| Chapter : | Introduction: An American Literature of the Outside |
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mere map of the postmodern landscape” via a “disembodied postmodern theory” (5). While I draw on theory some might label “postmodern,” and I certainly make a claim to a specific relationship between landscape and DeLillo’s novels, I do not make of DeLillo a transparent representation of the American and/or “postmodern” landscape, a maneuver that maintains a mimetic relationship between the world and the book. This study, then, could be read as an examination of Don DeLillo’s contribution to a greater landscape of estrangement.
Landscape of estrangement speaks to the assemblage between the fields of which Deleuze and Guattari write. Just as they claim one can no longer maintain representation’s regime of division vis-à-vis the book, a landscape of estrangement offers a site around which one can gather a defense against this division vis-à-vis landscape. That is to say, the invocation of landscape in the everyday sense implies two points concerning representation. On one hand, a landscape does not exist in itself but only as a representation—meaning a logical organization—of some other reality. On the other, a landscape as representation implies a separation—as Deleuze and Guattari note—between observer, observed, and observation. As I hope to make clear, to think of landscape in terms of the Outside—an approach to which DeLillo’s novels are particularly welcoming—is to relieve it of these burdens of representation and division. In other words, this project reads against the notion of landscape as, for example, a view to be visited and enjoyed or really any composition with “land” as a guarantor of its status as landscape. Although this maneuver might strike some as antithetical to the work of a novel, I hope to show that novels in general and DeLillo’s in particular offer fertile ground for reading the Outside vis-à-vis landscape.
As a starting point to my discussion of DeLillo’s works and the Outside, I will juxtapose a landscape from DeLillo’s most famous and certainly most taught and studied novel, White Noise, with another from the American Midwest, this one from Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918). Although these two passages taken together offer an illuminating example of how a landscape constructs and is constructed1—which is to say, as different as they are in content, the following landscapes