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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murdered girl” (821). If one limits one’s observation to the physicality of this landscape, one might be inclined to name this a modern landscape of estrangement, where individuals are alienated from their environment and seeking explanations or hope, sometimes in a divine message. If, however, one extends one’s reading beyond the limits of perception to a force outside, one begins to sense a different kind of landscape.

My exploration into a landscape of estrangement as it will be employed throughout this project begins with an obituary within Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist. In this case, the mixing of genre constitutes an interruption of the “novel” that nonetheless continues the narrative thread.2 In The Body Artist, Rey Robles, a man who appears solely in the first chapter, walks out of his rented house and never returns. His obituary, a nonchapter within The Body Artist, provides not only the name “landscapes of estrangement” but also a condensed site for my exploration into the landscape of estrangement. I will take some time, then, with this obituary, albeit in a redacted version:

Rey Robles, who directed two world-renowned movies of the late 1970s, was found dead Sunday morning in the Manhattan apartment of his first wife, the fashion consultant Isabel Corrales. The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police who were called to the scene. Mr. Robles’s accounts of his early life were inconsistent but the most persuasive independent versions suggest he was 64 at his death… “His work at its best extends the language of film,” wrote the critic Philip Stansky. “His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement. He found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments.”(30–32)

Before looking at the operations of this particular obituary, there is genre (inside-outside) work to be done. In which case, I look to Jacques Derrida, whose work on genre makes him particularly apropos. In “The Law of Genre,” Derrida states that a law of genre is that genres are not to be mixed; a purity must be maintained. A novel is a novel because it has such and such traits and not others. However, Derrida inquires after