Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fiction of Don DeLillo By Tyler H. Kessel

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

Chapter :

Introduction: An American Literature of the Outside

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to put a finer point on the relation between the novelist, the novel, and the outside:

For the artist or the poet, perhaps, there are no two worlds, not even a single world, but only the outside in its eternal flow. Errance, desert, exile, the outside. How can we conquer the loss of ourselves and go to the heart of the anonymous dispersion, indefinite, albeit never negligent, how can we enter into a space without place, in a time without begetting, in “the proximity of that which flees unity,” in an “experience of that which is without harmony and without accord?” (201)

Besides the passing resemblance to one of DeLillo’s famous responses to a question about his status as author—“Silence, exile, cunning, and so on”⁴—one finds here, I believe, a rough guide to reading DeLillo’s works. This is not to say that DeLillo’s works must be read in this way but that the works allow for this question to come; in other words, in contrast with a work like My Antonia, they are hospitable to this line of questioning. How does this line of thinking through a relation to the Outside cross, if only in a parabolic way, a line of thinking through a particularly American literature? What, in short, comprises an American literature of the Outside?

I take the idea of a literature of the Outside—American or other—from Deleuze, who began thinking along these lines as early as The Logic of Sense (Logique du sens, 1969) with his readings of Lewis Carroll’s stories, particularly Alice in Wonderland. Although Deleuze did not write about literature as a literary critic but as a philosopher, he produced volumes solely focused on literature, and his many joint and solo works contain numerous important references to and readings of literature—whether texts, writers, or characters. A consistent refrain among these references and readings is the importance of Anglo-American literature, in which Deleuze finds a relation to the Outside in many forms:

To fly is to trace a line, lines, a whole cartography. One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight. Anglo-American literature constantly shows these ruptures, these characters who