The Spaces of Violence

230 Pages·2006·1.26 MB·English

by  James R. Giles

JAMES R. GILES
S P A C E S
T H E OF
V II OO LL EE NN CC EE
The Spaces of Violence
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The Spaces of Violence
James R. Giles
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa
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Copyright © 2006
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Typeface: ACaslon
∞
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giles, James Richard, 1937–
The spaces of violence / James R. Giles.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1502-3 (isbn-13 : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8173-1502-0 (isbn-10 : alk. paper)
1. American ¤ction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Violence in literature.
3. Space (Architecture) in literature. 4. Space and time in literature. 5. Personal space in
literature. I. Title.
PS374.V58G548 2006
813′.54093552—dc22
2005022265
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To Gustaaf Van Cromphout and James Mellard
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1. Violence and Space 1
2. Discovering Fourthspace in Appalachia:
Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God 16
3. Russell Banks’s Af®iction: “All Those Solitary Dumb Angry Men” 42
4. Of Vultures, Eyeballs, and Parrots: Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle 59
5. The Myth of the Boatright Men:
Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina 75
6. Playing for Death: Don DeLillo’s End Zone 94
7. Drifting through Urantia:
Greyhound Space in Denis Johnson’s Angels 111
8. The Return of John Smith: Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer 128
9. “The Battle of Bob Hope” and “The Great Elephant Zap”:
Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers 145
10. “I Hope You Didn’t Go into Raw Space without Me”:
Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho 160
11. Violence and Family Structures 175
Notes 191
Works Cited 199
Index 203
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Preface
One afternoon when I was in high school in Bowie, Texas, I left the Bowie
Drug Store, where I had spent an hour or so drinking a Coke and reading
James Jones’s From Here to Eternity from the paperback books rack, and saw,
across the street, on the post of¤ce steps, a man step out of a car carrying a
ri®e. The armed man proceeded to shoot a man who was walking up the post
of¤ce steps and then drive away. Of course, a crowd immediately gathered
around the wounded man, and I had only a glimpse of one blood-stained leg
awkwardly sprawled across several steps before my view was completely
blocked.
I later learned that the two men had quarreled over the ownership of a
tree that grew on the boundary of their adjoining properties and that the
wounded man had died. I realized in retrospect that the two were (re)creat-
ing the dynamic of the movie Westerns and the high school football games
I had grown up on; there was, however, nothing heroic about this very real
shooting. In fact, football stars and movie cowboys lacked any true relevance
to the scene on the post of¤ce steps. It was as if the space of Hollywood noir
had somehow materialized in front of me, that the savage violence that I had
just been reading about in the Jones novel had become most assuredly real.
As I have done with virtually everything since, I turned to literature to help
me comprehend, to ¤nd some de¤ning equation in, all this; and I am prob-
ably searching in ¤ction for the explanation of why one man would in broad
daylight fatally shoot another on the steps of a small-town post of¤ce. Per-
haps my fondness for naturalistic ¤ction and its af¤nity for random, senseless
violence was born as the dying man tumbled down the concrete post of¤ce
steps.
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