Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fic ...

but in their secrecy, how a secret operates, which remains, unlike facts themselves, “impenetrable.” In redefining The Body Artist as a novella, a secondary point is to regard it as an anomalous member of DeLillo’s canon⁸, existing inside and outside that canon, riding the border and pushing its limits. It is, in other words, an outsider, DeLillo’s secret novel (la).⁹

Additionally, I have chosen to study primarily The Body Artist for the (oxymoronic) density of its landscape of estrangement throughout its pages (where it is and is not). To say, even parenthetically, that a landscape of estrangement is and is not present in the pages of any given text means—at risk of stating the obvious—that any landscape of estrangement requires reading and, more to the point, an active reading. In order to fully explore landscapes of estrangement, then, one must read the novella—and the accompanying texts as well—on the diegetic, the extradiegetic, and what I will call the superdiegetic level. By superdiegetic, I mean the level of event, becoming, affect, and percept.

Structurally, “landscape of estrangement” names the site around which I organize a series of related yet diverse literary and theoretical concerns. My readings of The Body Artist concentrate on the outside and the inside generally as exteriority and interiority; that is to say, I examine movements from outside to inside, desires for the outside, and fears of the outside through figures such as the guest/host and intruder/hostage. My focus on the notion of the Outside—as that which animates the relative difference between exteriority and interiority—directs my readings toward the outsider, hospitality, mourning, the uncanny, and becoming. The Body Artist does not dwell on personal interiority; rather, it tracks the movement from inside to outside (and vice versa) and the force of the outside that disallows the hardening of interiority that identity needs and craves. My development of the concept of the outside does not mean, however, that my investigations remain separate. I want to suggest, in fact, a specific relationship between the more commonsense and technical understandings of the outside. In The Body Artist, the landscape of estrangement emerges out of becoming, the uncanny, and interrupted hospitality, which means that the relation to the Outside