CRAFT ESSAY #4 - Jesus' Son

Craft Essay # 4:

Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson

In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the opening story of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a woman is taken into an office and told that her husband was just killed in an auto accident. “From under the closed door,” the narrator tells us, “a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there” (p.11). This strikes me as an apt metaphor for these radiant stories, which seem to have been organically harvested from the narrator’s (author’s?) subconscious.
This first person narrator, known only as Fuckhead, appears to be telling us these related tales from a later vantage point (“This was in 1973” [p. 69]; “Those sodium-arc lamps were new in our town then” [p. 28]). This historical perspective lends Fuckhead an air of authority he might not otherwise deserve, being a (recovering) addict. The passing of time between the action and the telling also allows him to be oddly vague at times—“I was twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that” (p. 91); one character had “been a high school quarterback or something” (p. 28)—a quality not often found in fiction, but which, here, actually adds to Fuckhead’s authority (he was high at the time, after all). Fuckhead is in many ways the ultimate unreliable narrator—a drunk, a drug addict, a thief, and a coward—but he tells these stories with an awkward honesty that invites our trust. His vagueness also provides an exciting contrast to the razor-sharp observations he is sometimes capable of: “The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts” (p. 3); “She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty” (p. 61); and this description of a dive bar: “It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere” (p. 36). The combination of these precise descriptions and those other, more inarticulate ones creates a unique and compelling tension.
In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose writes of how important it is to decide who the narrator is telling the story to. Though he sometimes uses poetic, soaring language (more on that later), Fuckhead’s otherwise informal, conversational tone implies a specific audience—perhaps a roomful of regulars at a series of AA or NA meetings. When he begins a story with “But I never finished telling you about the two men” (p. 105), harking back 90 pages to the story “Two Men,” he is commenting on the act of remembering, just like we do when we lose, and then find, our train of thought while telling a long anecdote. On pages 38-9, Fuckhead’s story about meeting Jack Hotel at the Vine is turned inside out when he realizes that he’s gotten the story all wrong: Hotel wasn’t about to be convicted of armed robbery and sent to prison for twenty-five years after all; he had in fact been acquitted. There’s more confusion on page 84, when the beautiful snow scene (at the deserted drive-in theater) is followed by this: “Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed.” These realizations “twist” Fuckhead’s life, as he puts it (p. 38), and they create for the reader an appropriately vertiginous sense of reality.
Another, related technique that emphasizes the informal, almost chatty tone is the narrator’s tendency to digress, often by making leaps in time. In “Car Crash,” for instance, Fuckhead interrupts one hospital experience (post-accident) to tell us about another “some years later when I was admitted to the Detox at Seattle General Hospital (p. 12).” Similarly, when relating a story about one of his unfortunate friends, Fuckhead will skip to some later time frame to tell us about the pathetic destinies of, say, Jack Hotel (p. 42), or Dundun (p. 51). This is another characteristic of improvisational (oral) storytelling.
Dialogue is also integral to the author’s establishing an awkward, off-kilter tone, and is often as idiosyncratic as Fuckhead’s narration. There’s a sameness that breaks the rules of fiction (Each character should sound like him- or herself!) while, paradoxically, affirming Fuckhead’s authority. When Jack Hotel says, “Everything was completely out of hand” (p. 47), or Georgie says, “They’ll get as big as gorillas” (p. 79), or Terence Weber (the man with the knife in his eye) says, “Okay, I’m certainly ready for something like that” (p. 72), they all sound like Fuckhead, which seems appropriate, since these stories are being filtered through his quirky sensibility and Swiss cheese memory. Dialogue also serves as a vehicle for the book’s humor, an outlet for the narrator (and us) in an otherwise bleak landscape.
All these narrative idiosyncrasies and the strangely casual tone are dramatically offset by the narrator’s frequent flights of equally strange but compelling poetry. Some of my favorites: “I knew every raindrop by its name” (p. 4); “The seeds were moaning in the garden” (p. 18); “After sitting on the bus for several blocks with a thoughtless, red mind…” (p. 56); “Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts” (p. 77); “Through the neighborhoods and past the platforms, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me” (p. 95); “When I coughed I saw fireflies” (p. 100). These seem to emerge whole and sincere from the disjointed mind of an addict, and serve as the spine on which the mood is built. Again, the tension between this poetry and the less articulate tone creates tension. It’s like we’re watching life with the color slightly off—or, we’re witnessing the radiance of diamonds being incinerated—and the effect is a feeling of anxiety and unease. And wonder, for this disconnect does not push us out of the stories, but pulls us in.