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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in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event. (124)

Although this and many landscape depictions in My Antonia owe a debt to American landscape painting, as John Murphy notes in his Introduction to the Penguin edition, leaving the impression that Cather’s descriptions are essentially verbal translations of painted compositions, to read for a landscape of estrangement, which can never be a simple reproduction of some preexisting composition, means to resist the temptation to make the “view” of the landscape the ultimate iteration thereof. Aside from the fact that both these novels—the narrative presents of which are separated by roughly one hundred years—are first-person narratives of a person transplanted to the Midwest, these particular passages share the unique perception of one who is moving2 toward an unknown and describing an utterly new landscape, two aspects of a landscape of estrangement. Jim Burden’s first perception of the landscape as he arrives in the Midwest on a wagon is of interest for the way it presents the country without country, as if space has displaced place; almost as if the land exists outside of time and certainly outside of the modern time one finds in White Noise. The land(scape) in his description has not yet become geographic, as it is “outside man’s jurisdiction,” a location diametrically opposed to the “man-made” quality of the “Airborne Toxic Event”; what is more, the description in both is that of a memory, which means a perceiving subject is at work.

However, there is an important distinction here concerning the point of view. Despite his feeling of being “erased,” Burden’s first-person description maintains a solid link to a personal subjectivity that is cultivated throughout the narrative. Gladney’s shift to the first person plural not only displaces his singular purchase on this description but also puts into question just who is subsumed by this “we.” That is, does the “we” refer to the Gladney family or them and the countless and nameless others who are traveling the same road? To compound this dispersion, in Gladney’s description, the motion of which Jim Burden speaks grows