Illustration by Maeve Breathnach

TN2 Magazine’s ‘Fiction Club’ is a monthly forum for writers to read, discuss and dissect selected works. To suggest a piece of literature for consideration contact literature@tn2magazine.ie

‘Emergency’ is a story from Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson’s 1992 collection. Having struggled with addiction himself, Johnson drew on his own experiences in his stories about a dissolute group of characters in the American Midwest. In ‘Emergency’, the narrator holds down a job in a hospital emergency department while dosing up on prescription pills. Johnson won the National Book Award for his novel, Tree of Smoke.

 

Dr. Kevin Power, Assistant Professor of English, Trinity College Dublin

Writing about drugs is difficult. You have to hit the comic register, or you risk boring the reader. Denis Johnson is incapable of boring the reader. “Emergency” is a drugs story, but it’s also a comic story. And like the best comic stories, it’s about loneliness, failure, despair, alienation, panic, and fear.  

The great pleasure of this story is its prose. The sentences consistently hinge on unexpected swerves – this is where Johnson works his best comic effects. “A bull elk stood still in the pasture beyond the fence, giving off an air of authority and stupidity.” The last word, so perfectly chosen, is both funny and accurate; without it, this sentence would be nothing. The whole story is full of lines like this. “It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge.” A sponge! It takes genius to think of something like that – a single, strange, unexpected word, one syllable, that stops the sentence dead with perfect rhythmic neatness.  

Denis Johnson knows that you can work wonders with language if you inhabit a skewed perspective – the perspective, in this case, of someone who’s altered his consciousness by dosing himself with miscellaneous drugs over many hours. All writers want you to see the world as if you’d never seen it before – which means, in a sense, that all writers want to affect you in the way that certain drugs affect you. The technical term for this is defamiliarization; this is what Johnson’s up to, in “Emergency.” “We stopped the truck and the boy climbed slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano.” The poetry of dissociation.  

“Emergency” takes place in a world in which nobody is connected to anybody else, or even to themselves. This is the emergency of the title. Everyone is detached from reality – perhaps most especially Georgie, the orderly, a literary descendant of Lennie from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937). In that novella, Lennie accidentally kills a puppy while stroking it; here Georgie and the narrator kill a rabbit and fail to nurse her babies. How can they care for baby rabbits, when they can’t even care for themselves? The irony of Georgie’s closing line hardly needs underscoring. “I save lives,” he says, in the face of a world that has been “rolled up like a scroll.” The emergency continues.  

 

Killian Beashel, Contributing Writer

Americans are good at some things, fiction occasionally being one of them. I suppose that was my initial reaction to reading Johnson – the very American-ness of it. Being presented with a world where people drive Dodges and have moms. 

This is a very well-formed story. There is a theme. Things happen that are symbolically or metaphorically related to the theme. There is a restrained climax. It is all very quiet, calm, measured, laconic, refined. I enjoyed reading it, to an extent, but Johnson’s background in the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop is clear. Not that this is inherently negative, just that this story is an example, albeit a good one, of a very particular and dominant strain in short fiction which normally doesn’t do much for me. 

I was most interested in the notion of care in the story. In Johnson’s idiomatic and quiet prose, injury and care become dull daily occurrences. Medical care is emptied of any transcendental or hagiographic resonances. Rather, it becomes a fact of daily life, whether that be wiping blood from the floor or helping a stab victim. 

There is a curiously flat tone to the story, perhaps indicative of this notion of care and trauma as everyday occurrences, as the daily banalities of work. When the stab victim presents himself at the hospital, his surprisingly calm demeanour is, medically, almost certainly related to the fact that he is in a state of shock or trauma. Yet it chimes with the narrator’s sense of calm. It’s just another day at the office. There is something beautiful in this, possibly. 

The death of the rabbit, and the rabbit’s babies, similarly hinge on this notion of care, I think. Animals have long been dying metaphorically in fiction, so as a reader I was a little bit bored by seeing this narrative device deployed. If you want to make a point, kill an animal. Pulitzer Prize please. But, that being said, there was perhaps something more interesting at play here. The deaths, at different instances, of the rabbit and its young were accidental. They took place outside any kind of institutional setting. There is no sense in the narrator that he is culpable for their deaths, or that they mattered much. While this may seem to suggest that some lives are more worth saving than others, it may also quietly contend that care needs to be a concept that is central to all of our lives. 

 

Sophia McDonald, TN2 Magazine Deputy Editor

We’ve all had summer jobs to tide us over, jobs to help us save, to get us to move up and out and these jobs can define our in-between summers. The heat and eight-hour shifts can warp time, make you crave the cool evenings; your days and nights literally become night and day. That said, the vast majority of us haven’t worked in an Emergency Room as a clerk and then proceeded to get high off hospital meds with your manic orderly colleague.

Denis Johnson’s Emergency is nothing short of a meandering tale of someone’s bizarre new normal – as if a boy in the Workman’s smoking area had given his “amazing time on ket” some narrative structure and a lyrical quality. Event follows unsatisfied event, but Johnson did have me hooked. There’s no risk involved for the unnamed narrator who witnesses pools of blood being mopped up and boys running away from military duty. He comes across as someone on the cusp of seriousness. He knocks at the door of bodily harm and danger to human life but only encounters a farcical man whose wife stuck a knife in his eye. His experiments with medical drugs come across as a mishap hobby, a way to pass the time in the Midwest.

Johnson rocks you in and out of lucid drug-fuelled dreaming like a baby, never letting a real sense of danger seep in despite Georgie driving under the influence and removing aforementioned knife without the guidance of any doctor. You’re teetering on the edge of reality and imagination throughout the story, questioning its grounding in anything real like an involuntary passenger in the back of their truck. The confusion and frustration of these hospital workers as they go on a trip dissipates before any real conflict can begin.

Before you know it, they’re back in work. The clock resets and nothing seems to have changed in the hospital, an environment where everything hangs by a thread. but that may be down to the ignorance of the narrator. The Emergency entertained me with its characters banal drug induced anti-exploits. He showed me that what we experience in our boredom can be gripping if strange when you recall it. If you want to take a trip and be engrossed in a wintery summer and the calmest A&E on earth, then The Emergency is the pill for you.

 

Shane Murphy, Literature Editor

I was grateful for no ceremonial cigarette lighting in this story. If there was any here, it would have been too American. Even still, this story is very American. Staunchly so, like Kerouac and Burroughs. Nothing is more American here than the American way of protecting their freedom, protective like how British royalty safeguard their status because it allows them to do whatever they like without consequences. There is a sense that freedom is American-branded, like the way Ford Motors was their brand before it was sold in parts China and Russia. And freedom is the joie de vivre of Johnson’s story, without a doubt — freedom to steal prescription drugs, to stab your husband in the eye, to dodge the Draft. It is the sort of story that asks, like most stories of twentieth century America, how much freedom can I get away with?

It’s also funny, funny as in curious, that nobody is unhappy in this story. Hardee is cheerful, though he’s homeless; Terrence Weber makes jokes, though he’s been stabbed in the eye; and Georgie remains calm throughout the story, though that could be the drugs.

Everyone stays quite happy until the last scene when there’s an upset, and the freedom which protects their lifestyle is threatened. This ends in a very un-American way — not least because it depicts Canada as the better option — but because it shows characters betraying their freedom by exercising it. Hardee dodges the draft and hitchhikes to Canada. This flippancy delegitimizes much of the story until then, exercising their freedom to go AWOL is important, but defending it is not. Because defending it seems baseless and unnecessary. This wonderfully ruptures the American identity that is centred through the story, leaving it flat and scattered. Not so much On the Road than on the road. 

 

Fiachra Kelleher, Deputy Literature Editor

I think this story is hilarious. Split into two unequal parts, the opening section centres around the “hunting knife kind of thing” stuck in Terrence Weber’s eye, while in the latter half the narrator drives aimlessly down rural highways. The opening scenes are packed with punchy comedic exchanges that lie just within the bounds of the believably farcical. Out on the highway, Georgie and the narrator experience considerably more tribulation even as the stakes are lowered from the A&E drama of which they’re supposed to be a part. Johnson delays revealing the narrator’s drug use – and therefore his unreliability – and his position in the hospital gives greater gravity to situations that are, in essence, silly. In broad terms, an unreliable narrator can immerse us more fully in the world of a text but can also make the story more difficult to follow. Johnson manages to communicate the confusion of his characters largely through the idiosyncratic narration; the story itself is not tremendously confusing to read, however, which evidences Johnson’s artistry. 

Just as the narrative bends and breaks the rules of time and believability, basic notions of cause and effect elude the story’s characters. Georgie is driven to distraction by roadkill and by imagined blood in a spotless operating theatre, but fails to register the seriousness of Terrence Weber’s injury. The narrator’s moment of revelation, in which the angels descend onto the military graveyard, is subverted and denied him when he realises they’ve merely come across an empty drive-in cinema. 

Just as really great horror or fantasy texts often use the unreal to explore the real, writing about drug abuse must give us more than mere farce if it’s to avoid charges of self-indulgence. ‘Emergency’ is set in 1973, and the Vietnam War irrupts into the prose in several places. It is, therefore, more of that drugged up US writing I’ve come to associate with Vietnam War writing and filmmaking. The fact that I found the story so entertaining and so energising despite its piegonholeability is testament to Johnson’s skill. It may be, also, that where much of the fiction set in 70’s America gets stuck in the nihilism and dissolution of the age, “Emergency” doesn’t slip into mimetic fallacy; the needfulness and solace of human relationships remains even as reality itself is corroded.