Thoughts on Jesus’ Son

Read Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son this week, and was - and becoming even more - blown away. The stories are entertaining yet complex. I finished the book last night and today while I was thinking about something totally unrelated, one of the stories hit me viscerally - as if it was the residue from some vivid dream I had had where before your mind even has a chance to fill in the details, you feel the way you did when you first experienced it. Two chilling details remained with me: the slimy miniature bunnies found inside the guts of a roadkilled rabbit in “Emergency,” and the protagonist in “Beverly Home” on the ground peering beneath the Mennonite woman’s window curtain. 

In this last story, the junkie protagonist starts out a run-of-the-mill peeping Tom but becomes obsessed with observing a Mennonite woman and her husband - seemingly for non-sexual reasons, although this is sort of an open question. In one of the story’s final scenes, the junkie is laying on the ground outside the woman’s bedroom, desperately trying to see beyond a closed window curtain. At one point the woman yanks open the curtain and is face to face with the junkie - but since it is dark outside and light inside, she doesn’t see beyond her reflection. It struck me that this scene embodied something that happened throughout the book: outsiders looking in - and, rarely, insiders looking out. 

Every story involves a junkie of some kind, which might sound depressing, but the tone is entertaining and never taxing. The junkies are respectable for some reason - maybe because of the narration - although they are not control of their lives, they are certainly in control of the narration. Although the average reader of Johnson probably does not have much in common with the kinds of people presented in his stories, their lucid narration bridges the gap. You respect the perspective they have on their own situation.

I thought this was an interesting aspect of the book - the fact that the average reader probably doesn’t have much in common with the types of people in the stories. The last line of the book gets at this - “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a hearbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

The book presents two spheres of people: the responsible ones and the irresponsible ones. Usually you are asked to look into the world of the junky - who often interacts with the responsible ones. This point makes this tension all the more apparent: often, the junkies hold jobs that intrude on the other sphere in an uncomfortable way. They are in charge of cleaning patients in ER room, or working in old folks homes. They work in jobs you’d expect - and demand - more competent people to be working. Positions of trust - to some extent. One particularly horrifying intrusion is when one junkie, who works in an ER prepping patients, does drugs on the job and yanks a knife out of a patient’s eye without even thinking about it - all while the surgeon doubts his own ability to perform such a difficult removal. 

There’s one moment where a group of junkies find themselves interacting with another group of even worse junkies. But usually they’re interacting with normal folk and it can be uncomfortable but mostly it’s easy to sympathize - or at least be entertained - by the narrator junky. In “Beverly Home,” you sympathize - at least to some small degree - because he writes such a caring and enthusiastic newsletter for the community. As noted above, I believe the sympathy you feel relates to their ability to write, to express themselves. The narratives are direct and honest, sometimes visionary but controlled.

Here I am throwing around the word junky. Maybe I shouldn’t be judging everyone so quickly in a book called Jesus’ Son. I really don’t think the book is getting at something so trite (i.e. presenting you with “sinful” characters that evoke sympathy all to show you that even the sinful are worthy of love), but there might be something to that. I’m more interested in the relationship between these two spheres of people. The book asks you, the presumably educated, to examine the lives of the uneducated - to look out beyond your own reflection. 

Great Lines (So Far) in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

“You broke, eh?”
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”

I said: “Anybody home, son?”
“How would I know?”
“Go ——— yourself [sic].”
“That’s how people get false teeth.”

“Whoever had done it [killed Geiger] had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

Link → Mystery In Flannery O'Connor

Patrick Galloway’s take on Flannery O’Connor’s use of mystery:

“The Catholic mindset accepts mystery as a fact of life, that there are certain things we are simply not meant to know, certain workings of the cosmic machine that only God understands. O’Connor utilizes this as a plot option, this mysterious, unexpected turn. She is not satisfied with the limitations of purely realistic prose, being rather of the opinion that her kind of fiction ‘will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery.’”

This sounds right to me—and it takes a little pressure off of me as I reader her Complete Stories. Writing about O’Connor is a little intimidating because so much has been written about her, and I have never read her before. I am reading her without a clue as to how I am ‘supposed’ to read her, if there is such a thing.

At first, I found her style a little jarring. I found myself unprepared to handle her sudden plot twists and unresolved endings. As I continue to read, I appreciate the mystery at the heart of her stories. She respects the limits of fiction and does not ‘tell’ her readers how to read her stories.

In a weird way, when reading O’Connor’s stories, I feel like my ability to read is under examination, judged in the same way that God will judge her characters. My struggle to follow her narratives reflect the struggle of her characters to know the will of God. At the heart of her narratives is a mystery that I am shut out of, just because.

More and more, I am finding this mystery one of the most compelling things about her stories.

Link → Ten Theses on the Nature of Metafiction (And a Parenthetical Review of Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper) » Quarterly Conversation

George Fragopoulos reviews Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, and works in ten ‘theses’ of metafiction:

I. Metafiction is the twice-told lie. Much of the novel’s aesthetic power rests in its paradoxical nature. The novel posits itself as a vibrant fiction driven by a convincing verisimilitude; it is in blurring the line between reality and fiction that the novel really takes form. Metafiction is simply the logical extension of the novel’s initial goal: a fiction that would be so convincing it would fool us into accepting it as reality.

II. We fall in love with the fictional construct of the lie before we claim that fictional construct as a truth. This is a fundamental aspect of all metaficiton. Malraux: “An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, according to the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue.” Metaphysicians, whether they were the guise of artist or theologian, always attach more importance to those things they know to be false than the world those fictions represent.

III. We are never betrayed by reality. We are only betrayed by the lies that we have constructed around that reality. This is another of metafiction’s truths.

IV. Metafiction treats language as the utmost sacred object, but such notions rest on the paradox that there is nothing truly sacred left but fiction. Fiction is the last sacred language act we have. Metafiction seeks to construct sacred books for an age that neither wants nor needs such texts.

V. Metafiction is what Nietzsche may very well have been writing about when he stated that he feared that we still believe in God because we have grammar. God is dead, but only in a sense. We might say, God is no longer the communal gossip whispered from ear to ear in social circles. God is now idle chatter, the nonsense we hear in those most private of moments when we are confronted by something like the Self or the World. For our post-Christian, metafictional world, god has become language, or, better yet, a private syntax rather than a communal grammar. It is still that which structures the world, but on a private scale, atomized.

VI. Joan Didion stated that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Metaficion posits a slight addendum to such a statement. We tell ourselves lies in order to live. The difference is subtle, but a necessary one, I think. We capture the fiction behind the lie, we may, at first, even be aggravated by such a fact, but we still belong to it, and are grateful it is there.

VII. Metafiction does not posit an arrogant form of human exceptionalism. The Word is flesh not because it has fallen from the heavens but rather because it exists in us. Language possesses a materiality and corporeality not frequently considered.

VIII. Toni Morrison: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” These are the only two human realities we truly know, death and life, and when faced with the abyss of either path we only have language.

IX. We are living in a historical moment lifted straight out of a Borges’s essay: “Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of ‘Hamlet’? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” I would like to amend this a little. Metafiction acts from a center of certainty regarding our own uncertainty as real constructs. We readers and spectators are fictitious, not simply open to such a possibility. Of such notions, there is little doubt of metafiction’s certainty.

X. There is no anxiety in metafiction regarding the fictitious nature of it all. To learn one is a fiction is a liberating truth, perhaps the final one. All the anxiety that exists in metafiction revolves around the construction of a narrative, and what that narrative will contain. A metafiction never ends with the last sentence, but continues long after as the static of our lives. It is all there, simply listen:

On Marguerite Duras, a paraphrase

Something I heard in class tonight, paraphrasing my prof.,  Francois Camoin:

‘It’s like when someone tells you about a dream they just had. It’s the most boring thing someone could possibly say. They go on telling you about how their dad was a dog, but he could speak, etc. But it wasn’t your dream so you don’t know what those things mean. You want to tell them to stop talking. The problem is that they take out all of the mystery and the ambiguity, but those are what make it interesting—interesting, unless it isn’t your dream, of course.

What makes Duras so great is that she makes it your dream. She maintains those mysteries, the complexities.’

Now reading: Marguerite Duras The War

The Frame is a commonplace book by Marshall.

Reach me at marshall[at]theframe.org.

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