Tim Parrish, Texas Christian University

Abstract

In Jesus' Son, perhaps Johnson's most representative work, Johnson portrays the story of his narrator's search for religious transcendence through a creative engagement with Lou Reed's great song about drug addiction and spiritual yearning, "Heroin." The title of the book is in fact a coded reference to Reed's "Heroin" (mentioned in the epigraph) and to the narrator's search to become worthy of Jesus Christ's legacy. Lou Reed, though, is the novel's authorizing voice, or spirit of the novel. Johnson writes a kind of confessional novel--the story of his birth of an artist that also refers to his status as a born-again Christian. In using Reed's "Heroin" to structure his fictional autobiography, Johnson acknowledges that Lou Reed helped give him the vision to render a horrid world true and beautiful, something worth saving.

[1] Despite the fact that three of Denis Johnson's books are included by Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon, Johnson has not received the critical attention he deserves. Part of this neglect may be because Johnson's work is difficult to categorize: his characters are usually drug addicts with little interest in achieving the usual forms of American "success" regardless of their lives' social or political position. Nor are they that concerned about protesting against an unjust society that denies them access to its rewards. On the surface, they are only looking to make their next connection–be it with a drug or an occasional friend or lover.  Eschewing a political context for his work, Johnson favours characters and implicitly readers who believe in the power of narrative to transform personal lives. The narrative complicity he seeks is distinctly religious in orientation. For Johnson, an acknowledged born-again Christian, narrative matters only insofar as it is spiritually regenerative: his characters seek stories that will allow them to transcend their lives as they have known them.

[2] In Jesus' Son, perhaps Johnson's most representative work, Johnson portrays the story of his narrator's search for religious transcendence through a creative engagement with Lou Reed's great song about drug addiction and spiritual yearning, "Heroin." The title of the book is in fact a coded reference to Reed's "Heroin" (mentioned in the epigraph) and to the narrator's search to become worthy of Jesus Christ's legacy. Lou Reed, though, is the novel's authorizing voice, or spirit of the novel. He is the muse that the narrator, who is named for us only as "Fuckhead" (hereafter F.H.), invokes to tell his story and we cannot approach the book except through Reed's voice. The verse Johnson cites from Reed is: "When I'm rushing on my run/And I feel just like Jesus' son."  Reed's song is about a heroin addict explaining to a potentially unsympathetic audience why he does something over and over that seems to invite only self-destruction. The central paradox "Heroin" explores is that the same force that is killing the singer is what makes life seem bearable, even worth living for. The second verse begins: "I have made a big decision/I'm gonna try to nullify my life", and clearly this song is an account not only of that desire but the release pursuing this desire gives him. Reed's singer says that injecting heroin into his bloodstream makes him "feel just like Jesus' son" to convey the power, the feeling of pleasant self-aggrandizement, that overwhelms him when he is high. Although Reed's narrator wants to shock his audience since he implies that his acts are somehow indebted to Jesus, he is less interested in arguing about Jesus than he is sharing as directly as possible his own overwhelming sense of self-absorption.  After comparing himself to Jesus' son, he sings twice "I guess but I just don't know" and these are also the words employed to complete the song. That is, the only world that is real to him is the one that he discovers while he is high; he will speak for no others. When he does receive glimmers of a world beyond his own interior one, he is aware of "politicians making crazy sounds" and "dead bodies piled up in mounds."  The song implies both that the city (New York) the singer inhabits is a moral and physical wasteland and that the singer takes heroin in order to escape that wasteland. To a certain extent, his drug-taking makes him into a projection of the urban landscape and society he dreads, but one that he transcends though his heroin-induced mystical visions.

[3] I am discussing the lyrics as if they were poetry but the words are enlivened by music and Reed's extraordinary vocal performance. Much of song is a loud, barbarous squawk. The rush of the drug is conveyed by a blooming atonal buzz, a howling that often compels uninitiated listeners either to leave the room or to shut down the sound system. The noise of the music means to set up a barrier that only the truly infected (symbolically or otherwise) would care to cross. Despite the music's pitch of driving atonality, the overall feeling the song conveys is one of beautiful surrender. In this respect "Heroin" accomplishes the same goal Jesus' Son seeks: to give voice to a visionary way of perceiving the world that normally dies with its expression. Johnson, like Reed, speaks for the nameless, those imprisoned souls who can neither escape their lives nor make them into the poetry they long not just to hear, read, or know but to become. Hence, Reed and Johnson are arguably both religious writers because they are both obsessed with communicating through art an experience beyond the sensation of ordinary life.

[4] Johnson situates Jesus's Son within the context of "Heroin" both to pay tribute to Reed and to subvert Reed's work into something else. Although Reed's singer and Johnson's narrator each articulate a sense of illegitimacy as unacknowledged sons of Jesus, only Johnson's character seems touched with the possibility of being able to redeem his life. Still, virtually everything that occurs in the book is implied by the song, from the acts of crime the narrator commits to maintain his habit to the casually wasted persona of the narrator-protagonist. In the mind of Johnson's narrator and throughout his story generally, Reed's line " I guess but I just know" becomes a kind of benediction, a blessing that hides the narrator's fear of the world and his involvement in it. In one story F.H. finds himself carrying a baby who has just survived a car wreck that killed the baby's father. The narrator is anxious because he worries he might somehow be responsible for the child's welfare. When a bystander conveys to him the impression that no one is responsible, the narrator's gratitude is practically unbounded.  In pointed contrast to "Heroin," Jesus' Son portrays the successful realization of a lasting redemption from the sordidness of one's life. Indeed, Johnson's narrator claims the mantle of Jesus's son not as a bit of wry drug humor, but to convey his sincere hope to live a life worthy of anyone's–even Jesus'–scrutiny. In "Dundun" he speaks of a moment "when the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time" (51). The narrative never portrays this moment: it appears only as a retroactive prophecy open to the reader's interpretation. With "Heroin" the song implies the singer's death; with Jesus' Son the narrative implies F.H.'s rebirth. "Heroin" inspires Johnson to write a conversion narrative in which the conversion is not depicted. In the process, Johnson acknowledges that the decidedly unchristian Lou Reed inspired him to become an artist capable of both controlling and portraying not only his self's transformation but the longing for beauty that supersedes all of his other quests and ultimately brings him to Christ. 

[5] The protagonist's world that Johnson evokes through Reed is a version of hell–a hell that is defined by and conveyed through the vision of Lou Reed's "Heroin." Surrounding the narrator are tortured souls trapped in existences that they cannot escape, perhaps because they have found the life that best suits them. In "Out on Bail" the narrator tells of an aging boxer who "spoke in two voices" and had "wasted his entire life." This man "was dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years" (37). Except for the narrator, the characters lead endless, wasted lives that none obviously can escape. The narrator knows that he and the other characters look for places where they can meet others, like the boxer, in order to commune with versions of themselves.

[6] It is no exaggeration to observe that the structure of Jesus's Son is a classic conversion narrative that follows Dante's progress in the Divine Comedy. In Johnson's work, just as in Dante's Inferno or Reed's "Heroin," condemned souls are reduced to the essence of their being: they become their life's defining sin. F.H., like Dante, is the pilgrim who experiences "hell"–but only so he can transcend it as Jesus' metaphorical son. If the book were not told from a point in time after the events being depicted, the reader could not imagine that the protagonist could ever escape his world. "Happy Hour," for instance, exemplifies the ongoing hell in which F.H. and the other characters have been placed. Describing the lost souls who haunt the bars of First Avenue in Seattle, the narrator speaks of how

  People 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, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar (122).

This passage depicts the pain of the transformation that does not occur, the endless re-enactment of the same profane existence figured as an endlessly recurring violation. They are like the doomed in Dante, or Reed's narrator, in that they have fallen to the circle of existence that most perfectly expresses their spiritual state.  Clearly, the lost souls that haunt this bar are imprisoned within their bodies as a consequence of their inability to find appropriate expression for their spiritual longing. Their physical decay expresses their metaphysical condition.  Here "the dead come back" because they continue to fail to figure a way out of the hell they have made for themselves. "Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened there," the narrator says of one place they frequent, "but like the others I kept coming back" (37). The bar where these damned souls must consume daily the bitter fruit of their lives is also the space where they gather to relive the terrible moment of self-recognition that they can never escape. Thus the confrontation between mother/jilted child or rapist/victim evokes the terror experienced by the wrongdoer–the betrayer–forever facing, but never transcending, the consequences of a past violation she or he committed.  Sharing their misery­­–their “tears of false fellowship”–through a kind of communion taken with their shots of drink and smack, the characters Johnson writes about abuse their bodies in effort to communicate with their souls. Their perpetual self-violations come to seem part of an endless cycle that will end only symbolically with their physical death since their imprisoned souls cannot be released.

[7] Reed and Johnson both practice their art as a means for confronting people living on the edge of their humanity. Searching for worlds better than the ones they know, their characters do things that most Americans would find both morally objectionable and deeply psychotic. The disparity between the world as they want it be and the world as they experience it causes them to accept acts of violation and betrayal as the given of their existence. They become characters that only someone such as Jesus might save. Yet, Johnson's work suggests that all actions have moral consequences and the story is told in such a way that the narrator is implicated in the crime–even if he was not there. In "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" the narrator knows that innocents are about to be massacred but does nothing to stop it. In "Dirty Wedding" the narrator wants to protest his girlfriend's abortion but cannot. Instead, he imagines himself as the fetus being destroyed, an extreme reflection on his own ongoing death-in-life. In this harrowing story, the narrator confronts a version of himself who did not make it, the child he and his girlfriend chose to abort. Here he addresses not only his audience but himself:

  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)

The rhetorical questions convey the narrator's sense of his own identity. He is haunted by the lost child whom he understands to carry the terrifying message that no life can ever end.  "I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me" (95). This cancelled life pursues him in the book where he walks a "circular hallway" that he understands to be "the place where, between our lives on this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls who have been born" (151). To Reed's singer there is no life but this one which is what makes his hero's bid for transcendence seem such a desperate gamble. He risks his life for the confirmation of his vision. Johnson's narrator distinguishes himself from the other characters in the book because he suspects that no life, however empty, is ever fully lost and that all souls will have the opportunity to redeem themselves. As F.H. remarks in "Out on Bail" when an acquaintance dies after shooting up from the same batch of heroin also used by F.H., "He died. I am still alive" (42). 

[8] The intimation and perhaps knowledge of potential rebirth is what gives Johnson's narrator the power to take on the voice of a prophet–­­to be the son of Jesus that Reed's persona claims himself to be. "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" establishes the narrator's persona as both a visionary and as one who has the chance to be reborn into a different kind of life. The story concerns a car crash the narrator suffers. At least two people are killed and others are badly broken (the narrator is already broken). By telling the story retrospectively, with startling shifts in time, Johnson structures the narrator's perception of the event as if he knew it was going to occur and was helpless to stop it. This ability to look back without being able to avert the tragedy is what gives the story its power. It suggests the narrator's relationship to his own past life at the same time it makes him a prophet.

  My jaw ached. 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)

The family's voices are siren-like, leading them unknowingly to their own destruction. The narrator's familiarity with every raindrop conveys his drug-induced state: a sense of clarity that is irrelevant to the world that is being experienced by the others. The phrase "stop for me" suggests that the experience belongs to the narrator, not the doomed family. He is the chosen one fated to carry this event away as a story that others must hear and understand. 

[9] When the Oldsmobile crashes, as the narrator retrospectively knows it will, the man driving the car and his wife wake him up, "denying it viciously" (6). They yell "Oh-no" and "NO!" but the narrator renders their protests almost childishly futile. Johnson's depiction of the crash is cinematic so that the feeling of dislocation is rendered with naturalistic precision: "A liquid which I knew right away was human blood flew around the car and rained on my head" (6). These raindrops he does not know by name, but being touched by the blood suggests that his survival is also a kind of resurrection. "I rose up," he remarks, to find himself "the president of this tragedy" (7, 10). Walking among the dead and the dying the narrator carries with him the baby with whom he has been riding, unseatbelted, in the back seat. Like the narrator, the reader hardly knows how to take this baby. It is possible that the baby is meant as a double for the narrator's consciousness–the suggestion that his survival marks his beginning into a new life free of the cycle of drug abuse and spiritual despair that has brought him to this moment. F.H. as depicted, however, sees the baby only as something he wishes to deliver himself of as quickly as possible. He tries to give the baby to a truck driver who has pulled up to ask what happened. The driver refuses, though, saying "you'd better hang onto him" (9).  The moment is, for the narrator, more terrifying than the crash itself because it confirms his fear that he might somehow be responsible for the baby after all. A moment before the narrator had taken hope from the driver's casualness in the face of tragedy because "by his manner he seemed to endorse the idea of not doing anything about this" (9). By refusing to relieve the narrator of what fate had dropped into the narrator's life, the truck driver suggests to him that the baby will live and so must the narrator. He writes the book–tells his life story–so that he may be responsible for this knowledge.

[10] The narrator admits that "I'd thought something was required of me, but I hadn't wanted to find out what it was" (9). What that something turns out to be is the narrator's eventual recognition that he is required to confront a tragedy that belongs not only to him but is in a sense universal–the cost of living.  What will be required of him is seeing through the world's pain to the possibility of redemption embedded in the pain he witnesses and suffers. Consider this remarkable passage, which describes the grief of the woman when she learns her husband is dead. Here Johnson positions the reader to reflect on what the narrator cannot yet understand.

  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 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)

This woman's scream, and the narrator's apprehension of it, is Johnson's version of Reed's "Heroin." Just as the listener of "Heroin" comes to appreciate the beauty that the music's atonal howl unleashes, so must the narrator, and ultimately the reader, understand that this woman's howl serves as a kind of initiation into a more profound understanding of one's place in the world. When Reed's son of Jesus dreams of being "born a thousand years ago" and sailing "the darkened seas" on "a great big clipper ship," he seeks a moment of stillness and serenity in the midst of a terrifying maelstrom. Likewise, for Johnson's son of Jesus the woman's scream stills the chaos of the accident: its terror and beauty are compressed into this one single moment, the duration of which makes bearable the confusion that is his life.  The wonder the narrator experiences upon hearing the woman's scream is a version of what he feels when he shoots heroin. The moment is a revelation to him because he hears in the expression of her unmediated pain a version of what he understands his life to be. Whenever he shoots up, he realizes, he has been looking not only to experience life in the purity that the woman apprehends it, but for a way to control that feeling. Shooting heroin provides the narrator with a sense of his life's inherent drama without the ability to control or even understand that drama. As a confessional narrative, however, Jesus' Son, like Reed's "Heroin," would give the woman's scream to the reader as a kind of recognition of what we all must go through to experience life's enduring worth.

[11] The narrator's stunning account of the woman's agony is interrupted by an assertion of denial: "There's nothing wrong with me" (11). That is, he initially denies his complicity with what he has witnessed and in the story's concluding paragraphs he presents this denial, not the awareness the scream inspires, as the defining fact of his life. Yet, that scream defines the book to the extent that it expresses a humanity that we all share. If the act of narrating Jesus' Son is itself an attempt to take responsibility for his life, then the life he depicts is a daily attempt to avoid the responsibility inherent in his recognition of the woman's pain, which is a version of his own. One might argue that the "Heroin" singer imagines himself to be Jesus' son because he knows there is no Jesus who is going to save him from the world of corruption he perceives and therefore he must save himself. His big decision can only take him away from society; the only screams he hears will be his own. Johnson's hero, however, seeks communion in his isolation. Unlike Reed's singer,  he will ultimately preserve his unique vision not as an act of utter self-consumption but as a vision that others may recognize and share. In this respect, the clairvoyance, the intimation of the divine that F.H. gleans throughout the work is not merely a side-effect of the drugs; it is a gift and it is real. He can say with his friend Georgie who, when asked in "Emergency” to name his occupation, declares, "I save lives" (88).

[12] What can make Johnson painful to read, or Reed painful to listen to, is that for their characters no single act, murder or forgiveness, is morally superior to any other one. The "stupendous process" by which "diamonds were being incinerated in there" describes how the terror of life is converted into the lasting beauty of art. This description better fits Reed's "Heroin" than Johnson's Jesus’ Son since Reed's perspective is so insistently anti-Christian. Different degrees of perception of one's acts are possible and one's perception of any given event does determine the meaning that event takes, but this understanding does not change the fact that every single moment these characters experience beauty and terror as a single emotion. In "Dundun," the title character shoots another character and kills him. The shooting, but not the death, has already happened by the time the narrator shows up on the scene. The dialogue that ensues is comically deadpan:

  "McInnes isn't feeling too good today. I just shot him."

  "You mean killed him?"

  "I didn't mean to."

  "Is he really dead?"

  "No. He's sitting down."

The narrator makes no effort to explain what has occurred because assigning motivation and guilt does not interest him. He is merely there to pick up some pharmaceutical opium. Once he discovers that the opium is all used up he decides to salvage his errand by driving McInnes to the hospital. He hopes that by being known as the one who saved McInnes, he "would be liked" (48). When his charge in fact dies on the way to the hospital, the narrator is undisturbed. He decides that he is glad McInnes is dead because McInnes was the one who gave him his unfortunate but deserved name. No one in the story is interested in determining what caused the death or how the blame for it should be distributed because death is understood to be incidental to the pursuit of what Lou Reed might call "kicks." Moreover, giving and receiving "kicks" makes anybody else's death irrelevant because such a death seems so inevitable. 

[13] At one point Johnson's narrator observes, "I was in this life because I could tolerate no other."  What he means is that as bad as this life seems, it is the only one he can know. There is an implication that other lives might exist and he might one day know them, but for now accepting this life means accepting everything that is a part of it. This includes the vision he sees in a snowstorm of angels descending to earth (actually he sees the projection of actors on a drive-in movie screen); it also includes the moment he punched his girlfriend in the stomach just because he could not think of anything appropriate to say to her. The question for Johnson, as for Reed, becomes: what relation does the reader (or listener) have to the kicks being portrayed? Johnson specifically raises this point by including the reader in the action being described. He employs the rarely used device of shifting unexpectedly into the second person address. At the end of "Dundun," for instance, the narrator casually observes that "if I opened your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into something like [Dundun]" (51). In "Beverly Home" the narrator addresses the audience while relating his experience as a peeping tom.

  How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected myself to do worse. (147)

Where Reed's "Heroin" does not reflect on its status as art, Johnson's narrator comments on his narrative, and the acts contained within it, not only to earn the audience's confidence, but to confront us as directly as possible.Consequently, his forthrightness may be limited by his reluctance to compromise his audience's view of him by telling us how much lower he may have indeed sunk. His ultimate strategy, though, is not to conceal the extent of his crimes from the audience so that our trust will be easier to earn but to make the likely unwilling reader into a co-actor in his life.

[14] "Emergency," for instance, is Johnson's meditation on his subject matter and the relationship to it he shares with a possibly unwilling audience. In this story the narrator is working as an orderly disoriented by pills he has stolen and ingested, when a man walks into the hospital with a knife stuck in his eye. The man can still see out of his damaged eye. Since his other eye is glass, his vision is literally framed by the knife. The doctor on call is reluctant to treat it and calls immediately for as many specialists as occur to him. Before science can intervene, though, the narrator's friend, Georgie, an orderly completely stoned on pills he has been stealing, pulls the knife out of the man's eye. The patient is healed; "it's just one of those things" a nurse says to a stunned doctor (76). What connects this story to "Beverly Home" is that the injured man, Terence Weber, reveals that his wife stabbed him for "peeping on the lady next door while she was out there sunbathing" (86). The reader sees that Weber is a version of the narrator, another peeping Tom. If Weber does not understand his pain and the pain he has caused as being connected, then Johnson uses the reader's complicity with Weber to prompt us to this conclusion. Ironically, while the knife stuck in the eye is intentional, the healing is accidental, a moment of dumb luck or grace depending on how you want to see it.  For F.H., the knife in the eye brings a kind of renewed vision: an act that divides everything from itself only as a prelude to combining this division into something whole. In this context, violence and pain are the necessary precursors to moral regeneration.

[15] In "Beverly Home," Johnson further explores how the narrator's voyeurism is a mirror held up to the audience: here is where we the readers receive Weber's knife in our eyes. Standing outside the woman's house, afraid that he will be seen, the narrator is momentarily disturbed when the woman upon whom he spies moves to the window and stares directly at him–only she cannot see that he is there. "My face wasn't two feet from hers, but it was dark out and she could only have been looking at her own reflection, not at me" (155).  He had been hoping to catch her and her husband making love and instead he witnesses a disagreement that is ended by the husband when he kneels to wash her feet. The gesture, as surprising as it is tender, seems to be an inversion of Mary washing Jesus' feet, or is perhaps an allusion to the Last Supper. Significantly, the husband's act of contrition occurs immediately after the woman stares at the narrator without seeing him. The narrator presumes the couple to be Mennonites and it may be that she is silently praying. Standing, as he says, "on the dark side of her," he understands himself to be part of the reflection she sees (155). If so, then the moment of tenderness she receives is connected to his presence. Perhaps her prayer summons her Jesus to make himself known through F.H.'s presence; perhaps her prayer has nothing to do with him at all and he is just a lonely pervert standing forever on the outside of love.  Instead of witnessing a couple having sex, he sees them reading the Bible together. The relief the reader may experience for not having to witness the couple's physical intimacy becomes something more difficult to define when we realize Johnson has made us witnesses to an unexpected, even miraculous, spiritual union.

[16] Secular readers may be the most uncomfortable because what Johnson seems to suggest is that behind every lurid desire lies a grace waiting to overwhelm you into seeing the world differently–perhaps even from the very point of view you most want to deny. Nonetheless, Johnson seems to want to write a kind of scripture; one can even read the work as if it were a modern version of one of the lost books of the Bible. You could think of it as an addition to the so-called Gnostic Gospels–inspired by the twenty-one missing years of Jesus' life. To a believing Christian, such a reading could only be blasphemy, unless you share the narrator's point of view and understand him to have been truly touched by Christ. To Johnson, however, the narrative is about conversion and the unlikely redemption of his protagonist. Regardless of your religious orientation (or lack thereof), Johnson will try to convert each of his readers to an unembarrassed sense of spiritual renewal.

[17] The book's concluding sentence suggests that by the time he writes his story the narrator has become with one with the maimed and the deformed who look to be healed: "I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us" (160). By now he is working at a kind of hospice called Beverly Home and is charged with healing others simply by touching them. Like Lou Reed's "Heroin" singer, he presents himself as someone who has lived out our darkest fantasies so that we do not have to.  Reed's singer pursues his self's end because he knows he alone is responsible for his own salvation (or damnation). Johnson's stance ultimately is not that of one who has remained true to his vices but one who has escaped them. As a self-portrait of himself before he became an artist, Jesus' Son will tell us where Johnson's art comes from and even hint that his end was in the beginning; like Reed, he will not separate his survival from what he has survived. Johnson's refusal to connect all the dots, to give us a scene that says "and then I decided that I would quit using drugs and become a real writer" is more than a refusal of banality, or the commonplaces of linear narrative. His silence about his birth as an artist is, I think, a reproduction of the silence that follows the woman's scream in the first story. It acknowledges that his survival is mysterious, an unexpected blessing for which he must be grateful.

[18] When Reed sings in "Heroin" "I don't know where I'm going but I'm going to try for the kingdom if I can," he defines the existential dream of Johnson's protagonist–his desire to live despite his death-in-life. For Reed, there is in this assertion a quiet defiance, a refusal to believe the world is as sordid as it appears, even if the clipper ship he dreams of sailing is likely carrying him to his death. I think Johnson understands Reed's singer to be enacting a version of death from which he will be reborn but only into a endless repetition of the same cycle–a version of what his characters experience at the bars they frequent. Reed's singer may be headed toward his death but that is not exactly what he wants. In this respect, Reed's "Heroin" singer, better than the Biblical Jesus who lives for others rather than himself, communicates the craving for salvation that leads F.H. to seek that moment when "the false visions had been erased" because "the Savior did come" (51). If the reader will forgive the comparison, Reed finds literary expression by serving unknowingly as a kind of Virgil to Johnson's Fuckhead Dante. By using Reed's lines from "Heroin" to frame his fictional autobiography, Johnson acknowledges that Lou Reed helped give him the vision to render a horrid world true and beautiful, something worth saving and giving to others.

Notes

1. Bloom does not discuss Johnson. He lists him in his index of authors. For critical discussions of Johnson, see Lenz (2001), Parrish (1991), Reitenbach (1991), and Smith (2001). 

2. To speak more plainly, Jesus' Son can be read as a religious text intent on converting the reader to Jesus. Johnson's recent collection of essays, Seek (2001), which should be read as a companion volume to Jesus' Son, makes this connection blatantly obvious. Off-handedly, and incidentally, the essays refer to Johnson's past life as a drug addict and his current one as a born-again Christian. In "Bikers for Jesus," Johnson characterizes himself as one who has "grown from a criminal hedonist into a citizen of life with a belief in eternity" (33-4). For a secular reader (such as myself), the collection of autobiographical essays, Seek, in which the “real” Denis Johnson appears, seems much less interested in converting the reader to a possibly religious awakening than the work of fiction, Jesus' Son.

3. An exception to this practice would be Reed's disturbing song, "The Gun." Far from the dreamy world of "Heroin," Reed in this song inhabits the persona of one who murders for sadistic pleasure. The first five lines establish a distance between singer and subject that is momentarily abolished when Reed says "let's see what he can do."  "The Gun" challenges the listener to be part of the event but turns the tables on the would-be watcher/listener by making him the victim of the criminal's killing spree. The singer moves from warning the listener that "he'll [the killer] blow your brains out" to adopting the perspective of the killer himself: "Don't you mess with me/I'm carrying a gun." The shift of narrative perspective is startling because it retains the use of the second person. The person addressed by the song does not change; the speaker does. Reed thus manages to trap the listener in the listener's own violent fantasy. Taken literally, the listener cannot hear Reed when the narrative shifts back to the original speaker in the song's last two lines because the listener, identified as the "animal [who] dies with fear in his eyes," is already dead. The lines "Stay away from him/He's got a gun" convey a mocking echo, its message rendered futile. 

4. Lou Reed has spoken of his debt to his college mentor, Delmore Schwarz: "[he] was my teacher, my friend, and the man who changed my life. He was the funniest, saddest person I had ever met. I studied with him at the bar. Actually, it was him talking and me listening. . . . At this time Delmore would be reading Finnegan's Wake out loud, which seemed like the only way I could get through it. Delmore thought you could do worse with your life than devote it to reading James Joyce" (Bockris, 1994, 60-1). Inspired by Schwarz, Reed hoped to transform rock and roll into an adult art form capable of being compared not unreasonably with Joyce's Ulysses. "I've always thought of myself as a writer," he told Bill Flanagan. "I work in a rock & roll format because I really like playing my guitar and wouldn't it be great if I could combine these three things I really like" ("Interview", 1987, 331). He adds, "My interest–all the way back from the Velvets–has been in one really simple guiding light ideal: take rock and roll, the pop format, and make it for adults" ("Interview", 1887, 329).

Works Cited

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

Bockris, Victor. Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Johnson, Denis.  Angels. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1983.

_____. Fiskadoro. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1985.

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