Innocence and Jesus’ Son: A Comparative Look at the Stories of Harold Brodkey and Denis Johnson

Innocence Harold Brodkey Pdf
Harold Brodkey Innocence Story

When, in 1953, Harold Brodkey arrived on the literary scene with his first published story for the New Yorker, “State of Grace,” he was almost immediately hailed as the latest in a line of great modernist writers in the tradition of William Faulkner and James Joyce–a talent on a par with the best writers of his generation. His great work, a novel that was widely speculated (by Brodkey as well as his fans) to be a masterpiece, was a perpetual work in progress. For decades the public awaited the arrival of the magnum opus he titled “Party of Animals,” contenting themselves with rumors and leaked portions of the manuscript that were published as short stories, while Brodkey cultivated an air of genius born of anticipation. In thirty years, he published only a handful of stories in the New Yorker, Esquire and the (now defunct) American Review, collected in the volumes First Love and other Sorrows, published in 1957, Women and Angels, published in 1985 and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, published in 1988 — a sort of greatest hits of Harold Brodkey.

The short story 'Innocence' by Harold Brodkey is. The short story 'Innocence' by Harold Brodkey is presented. ACCESSION # 74234953. Read the Article. Courtesy of your local library. Enter a library name or part of a name, city, state, or province. Or enter your postal code and country to.
Innocence Harold Brodkey Pdf - polllasopa Harold Brodkey 1930-1996. Most of his writing is concerned with reconciling personal tragedy through reminiscences of his childhood and adolescence, during wich Brodkey endured the death of his mother and adoptive parents. A major theme in Brodkey's fiction involves the loss of innocence.
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In 1991, Brodkey finally published The Runaway Soul, the novel that he considered to be the first installment of the Proustian series of volumes that would make up “Party of Animals.” It was a critical flop. Before his death of AIDS in 1996, he completed three more books in different genres, all of which would garner moderate praise, but nothing would ever come close to living up to the inflated potential that hung around him during his years of mystery. To date, two collections of stories (one nonfiction) have been published posthumously, rounding out his catalogue and going a little way toward restoring his former glory, and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, generally considered his best work,has been added to Harold Bloom’s widely cited Western Canon.

The writer Denis Johnson also has a spot on Bloom’s prestigious list, for two of his novels and what is by far his most famous work, the 1992 collection of short stories titled, in reference to the lyrics of a song by Lou Reed, Jesus’ Son. A slim volume comprised of just eleven unusually short stories, Jesus’ Son created a buzz around Denis Johnson that none of his other seven novels, five plays or many books of poems have come close to replicating.

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Innocence Harold Brodkey Pdf

Unlike Brodkey, Denis Johnson published his first work, a book of poems called The Man Among the Seals, to little fanfare in 1969, while still a student at the University of Iowa. Over the next several decades, while his personal life unraveled (Johnson is open about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and two failed marriages) and then was stitched back up (he has been clean and sober and happily married to his third wife for many years), he continued to produce novels and books of poetry. His early novels Angels, Fiskadoro and The Stars at Noon were praised by critics but never pushed him into the limelight. It was not until the publication of Jesus’ Son, a series of semi-autobiographical, very short stories that he claims to have dashed off quickly to pay off a debt to the IRS, that Johnson acquired moderate mainstream success (and an enthusiastic cult following).

At first glance, the writings of Johnson and Brodkey don’t appear to have much in common. Denis Johnson and Harold Brodkey both write what has been called “confessional” work, and both admit to using autobiographical details. Both use first person narrators looking back on their past—a technique that uses the reflective language of a mature character to illuminate his younger self. Both write intensely voice- and language-driven narratives. They both prominently feature controversial or “racy” subject matter (primarily sex in Brodkey’s case, drugs and dispossessed people in Johnson’s). They have both, to varying degrees, been critical darlings.

Here the similarities seem to end. Johnson writes in a spare style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, whom he studied under at Iowa, though he packs the pages with gorgeously rendered, seemingly extraneous details that Carver would certainly leave out. The result is a stark, lyrical narrative that reads like a kind of poetry-prose. Brodkey, on the other hand, chronicles the minutia of his characters’ experiences with an almost relentlessly detailed focus and precision, building on the momentum of a single act or moment to the point where it can strain the reader’s patience. Both have been accused of writing “elliptical” prose—there is a reluctance in both to get to the point. For Brodkey and Johnson, “the point” does not seem to be the point. Instead, language is used to explore and finally to get at an emotional truth that can’t be arrived at by more traditional means. It is not, for either writer, necessarily a fiction where “things happen” in a linear way that adds up to a momentous change for the protagonist. Instead, they seduce their readers with an almost visceral reading experience, where what at first appears disjointed or uneven gradually builds until it produces a feeling, an emotion, an authentic but unnamable realization—something like the effect of music.

“Innocence,” Harold Brodkey’s 1973 story first published in the American Review, is the chronicle of a young scholar’s attempts to bring his reluctant girlfriend to orgasm. The story starts out traditionally enough, describing in rich, florid, ironic language the conquest by Wiley, our narrator, of Orra, a girl so fantastic that “to see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” A few pages in, Wiley gets the girl and quickly gets her into bed. Then, having already sketched a fairly complete, sympathetic, Salingeresque character in just a few pages, Brodkey proceeds to spend the next thirty pages describing in rigorous, precise, seemingly boundless prose Wiley’s efforts to get (and at times almost to force) Orra to come. Finally, on the last page, she does.

The key to reading “Innocence” lies in the beginning of the second section, titled Orra with Me: “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven…I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.”

Brodkey is both warning us of the relentless project that he’s about to undertake and inviting us to join him in the sacred/profane ritual that will be enacted therein (for the writer, himself, and the reader). It is impossible, in reading the rest of the story, not to be swept up in the act, however quotidian, seemingly fruitless, exhausting and sometimes maddening it is to keep at it. In the end we must keep reading as Wiley must keep licking and fondling and thrusting at poor Orra, determined to get at some kind of elusive final outcome. When it (and she) finally comes, we are left with the realization that somewhere in our drive to get to the point, we missed it. The experience of getting