscape devoid of crops or farmers to reflect that “Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history.” In that moment he senses that “All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come,” he adds, “but we had to wait a long time” (50–51). The calm of the narrative present mingles with intimations of divinity that the narrator experienced but could not sustain in his drugged condition. He positions his audience so that always we feel that something transcendent is about to be revealed, or already has been. Be patient and observant, we seem to be told, and the miracle will be made known to us as it was to the narrator. If the character known as Fuckhead could not withstand his moments of trembling revelation, then the narrative voice he achieves is a way of making his earlier flashes of illumination last. At one point the narrator walks with his lover “out into a town flooded ankle-deep and wide with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that” (65). The narrative of Jesus' Son forsakes teleology in deference to the mystery of the birth or rebirth he describes.

“Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the book's opening story, seems to place us in the middle of one such birth by beginning with three sentence fragments strung together by ellipsis points. The fragments introduce travelers on the highway; the ellipsis points suggest the intervals of space between the travelers who, unknowing, will come together through their interaction with the narrator, two of them literally and fatally in a terrible crash. The fourth sentence introduces the narrator: “… I rose up sopping wet from the rain” (3). The words “I rose up” suggest the theme of resurrection at which the title of the book hints, as does the water out of which he emerges. Writing in a clairvoyant voice, the narrator recalls the event as if he knew in advance what the other characters could not: “I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we'd have an accident in the storm” (4). His foreknowledge both exalts and terrifies him. After describing his ominously innocent meeting with the Oldsmobile family, the narrator doubles back in time to recount his earlier journeys: with a traveling salesman who was hopped up on speed and, later, with a college student who was stoned on hashish. The jumbled narrative conveys the narrator's scrambled mental state; but more than that it suggests how his previous experiences as they are remembered offer no explanation as to how he achieved the consciousness from which the stories are told.

Something similar happens to the readers of the story because Johnson transforms them into helpless witnesses—rubberneckers, one might say—to a tragedy that they are powerless to avoid. By the time the crash occurs, we have become willing participants in a story that we might otherwise turn away from. In a later story, the narrator becomes a voyeur and wonders if his audience should be startled at the extent to which he can debase himself. However, the irony is that Johnson has anticipated that question by making us voyeurs in the first story in a way that invites us to gaze at the luridness of the narrator's life. As a hitchhiker, the narrator presents himself as the outsider who has compelled us to join him. By no social logic does the heroin addict-narrator fit into the car that carries this “normal” family except through the family's act of good samaritanism. The man driving the car tells the narrator, “I'm not taking you anywhere very fast” because “I have got my wife and babies here, that's why” (4). Eventually, the car crashes—the husband dies; the wife is badly injured; we do not know what becomes of the children. The family is destroyed; the outsider, the drug-addicted narrator, survives—to tell the tale that he and we must suppose.

On one level, Johnson uses the incident to suggest that disaster is no respecter of persons. On a deeper level, though, he wants to terrorize the audience as he has been terrorized. He does this neither to hurt us nor to continue to hurt himself but to create a shared realm of compassion to withstand life's inscrutable misery. Consider this spine-tingling description of the woman's reaction to her husband's death:

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it. I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.

(11)

In part, as a reflection on tragedy and its relation to narrative, Johnson reverses conventional audience expectations. The woman's power over her audience derives from her ignorance of the fate that the witnesses know will befall her. When she screams in recognition of the arrival of the moment that the audience could only anticipate, she releases the audience from its sense of dread. Mystery and wonder accumulate in the woman's scream through the recognition that the terror of death makes possible the beauty of life. For the narrator and for us, her scream takes the beautiful arc of an eagle soaring; that is, her terror becomes aestheticized and released as something beautiful. Johnson's narrator aspires to elevate his pain to the majesty of art; he wishes to scream as she did in order to have the power over us that she had over him.

Yet, this lovely description of the woman's grief also risks being a cool act of disassociation by the narrator, because on the deepest level the narrator is at the time as unknowing as the woman: he hears the scream but does not understand it. The terror that the woman experiences contrasts with the numbness that the narrator feels at his own survival. His initial response to surviving the crash is to deny that he was involved in it: “When it was over I was in the back seat, just as I had been” (6–7). He tries to leave the scene of the accident. He is relieved to the point of being “tearful” when a passing motorist “endorse[s] the idea of not doing anything about this.” He then acknowledges his greatest fear: “I'd thought something was required of me, but I hadn't wanted to find out what it was” (9). Jesus' Son dramatizes the narrator's seemingly endless repetition of his many acts of betrayal, but with a clarity of vision that aspires to holiness. The act of telling becomes his way of finally doing what was required of him: bearing witness to the tragedies he has seen and in some cases helped to create.

The scene abruptly shifts from the woman's scream to years later in a Seattle hospital where the narrator is denying that he needs help with his drug habit while nonetheless being sure that boxes of cotton were screaming, “‘Help us, oh God, it hurts’” (12). By this time in the narrator's life the woman's scream had been transferred to the boxes of cotton because the narrator could not acknowledge that her terror, despite his survival, belonged also to him. The story concludes with his displacing his guilt and grief onto the audience: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you” (12). Here the narrator is concerned less with assaulting his audience's pieties than with challenging us to gain a clearer perception of the story than the one that he has told. Reading the book retrospectively, we realize that the narrator frames his own reaction so that his audience sees him in the same way that he and the others look at the woman. Initially, though, if your appreciation of the power and mystery and horror of the woman's scream depends on feeling separate from it, then, regardless of how you live and what you believe, you are pretty much in the same miserable situation as the narrator. By the time the narrator writes his story, he has achieved the compassion that allows him to deflate his romanticism. Or, to put the matter differently, he has come to accept that what may be required of him is to find an audience whom he can help as he helped himself.

The narrator's desire to crash into our world is reflected in his abiding fascination with those moments when one world impinges upon another. In story after story the narrator imagines “that the dead are coming back” (77). More often, though, Johnson evokes the pain that is felt when not transformation but only the re-enactment of some prior violation occurs. Describing the lost souls who haunt the bars of First Avenue in Seattle, the narrator speaks of how

[p]eople entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself. […]

(122)

The obvious irony of the passage is that this collection of alcoholics and junkies cannot give up their bodies because they are chained to them by addictions that then become the physical embodiment of their metaphysical state. They are doomed to inhabit their bodies, exhausting the universe's possibilities until their lives are reduced to a single moment. More subtle is the suggestion that they are being punished for failing to come to terms with their choices in some previous experience or even existence. In “Dundun” the narrator observes of the murderer whose name gives the story its title that he “beat a man almost to death with a tire iron right on the street of Austin, Texas for which he'll someday have to answer, but now he is, I think, in the state prison in Colorado” (51). As I have suggested, in Johnson's universe the most frightening form of death is not to lack an existence but to suffer the endless repetition of a terrible one (or ones). As the repetition of the name “Dundun” suggests, this particular character is doomed to relive acts that he has already “done” but has not transcended. Similarly, in the First Avenue bar the confrontation between mother and jilted child or rapist and victim evokes the terror experienced by the wrongdoer—the betrayer—when she or he must face the consequences of having committed a past violation. The bar, a version of hell, gathers these souls together to relive the moment that they can never escape. Sharing shots of drink and smack, they commit endless self-violations through their bodies, sending themselves doomed messages, trying to release imprisoned souls.

The name Dundun also carries with it the image of doubling. For the souls trapped in the bars of First Avenue “nothing could be healed, [because] the mirror was a knife was dividing everything from itself” (122). It is significant that in this passage the narrator imagines his kindred lost souls being made to confront the very images that have produced their self-divisions without allowing them an accompanying transformation. Those images become the knife that prevents healing from taking place, the mirror that shields each character from continuing his life. Johnson arranges the stories to reinforce that point. Lovett dies in the ironically titled “Out on Bail” yet surfaces in subsequent stories. Reappearing in later stories that describe earlier events, Lovett becomes a kind of ghost to the reader. The narrator reintroduces Lovett without ever letting on that he knows what we do. Thus we watch with mingled horror and fascination as Lovett repeats the same acts that must eventually kill—indeed, have already killed—him. Likewise, in “Dirty Wedding” the narrator is tormented by the memory of a version of himself that was never allowed to cross the threshold into being: the memory of his aborted child. He attempts to transfer the guilt and grief he feels for this experience to his girlfriend, who actually had to endure the abortion. “She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer,” he says, denying that he, too, has participated in what he understands to be a murder. After the medical procedure is completed, he asks her, “What did they stick up you?” (94). The mirror-knife that earlier destroyed life by freezing it in an endless present now becomes in this passage the knife that destroys life before it can even emerge. If the story's title marks the union that has occurred over the remains of the slaughtered fetus, then the story itself is where the narrator confronts the victim of his own crime.

The issue of the baby's continuing life is more complex than this quoted passage allows, for it treads on what I loosely call Johnson's aesthetic. Throughout these stories, as I have been suggesting, Johnson is interested in emergent forms-lives beginning, new worlds being ushered in. In “Car Crash” the narrator sits next to an infant in the Oldsmobile. After the crash he carries the infant about with him and tries unsuccessfully to leave the baby with a truck driver. The narrator never tells us what happens to that baby—perhaps because the infant is also the narrator or may be another incarnation of the potential child he loses in “Dirty Wedding.” The memory of that loss stirs him to try to imagine the consciousness of the life lost in the womb.

Think of being curled up and floating in darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the “Ten Thousand Things”? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you even know the difference?

(98)

In terms of logic, what he asks makes no sense. What would it be like to lose a life you could not fully imagine, only to find yourself dead from a life that you never were able to experience? These stories are not about logic but about buried states of being. Of course the narrator cannot know what the fetus suffered, or even that it did. However, he can now imagine what it would mean not to experience the transformation that has enabled him to live in “this miraculous world.” In a sense, he overcomes the death that was his life to become the baby this fetus did not. The sense of innocence that permeates his prose allows him to describe the difference it makes no longer to be dead: to envision the miraculous world that exists side by side with a world of death.

“Emergency” contains Johnson's fullest exploration of this theme. In this story the narrator is working as an orderly in the emergency room in a Seattle hospital. A man walks into the E.R. with a peculiar ailment: a knife “blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye” (71). His other eye is a glass one. Despite the knife lodged in his one good eye, the man can still see, though he cannot form a fist with his left hand because something is happening to his brain. The doctor on call is intimidated by what confronts him and decides to call in an entire team—“a great eye man,” “a brain surgeon,” and a “genius gas man.” Before this collection of medical all-stars can be collected, the situation is unexpectedly resolved by the stoned-out-of-his-mind orderly, Georgie. While interested observers discuss various opinions, Georgie suddenly appears carrying the knife that a moment ago was stuck somewhere in the patient's brain. Full vision is restored to the eye; acceptable motor and reflex skills return as well. Georgie becomes an almost unwitting agent of grace, the innocent who confounds experience. “There's nothing wrong with the guy,” the nurse says. “It's just one of those things” (76).

Later in the story the narrator, too, experiences the power of “one of those things” as an intimation of divinity. After the shift is over, Georgie and the narrator decide to drive up into the mountains. High, feeling “like a giant helium-filled balloon,” they accidentally run over a rabbit (76). Georgie bounds out of the car to put the rabbit out of its misery, carrying the same knife that he had pulled out of the patient's eye. He comes back carrying several “slimy miniature rabbits.” “We killed the mother and saved the children,” he proclaims (79). As the rabbits' savior, Georgie believes a special charge has been given him. He plans to raise the rabbits on milk and sugar. The rabbits are temporarily forgotten, though, when the narrator suggests that because the snow is accumulating they should turn for home. Driving without headlights, and night coming on, they become so lost that they leave the road and find themselves moving over a field that turns out to be a graveyard. Out of the snow's white darkness a miracle trembles before the narrator:

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 pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there had been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.

(81)

Lost in the graveyard, the narrator sees that Judgment Day has come. What a sight! The sky is opening up to bring forth angels who will receive him as he wants to be taken. He seems poised to embrace what he most longs for: a vision that will take him out of his endless life. Were he to die at that moment he might think that his life had been redeemed—but probably not. As he admits, were he to evacuate his bowels it would not be because he died but because he could not overcome his fear. The “pity and light” he wants to experience he has not yet earned. Besides, as Georgie points out, the angels he sees are really movie actors; the graveyard turns out to be the parking lot of a drive-in movie, with speakers instead of headstones. “In a couple of minutes,” the narrator tells us, “the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but my breath” (82). In other words, his vision is temporary, and he is returned to the sordidness of his life, alone again. This miracle lost returns their attention to the motherless rabbits at the moment the narrator suddenly realizes that he has inadvertently killed them. While dreaming of angels descending, he was giving birth to the rabbits' deaths. Looking at the eight corpses, which must recall his aborted child, he thinks “Little feet! Eyelids! Even Whiskers!” (84). Whereas Georgie can proclaim, “I save lives,” the narrator accumulates deaths: the family of “Car Crash,” the passenger he is driving in “Dundun,” the girlfriend who had the abortion accidentally kills herself. The death of the eight baby rabbits, which could not have been saved anyway, moves him more violently than any other incident in the book. It is as if he finally hears the scream that thrilled him in the book's opening story and is now at last moved to tears.

The disassociation between act and feeling that the protagonist has tried to maintain throughout breaks down in this story. By allowing himself to be overwhelmed by the pain he elsewhere tries to numb, the narrator depicts himself as one able to accept the experience of suffering as an inalienable truth. As the concluding story suggests, the narrator of Jesus' Son hopes like his namesake to adopt a perspective that can transmute the world's suffering by absorbing it into his own. “Beverly Home” portrays how the narrator identifies his experience with that of the audience from whom he seems to be excluded. That communion begins when the narrator walks by a house where he hears a woman singing in the shower—“a soft song from the wet chamber” that makes him think of mermaids (142). The voice calls to him and he finds himself drawn to her bathroom window. Catching a glimpse of her, he is so enticed by the experience of being a voyeur that he makes a habit of looking through her window. Fascinated by her life with her husband, he determines that they are a Mennonite couple and becomes as interested in their mundane daily rituals as he is by the prospect of getting “to watch them fucking.” He confesses,

I got so I enjoyed seeing them sitting in their living room talking, almost not talking at all, reading the Bible, saying grace, eating their supper in the kitchen alcove, as much as I liked watching her in the shower.

(152)

An attempt to see a woman naked becomes a fascination with a life from which he is excluded. Watching this couple every evening constitutes the most fully sustained relationship he has with anyone in the book. One evening, standing “outside in the dark with a great loneliness and the terror of a whole life not yet lived,” he thinks he hears them making love. Because the window is closed and blinds are drawn, he cannot see them. He feels “abandoned—cast out of the fold” (154). It is likely that he returns to this scene precisely so he can dramatize to himself the alienation he feels from any community that is not made up of outsiders like himself. Yet, his desire to see them couple reflects not only a desire to participate in their universe, but his longing to be present when people touch each other in a meaningful way.

The narrator hovers on the brink of recognizing his own complicity with what he views when he determines that the couple has not been making love after all, but fighting. He is startled when the woman suddenly draws back the curtain to uncover a face that reveals nothing except a nameless hurt.

I stood on the dark side of her and actually couldn't see her very well, but I got the impression she was upset. I thought I heard her weeping. I could have touched a teardrop, I stood that close.

(155)

The physical closeness between the narrator and the woman only accentuates the distance that he feels between himself and the world he wants to transcend. Obsessed with the idea that there is a world other than the one he inhabits, he finds himself peering into an alternative universe only to be confronted with a doubled image of himself. Johnson frames the scene so that the audience sees the Mennonite woman unknowingly witnessing a reflection of the narrator's hurt, just as the narrator recognizes his own darkness reflected in her. Thus, the phrase “I was on the dark side of her” connects the narrator and the woman. He projects himself as an image of her suffering. The hurt she sees in her own face is also a reflection of him.

When he floats in her outer darkness as vestige of her own pain—and perhaps that of the world—she is healed in a strange and moving ritual. Reversing the archetypal moment when Mary Magdalene washed Jesus' feet, the husband returns to end their argument by washing her feet.

Then she turned toward him, slipped her tennis shoes from her feet, reached backward to each lifted ankle one after the other, and peeled the small white socks off. She dipped the toe of her right foot into the water, then the whole foot, lowering it down out of sight into the yellow basin. He took the cloth from his shoulder, never once looking up at her, and started the washing.

(157)

This touching ceremony of healing is what the narrator has sought all his life, without finding. If the man's offering is a remarkable gesture of conciliation, then there is something mysterious in the woman's action. Why does she accept the man's offer? Has their difference of opinion been resolved? These sorts of questions give way to the eloquence of the act. She seems to confer grace on the couple merely by consenting to become a part of the ritual her husband initiates. The narrator and the reader join as witnesses and together wonder whether this scene of grace might also include those outside it.

As the book's title suggests, the narrator wishes to suffer the unredeemed penitent to come to him. The antecedent for the title, though, comes not from the Bible but from the Velvet Underground song written and sung by Lou Reed, “Heroin.”⁴ Like the singer of that song, Johnson's narrator is a heroin junkie whose apprehension of the divine derives from the rush he experiences when shooting heroin. Johnson places Reed's lines “When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' Son” on the page that precedes the title so that they hover over the narrative like an unanswered inquiry. These lines are as close as Johnson comes to explaining why the narrator chose to shoot heroin, and they also help explain why Johnson chose the title for his book. Reed's singer speaks of “trying for the kingdom if I can,” which means making good on his earlier claim that he is going to try “to nullify my life.” The music, insistent and beautiful and breathless all at once, seems to storm heaven as if to reclaim the throne that Milton's Satan could not. Reed, like William Burroughs in Naked Lunch, uses his art primarily to convey the sense of being high. As a consequence he is as likely to convert the uninitiated to heroin as to scare them away from it. Reed sings, “Heroiiiiiiin will be the death of me,” and it sounds lovely, perfect. Johnson's narrator, by contrast, overcomes the siren call of nullity to ascend to the kingdom of an angelic narrative consciousness. He associates himself with Jesus to evoke both his own doomed life—that his addiction to drugs will kill him young—and the fact that he transcended this fate. Not Jesus's biological son, the narrator transforms himself to one of Jesus's living spiritual heirs.

This son of Jesus ends his narrative working in a hospital for the aged, where part of his job is “to touch people,” that is, to heal others (139). Healing others requires that he walk against patient traffic, which “flowed in one direction only.” He “walked against the tide, according to my instructions, greeting everybody and grasping their hands or squeezing their shoulders, because they needed to be touched, and they didn't get much of that” (139). The man who in “Car Crash” rode against the traffic into collision and death now moves against it to make contact and provide restoration. Earlier he could not admit to being part of a story that included him; he now discovers his calling is to tell the story as the writer of the “Beverly Home Newsletter.” This homely medium predicts the artist of this work: he makes others aware of their existence and glad that their presence on this earth is recognized by someone else. Somehow, he has traveled far from that moment in “Car Crash” when he had stared at a dying man and saw in him that “the great pity of this life on earth” was not “that we all end up dead,” but “that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real” (10). The book thus concludes with a gesture that confirms the journey he has made and that he hopes his audience has made as well. “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat,” the narrator confesses, “that there might be a place for people like us” (160). If the narrator could not reach that dying man or his aborted child or Jack Lovett, then he learned it was not too late to learn to try to reach through us to himself. “That world!” he reflects of his past. “These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up into a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?” (88).

In these stories Johnson unrolls his scroll, finds that it belongs to him alone, but gives it to his readers anyway. He offers us the strange beauty of seeing life with doubled vision: how the world is perceived when a knife is plunged into your eye and how it is perceived after the knife has been removed. Either way, the angels that the narrator envisions descending from the movie screen may turn out to be sustaining and real. He is.

Notes

1. Nelson Fairchild, Jr. ends up being murdered by the same man whom he had hired to murder his wife; moreover, his death is portrayed as the completion to a series of botched lives, and thus his soul has now been freed to initiate a new life cycle in some other incarnation.

2. See Lenz, Reitenbach, and Smith.

3. Philip Roth called Jesus' Son a “masterpiece” at a reading by Roth that I attended at Trinity University (San Antonio) in November 1992. When asked which young writers he admired, Roth at first stated that he no longer read contemporary fiction. Nonetheless, he then went on to single out Jesus' Son, which he had read in manuscript.

4. Johnson's work borrows freely and often from rock and roll culture. In Fiskadoro, Bob Marley is referred to as a god equal in stature to Quetzalcoatl and Jesus. Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze” plays a key role in the narrative, as does Bob Dylan's “Man of Peace.” In Angels, the lawyer Fredericks suffers his realization that he wants to help murderers go free while standing under the knowing gaze of Elvis Presley, hanging above him in “iridescent paint on black velvet” (208).

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Harcourt, 1994.

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1966.

Johnson, Denis. Already Dead: A California Gothic. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

———. Angels. New York: Knopf, 1983.

———. Fiskadoro. New York: Knopf, 1985.

———. Jesus' Son. New York: Farrar, 1992.

———. The Stars at Noon. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Lenz, Millicent. “Reinventing as World: Myth in Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro.” The Nightmare Considered: Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature. Ed. Nancy Anisfield. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1991. 114–22.

Reitenbach, Gail. “Foreign Exchange in Denis Johnson's The Stars at Noon.” Arizona Quarterly 47.4 (Winter 1991): 27–47.

Smith, Robert McClure, “Addiction and Recovery in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.” Critique 42.2 (2001): 180–91.

Velvet Underground. “Heroin.” Lyrics by Lou Reed. The Velvet Underground and Nico. Verve 422–823–290–1 Y-1. 1969.