Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fiction of Don DeLillo
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Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fic ...

Chapter :  Introduction: An American Literature of the Outside
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out of control. Everything is in motion and “flux”3 to such a degree that any notion of capturing an image of the landscape quickly dissolves. If Burden’s description ultimately retains the sense that landscape exists to be represented, Gladney’s speaks to the way in which landscape and representation are more intimately codependent. Paul Patton reads “The Airborne Toxic Event” from the position that it is “implausible to claim that events and their representations are entirely distinct from one another” (“The World Seen from Within” 41). He writes:

…the Gladney family experience the social event from the inside, finding themselves directly caught up in the rumor, mass fear and prophecies of doom which accompany this apparently real but uncertain threat to their lives. For them as for the other participants, the event is mediated in such a manner that their experience is of something at once remote and all too near, something both real and imaginary. They experience the event as though playing a part in a film or a dream. Indeed, several characters report their experiences as being that of events as in a dream, and the experience of déjà vu becomes a recurrent metaphor for the entire episode. (42)

In other words, the Gladney family cannot be reliably distinguished from the landscape, yet the ever-present “mediation” makes of them players—to invoke one of DeLillo’s earlier novels—in a “dream” or “movie.” Clearly, there is a different kind of inside/outside problematization going on here than Jim Burden’s first waking perception of the Nebraska horizon. Although the space into which the young Burden rides is arguably outsidelike, the overall sense is of impending organization and protection by God; in other words, the tendency is actually toward the recuperation of an inside. By contrast, the space in which the Gladneys are moving is marked by simultaneous dispersion and attraction, signifying a loosing of the forces of the Outside. Therefore, while these two passages have a certain common ground, only that from White Noise provides a sustained sense of the force of the Outside at work.

I turn now to Peter Pelbart’s very general question with which he opens “The Thought of the Outside, The Outside of Thought” in order