“War is Ninety Percent Myth”

Post-postmodern Revisions of Vietnam in Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro” and “Tree of Smoke”

Abstract

Denis Johnson’s post-9/11 incursion into the Vietnam war genre, the sprawling novel Tree of Smoke (2007), is a prominent example of a typically post-postmodern constructive attitude towards the crisis of historical referentiality. This issue can be further illuminated by reading Tree of Smoke in the light of another novel by the same author, the overlooked post-apocalyptic phantasmagoria Fiskadoro (1985). Set in a “time between civilizations” following a nuclear holocaust and in a region of Florida called “The quarantine,” Fiskadoro portrays a fallen and linguistically hybrid America where only the elements that were marginalized by the myth of American exceptionalism seem to have survived. Fiskadoro’s only incursion into the past, buried in the memory of a mute centenarian female character, concerns the fall of Saigon, which is narrated also in Tree of Smoke and is seen as the event that marks the beginning of the decay of the US empire. Reading Tree of Smoke in connection to Fiskadoro, this article will analyze how Johnson’s literary project reflects on the ritualistic and
mythical dimension of the construction of history with a sensibility that both incorporates and overcomes postmodernism.