Looking for God in the Writing of Denis Johnson / Aaron Thier. In: Lit Hub Daily Dec 5, 2018

In an article titled “Bikers for Jesus,” Denis Johnson described himself flippantly as “a Christian convert, but one of the airy, sophisticated kind.” It was the sort of claim he made often, and it points to one of the central problems in his work. Johnson’s writing is full of street-corner prophets and enigmatic religious language, but it’s hard to decide whether these elements are poetic tropes or articulations of a deeper kind of religious feeling. Johnson never offered any guidance.
In 1993, he sat for an interview about spiritual themes in his writing, and his answers were slippery and confusing. He talked about television and secular culture, the Jungian notion that spirituality will express itself one way or another and the idea that all novels spring from the same impulse as the Bible. The nature of Johnson’s own belief seems to have been inexpressible. Late in life, he’d given up trying to explain. “If I’ve discussed these things in the past, I shouldn’t have,” he said in 2013. “I’m not qualified. I don’t know who God is, or any of that. People concerned with those questions turn up in my stories, but I can’t explain why they do. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t.”
And yet these people do turn up, again and again. Johnson, who died last year, wrote in many genres, but the through-line in all his work is “God”: God the metaphor, God the stylistic trope, God the real and eternal being. In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), the hero is a Catholic struggling with his belief. There are people in Fiskadoro (1985) who worship Bob Marley, and there’s a woman who prays to a loa named “Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdoze.” In Angels (1983), religion is worse than drugs—you can lose yourself in it more completely. In Tree of Smoke (2007), a Vietnam-era spy novel, there’s a psyops figure who dreams of weaponizing religious feeling in the fight against communism. On and on it goes.
When I was 19, I read Johnson’s 1992 story cycle Jesus’ Son, which is about a heroin addict whose friends call him “Fuckhead.” I was a novelist who hadn’t written a novel yet, and I was interested in Jesus’ Son because of its texture: fragmentary, episodic, surprisingly mixed in its tone. Fuckhead, who is also the narrator, and who doesn’t object to his nickname, has an innocence that gives the book a surprising delicacy—it’s more like Catcher in the Rye than Requiem for a Dream. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/looking-for-god-in-the-writing-of-denis-johnson/