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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sensibility. An obvious consequence of, and paradoxically condition for, this reading is the construction of and reliance on an inside: “DeLillo.” This type of reading reduces the various texts signed by Don DeLillo to a mythic figure “Don DeLillo,” about whom one can make intelligent and meaningful statements. Glenn Scott Allen, for example, argues that DeLillo’s fiction

seems to argue for an almost romantic return to the sovereign powers of the individual—an entity considered essentially extinct in most theories of the postmodern subject. This resurgent individualism is in fact not only a rejection of the paranoid strategy for postmodern survival as formulated in Pynchon; it also represents a rejection of formulations of postmodern subjectivity as conceived in the works of contemporary critics such as Emile Benveniste, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard… (116–117)

Allen continues the onslaught, this time locating this penchant for “return” not in DeLillo’s texts but in the author himself:

…DeLillo seems to feel that our only hope for redemption from a self-perpetuating cycle of terrorism, repression, and paranoia is in moving away from constructions of the self that work to deny or subvert classical conceptions of the individual as the primary site of responsibility and authority. (117)

This argument relies on a neat separation of a subject that is responsible and not (that I do not see as holding up) and thereby denies the Outside its force in favor of shoring up an interiority—a responsible individual that is not contingent—that ultimately triumphs over the Outside. For his part, Curtis Yehnert rightly asserts that the “quest for self…is not a search for the real and true, but for a relationship with uncertainty, silence, death” (363). Unfortunately, he then goes on to read this quest as an act of “personal agency” that actually reintroduces a “real and true,” all of which goes to produce what he calls the “postexistential self ”—“the only viable site of resistance to postmodern obliteration” and “a concept of subjectivity grounded not on a separation of psyche and socius but on a dialectic between form and formlessness” (361). Once again, one finds