(On Not) Eliding Class: Working Class-Consciousness, Rock & Roll Culture, and Narrative Self-Referentiality in the Fiction of Denis Johnson

(On Not) Eliding Class: Working Class-Consciousness, Rock & Roll Culture, and Narrative Self-Referentiality in the Fiction of Denis Johnson

When he died from liver cancer in 2017, Denis Johnson was rightly hailed as a genre-defying writer, a “storyteller fluent in […] the transcendence of compassion” (Seaman 26), whose visionary scope and lyrical intensity differentiated him from many of his contemporaries. His career spanned some forty years and evinced an astonishing range, including nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, five collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. But consistent across Johnson’s oeuvre was an ability to inject both black humor and tragic seriousness, including a quest for the spiritual, within characters afflicted by the burdens of class-society in a post-1980s America. This paper will thus explore how Johnson foregrounds an especially working-class consciousness in his fictions and employs elements of popular culture, including many allusions to rock & roll music, along with fictional self-reflexivity to ultimately reveal a humanistic perspective throughout his literary canon.