The Divine Intimacy

The strength of a short story may be evaluated by various quality-judgements. And, as the nomenclature suggests, short stories haven’t the time to unimpress. Fortunately, there are many routes that one may take to perform such a feat; the best-cobbled path is, however, in the same fashion as one would win the heart of a lover: intimacy. Dennis Johnson’s collection of linked short stories, Jesus’ Son, not only deeply affects the reader, but also possesses one’s soul with a devilish intimacy nearly divine in its courtship. Some might moot artistic afflatus; some might point to the rampant drug abuse. I remain nevertheless steadfast in the opinion that these slices of someone’s literary heaven exist from a mastery of craft. It may be interpreted that Johnson completes this coaxing, in part, by three forms of ingratiation: a conversational first-person-reportage narrative style, the acknowledgment of the reader with the second-person, and the Big Kiss Goodnight ending.

Johnson’s stories feel like a shifty, likely armed man in a dusty jean jacket whispering unspeakables. Whenever a shifty, likely armed man in a dusty jean jacket descries us at a social gathering and, after cornering us with his broad shoulders, proceeds to delineate to us his heaviest moments, we normally fear for our lives. Though this is often the prudent choice for those in favor of a full life, the opposite is likely our response to Jesus’ Son. Johnson earns our affections with his conversational first-person-reportage narrative style. Reportage, though often considered unliterary, is pungent with authenticity, for it most closely imitates someone speaking directly to us about one’s life. The reportage style is told using the past perfect tense, “I’d been staying at the holiday Inn with my girlfriend,” in conjunction with the simple past tense, “we made love in the bed,” often also using signifying wording, such as “I remember.” Neither does it hurt to compare one’s Holiday Inn romance with a heroin-junkie to Dante’s climb to Paradiso and the Empyrean with his truest love, Beatrice: “we…carried one another to heaven.”

What do you think about the use of the second person to acknowledge the reader? I am not certain about it, but I shall leave that up to you to decide. I trust your judgement. In any case, it certainly is personal. On the wrong day in Germany, you could get the bamboo cane for it. But, in Jesus’ Son, you understand the second person to be a term of endearment, as this usage suggests: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Consider this supremely yarn-like confidence that Johnson unravels, after confiding in us some heavy exposition about the characters in his story Two Men: “My two friends and I went to get into my little green Volkswagen, and we discovered the man I started to tell you about, the first man, sleeping in the backseat.” Remember?

What is the Big Kiss Goodnight ending? It is what everyone wants. Moreover, it also seems to be a tactic of writers who enjoy finishing stories with a smooch of the angelic. In accordance with the aforementioned considerations as regards a short story’s incapacity to allow a moment’s somnolence, its ending might perhaps be its most important time to excite, and the stories in Jesus’ Son do not leave us blue. Indeed, each story ends with a bang. 

Consider this coda at the end of a story about a less than gentle man named Dundun: “Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.” Or this uplifting bit: “Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”

Of course, this narrator had no filial connection with the barmaid about whom he is reporting, but that has never been a qualification when considering if one has been another’s mother. 

You Can Say That Again

Redundant Writing, as defined in the DSM-5, is “a mental disorder in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others.” 

Why must the DSM-5’s above-displayed introductory description of Anti-Social Personality Disorder—which bears hefty resemblance to the definition of one’s neighbors whenever it’s 1:50 a.m. on a Tuesday and the Mumble Rap is still going strong—reattribute “mental disorder,” whenever we are reading a book called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? Moreover, does someone who shows no regard for right and wrong ever consider the rights and feelings of others?

Philadelphians call it water ice. Sexual deviants call them assless chaps. And the Germans call it language. For the rest of us, it’s called redundancy.

The repetition of unnecessary details causes children to weep and the beloved family dog to take its final breath; therefore, the practice has long since been forbidden by literary authorities as a tragedy and miscarriage of compositional justice. 

There’s your classic Thesaurus Thumper:

“A titanic, humungous, behemoth of a mountain—just a huge piece of rock, and enormous.” 

The Dunderheaded Double-Up:

“With every tuna fish sandwich that you swallow whole, you’ll receive a free gift. That’s an actual fact. “

The Fool by Abbreviation Special:

“I’m so drunk from alcohol that I forgot my PIN number before we got to the MLS soccer match, so I couldn’t use the ATM machine to take out any cash money. Please RSVP— s’il vous plaît.“

The Undue Intensity Stack:

“These were extremely important company meetings, and they were met with severely inadequate attendance.”

The Loose-Lipped Lenny:

“Yeah, so that’s basically how you do it; it essentially works like that.”

In all fairness, The Undue Intensity Stack and the Loose-Lipped Lenny can make for humorous combinations, as they can often carry with them a certain amount of irony. The key here is to employ them intentionally and deftly. 

The True Plus True Equals True (Tautology)

“I struggled to find the words to describe the oddly shaped man before me; he was indescribable, due to his appearance, so I was speechless.”

The Tautology by Cliche

“I struggled to find the words to describe the oddly shaped man before me; the cat had my tongue, and I had a rock in my throat.”

Cliches are particularly sinful, for, through their utter banality, they are rendered redundant the moment that they depart the lips or manifest from the keyboard. To use a cliche to emphasize a statement, as depicted above, is a sign of genetic inferiority. 

What we want is deliberateness. Whenever deliberate, these heinous lexical acts aspire to inspire rhetorical emphasis, adding additional dimension and meaning. This called pleonasm.

Here, someone uses pleonasm to show high vexation, perhaps hoping for a payout.

“Yes, officer. That’s right. The stupid idiot and his fellow colleagues completely destroyed my exact replica Porsche by punching it with their fists and kicking it with their feet. That’s a foreign import, by the way.”

The rhetorical forms of merism and blazon, used as they are to describe at length things already stated, could fit into this category, but I have deemed them nearer to sacrifices at the altar of The Description than merely déjà vu all over again. 

All this championing of clear and concise writing for the sake of transparency and succinctness has, however, given rise to the need for balance. Therefore, I’d like to end with a quote from a good friend of mine whom I’ve never met, Mark Forsyth:

“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. Again.”

Pissed from a Distance

Angry, bellowing men with pythons for arms and peanuts for brains are no laughing matter. Disenchanted, seething gentlemen, whose arms exist merely for decoration and whose wits are tucked away in the dark steeples of brooding misanthropy are often a gaggle of laughs. Why we prefer one over the other is uncertain, yet the conundrum remains: why is being pissed from a distance so funny? 

As if Holden Caufield found himself a trifle more well-adjusted English don, the hero from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon, sets the modern gold-standard for amusingly irritated young men. However, unlike Caufield, Dixon, despite his patent literary-level hatred for the Post-War English University, is regarded by most of today’s literati primarily as a childish perpetrator of mildly lascivious high jinks. This is not an untruth. How, then, amongst all the griping, does Dixon keep sneaking in the ole’ rib-tickler? By examining a few of Amis’s distancing narrative techniques, and their effects on our humorous interpretation of novel, one may gather how merely being miffed is enough to blister the knees.

It is no happenstance that Lucky Jim is written in the close-third-person narrative style. This narrative choice sets the perfect level of impersonality necessary for harmless irritation and subsequent schadenfreude. Where in more than a few cases the first-person narration style, with its highly intimate connection with authorial intention, might perhaps flounder, the close-third-person succeeds in creating just enough distance between the snappish views of the character and the author who wrote them. This faux distance is important for the reader, as it allows him to fully experience all the fun of the hatred whilst relieving him from any of the personal responsibility for enjoying it. The distant-third-person would ostensibly also be quite effective in the pursuit for amicable animosity, but in its stark dissociation from direct emotional experience, it often cannot quite achieve the level of intimacy needed for one to feel that humbling pang of guilt so closely linked with humor. Therefore, in depicting the Displeased, the close-third-person reigns as the supreme line-walker. How, then, does Amis apply this balanced mode, in conjunction with other techniques, to Jim Dixon’s understanding of the provincial university at which he works and the pedantic characters who inhabit it?

One technique Amis employs to achieve a safe proximity with the Scathing is to affect the first comedic commandment of Euphemism. How does one scathe euphemistically? It is in this very field where Lucky Jim displays its unique brand of genius. The idea here is similar to the effect of outboxing an opponent, whilst simultaneously inquiring into whether he endeavors to continue, yet reminding him he cannot stop the round; it is a kind of controlled, gentle viciousness that is a bit difficult to have happen upon one’s own person, but highly entertaining to watch. Dixon is not bashful about whom he targets for what is more than solely pugnacious satire, rather a kind of ruthless portrayal of truths. For an example of this, seek no further than the first scene of the novel, during which Dixon’s interpretations of Professor of History and mentor, Professor Welch, are described. Welch tells an anecdote to Dixon regarding his playing recorder and piano with a few music aficionados around the school, and how he was observed by and reported on by a local gazette. Whereupon, beginning with Welch, the following takes place:

 “(B)ut what do you think they said then?”

 “I don’t know, Professor,’ he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor.” 

 “‘Flute and piano.”

 “Oh?”

 “Flute and piano; not recorder and piano.” Welch laughed briefly.

A veritable knee-slapper. And Dixon felt the very same way, going as far as to mention that “the older man… began speaking almost in a shout, with a tremolo imparted by unshared laughter”. And, though the laughs indeed remained in the singular form, Welch continued on absently and without consideration for the human constraints of boredom. Dixon, however, like a decent lad, attempts to honor this insufferable codger by “tr[ying] to flail his features into some sort of response to humor”. May we see now how Dixon is following the standards for decorum, responding in seemly ways, seemingly adhering to societal expectations, whilst also taking the piss? This is the very essence of being pissed from a distance. It is a kind of Bad Faith agreement wherein one conforms yet kicks dust. A subtle rebellion. 

Let us now tackle the subject of Bertrand, the unequivocal coxcomb of the novel. Dixon treats Bertrand with palpable discontent. Fitting to the temperament of an exasperated young man, Dixon behaves the opposite way to his contemporary, Bertrand, than he does through his begrudging subservience to Professor Welch. Bertrand is rendered as something of a laughingstock. We are meant to laugh at Bertrand, not with him. Bertrand is described as a kind of Post-War beatnik; he is a self-proclaimed painter and caricature-grade clown; and Dixon sees this to its core. Through his persistent commentary on Bertrand’s madcap insistence on perpetually wearing a blue beret, Dixon dances not around his distaste of Bertrand, stating his claims outright: “He was wearing a blue beret, which had much the same effect on Dixon as Welch senior’s fishing-hat. If such headgear was a protection, what was it a protection against? If it wasn’t a protection, what was it for? What was it for?” Can we not hear Dixon’s irritation? Inevitably, one of the final elements of the novel is a, due to an ignominious lack of physical conditioning on the part of both participants, graceless affray between Bertrand and Dixon, of which event Dixon narrowly claims victory. 

Lucky Jim is a young man’s novel. It preaches to the soul of the forthcoming thirty-years-of-age existential crisis, incisively arguing with, and often fittingly ignorant to, the antithetical notions of career versus freedom, love versus happiness, and suffering fools versus societal dissociation. Lucky Jim, truly a late-stage bildungsroman book, by Amis’s use of the close-third-person narrative style and tastefully detached prose style, a Looney Toons steam-whistle-escaping-from-the-shirt-collar hot-temperedness is rendered irascibility-light, a stiff scotch cut with water, heavy on the ice.  

The Problem of Today

Standard English expects the present perfect tense to be always used whenever the adverb of time, today, is used.

Have you seen Aunt Sarah today?

Yes, I have seen Aunt Sarah today.

Although the examiners at the Cambridge Exam would applaud one’s blanket usage thereof, I should employ my hands upon a different task, dipping them first into the glue, thence the glass. 

Although myself a trifle to the right on the Descriptivist/Purist scale, I nevertheless call the case of limpeting on to this usage of the present perfect, as one does the ship’s mast before the final plunge, a load of the shoddiest. Tenses should be used discriminately, to denote time and one’s passage through it. Rules should not simply exist. 

It might insult the sensitive reader to hazard forth that the simple past tense denotes events that occurred in only the past, whilst the present perfect denotes those that have occurred in both the past and at present. Past this, I ask, then: does today happen before, now, or after?

Let us examine again the case of Aunt Sarah. The general idea is that today is not over. You just might see Aunt Sarah in the same collection of 24-hours that have been allotted the title; therefore, you have seen Aunt Sarah.

With this, I agree. This present perfect usage is paramount, whenever, for example, one works with Aunt Sarah in the same building and seeing her again is merely the work of one’s pivoting around the next corner, or one lives in the general area as Aunt Sarah, and she’s known to stop by with baked goods or bad news, or she’s prone to spontaneous FaceTime calls on the same day that you have already seen her, or oneself is a known serial visitor of Aunt Sarah. I take issue, however, with the fact that, if you ever saw Aunt Sarah, then you are mistaken.

A dismissal of the simple past tense’s “I saw Aunt Sarah today” as purely an American vulgarism smacks of the worst kind of linguistic injustice. And, indeed, it is regarded as something of a singularly American sin to say, I saw Aunt Sarah today.

It would be correct, however, to say: I saw Aunt Sarah earlier today, for it uses earlier to denote a time that happened before and will never again occur, so the simple past tense it approved.

Firstly, about this, I should state the obvious: In the sentence, I saw Aunt Sarah today, the earlier is simply omitted and therefore implied; we are intelligently implying that some part of today ended, never to return, or that a particular event or function is now history. In this case, stating earlier would also be something tantamount to a redundancy. And, aside from within the plays of Shakespeare, redundancy is given the stink-eye.

I wrote an article today.

OR

I have written an article today.

I wrote the article, and I am no longer writing the article, thus the action of my writing the article exists solely in the past—but it all happened today. Additionally, I wrote the article during the the morning, a bit in the afternoon, and knitted the loose ends together during the evening. Am I simply to say, then, that I wrote the article earlier? When was earlier? Well, in bits throughout the day. Which day? Today? Yes. Surely, I could rewrite the article later that same day; I could edit the article, too. I could even, though my Sloth prevents it, write another article. However, I can never write that same article again today. The article, as both an idea and artifact, is complete. I cannot link the completed artifact to any present action; therefore, it’s simply in the past.

Let us return to Aunt Sarah, whom I have seen today—only.

Oh, yes? Although Aunt Sarah was viewed by Yours Humbly in the later forenoon through to the early afternoon, lives three hours away by car, hasn’t a computer, smart phone, car of her own, or nearby train-line, enjoys a healthy dose of agoraphobia, is not prone to kidnappings, has an aortic embolism, lost her voice to a pleasant life of Pall Malls, and doesn’t have any legs? It would be for my money that I saw Aunt Sarah today. Need I say earlier? Is that not obvious? More often than not, a common day on Earth begins with the sun’s rising, its staying overhead for some amount of time, and its setting. Moreover, humanity has added things such as seconds, minutes, even hours therein. To complicate things even further, we’ve given names to certain clusters of hours; there’s breakfast, second-breakfast, elevenses, lunch, dinner, supper. You know about those, don’t you?

I sympathize towards rules. I am, however, sympathetic towards rules that exist only due to their making sense; I believe that the smudge in the painting should be intentional. We have an s at the end of nouns to show the plural, we have pronouns to make sense of antecedents, and we have verb-tenses to understand one’s relation to time. But, if someone corrects your saw with a have seen, firstly, consider if you perhaps truly have made a mistake. Upon vindication, tell the offender that you’ll see him later, which doesn’t actually mean that you’ll see him later, if that isn’t obvious to him already—but, maybe, for obvious reasons, he’ll require the clarification.