René Dietrich, "Postmodern Noir Investigations and Disintegrations of Identity," continued
Section 3 Denis Johnson: Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
3.1 Lost in the Ambiguities of the Postmodern: Leonard English in Provincetown
For Leonard English, the investigative protagonist in Johnson’s novel 1, all certainties are lost in the indeterminacies and paradoxes of “the twentieth century, this region of the blind where there was no telling between the difference between up and down, wrong and right, between sex and love, men and women, even between the living and the dead” (155). Such an unsettling feeling of uncertainty is increased for English by coming straight from the American heartland, Kansas, to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and being confronted with its embrace of postmodern diversity in every respect, especially in its celebration of sexual alternative lifestyles. English does not experience this as liberation, instead it adds to his feelings of disorientation and dislocation. They express themselves in several literal or metaphorical reversals. Trying to begin a new life, English looks for his ‘manifest destiny’ in, appropriately, New England, which, however, reverses the classic Frontier Movement. Thus, Provincetown, the first settlement of the pilgrims, becomes “the last town of America” (7), and his first lodging, instead of being an appropriate place for a fresh start, is described as having “every quality of the end of the line” (9). Such examples of contradiction and ambivalence add up to the notion that English, in coming to Provincetown, has “made a wrong turn” (4). Literally and metaphorically, his arrival is not so much guided by fate as it is the result of an accident caused by his own irresponsibility. The trouble English has in telling apart fate and personal fault in this context already point to his characteristic instability. The start of the novel suggests that English’s attempt at realizing the American dream of a clean slate is bound to fail, and that there can be no successful disconnection from a troublesome past for the lost noir investigator. Even more poignantly, this dominance of reversals becomes the leading metaphor for his perception of Provincetown:
Everything seemed to be reversing itself like that, a woman asking him out, most others ignoring him while the men seemed to look him over, this strange hush at evening, as if it were dawn, and even the buildings seemed to be going in the wrong direction, […] every building around her seemed to be receding into the historic past. (77)
The dissolving of clear boundaries into paradoxes, uncertainties and ambivalences extends to English’s perception of himself and undermines his ability to constitute a stable personal identity. For Ricoeur, the act of “drawing a configuration out of a succession” is essential to a narrative identity. This act is one of great difficulty for English since he cannot even discern a clear succession of his actions and thoughts: “English was at a loss to trace his own path here to the very end of the earth” (16). Typical for the lost investigator, this experience of discordance is found in his conflicted relation to the past. As a refuge from the uncertainties of postmodern life, he imagines a vague pre-modernity “before the First World War, as a time when everything made sense [and] the world had been founded on things everybody understood” (155). Such an idea of the lost paradise of “those days” (155) returns more personally in English’s desire for a lost home: “Then English was lost, and he wanted to go home […] to his family’s farmhouse in Prairie, Kansas, and to his childhood, and to his dead mother and father” (48). This past is not only past but lost and probably never existed in any other form than as an imaginary sanctuary from his present. It is, in turn, confronted with a real past from which he wants to disconnect himself and which accordingly continues to haunt his present.
The real past of his life is characterized by guilt, corruption, and despair over the absence of meaning. The guilt is associated with Vietnam, a war in which Lenny English did not fight, but which haunts him in the image of “the tattooed ghost […], the dead GI in Vietnam, the one who’d been drafted in Lenny’s place […] and shot at and killed instead of Lenny” (169). In Neon Noir, Woody Haut emphasizes the influence of the Vietnam War on the noir writers, especially in its connection to an “atmosphere of paranoia” and “government secrecy” shedding new light on “the relationship between public and private crime” (4). Paradoxically, the guilt of Vietnam is experienced by English as a purely private one because he did not fight in it, which later, however, adds to his compulsion to investigate possible public crimes in connection with Vietnam. English has experienced guilt and corruption also in his former job as a medical equipment salesman. The deliberate torturing of laboratory dogs during a “big sales conference” (33), that was to demonstrate a “new surgical stapler, and […] the variety of its uses” (34), led him to feel that “all things conspired consciously to do perfect evil” (35). The search for meaning and purpose in such a world leads English to God and to the end of his job. Finally, the impossibility to answer questions such as “what was really wanted of a person and just how far God would go in being God” (17) coupled with a despair over the fact “that what he prayed to was nothing, only this limitless absence” (119) are factors leading to a “halfhearted suicide attempt” in which he functions “as his own unsuccessful hangman” (32). Quoting Haut, English emerges as an example of “neon noir protagonists [who are] psychologically scarred inhabitants of a morally ambiguous world in which people are capable of perpetrating any and every outrage” (Neon Noir 4-5).
In Provincetown, English is confronted by all of these aspects of his past again, which adds greatly to his instability. The guilt associated with Vietnam reappears in two forms. The significant number of Vietnam veterans in Provincetown revives English’s guilt complex over evading the draft because of asthma, which now seems an insufficient excuse to him (193).2 More importantly, though, the connection to Vietnam becomes manifest in Ray Sands’ vague relation to an equally vague Vietnam-related organization called “Truth Infantry” (67). Ray Sands has hired English as assistant investigator and radio DJ, a typically undefined hybrid job in Provincetown, and is hence the reason English came to this place. English becomes obsessed with this Truth Infantry and tries to detect a conspiracy that involves Ray Sands and possibly extends to the president or, absurdly enough, to Bishop Andrew, the head of the local diocese (188). Thus, English re-encounters a general condition of corruption and the idea of an evil conspiracy in his work as an investigator. Already in his first investigation, a divorce case, English realizes that he is not investigating corruption so much as adding to it: instead of solving a crime he spies on a woman whose sexual relations to other women are “going to be used against her” (55). Ray Sands, the actual private detective, is the one figure in Provincetown who seems to embody old times, and hence he is a figure of stability on which English relies. Sands is “dressed like a forgotten President” (19) and “one of those people who’d been grownups when English was a child” (66). His sickness and death upsets this last order of things. After his death, Ray Sands appears in a much more ambiguous light, since he could possibly be both a passport forger and the head of this paramilitary organization, the Truth Infantry – although this, too, can never be ascertained. Thus, English is doubly deprived of his last authority figure. Connecting his second investigation, a missing-person case, with the death of his employer and an absurd kidnapping of his own person, he construes fragmented events and thoughts into a peculiar conspiracy theory. The creation of a corrupted narrative which lacks any certain base seems to him the only appropriate response to an absolute loss of certainties and is also an expression of his despair over the absence of meaning. In his attempt to act against an assumed conspiracy, he is the one who comes closest to committing a fatal crime. Instead of revealing corruption in others, English lets himself be corrupted by giving in to the paranoid narrative logic of absolute concordance in which everything is connected to everything else in “strands of an indecipherable web” (163). In addition, he is confronted with his past not only metaphorically in the aspects mentioned above, but also in a very concrete manner: the missing person of his second case, Gerald Twinbrook, is obsessed by the idea of suicide and resuscitation and turns out to be a more successful “hangman” (32) than English himself. His overt identification with Twinbrook finally contributes to his own disintegration of identity.
English encounters in Provincetown a postmodern noir world in which guilt and corruption are all pervasive, meanings are lost in a ceaseless play of differences that have ceased to make a difference, and every revelation of guilt and corruption implicates himself. In this prototypical postmodern place, where no assumed meaning can be certain and no connection is self-evident, English is lost both as an investigator and as a person of “inside trouble [and] unsound thinking” (37) who is in need of simple connection and clear meaning. In addition, he suffers from “a brain where everything fizzes and nothing connects” (14). Disconnected from himself, he cannot take a clear stand to anything and lacks decisiveness and conclusiveness in his thoughts and actions. His own inclination to get lost in his personal contradictions puts him in conflict with the contradictory qualities of Provincetown, where appearances can be deceptive and no identity is clearly defined. Two examples of these inner contradictions are his relation to his suicide attempt and his equal fear of the absence and the presence of a heavenly meaning manifest in this world.
Although he tries to classify his suicide attempt as “nothing really serious” (17), his experience with death is crucial to his character, since it leads him to experience the start of his life in Provincetown in a more literal than mere metaphorical sense: “his life on earth had stopped and then started somewhere else – here, now” (132). The act of hanging himself did not rob him of his life, but of his agency and, in Ricoeur’s terms, any clear relation between ipse- and idem-identity. The disruption of this relation puts him in a state of immobility and disconnection in which he can see no clear “trace” (16), no “trail of his own footprints” (32) establishing a continuous narrative of his identity. In order to feel this connection again, nothing short of resuscitation will do. The only action that can make a difference in this half-life is “God’s charge, the task that would bring Lenny English back from the dark” (132). This idea of living a post-mortem life is a typical noir characteristic, continually found in Jim Thompson’s work and in the apt title of Johnson’s recent novel, Already Dead. English’s emphasis on his suicide attempt as “sentence” (131) also closely relates to Thompson’s “general view of humans under sentence of death” (Cochran 26). For Johnson, however, a post-mortem life always entails the possibility to live once again. In this view, to escape one’s own death sentence means nothing less than the possibility of resurrection. Referring to his permanent obsession in his work with death and resurrection, Johnson states himself that “survival is salvation” (Interview in Ironwood 34), which also means that salvation is always tentative, fragile and never final. Thus, Johnson’s protagonists can hope for redemption and salvation only in so far that they might survive their own inevitable deaths a little while longer and look back on their failings. Despite the descent and regress that characterizes his narrative, English manages to do both, not only after his suicide attempt before the beginning of the novel but also after his assassination attempt at the end of the novel.
Although English vaguely feels that he is “being called” by God (86), he is both afraid of this being only a delusion and of a possible truth in this, even if being called is “a blown-up version of the truth” (87) and it might only mean to take responsibility for himself. In his job as an investigator engaged in the search for meaning, he is confronted both with his wish to ascribe a meaning to life that transcends postmodern diversity and his fear that such a meaning might entail taking responsibility for his actions and interpretations: “every object […] seemed to mean something. You are here, he said to God, and then from nowhere came the hope that he was wrong […], and that nothing would ever be asked of him” (74). In Giddens’ terms, such a fear is the result of “radical doubt,” a state in which no trust can be put in one’s perceptions or interpretation, and in which no authority seems stable enough to provide trustworthy guidance. English’s search for meaning, then, is to hold off a world in which every difference is equal to any other, finally indifferent to each other, and all meaning and essence is obliterated. Such a search would be equal to Ricoeur’s idea of striving to form a meaningful “configuration” out of a mere “succession” in narrative identity. In a condition of “radical doubt,” however, such an endeavor is likely to result in disaster. Indeed, the very act of asking for a meaning behind one’s actions is dangerous: “Later he’d tell himself that if there was a beginning to his troubles, that was it: wondering” (32).
In his ambivalent relationship to his environment, English finds himself in a typical noir conflict in Provincetown. He comes to this place in order to leave behind his troubles and his past and start anew. Instead, he finds himself confronted with his past and conflicts which inevitably leads to his failure. Thus, the problem of establishing a personal continuity that leads to a unified identity shows itself in noir fiction not only in the series of attempts and failures resulting in a life of discontinuous fragments. It is also apparent in the fact that the only continuity lies in the fatality through which one is confronted over and over again with the same problems from which one meant to disconnect oneself – and which, in turn, again lead to disrupting one’s attempts at a unified narrative of identity.
The “morally arid social environment” (Giddens 201) of postmodern Provincetown is the place in which English loses himself and which contributes to his descent into psychosis. It is a socially, geographically and historically well-defined place and its specific characteristics – emphasizing performance, difference, ambiguity – determine English’s fatal course in the narrative. At the same time, English’s state of being lost is ascribed to very personal troubles and is also to represent a more universal condition of despair and anxiety. Phil, a paranoid cabdriver without a cab who introduces English to Provincetown, says: “I think our world could really be some form of Hell, you know what I’m saying?” (6) This statement is paradigmatic for the novel as well as for the entire work of Johnson. He continually depicts protagonists who are hopelessly floundering through a world which is perceived as a version of hell, an apocalyptic underworld in which everyone is lost and doomed. Jim Thompson’s characteristic “emphasis on hell” (Cochran 21) can as well be ascribed to Denis Johnson. Hell, for both authors, is the suffering under an unbearable condition which allows no escape and is dominated by the “lack of any moral center” (Cochran 37). The perception of such a lack is typical of noir fiction. In the investigations of Spade and Marlowe, it contributed to the notion of an irredeemable corruption in society and human nature. In Johnson’s version of postmodern noir, such a lack leads to a more universal spiritual and inescapable condition of irretrievable loss. This includes the psychological state of the investigator English, who is lost in the ambiguities of a postmodern hell while investigating the case of a missing person. This paradox of one lost person trying to find another destroys the dichotomy between investigator and object of investigation and contributes to English’s loss of narrative control and disintegration of identity.
3.2 The Lost Investigator and the Missing Person
As he seriously starts to investigate the case of the missing painter, Twinbrook, it occurs to English that he “must have been missing for years before anybody missed him” (153). This idea that persons are characterized by something that is missing even when they are present is not restricted to the character of Twinbrook. When Leanna, mostly a lesbian and the goal of English’s hopeless amorous pursuit, makes love to him for the first time, she is to him “the only nobody for this nothing in the world”, and in the act itself “nobody mattered, […] love was just making love, calling to itself out of the void” (133). Leanna herself is “strictly P-town” (14), which not only refers to her homosexuality, but also that she embodies the variability of Provincetown by quickly adapting to rapidly shifting situations without feeling a need for final commitment. Due to this quality of the void, Leanna will permanently elude English and finally stay a ‘missing person’ for him, both somebody to long for and somebody out of reach, “the goddess beyond the pale” (174). In Grace Sands, Ray Sands’ “prematurely senile old wife” (66), one finds a very direct image of a person that has gone missing. Having disappeared into her own world, she only surfaces now and again, which gives off the impression of absolute discordance, of a life in fragments in which any personal integrity is lost in mental degeneration. Ray Sands, on the other hand, presents this quality of being missing in a more complex manner. To English, he is somewhat characterized by his “personal emptiness” (55), which is compensated by his “inner power to be mild [and] to love without hope” (55-56). Soon, however, he begins to appear as a person who is “very mysterious and almost invisible” (66). Especially in his dubious connection to the Truth Infantry and his possibly passport forgery, the image of Ray Sands becomes invested with a sense of a hidden identity which had been missing from his former appearance. His sudden death and English’s shock about “the collapsed quality of Ray Sands’ lifelessness” (156) seem to ascertain the fact that any fixed image of Ray Sands has disappeared, and that no speculation will be able to retrieve what has been missing. The fact that people can so easily go missing, miss a central quality or disappear from the sights of others and even themselves, points to the absence of a personal inner center. In fact, it extends to the notion pervading Johnson’s negative view of the postmodern condition: anything permanent and central is lost in a great emptiness. Such a missing permanent center – or rather, this absence in the place of the center, and the fluidity in the place of permanence – reveals a fundamental uncertainty. Nothing can be known about anyone else for certain, including oneself. Thus, everyone is always a lost person to everyone else, and, consequently, one is always lost to oneself.
English himself is a prime example of being lost within himself in this way: He is constantly “at a loss to trace his own path” (16) and to explain his actions and thoughts to others and to himself. The most significant example of such an action is again his suicide attempt through which he has “gone blank” (133). He disrupted his identity narrative without ending it and now has trouble to perceive himself as a continuous self, a subject acting to constitute a unified identity. The ultimate action that was to define the end of all actions instead has led to a loss of agency and defined unity, has put him in a state of limbo and has made him missing from the world. Standing in “the dark”, only “God’s charge” (132), the ultimate task, can summon him. His interest in the lost and missing becomes a personal obsession. It transcends the professional task of the investigator to retrieve something lost, which can manifest itself in the restoring of a lost social order or in the finding of a missing person. For in addition to that, English’s obsession with the absent becomes apparent in his relation to God, since “a growing certainty of the Presence was accompanied by a terrifying absence of any sign or feeling or manifestation of it” (119). Absence and presence even become interlinked to a point at which he no longer can tell them apart. The inherent danger that lies in confusing absence with presence informs the observation which a self-declared aura-seer directs at English: “You can easily begin empathizing with situations you only imagine. Find yourself getting stirred around by things that aren’t really – real” (144). It is exactly this quality which leads English away from his investigative job of discovering a lost narrative in order to ascertain someone’s identity or to solve a case. Instead, it leads him to imagine “God’s charge”, which is to retrieve his own identity, and to the construction of a narrative which was never there in the first place.
In the breakdown of the dichotomy between investigator and object of investigation coupled with English’s obsession with the absent, it is his relation to the actual missing person, Gerald Twinbrook, which becomes most important in the course of the novel. In the investigation, Twinbrook’s mother first introduces him to English as a painter, an artist. Instead of acting as if his “only interest in life is to gather information” (69), as Sands instructed him, English gains an impression from the way Twinbrook views the world. In his view he finds the same emphasis on absence that informs his own sight of things. He focuses on the way Twinbrook managed to catch “the eerie Cape light” which seems to be a brightness “just in the air, a brightness not otherwise locatable” and the depiction of “mysterious” people who have “no faces, only blank ovals” and come only alive “in the way they held their bodies” (72, 73). Especially in regard to the light, English discovers a resemblance to his own perception. In addition, the impression of Twinbrook’s artistic view influences his own view of the world: “Her face was soft and disappeared […] into a blankness like that of the faces in Jerry Twinbrook’s paintings” (85), and “he watched this shopping center as he might one of Jerry Twinbrook’s beaches, the arrested moment of it” (88). Under this influence by a painter’s vision, English tries to attain the same detachment to his life as he would have to an object of art: “the way to deal […], with his time on this eerie peninsula, maybe with his whole life was to stand back and look at it as he would a painting he didn’t understand and probably couldn’t appreciate” (87). English himself is a person who is always trying to “get the whole picture” (189) of everything. In Twinbrook he finds someone who has painted this “whole picture” for himself and has done this so perfectly that he finally disappeared in it, became another figure of absence, both literally and metaphorically. Influenced by Twinbrook’s vision as a painter, English loses the detachment to his vision as a lunatic and finally gets lost in it himself.
The fact that for English the Twinbrook case is a personal matter and not a professional one, is established already after the impression of his paintings: “He was wrenched by a thought. I’ve got to find that guy. It was a necessary thing” (88). It is also this case which puts the demand on English to become an independent investigator. At the beginning, Sands announces from his sickbed that “Today you are the investigator [and] I’m your assistant” (68, 69). This reversal of roles becomes complete after Sands’ death. After a break of two months, English in fact becomes an absolutely independent investigator. In addition to no longer working for an employer, he also has no client anymore, since the family has “another agency on it” (137). This only increases his need to do this for himself: “This whole thing has got to me – I have to do something” (138).
In the obsessive investigation English pursues from then on, Twinbrook is transformed from a vague influence and matter of personal importance into a more unsettling image of English’s doppelganger, his, literally, missing Twin. This identification occurs in a confrontation with English’s past troubles, namely his suicide attempt, and with his present obsession of a possible conspiracy involving Ray Sands and the Truth Infantry. In an abandoned office of Twinbrook, English discovers a heap of books - among them “one called Life after Life[,] The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a dictionary, novels by George Simenon and Graham Greene, three James Bond books” (148,149) – and lists “of brand names, or the names of political groups or business corporations” (150). English stumbles into a bookcase of paranoid conspiracy theories, and he immediately adds his own obsession to it. In a list of organizations such as “The Daughters of the American Revolution, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan” English makes his discovery:
There was a circle around ‘Truth Infantry’. English stood up, greatly excited! Circled! But had Twinbrook circled it, or had he, English? He was holding a pen in his hand. He put the page on the desk and drew a circle on it. The ink looked identical. (150)
This passage does not only display the absurd humor of the book but also hints at the danger involved in English’s investigation of Twinbrook. In his unstable status and his inclination to lose track of himself, English’s identification with Twinbrook happens unaware of himself and leads him to continue the project of paranoia he is meant to investigate. Even in this mundane gesture, it is noticeable how hard it is for English to tell apart his own actions and thoughts from someone else’s, and how likely he is to follow a clue that is not only obscure but possibly created by himself. Finally, a lack of security prevails and a remnant of indeterminacy can never be eliminated. “The ink looked identical” can as well mean that English holds the same pen Twinbrook has held in the moment he made the circle. The writing itself does not clearly determine that either case is correct, and the fact that it “looked identical” has to be taken with a grain of salt especially in a novel so heavily dealing with false appearances. Generally, this unsettling and hovering feeling of uncertainty does not leave the reader until the end, especially since some kind of connection exists between Twinbrook and the Truth Infantry, even if it is only banal or coincidental.
However, it is especially in Twinbrook’s obsession with death and resuscitation, that he answers to English’s personal troubles and appears more directly as his double. The scattered sheets of paper appear as notes for a book on “Brain Death” and actual cases of “life after death” (151, italics in original). As Twinbrook puts it himself in a typed page full of spelling mistakes, it is “a book about the verge of conscoiiouslness [sic], the splitting apart of the world, and the end of time” (152, italics in original). One of these cases of “life after death” is the one the title Resuscitation of a Hanged Man refers to most directly: In 1870 “John H. Skaggs had been hanged for murder” (153) and was to be resuscitated by two doctors, J. H. Jackson and Joseph F. MacDonald, two men who “already found their footing in the twentieth century, this region of the blind” which is so troublesome to English (155). In order to do so, they used the latest discovery of science: “By the power of electricity they meant to revive John H. Skaggs after he was hanged” (155). In this attempt to disintegrate the difference between “the living and the dead”, Skaggs becomes an “unholy nineteenth-century Midwestern Lazarus” (160-161). He becomes so alive that “the left arm flails out at nothing, the mouth froths, and the face twitches” and, before he is dead again, takes on the appearance of being “slaughtered” (156). In the horror of the scene, one finds a mixture of gothic and noir elements. The ‘mad scientists’ are determined to revive a dead person with help of their ‘unholy’ instruments, and also the mechanical movements of the dead Skaggs recall rather Frankenstein’s Monster than Lazarus. Although they finally fail to revive him, their slaughtering violation of a person, even though already dead, can in typical noir fashion still change the status of this person from being a “perpetrator” to being a “victim” (155). The result close resembles Horsley’s definition of a classic noir outcome, “the utter disintegration of the human” (13).
Of course, English’s failed execution of his own death sentence and his expectation of a metaphorical resurrection immediately comes to mind. In addition, however, this display of instrumental reason recalls the scene of the tortured laboratory dogs described earlier in the novel which led to the end of English’s former job engagement and to some degree to his attempt at self-murder. This torture scene somewhat exceeds the horror of nineteenth century mad science and leads English to express a typical noir worldview in which corruption is at the heart of modern civilization and, in fact, of every human being. In both scenes there is a sense of conspiracy that is finally more terrifying than the possible connections between obscure organizations and respected people. This conspiracy “to do perfect evil” (35) rests on an unacknowledged agreement to justify ‘useful’ cruelty and includes everyone involved in the project of a human race based on rationality and science: “There was some undercurrent here that […] it was his nauseating privilege, his instinctive duty to do whatever the creatures who weren’t dogs were doing to the dogs” (35). In regard to Twinbrook narrative one might add, ‘whoever wasn’t dead was doing to the dead’. Under the rule of scientific rationality, both the dead Skaggs and the laboratory dogs turn into helpless victims. With the case of Skaggs, Twinbrook documents the terrifying “lack of any moral center” leading to victimization in the procedures of modernity while he has possibly become such a victim himself. English imagines Twinbrook has been abducted by the Truth Infantry – an organization he associates with social and personal guilt and industrial warfare, one of modernity’s greatest crimes. Thus, English greatly empathizes with Twinbrook because of his own recent experience of having become a victim of an unexplained kidnapping – which he also attributes to the Truth Infantry – and because of his experience of victimization of others which almost led him to become a victim by his own hands.
The confrontation with his own suicide attempt becomes complete in the moment his investigation ends with the discovery of Twinbrook’s corpse who hanged himself in the woods. Just shortly before this, English discovers last sketches and words by the artist in a hut also used by the Truth Infantry, not so much a paramilitary organization but more probably a harmless group of Vietnam veterans. Beneath the sketch of a man hanging from a tree, English discovers these words of Twinbrook’s own writing: “Now we are allowed to take the dead man / and strike him with lightning of our own making / and bring him back to life” (222, italics in original). Just as Twinbrook becomes a figure of his own drawing, the act of ending his life turns into the conclusion of his narrative identity. The act of suicide is no longer a result of the loss of agency but appears instead as an act of personal authority. No doubt, it is a matter of delusion, isolation, alienation. However, it is also a matter of utter consequence, fearlessness and impossible belief in the promethean forces of man to claim authorship for one’s own life and thus even to restore life with “lightning of our own making”. In Twinbrook’s act of utter irrationality and independence, English finds relief: “All anxiety had left him. He was happy. […] Anything was possible, anything” (222). He finds the power of conclusion in Twinbrook’s action by which he is “laid out at the end of his own road” (228). It is the quality of bringing things to an end according to one’s own narrative logic which English is lacking and from which he draws a fatal inspiration for his own deluded actions guided by an illusionary authority.
The finding of Twinbrook’s corpse is English’s second confrontation with death in the novel, the first being the exposure to the dead body of Ray Sands. Whereas the first made him anxious and desperate, the sight of the “frozen man English took to be Jerry Twinbrook” (224) liberates and exhilarates him. Twinbrook is lifeless, robbed of his agency and vision, emphasized by the fact that “his eyes were gone” (224). English, on the other hand, is alive to the point of mania: “Suddenly his eyes burned, he felt sexy, and he wanted to take off his clothes and dance around, fondling himself and screaming” (225). English’s reaction to the discovery of Twinbrook’s “impossibly alienated” (224) body turns into the resuscitation Twinbrook had imagined for himself: “he pirouetted whitely through the woods, like the naked soul of Gerald Twinbrook liberated from the corpse” (225). In addition, the death of one hanged man makes it possible for another hanged man to live, and Twinbrook’s accomplished suicide turns into English’s own resuscitation after his failed attempt. In this degree of identification, the action of someone else can take away a personal burden of one’s own. This also makes it possible for English to be inspired by Twinbrook’s narrative of paranoia, adapt it and follow it through to his own end. Even more so, the fact that English managed to find Twinbrook on his own intuitive account, seems to him the confirmation that God “was riding him toward his destiny” (225) and that there is a heavenly meaning underneath all events guiding his actions in a narrative logic of its own. Twinbrook’s corpse itself becomes the image of a heavenly presence: “That strange naked moment, he thought. […] Nothing easy or even anything that can be understood. I saw the goddess: dead, in the form of a man with his eyes pecked out” (229).
In the course of the investigation, Twinbrook becomes a dominating presence for English even in his continuing absence. This is apparent in the way Twinbrook functions for English as an addressee in various degrees, to the point of being an imaginary conversational partner. Even during English’s first time at Twinbrook’s abandoned office, English starts to address Twinbrook. The narration, which otherwise is told in 3rd person in a mixture of figural and authorial narrative situation, leaps into the 1st person: “Twinbrook, are you missing or are you hiding?” (149), “What do you want with these names? I’m not going to read the typed stuff” (150). In fact, these fragments of an interior monologue become part of an interior dialogue in response to the writing of Twinbrook: “Who does all the work? Me. I do all the work. You go crazy, and I do all the work” (153). The formal detachment of such a mode of addressing is reflected in English’s mental distance toward Twinbrook’s paranoid attitude which English expresses in his thoughts. Shortly afterwards, however, in a moment of destabilization brought about by the impossibility to have Leanna all to himself, the relation to Twinbrook turns more personal. He is added to the absent presences haunting English which include Leanna, “his dead parents”, “the dead GI in Vietnam” and now also Twinbrook, “the invisible one, the missing man, the ghost who could put real daylight into false landscapes” (169). He addresses an emotional letter to him, a vision of comfort and sorrow ending with “you’d be lost in the dark, and I would cry these tears” (170, italics in original). In need of comfort himself, English turns to Twinbrook, who, he senses, is in equal need of understanding and company.
Twinbrook, who directly introduces the gothic elements of the double and the undead in the novel, finally appears to English as a ghost, a hallucinatory apparition. During English’s bus ride back from the woods where he found his corpse to Provincetown, Twinbrook “lounged beside him with an innocent irony glowing out from deep in his excavated eyes” (226). In this conversation with an imaginary other, English externalizes his personal concerns and worries in order to achieve the detached position of a corrective view and to find somebody in his isolation to whom he can connect. Twinbrook’s ghost functions as English’s teacher: “Don’t you know the lessons of love? Nothing is what you see” (227). This “radical doubt” towards the truth claim of any perception is not only typical postmodern but in the context of this novel also points to English’s specific incapacity to access any inner or outer concept of certainty. It is impossible for him to decide whether Twinbrook is a spiritual manifestation or a deranged hallucination, just as his obsessive quests can be a matter of paranoid delusions deriving from his inner instability, or a divine calling coming from an external spiritual authority. English is incapable of establishing a clear relation to an obscure inner core of his self and to any authority outside of him that would grant meaning to his actions. Thus, the oppositions of inside and outside collapse, and he sinks into an universe in which everything is a projection of his own anxieties and every encounter becomes an instance of involuntary self-reflection. Twinbrook is reflected back to him as the ghostly image of the hanged man, who English almost would have become himself, and who can only be resuscitated in English’s own visions and hallucinations. Appearing as a testimony to English’s empathy for the imaginary, Twinbrook’s ghost also emphasizes the importance and the curse of empathy in a hellish world dominated by suffering: “As long as one slave walks the earth, you cannot be free” (227). Just as the total lack of empathy in science can turn a perpetrator in a victim, absolute empathy can destabilize identity in that it erases the difference between the self and the other, the free and the imprisoned, the living and the dead. With such a degree of empathy, English is bound to turn into a victim in a noir world in which success is based on emotional detachment to the point of cruelty. In fact, English’s descent into madness is a result of his empathy – to freely quote Ricoeur, his capacity to perceive ‘himself as another’. In Giddens’ terms, this empathy becomes dangerous because it is coupled with a loss of a stable position in “internal referential systems”. Instead of interpreting the reflexive project of narrative identity within these systems, English misinterprets everything as total self-reflection until he completely suffers “the loss of anchoring reference points” and can attain no corrective viewpoint anymore. His growing identification with Twinbrook, and the acceptance of him as a presence, especially after discovering that the missing person can no longer be found, bear testimony to this process.
The search for the missing person becomes the dominating presence for the lost investigator. It is the means to establish an inner sense of purpose to his actions in a world populated by ‘missing persons’ and dominated by an absence of essences. For the lost investigator, the investigation can no longer offer the hope of retrieval but cannot be abolished either because it is needed to “ascertain that missing persons were truly and forever lost” (54). A lost person lacking inner certainties himself, the lost investigator is additionally driven by an inner need in the search for the missing person. He occupies himself with the task in anguish to cope with “the threat of meaninglessness” which is always present as an “underlying dynamic” in late modernity (Giddens 201). Thus, in the loss of difference toward Twinbrook and the adaptation of his paranoid narrative logic, English begins to lose his narrative control and disintegrate his identity.
3.3 The Loss of Narrative Control in the Paranoia of False Narratives
For Ricoeur, the project of narrative identity can only be achieved in a balance of discordance and concordance. In Oneself as Another, he states that concordance is present in the “unity of a life considered a temporal totality” and is threatened by discordance in “the disruptive effect of the unforeseeable events that punctuate it (encounters, accidents, etc.)” (147). In the postmodern noir vision of Johnson, this “disruptive effect” of discordance dominates to an extent that the quality of life as a “temporal totality” seems disrupted and gives way to the notion of a fragmented life engaged in an endless succession of death and resurrection. In a general condition of radical instability, balance is impossible to maintain. Thus, following Ricoeur, there can be no “synthesis of heterogeneous elements” into the “discordant concordance” of narrative. The unbearable state of absolute discordance can only be escaped by acknowledging the absolute concordance of paranoia. In the narrative logic of paranoia there are no “unforeseeable events” and “nothing could be viewed as separate from anything else” (Johnson 136). The narrative principle of “drawing a configuration out of a succession” is radicalized so that any succession already appears to be a configuration of meaning. This results in the conclusion that “accidents” don’t exist: “There are no coincidences” (Johnson 229).
For English, the escape to false narratives of paranoid delusion is a consequence of violent disruptions in his life. Especially for English, who is professionally and personally in need of certainties, the utter meaninglessness of these events is as frightening as the frightening possibility of a terrible meaning connecting them. Both point to the absence of meaning as a source of terror and anxiety endangering the struggle for a unified identity: One is the sudden death of Ray Sands, the other is English’s experience of being kidnapped and beaten.
Ray Sands suffers a heart attack, and his death takes place in a hospital depicted as a place of chaos and lonely despair. Witnessing the arrival of Sands in the hospital, English feels himself in a position that is “vulnerable to some vague hostile thrust” (96). The vocabulary which describes English’s perception evokes personal violation, “he felt himself tearing away from these details and felt the strands of them being burned from his person” (97). Both in the “widow’s torment” (99) of Grace Sands and English’s “great anguish” over his doubt whether “a human soul drifted along these corridors now” (100), the depiction of the hospital recalls Giddens’ “morally arid social environment” of late modernity, in which neither personal nor spiritual comfort can be attained. The final confrontation with Ray Sands’ dead body makes him experience “an unbearable thrill in his chest” (102) and lets him doubt the “Resurrection of the Body” (104). In this personal turmoil, English ends up losing himself in a self-destructive vision incited by a rock song of a “jilted, effeminate Jehovah [whose] love was profoundly uncontrollable [and] willing to take forever, if necessary, to drown him” (106).
The instability created by the “disruptive effect” of this event is increased by a more direct violent intrusion in English’s life. Mistaken for a thief, “a rip-off bastid” (120) of some sort, English is kidnapped from his room, threatened with death, interrogated and beaten up in a restroom in an abandoned basement, and afterwards thrown back out on the street. In all its violence, the scene stands out for its absurdity. One of the men threatens to kill English only to show him that he would do it (121), the kidnappers fight over banalities and exchange everyday-anecdotes about drug abuse and sexual violence which pushes English to the point of tears (125), the “gigantic novelty hat of furry silver-blue velvet” of his interrogator leads English to wonder: “Am I on LSD? (125). During the interrogation, the obscurity of the questions – “Think back. Some items are missing. Do you know what I am talking about?” (126) – scares English into believing that this is not a simple case of mistaken identity but connected to the death of Ray Sands and the possibly forged passports he threw away, and to the Truth Infantry. Breaking down into a confession, English links all of these information fragments. Reduced to being a scared “nothing” (128), English is desperate to create meaning and make sense to his kidnappers, whose only response is to leave him on the street. This scene confronts the random violence of a noir universe in which one’s life can be ended simply by mistake with the equally unsettling notion that anything has a secret meaning to it, also a typical theme of noir which continually creates “a picture of a society in which everyone is a ‘secret agent’” (Horsley 9). In Johnson’s postmodern noir, it is impossible for English to determine which of these scenarios is the case. Just before the intrusion of the kidnappers, English is pondering: “What if there’s really nothing?” and concludes:
I’ve got to pray because I can’t stop thinking these thoughts. Prayer is my home. God is inside it […] The end of the world. And the deep, dark secret of my life. It’s a case of answering the door and being entered. (120)
In a moment afterwards, English’s door is broken down, and violence enters his life. Thus, paradoxically, this violent intrusion can also be understood as an answer to his prayers. It becomes to him the manifestation of a God who is “an alligator” (119). It can only be grasped by the authority of God testing him, pushing him close to the ‘plot’ of a hidden narrative of corruption, and assigning him the charge of revealing this conspiracy and eliminating it. This double meaning of ‘plot’, as story line and conspiracy, is essential to English’s desperate attempt to reconstitute his disrupted identity by narrative interpretation. Only the perception of the disruptive events as part in a conspiratorial but meaningful configuration grants English the possibility to see himself as an agent engaged in a plot. In such an interpretation of events, he can regain his agency and escape the status of a victim. English’s belief in such a plot is heavily based on his desperate faith in the authority of an all-knowing God, whose existence would be the only guarantee for meaning in a world lacking any stable references. Thus, the traditional knight-metaphor for the detective, in noir fiction most heavily applied to Philip Marlowe, reappears in English’s self-ascribed status as a Kierkegaardian “knight of faith” (43) acting out a drama of ‘dark secrets’ in an apocalyptic “end of the world”-scenario.
On the other hand, if this violation of English, his victimization resulting in an utter reduction to “nothing”, would serve no purpose but to demonstrate the absolute pointlessness of life, English’s only home, his sanctuary of “Prayer”, would be destroyed with much more lasting effect. Any meaning in such a world would not be secret but irrevocably lost. The world would not be rushing to an ultimate and possibly terrible conclusion of apocalypse, but emerge as a more terrifying permanent hell, in which one could only conclude that “the earth was uninhabitable” (108). After getting a glimpse of this hell by stepping “through a curtain into a world of meat, a slaughterhouse” (130), it is easier for English to escape into the paranoid logic of hidden secrets and false narratives than to be lost in an unknowable world that “had lived its history” (129) and in which any story, either true or false, is impossible.
The working of such a paranoid narrative logic is demonstrated when English begins to list all “the peoples, the places, the connections” (160) involved in his case. The list begins with “Ray Sands and Grace Sands”, leads over “Twinbrook and the Cape Light and John Skaggs” and ends with “the big corporations and the Truth Infantry and God and Jesus and the Bishop…” (160, 161). The absurdity of these connections is evident in the way they spin out of control and quickly contain everyone and everything. In a final twist, they extend to Bishop Andrew, who stands in an obscure relation to Ray Sands which is suspicious to English since this relation is at one time denied by Sands but affirmed by others. The paranoid characteristic, however, especially lies in the fact that a simple accumulation of names, a “succession” of words, already implies a connection between them, a “configuration” of meaning. The “and” between each name does not simply serve a syntactic function of linear succession, but instead suggests a string of connections established by following causal logic. In this all-encompassing logic of paranoia, the sense for distinction disappears and affects the sense of personal identity:
Why did everything vibrate when he touched it? – strands of an indecipherable web, connections that shouldn’t be there. The coincidences of his life assailed him. The walls of the world were soft; wherever he bumped against them he pushed through into inscrutable chaos and naked meaning and Heaven and Hell. (163)
In Johnson’s postmodern noir, the experience of “inscrutable chaos” and “naked meaning” necessitate each other and equally lead to disaster. English is prone to fall into the absolute concordance of religious paranoia, because he suffers from an unbearable discordant state of disconnection, leading him to feel closed off from himself – “a brain where everything fizzes and nothing connects” (14) – and from his surroundings: “He felt his isolation, his inability to connect – it was stronger, essential, cosmic” (199). In fact, this state of solitary entrapment begins to define him to a point when “connections that shouldn’t be there” appear as a violent force that dissolves any kind of integral self-definition and makes him feel “assailed”. At the same time, his instability, due to the lack of any stable contact, turns this force into an irresistible lure to which he gives in. Instead of being stabilized by the satisfaction of his need to connect, random connections hit him suddenly and uncontrollably. The extremity of the situation upsets any personal assumption English holds about himself and leads to a loss of differentiation in which any permanent state disappears into constant “transformations” (164), and even the oppositions of “Heaven and Hell” collapse into a “naked meaning” beyond understanding. Thus, the paranoia of false narratives appears in “strands of an indecipherable web” which is felt by English to disintegrate his identity. It suggests a malicious connection between any event and any person and tries to victimize English by dictating him the further course of his actions: “He closed his eyes and willed himself to understand that it couldn’t possibly be an instruction to him from God to kill the Bishop of his diocese” (162).
The dilemma for English lies in his inability to determine whether the conspiratorial connections and the conclusive action they suggest to him are triggered by the corrupted perception of his deluded mind or are to be treated as instructions from the unquestionable authority of God. The suspension of any personal reasoned judgment in favor of the ultimate commitment to a faithful and unreasonable conviction connects the aspiration to sainthood with the descent into madness:
How quickly would a person’s life progress along its lines if he followed every impulse as if it started from God? How much more quickly would he be healed? Or how much faster destroyed? Saints had done that. Also mass killers, and wreakers of a more secret mayhem, witches and cultists and vampires and so on. (194)
In exemplary stories of these cases between sainthood and madness – Simone Weil, Joan of Arc – English finds, besides Gerald Twinbrook’s story, further narrative foils for the interpretation of his own troubles and inner impulses. Letting his ‘life progress along these lines’, English’s reflexive project of narrative identity turns into mere projection, and interpretation is reduced to the unquestioned following of “every impulse”. However, such an abandoning of reasonable reflection is not a matter of mindless certainty for English. Instead, it is a consequence of the dread of indeterminacy concerning both the sources of one’s actions and the respective outcome. Because one can never determine the rightness of one’s actions, to follow one’s “delusions” might be as justifiable as following the “most careful scientific observations” (189). Equally, it is impossible to interpret the outcome of one’s actions so that one never knows whether one is left “damned or saved”, healed [or] destroyed” (194). Any notion of narrative control is lost in a dominance of “radical doubt” due to the impossibility to decide the value of the very actions constitutive of one’s identity. The denouncing of control and responsibility for any determining action in one’s life story seems the only escape. As a result, the blind acceptance of any narrative clue as if coming from an external power establishes a logic of its own in which every link is self-evident. Because facts are seen as impossible to interpret in their fluidity and ambiguity, fictions are created instead in which one can clearly determine a plot, an author and a certain meaning. The impossibility of finding such a clear structure and meaning anywhere in the postmodern condition, even in a work of fiction, is emphasized by the novel itself. Its loose plot structure is rather based on accidents and absurd impulses than on logical conclusion, and it repeatedly makes clear that meanings as a matter of interpretation are always multiple and ambiguous. Correspondingly, the novel’s narrative rushes towards its fatal ending as the constitutive aspect of English’s narrative identity is reduced to following a prescribed course to a predetermined conclusion.
These phenomena, the loss of narrative control and the adaptation of a paranoid narrative logic, depend on each other. Both are described as an escape from an unbearable condition, and both escape attempts fatally upset a balance vital for maintaining a stable identity. The loss of narrative control upsets the balance between fact and fiction, just as the ensuing adaptation of a paranoid narrative logic upsets the balance between concordance and discordance. The typical noir fatality which inevitably leads English into psychosis is then not a matter of a deterministic society, but is insofar determined by society in that his descent into religious paranoia is a response to a society in which nothing can be determined and in which the absence of fate is experienced as an unbearable inner loss: “But how do I know you’re God? Because I’m all that’s in front of you, and all that was behind you is gone” (194). The loss of narrative control in the favor of following an illusionary authority is the expression of an existential despair over the loss of certainties, including any certainty of an inner self.
In creating paranoid false narratives, English tries to convince himself of the existence of certain connections which all point to a center and allow for directed agency: “There’s a web [and] at the center of it is Andrew, our Bishop” (188). By putting Bishop Andrew at the center, English denies the absence of a center in postmodernity and is able to circle in on him – just as he involuntarily circled the “Truth Infantry” acting like Twinbrook. He creates the Bishop as the main character in his paranoid narrative, the representative of all inexplicable evil constituting modern civilization. This ‘plot’ includes warfare, corruption and the permanent presence of senseless violence forever claiming innocent victims. One of these victims, English assumes, is Jerry Twinbrook with whom English identifies strongly and who supposedly is abducted by the Truth Infantry at the order of Ray Sands (188). English finds himself implicated in the victim and in the perpetrator of this assumed crime. In his attempt to investigate this conspiracy and reveal the corruption at the heart of (post-)modern society, English falls prey to the paranoid narrative logic that corrupts his perception and interpretations. He loses his narrative control by following blindly an illusionary authority that directs the plot of his narrative, and by losing the power to differentiate, his identity disintegrates to a point at which he turns criminal himself.
3.4 The Disintegration of Identity through the Loss of Difference
English’s incapability to differentiate becomes pronounced especially in the section of the novel titled “May-June” (171) which itself already blurs the difference between the temporal units that served as titles for the first two sections, 1980 and 1981, and English’s act of naming himself “May-June” in his incarnation as a transvestite at the end of the novel. English is at a loss to decide whether he is “at the slurring start of some grand opportunity or injury” (175). The loss of control this implies is apparent in the direct connection of such a sensation to “the dreamy beginnings of an accident” (175). In addition, he experiences the intuitions of the mentally unstable: “Whispers from the center of his heart. All are martyred. Kill the Bishop” (175). After a final disillusion concerning the ever-elusive Leanna, English leaves Provincetown on the search for Gerald Twinbrook. Every encounter turns into a revelation or a threat, and the reaction of other people towards him demonstrate the degree of his distorted perception of others and of himself in a blackly comic manner: “You know who’s strange, man, is you. Your eyeballs are sort of quivering, and I don’t like the way you keep chewing on your tongue” (215). English is at much at a distance to himself as he is to the world outside, and in his struggle to connect, he projects his inner anxieties outside without being able to differentiate between hostility and pity, a harmless joke and real danger. This is exaggerated to the point of a terribly funny absurdity:
English now recognized this man as a messenger.
“You’ll know the Sasquatch. He looks kind of like Senor Mister Vance over there across the street, who you were talking to.”
A sour feeling of dread stroked English under his throat. “Are you saying,” English asked, “that he might follow me out there?” (218)
It is only when English is on his own in the woods coming close to Jerry Twinbrook, that “the feeling he was launched on a fatal errand left him, and he forgot he was here without any good reason but with complete certainty” (219). Being by himself out in nature, he also becomes more convinced that it is a “matter of faith marching after the delusion” (221). The discovery of his dead double seems to confirm this, even if Twinbrook was not the victim of a conspiracy but acted out a more personal narrative of self-annihilation. However, English seems to draw inspiration for his further actions both from the fact that Twinbrook followed down “his own road” to the ultimate conclusion and from his ability to having found Twinbrook by following his intuition.
During the return to Provincetown, the loss of difference between inside and outside in English’s perception is apparent in his talking to himself as Twinbrook’s ghost. Back in Provincetown, the last step of his mission and investigation seems to be “taking this gun and shooting the Bishop, but that was crazy” (230). In fact, English is never able to decide whether he should shoot the Bishop or not. Even as he is marching through town disguised as a woman and with a gun in his purse, “the dilemma, that both ideas were absurd” (242) never leaves him. The fact that he finally tries to kill the Bishop is not so much because he is convinced of a good reason to do so, but because he neither finds a good reason that stops him. Trapped in a condition of inescapable indeterminacy, English runs out of control. Instead of changing his status by a decisive step, he glides from being an investigator to being a perpetrator because he can no longer see a difference from one position to another. Typical of noir, where loyalty and betrayal are closely connected, they too seem to become interchangeable to English. Acting out his delusion becomes both a matter of following God and betraying him. Ironically, it is a betrayal which seems to need the approval of the betrayed: “Give me another chance to betray you, Lord. Let me let you down again” (231).
This transformation of status from investigator to perpetrator is anticipated by English’s transforming disguise as a woman in Leanna’s clothes. English’s act of turning himself into a transvestite seems to signal that he adapts to the performance and the diversity of Provincetown-identities who need to re-create themselves permanently. But this, as frequently in the novel, is only a false appearance. The disguise is to represent the disappearance of his former self-image, “when [he] was knowable” (233), and also his disconnection from the people around him. English sees himself in another world than them, one in which he is the only one alive: “These wraiths couldn’t see him” (233). Simultaneously, it becomes a performance of self-effacement, a pronouncement that the old Lenny is dead. This allows him to successfully conclude the confession of his suicide attempt for which he lacked the commitment at the beginning of his stay in Provincetown. In the confession, the priest tells English that in “an act of perfect faithlessness […] you succeeded in canceling your life” and that “your faith is making you whole” (237). Such a view of resurrection through faith has to be seen with heavy irony, though, since the ‘act of faith’ English is about to commit is the attempted murder of his Bishop. English is granted the absolution but it does not free him, and in the ensuing vision leading up to the crime, his identity is dissolved in an endless multitude.
In the disguise of a woman, English is no longer able to hide in the routines of his usual self-image. However, it also does not grant him the “protection” (239) of creating himself anew through performance. Instead, he is robbed off the ability to perform himself, is “naked of all [his] signs and moves” (237), as if he “were born” (238) and in this raw openness he becomes open to all sensations, and any former concept of self-definition disappears:
Everything he was – a man, an American, an image patched together out of certain assumptions and beheld mostly by itself – was burned to ash by the fire of this new thing. (239)
This “fire” does not only burn his sense of identity, but dissolves any boundaries that usually define the unity of personal temporal lives. English experiences an epiphany in which great clarity and utter distortion intermingle. It is vision of a holistic universe in which every moment, from prehistory to the apocalyptic last days of “some gigantic holocaust”, happens simultaneously and implies English’s present life “extending backward into the conflagration of all other lives [and] touching the tender pink future” (239). Everything is always in a constant flux, “all things could fall away in an instant” (238), but at the same time recaptured in eternity, “going on forever” (240). In the perception of other persons, English does not see them as single entities so much as merged in an all-encompassing suffering soul-identity: “Each one was crucified and completely open, every thought, every desire floating out from their torn hearts” (239). As English walks among the beach dwellers in his full guise, isolated even in his appearance, he hears “the incense of [their] secrets rising […] into the clear day” (239) and to his ears. English imagines all individual thoughts to converge so that everyone is not only connected across the pasts and futures of all lives, but also synchronically with everyone else in each moment: “’It’s all my fault that memory is dark.’ ‘Thank God, I’m out of that mess.’ ‘I’m fat.’ ‘I’m thirsty.’ ‘When am I going to live?’” (240). This mixture of banal thoughts, clichés and existential questions does not only present the equal status of any thought in this holistic vision. The attitudes generally expressed also emphasize how much this vision is the ultimate projection of English’s anxieties and preoccupations on an outside world. This vision is also an exaggeration of the ever-present connections in the paranoid logic, and the absolute loss of narrative control. The single entities which the paranoid logic only meant to connect, collapse into each other and become indistinguishable from each other. At the end, the voices can no longer be ascribed to any single speakers. In addition, any concept which makes a narrative identity possible – time, individuality, subjectivity – dissolves into an absolute concordance in which the narrative of any single person disappears in total simultaneity and collectivity. In the merging of all narratives, no single narrative strand is left. At this extreme point of empathy, empathy as the capability to feel for another person becomes impossible because the other person dissolves in an endless everyone. Instead, English’s empathy focuses on an imaginary all-unifying soul-identity whose presence he feels in a state of ultimate alienation, isolation, disconnection. He empathizes mainly with his own imagination, and thus empathy turns on itself and collapses in solipsism. It is a vision of ambivalence, an epiphany of delusional transcendence, and, leading up to his assassination attempt, of even destructive grandeur. In such a state, harmony can only be achieved at the price of indifference, and the connection to other persons is only possible in an imagined vision whose “agony of brightness” (239) extinguishes oneself, and finally the notion of any separate self. The loss of difference leads to the collapse of all defining features, and English’s identity is disintegrated as his self dissolves in every other person, every other moment of time, every other part of the world: “…and then the moment granted him a vision of his life dissolving away until there was nothing left in front of him but the sea, going on forever” (240).
As English sails the boat from which he is going to try to shoot the Bishop, this vision is contrasted with another one that is to represent English’s mind at the moment: “A 1940s-style spike heeled shoe ripping open a child’s abdomen while, in the background, Marlene Dietrich smokes a cigarette” (243). This image is laden with noir associations. These range from familiar film noir iconography including the stock figure of the femme fatale to wider ranging thematic connections of absurdity, obsessive sexuality, random brutality and violation of innocence. For English, it seems to capture the essential irrationality of his action. It also points out the impossibility to locate any reason in a mind that is dissolving in an associative endlessness.
At a point when his identity is disintegrated to the point of indifference, it becomes only a matter of going on to change his status from investigator to perpetrator and kill the Bishop. Yet, English fails to do so and becomes “a sad assassin” (246), failing as a killer just as much as he failed as a suicide and as an investigator whose only success consisted in finding a dead person. This, of course, prevents the disastrous outcome of an actual murder. However, it also has to be read as a continuation of English’s inability to conclude his actions and to attain the status of an agent, an actor in the narrative of his identity.
The end, “The Last Days” (247) in prison, in fact proves that English is best suited for being a victim. He is robbed of any possibility of agency and the control over his life. In such a situation, where none of his actions have to matter anything to anyone and in which he can abandon all narratives of self-constitution, he is finally content. Apparently, the experience of a disastrous descent into psychosis ending in a murder attempt has ‘healed’ English from any desire to find a purpose to his thoughts and actions. In this bleak ending, English emerges as a person affected by the postmodern dominance of indeterminacy to the point that he ceases to attach any importance to the certainty of a personal meaning in life. After the painful uncertainties of his spiritual quests for meaning, he is now content with the sterility and immobility of prison life. Since progress cannot be distinguished from regress and any ascent can emerge as a descent, the acceptance of inertia seems to be the most reasonable approach while waiting for “The Last Days” of apocalypse, proclaiming God as “the chief conspirator” and envisioning an absurd encounter with Leanna in “seven million years” (256) . The ecstatic vision of an all-encompassing soul-identity has burned English’s identity away to the hollowness of an indifferent self whose hunger can be readily satisfied by the nourishment-free prison food and who feels safe in the walls imprisoning him (257). English’s absolution from all responsibilities and the relegation of his self-narrative to the state authorities concludes the story of this lost investigator. In his narrative, he has been unstable from the start, haunted by his past, struggled desperately to ascertain meaning in a world of deception and indeterminacy, was implied in the corruption he meant to investigate, lost himself in the identification with a missing person and in the paranoia of false narratives, until he finally disintegrated his identity in the loss of all difference and came close to being a killer. His story ends with a postmodern example of the typical bleakness of any noir outlook: The only way to cope with the unbearable loss of certainties in postmodernity is to shed any aspiration toward a defined sense of personal identity and to accept the void of spiritual barrenness as one’s natural prison.
Sections 1-2 Section 4
1 After several volumes of poetry, this is the fourth novel by Denis Johnson (born 1949). In his poetry and fiction he has regularly presented a hellish underworld or apocalyptic afterworld: Angels described the fatalistic journey of two losers through the American underground into the death chamber and the psychiatric ward; in Fiskadoro, he turned the apocalypse literal by setting the novel in a post-holocaust Florida. After The Stars at Noon, a more experimental and overtly political novel, he offers in Resuscitation his version of a private-eye tale in a noir fashion close to Angels, his later short story collection Jesus’ Son and his recent novel Already Dead.
2 The veteran, as a person defined mainly by his past, is also a strong image for Provincetown itself, being a place who has seemed to outlive its best days and is mainly populated by persons whose ‘post-lives’ are characterized by an unknown and vague past and who are living up to little or no future at all.