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

a refusal to admit a reading of the outside—here, “uncertainty, silence, death”—that does not ultimately gather that outside into a comfortable inside. The triumph of the interior. Yehnert’s “dialectic between form and formlessness” allows for the outside to exist but only as ultimately subordinate to the inside—the form of form and formlessness.

Within this vein of critique, there is an instinct to return DeLillo’s novels to the human, which is always a positive return from dark, cynical conclusions about the “postmodern” subject. Again, in American Magic and Dread, Mark Osteen explains DeLillo’s apparently simultaneous endorsement and denunciation of postmodern culture, and by extension the subject, as a function of his criticism coming from within “postmodern cultural forms” and not outside (3). Osteen redescribes this as a respect for contemporary cultural institutions and a critique of their “dehumanizing potential.” Interestingly, with The Body Artist one encounters a figure that might have come from just such an institution because his status as “human” is under suspicion.

Insofar as The Body Artist deals with the question “What is the human?,” it continually returns to the idea that whatever the human might be, it cannot be thought without the inhuman. This is not, decidedly, to conclude that one is inhuman or posthuman; it is to say that one cannot think through the “human” as if it existed all by itself. In the same way, the protagonist of The Body Artist, Lauren Hartke, cannot think through the death of her husband, Rey Robles, without thinking around the edges of Mr. Tuttle, although it would be absurd to say that Mr. Tuttle is, in any real sense, Rey. DeLillo makes no conclusions about Mr. Tuttle’s humanity. Indeed, I suggest that one cannot conclude anything positive about the human from reading DeLillo’s novels, in the sense of a conclusion that has drawn on all the facts of the matter to produce a statement that reliably refers back to the imaginary entity. It is thus senseless to talk about rescuing DeLillo’s novels from postmodern readings.

In terms of situating The Body Artist within DeLillo’s canon and explaining its prominence in the present study, I would like to suggest a genre change. If one is inclined to think of The Body Artist as a novel, this might be primarily because the front and back covers contain the