Denis Johnson is a dirty realist. I imagine a homeless guy pushing a grocery cart full of empties and muttering it to himself—dirty realist, dirty realist, dirty realist—as if Denis Johnson had done him wrong. A dirty realist writes about mid-western white trash junkies who flirt with violence and describe it in first person narratives. They use short choppy sentences. The sentences are non-linear and associative. They reflect the mental state of your average NA regular.
Using Jesus’ Son as our paradigm, we meet:
• a rain-soaked hitchhiker picked up by a man with a young family who veers into an oncoming car;
• a pill-popping hospital orderly who pulls a knife from the eye of a man who’s been stabbed by his wife
• a recovering addict, part-time worker at an old folks home, who spends his off hours spying on an Amish couple, hoping to catch them having sex;
and so on.
We get passages like this:
The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do. He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn’t be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don”t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.
And like this:
Everybody had a different idea about exactly how to approach the problem of removing the knife from Terrence Weber’s brain. But when Georgie came in from prepping the patient—from shaving the patient’s eyebrow and disinfecting the area around the wound, and so on—he seemed to be holding the hunting knife in his left hand.
The talk just dropped off a cliff.
“Where,” the doctor asked finally, “did you get that?”
Nobody said one thing more, not for quite a long time.
After a while, one of the I.C.U. nurses said, “Your shoelace is untied.” Georgie laid the knife on a chart and bent down to fix his shoe.
I have my doubts about dirty realism. Not about Denis Johnson’s writing, which I love. My doubts have more to do with the idea of realism. Like the hitchhiker, I can’t tell what is real. I don’t think violence (or altered states of consciousness induced by drugs and trauma) makes the world more really real. The fact that it appears as text in stories should be proof enough of its artifice. The words mediate reality. And nowadays most words betray an awareness of their mediating role, which makes the artifice even more obvious.
Even if we assume that violence makes things more really real, I’m not convinced that the violence of an overdose and a knife in the eye is the violence most of us knows. The violence most of us knows comes from glowing screens. It pecks us to death at keyboards. Do you want real violence? Do you want the dirty truth? Consider how I came to own Jesus’ Son in the first place.
A few years ago, my wife and I were driving north on Highway 400 when we pulled into the Cookstown outlet mall. Tamiko said we needed new pillows. The old ones were worn out from killing our dog had lost their fluffiness. While Tamiko went to a linen and bedding store, I slipped into one of those discount book clearance stores. A hard-covered copy of Jesus’ Son had been remaindered there. My heart was moved with pity. I chose to rescue this book (and by extension, its author) from this indignity of accountants and shipping clerks. I took it home and set it on a shelf where it could be loved and admired and taken out for a walk from time to time.
Do you want another example of real violence? Denis Johnson’s latest novel, Train Dreams, didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The violence isn’t in not winning. The violence is in the Pulitzer committee’s indecision. Nobody won. Despite a field of worthy contenders, the award selection committee refused to make a choice. Bureaucrats have inflicted an indignity against those on the short list, and on the long list too. It is the violence of the glowing screen and the hunt-and-peck typist. It is the violence of a numb mind, worse than any drug fog. It is the violence of oxygen deprivation. It is adjudication by the plastic-bag-over-the-head method.