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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create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside. (Dialogues II 36)

Besides the authors Deleuze cites here, I include within this American literature of the Outside authors such as William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Auster.

I suggest that these authors’ texts fit well in Deleuze’s historical view that the founding act of the American novel, like that of the Russian novel, was to take the novel far from the order of reasons, and to give birth to characters who exist in nothingness, survive only in the void, defy logic and psychology and keep their mystery until the end. (Essays Critical and Clinical 81)

Thus, to read American literature of the Outside is to read works—as improbable as this seems at first—as anti-individual or as a singular becoming-other, which is not a personal but a neutral singular (chapters Four and Five deal explicitly with these figures.). More specific to the present project, I will argue that DeLillo’s voice of America is not personal. He speaks a singular “he”—for example, the opening of Underworld—that does not revert back to a personal history or interior psychology but, rather, gathers outside voices into what Deleuze calls a multiplicity. The relation to the Outside in DeLillo’s works, and the emergence of a landscape of estrangement, has to do in part with the absence of characters that normally exist in order to ground or personalize subjectivity. As shall be demonstrated throughout this project, it is as though Deleuze were talking directly about DeLillo’s Mr. Tuttle from The Body Artist.

Although Deleuze’s philosophy and in particular his writings on American literature provide a potentially fruitful addition to American literary scholarship, there has been relatively little work done in this vein. The need for Deleuzian-informed scholarship on American literature has recently been raised—and pursued via a reading of American narratives as Deleuzian “frontiers”—by William