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

as simultaneously foreshadowing the experience Lauren is about to have with(out) Mr. Tuttle (Rey) and referring back to the experience Rey has already had. The obituary is a hinge between life and death, that “to come” and that which “has come,” and the landscape of estrangement emerges with the uncanny creaking of this hinge, an atmosphere through which one readily moves from past to future, but also in which past and future take on a new relation to the present.

Reading this obituary, while it might transport one (the readers, but are readers also mourners?)⁴ to nonspecific images or scenes from a film, cannot transport one to Rey’s films and certainly not specific scenes within those films (this has to do with intradiegetic issues, not those between novel and its supposed “real world” referent.). Although one might assume that characters (not people) in a Robles film experience, or have access to, a landscape of estrangement, one gains access to a landscape of estrangement within a Rey Robles film only within the logic of an “as if.”⁵ In conjuring one type of landscape of estrangement, the obituary enacts another. Insofar as it problematizes the easy distinction between inside and outside by drawing attention to another outside that does not conform to this binary distinction, another aspect of this obituary’s double nature is that it refers to a more modern or even commonsense understanding of estrangement (and the landscape within which it occurs) and to the landscape of estrangement of which I will be offering an analysis. For example, I explore Lauren’s experiences with such a landscape. It is productive to contrast this type with the one being developed here, because it is similar to the contrast between the “relative” outside and the “absolute” outside—one reinforces a tendency toward a domesticated interiority; the other tends toward disrupting the distinction between interiority and exteriority. A Rey Robles landscape of estrangement presumes a physical landscape where a character experiences estrangement in order to ultimately experience a more definite sense of self. The outside serves the inside.⁶ This novella can be read, then, as a massive double—a landscape of estrangement emerging within a landscape of estrangement. However, this is not to say that a landscape of estrangement (in the sense I will be giving it) comes to pass/be—or is birthed—at this moment and