The “Other Countries” of the Human Mind and Soul: James R. Giles on Twentieth-Century Naturalism

As James Giles modestly reminds us in his work, there is nothing in his background to make us expect that he should stand apart from the crowd and demand our attention. That is, unlike an outsider figure such as John Rechy or Dorothy Allison, he has, he says, “always been a part of every establishment majority,” growing up “an Anglo-Saxon heterosexual” in the very small town of Bowie, Texas, situated in the “all-white and overwhelmingly Protestant fundamentalist” Montague County (Giles and Giles, “Interview with John Rechy” 30; Giles, Spaces of Violence xi). But, as Giles also remarks in the author’s note to his 1974 essay “Religious Alienation and ‘Homosexual Consciousness’ in City of Night and Go Tell It On the Mountain,” he believes that this very mainstream, majoritarian background explains, at least in part, “his desire for communication with, and understanding of, the ‘other countries’ of the human mind and soul” (369). For Giles, as he notes in his contribution to “Looking Backward, Looking Forward” in the special millennium issue of PMLA, the appeal of African American and other marginalized literatures reflects what Charles Taylor in “The Politics of Recognition” argues so persuasively—“that for a member of the dominant culture, such literatures constitute new and constantly expanding horizons of aesthetic understanding” (2046). In turn, Giles’s desire, seen throughout his academic and creative work, to envision the world from the point of view of an Other has significantly enriched our appreciation of the aesthetic and philosophical complexity of American literary naturalism. The figuration of multiple imaginary communities is the natural subject of naturalism in that it investigates the environmental, economic, and biological boundaries that exclude as well as privilege—those circumstances and propensities that cast out and suffocate—as well as favor, at times it seems capriciously, at other times almost maliciously—one individual over another.

Giles learned early on that virtually any crossing of boundaries—social, gender, racial, ethnic, moral—typically triggers an explosion of violence felt viscerally and psychically by perpetrator, victim, and onlooker alike. Indeed, Giles traces his compelling interest in naturalism to one particular act of violence he witnessed in that all-white, Christian, American small-town world during his high school years:

As I have done with virtually everything since, I turned to literature to help me comprehend, to find some defining equation in, all this; and I am probably searching in fiction for the explanation of why one man would in broad daylight fatally shoot another on the steps of a small-town post office. Perhaps my fondness for naturalistic fiction and its affinity for random, senseless violence was born as the dying man tumbled down the concrete post office steps.

(Spaces of Violence ix)

That private journey through literature in search of an explanation for the catastrophic extends, of course, to the present day. Here I offer a partial itinerary and description of particularly noteworthy stations on Giles’s journey that has so enriched our understanding of the relation of naturalism to violence and the importance of urban naturalism in twentieth-century American fiction and culture.

During his undergraduate years at Texas Christian University, Giles became a Norris aficionado after reading McTeague in a class on the American novel. Pursuing doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin, Giles originally planned to focus solely on Norris for his dissertation. Gordon Mills, one of his teachers and mentors, strongly suggested enlarging his planned study of atavism to include both London and Kipling. As Giles told me, he had not then read a word of Kipling and initially balked at including him but was later glad he had followed Mills’s advice since the study of Kipling provided him “with access to the supernatural and mystical elements in London and Norris,” both of whom cited Kipling as direct influence, and helped him to understand better “the beneficial atavism in the frontier fiction of Norris and London,” the longing for and fear of the forces that resist human deliberation.¹ Only much later, Giles admits, did he also come...