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 1:  Landscapes of Estrangement
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before embarking on the primary object of study and DeLillo’s seemingly least complex novel, The Body Artist.

Near the end of Underworld, in a section that confuses representation, one gains access to a virtual world—that comes under the tombstone script “Esmeralda Lopez/12 year/Petected in Heven”—via the “keystrokes” of Jeff Shay, Nick’s stay-at-home son. It is a world of miracles, the web itself being “where everybody is everywhere at once, and [Jeff] is there among them, unseen,” (808) and then the particular site offering a representation of a “miracle.” One might wonder, along with the narrator, “Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?” (826) While one ponders this undecidable, let one take in—or let out—the scene just before the miraculous appearance inside the orange juice billboard of Esmeralda, the destitute girl who has just been raped and murdered:

Then the stories begin, word passing block to block, moving through churches and superettes, maybe garbled slightly, mistranslated here and there, but not deeply distorted—it is clear enough that people are talking about the same uncanny occurrence. And some of them go and look and tell others, stirring the hope that grows when things surpass their limits…[T]wo hundred people wedged onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that old industrial muscle with its fretful desolation—the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the waste burner coughing toxic fumes and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind…[T]hey [feel] the wind come chilling in and gazing above the wash of standard rip-roar traffic to a billboard floating in the gloom—an advertising sign scaffolded high above the riverbank and meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that run incessantly down from the northern suburbs in the thick of Manhattan money and glut. (818)

Moments later, as the lights of the “ungraffiti’d” train “sweep the billboard,” “a face appears above the misty lake1 and it belongs to the