The Spaces of Violence

Lawrence.

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Violence and Space

Michael Kowalewski writes that American fiction is not for hemophobics. . . . In studying fictional violence one must explore the power of words to sicken and befoul as well as freshen and redeem (11). Slave narratives, captivity narratives, the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the nineteenth-century fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, and works of the turn-of-the century literary naturalists cumulatively explore virtually every conceivable violent act. In the modernist period, Ernest Hemingway was obsessed with war, even while romanticizing it, while William Faulkner focused on the psychological ramifications of a peculiarly southern violence. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Richard Wright, among others, investigated the brutal and dehumanizing nature of American urban life. Subsequently, Norman Mailer has proclaimed the centrality of violence to a male identity rooted in existentialist philosophy.

Given the history of the United States, the obsession of our fiction writers with the origins and ramifications of violence is hardly surprising. Sanctioned, even institutionalized violence against the socially marginalized (e.g., slavery and genocide of Native American tribes) played a central role in the formation of the United States. The nation was born out of a violent revolution, and the Civil War and U.S. participation in World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, and the two recent wars against Iraq have continued and intensified the national legacy of violence. In the last three decades, government and educational leaders and cultural analysts have been concerned with the degree to which violence has begun to assault and plague supposedly safe middle-class American spaces and institutions (e.g., political assassinations, school shootings, sexual assaults, violence against children), and they have devoted considerable time, energy, and money to trying to understand the phenomenon.

In this dual context, the contemporary American novel is an obvious place to look for insights into the origins and ramifications of the national plague of violence. Recent American writers have been, if anything, even more obsessed with violence than their predecessors. The texts that shed some light on the blood-stained nature of contemporary American society are numerous, and in a study of this length it would be impossible to cover even most of them in any depth. Thus, selection of a few representative texts offers the most promising approach. The ten novels upon which this study focuses contain contrasting visions of the interaction of violence and space in contemporary America. Published over a period of nearly three decades—from the late 1960s, the decade increasingly seen as inaugurating revolutionary changes in American society and literature, to the mid-1990s—they illustrate widely contrasting visions and modes of narration. In approximate chronological order, they are Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968) and Child of God (1973), Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972), Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974), Denis Johnson’s Angels (1983), Russell Banks’s Affliction (1989), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993), and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996).

Obviously, other novels by the nine writers examined here might have been chosen. Few contemporary American novels are as saturated with violence as Cormac McCarthy’s suggestively entitled Blood Meridian (1985), arguably the ultimate anti-Western in American literature, and the three novels that constitute McCarthy’s Border trilogy are perhaps better known at present than Outer Dark and Child of God. But these early novels evoke in their (re)creation of a simultaneously naturalistic and surreal Appalachia a kind of space unique in American literature. Like Blood Meridian, Russell Banks’s retelling of the John Brown story in Cloudsplitter (1998) is a powerful deconstructive American historical novel, and the settings of Banks’s other fictions cover a wide range of space, from New England to Florida to Jamaica. But in its probing of a strain of violence peculiarly rooted in small-town New England, Affliction evokes an important space that would not otherwise be present in this study. Don DeLillo’s controversial (re)creation of Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra, deconstructs the genres of both history and biography, while Underworld (1977) caps off the exploration of the links between language, violence, consumerism, sports, governmental spying, and waste that characterize the ambitious scope of his fiction. But the early End Zone concisely situates these tropes in a setting that grafts the worlds of football (now the dominant spectator sport in the United States and naturally one of the most violent) and academia onto the barren west Texas desert, itself a peculiarly inhuman kind of space. In the bleakness and anger of its tone, Indian Killer is a departure from Sherman Alexie’s earlier fictions such as the story cycle The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and the imaginatively multicultural comic novel Reservation Blues (1995). Still, Indian Killer creatively (re)imagines the historic violence against Native Americans in a contemporary urban setting.

As he does in Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone focuses on the exploration of American violence through nationalist political agendas in A Flag for Sunrise (1981), but in its vision of interpenetrating American and Vietnamese spaces, Dog Soldiers evokes a unique trope of space. Equally original is Denis Johnson’s vision of Greyhound space in Angels, which is particularly relevant to this study in a way that neither the dystopian fantasy Fiskadoro (1985) nor the impressive collection of stories Jesus’ Son (1992) are. By reconstructing the 1955 murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi and placing his narrative focus on the white murderers and incorporating elements of magic realism and an irreverent and satiric vision of Mississippi and (by extension) southern history, Lewis Nordan also evokes a unique trope of space in his best-known novel, Wolf Whistle. Another small-town southern narrative, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, has by now emerged as a seminal exploration of abusive treatment of women. In sharp contrast in many ways is Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho with its urban setting.

The ten novels cumulatively cover a wide range of social, cultural, and geographic spaces. Socioeconomic levels from the decidedly marginalized to the upper middle class are depicted in them. A systemic approach to violence is present to some degree in all of them; and, taken together, they offer a powerful critique of the pervasive injustices of contemporary American capitalism. Yet while social protest is a distinct aspect of Angels, Affliction, Wolf Whistle, and Indian Killer, the protest in all four is muted either by emphases on mythology or through narrative innovation. Bastard Out of Carolina is the closest of the ten texts to a traditional social protest novel, and even it contains significant elements of mythology, or at least bricolage. Dog Soldiers critiques the U.S. legacy in Vietnam as an imperialist (mis)adventure, but its concern is with exploring the tragic legacy of the war for the domestic space of America; and, while it would be hard to imagine a more devastating analysis of the practices and values of American capitalism than American Psycho, Ellis’s narrative mode increasingly becomes so surrealistic that it is impossible to be certain what actually happens in the novel. The geographic settings of the novels include New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Phoenix, along with small towns in New England and the South. Set respectively in Appalachia and the west Texas desert, the McCarthy novels and DeLillo’s End Zone, for different reasons, often seem to be happening in some space outside the strictly geographic.

Thus the spatial diversity of the texts discussed is both geographic and extra-geographic. On the geographic level, the organizing principle is a progression from the barren and desolate west Texas desert to a culturally and historically isolated Appalachia to New England and southern small towns to contrasting dimensions of urban spaces. On the extra-geographic level the movement is from realistic and naturalistic to metaphoric and surreal visions of space(s). The multilevel diversity of the texts is one of the three organizing principles of this study. The wide-ranging innovation of their approaches to familiar spaces was a central factor in their inclusion. Appalachia is the setting for other American novels, but not the surrealistic Appalachia envisioned by McCarthy. Since the novels and stories of Faulkner and Eudora Welty, small-town Mississippi has been one of the most commonly explored of American spaces; yet in Wolf Whistle Nordan’s magic realism brilliantly reimagines it, while Allison views it through the perspective of an angry feminism. Academic institutions are a familiar target of satiric novels, while the west Texas desert has been a favorite setting of Western writers and filmmakers, but no one has merged these two spaces by emphasizing their inherently linguistic nature as DeLillo does in End Zone. In Affliction, Banks views the New England small town, a favored setting for the nineteenth-century female realists Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, through an imaginative narrative perspective that combines elements of literary naturalism with a disturbing regional mythology. Johnson’s Angels, Alexie’s Indian Killer, and Ellis’s American Psycho discover new dimensions of urban space. Banks envisioned the American city and an isolated space as being haunted by the tragic international experience of the Vietnam