A Story I Loved- "Emergency" by Denis Johnson
- Staff Writer
- Aug 13
- 3 min read
I’ll be honest- I never really loved Denis Johnson.
Not in the way I guess writers are supposed to love Denis Johnson. My friends who write all seem to adore him. He is, after all, a “writer’s writer”, which always came off more as a slur than a compliment to me. What is a writer’s writer, anyways? Does it mean an aggressive attention to the semantics of craft? An adherence to literary dogma? I digress.
The guy’s good, I can’t deny that. I still think about “Work” quite frequently, and “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” has passages that leave me awed. He knows how to construct a sentence, and how to impart a feeling. Maybe, at this point, I am too young, and I haven’t simply seen enough of the world to understand the gravity and emotion with which he speaks about things. I have a feeling that in ten years, I’ll understand him better. Some good things take time- like a wine that has to be aged. I understand that for Johnson, this may be the case.
I know Johnson, too, certainly saw a lot of the world. Those experiences inform a lot of his work. The body of his work doesn't exist without Johnson's life. Should writers write about what they know? I think certainly, when one writes what they know, intimately, and they can speak on it with good authority, it makes for much more arresting work than something researched, or flimsy, or only imagined. Emergency gets its power because I could really see the main character, who is maybe a stand-in for Johnson, doing all of these things. The situation is so absurd: a man works at a hospital, and people come in with various gruesome injuries. He has a friend who keeps stealing pills. There are lots of funny lines here, little quips, which Johnson is good at. The absurdity of the situation highlights the humanity of who we’re dealing with- two men who are lost, in their own ways.
But of course it's not real. To think that this happened would be to deny Johnson the power of his work. Fiction has never happened, but the trick is making it feel like it almost did. Into sharpening life into something better, more powerful, more thoughtful and stirring.
There’s a thought exercise I play often, which is what would happen if I had to describe a story to artificial intelligence, or an alien, or a small child. A pointless exercise, since neither of those three things should probably be reading Denis Johnson. I think I would say that this story is ultimately about the human condition of feeling lost, and finding meaning. A cop-out answer, since isn’t really all art about that? But with this story, I feel it particularly strongly. I feel such a strong affection and affinity for Georgie and the narrator, for these two screw-ups. That’s what Johnson does- he makes his characters so human. There is no perfect thematic ending, no clean bow-tie. Life is messy- just like working in a hospital can be. Just like Georgie astutely comments, there’s so much goop inside of us, and it’s all trying to get out. What lands on the page can be described as fiction. Sometimes fiction is the sum of its parts, and it has to be looked at from a distance, so you can piece it all together. But sometimes there are other moments, where you zoom in on just a part of a short story and it touches you, greatly. A single line, but it’s there, all the same. Nothing touches me so much in the rest of Johnson’s work so much as the ending of Emergency, which is a stale answer, but it’s a stale answer for a reason. When Georgie talks to the hitchhiker, and he asks Georgie what he does for a living, and Georgie says, “I save lives.” So many illusions in writing fiction, in reading fiction, in living itself- Johnson elaborates on some of those illusions in this story. The ways in which we keep ourselves busy, keep ourselves entire and entertained. But it really does all come down to that line, and the context miring it.
There is no way in which I can articulate why that line touches me so without breaking some of the fragility, some of the power of that line. That's how one knows they are on the road to becoming human, I think, in that brief moment of electric understanding, that clarity between author and reader. It is what all devotees of fiction, both creator and listener, are trying to chase after.
Resources:
Denis Johnson- "Emergency" https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/stories-week-2014-2015/story-week/emergency-denis-johnson