Travelers in a Fallen World
Phantasmagoric landscapes, the Vietnam War, and characters unfettered by time haunt Denis Johnson's
Denis Johnson's writing has always presented transcendental narratives about degradation and redemption, down paths where the gutter and the stars converge, as narrated by characters who speak as though they dwell outside the action they observe, beyond the fetters of time, or else in some essential way may be already dead, left merely to feel as if they do nothing more than haunt the worlds they inhabit. Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), the author's seventh novel and his first since The Name of the World seven years ago, offers all manner of characters with turbulent and twisted psyches in a Vietnam that resembles a sort of historical fugue state. Although set for the most part during the Vietnam War, this political locale only underscores another, more profoundly celestial sense of dislocation: "It's not a different place," says one character of Southeast Asia. "It's a different world under a different God."
Johnson's true mise-en-scene, whether in his novels or his 2001 nonfiction collection Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, is some variation on the fallen world. His prose, while sometimes unquestionably murky, can assume a supernatural clarity and perform a kind of psychoactive magic on the reader. Readers familiar with Johnson's writing know him best through his impeccable collection of stories, Jesus' Son, which mingled an intensely unerring and hard-edged eye for detail with a transfixing style. Before Jesus' Son, Johnson's extraordinary post-apocalyptic odyssey Fiskadoro had been characterized extravagantly by The New York Times as "the sort of book a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Waste Land,' Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones." The world of Tree of Smoke is less like the ecstatic still-life portraiture of Jesus' Son and much more like the phantasmagoric landscapes of Fiskadoro or Already Dead, the author's most underrated novel, which was subtitled "A California Gothic" and which one critic referred to as the best Robert Stone book Stone never wrote.
The fallen world of Tree of Smoke is ushered in with the first sentence, which describes the death of John F. Kennedy as experienced by soldiers stationed in the Philippines. Among them is William Houston, Jr., a character whom Johnson first introduced in his debut novel Angels. William and his half-brother James are two of the characters through which we see both the war and the return home. Late in the novel, in a passage particularly reminiscent of the language of the narrator of Jesus' Son, Johnson describes how the now-damaged veteran James loses fights because he "enjoyed a righteous lethargy while he curled in a ball and somebody kicked him in the head and back and legs."
Tree of Smoke, said to have been begun after Angels two decades ago, may have emerged out of Bill Houston's story, but the novel's epic scope wends the reader through a mosaic of American and Vietnamese stories (including those of widowed medic Kathy Jones, South Vietnamese agent Nguyen Hao, and VC operative Trung Than), from 1963 to 1970, before ending in a melancholy, postwar '80s world. The reader's principal reconnaissance through this terrain is provided by William "Skip" Sands, a CIA officer working in Psy Ops (Psychological Operations). Sands's uncle is Colonel Francis Xavier Sands, an Agency legend whose presence possesses both Skip and the novel itself; he boasts an all-American resume - playing football for Notre Dame under Knute Rockne, fighting against the Japanese with the Flying Tigers, studying espionage under OSS/CIA icon Edward Lansdale - before becoming enraptured and later ensnared by his own intelligence-gathering enterprises. Characterized as "part joke, part sinister mystery," this cigar-smoking, Bushmills-swilling colonel who speaks so many of the novel's best lines seems more genuinely akin to the character of Edward Blake, a.k.a. "The Comedian," in Moore and Gibbons's graphic novel Watchmen than to Conrad's - or Coppola's - Kurtz.
The book's title is also the name of Colonel Sands's almost occult military psychological operation, which derives what one character calls its "embarrasingly poetic" name from a passage from the Book of Joel about "pillars of fire" that may in fact be a mistranslation from "trees of smoke." The networks of tunnels through which the Viet Cong and later American soldiers burrow might be best understood as the root systems or upside-down branches of this symbolic tree. At one moment, Sands imagines his uncle as himself the "pillar of fire" or "tree of smoke," a strange bodhisattva, seeking enlightenment with a peculiar rocket's red glare burning within his mind's eye:
Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud - if not a real one over the rubble of Hanoi, then its dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King. And who could say the delirious old warrior didn't grapple with actual truths? Intelligence, data, analysis be damned; to hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. Fires to light the minds and heat the acts of men. And cow their consciences. Fireworks, all of it - not just the stuff of history, but the stuff of reality itself, the thoughts of God - speechless and obvious: incandescent patterns, infinitely winding.
It could be said that every character in this novel engages in some form of Psy Ops. These characters are marked by their own distinct "incandescent patterns" - fixations on dreams, karma, "the realm of the Bardo," or their struggles to comprehend whether they are engaged in a "cosmological bureacracy" or "in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with one another." Even the other authors that find their way into the novel follow their own circuitous and labyrinthine progressions, from Melville's Moby-Dick to the passages Skip translates from esoteric texts by Artaud, Bataille, and E.M. Cioran. Johnson's novel expertly choreographs the metaphysical exchanges between his characters as if, at any moment, any one of them could suddenly strike through the mask, piercing the veil of another's perceptions.
Although Tree of Smoke might be regarded as Johnson's "Vietnam novel," it is best read with Vietnam serving as a kind of deep background for a more profound exploration; Johnson's imaginings of the Psy Ops of the American military are a portal into the more enigmatic operations of the human psyche. For Johnson, the real subject is the investigation of the soul. Trung Than thinks: "Who said that?-probably Confucius-'I can't beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can't free the soul of a man by violence.'" Indeed, the soul is the (holy) ghost in the machine of the military-industrial complex.
Colonel Sands, who sees war as "ninety percent myth," speaks of winning Vietnam by "penetrating the myth of the land." Johnson's novel navigates these mysterious spaces between lands of myth and history, never forgetting that there are more powerful forces in the cosmos that can intercede to restore equilibrium. "He didn't know what country he was in," muses one character, "but he was at home in the universe."
Tree of Smoke suggests that, as we read, we might want to consider divesting ourselves of all the myths and histories we have packed "in country" with us. The thrice-repeated phrase "all will be saved" that concludes Johnson's novel summons nothing so much as "Shantih shantih shantih," the Sanskrit incantation for "peace" in the final line of Eliot's "The Waste Land." Tree of Smoke is Johnson's superlative tour of his own American Wasteland, emanating from a Vietnam of the mind that can never be erased and leads us ever onward.
Published: 09/27/2007
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