9 - DeLillo’s Landscapes

Summary

From the desert, to the city, to parks and suburban spaces, landscape is a crucial element of Don DeLillo's fiction. Analysis of the ways he presents landscapes enables a richer understanding of many of the dominant themes in his fiction, including art, consumerism, simulacra and simulation, imperialism, patriarchism and violence. Interestingly, as Dianne Harris explains in ‘The Postmodernization of Landscape’, the interplay of landscape with culture and people was not fully realised until the end of the 1980s and early 1990s (436), a decade or more after DeLillo's first books and stories were published. While such an interplay undoubtedly had been previously acknowledged and celebrated by many indigenous peoples, Harris notes the shift of white Western perspectives due to theoretical developments that included ‘feminist and postcolonial theories that focus on recovering the voices of the oppressed and others on the margins of society’ (434). Harris further explains how a shift in studies could not occur until these white Western ‘scholars stopped seeing landscape as passive and started seeing it as active – what [W. J. T. Mitchell] described as the shift from landscape-as-noun to landscape-as-verb’ (436).

This shift is found in DeLillo's fiction from his first novel, Americana (1971), and is just another example of how his work is distinct from the white male postmodern novelists with whom he is so often compared (e.g., Coover, Pynchon and Wallace). A study of landscape in DeLillo's fiction reveals how he has continued to present landscapes as ‘important documents for understanding the development of national, social, and personal identities’ (Harris 437). Just as cultural geographers do, DeLillo brings to light the way landscapes ‘are at once personal as well as political, ecological, and ideological’ (Harris 437). In an interview, DeLillo notes that ‘I do feel a need and a drive to paint a kind of thick surface around my characters. I think all my novels have a strong sense of place’ (qtd in DeCurtis 62). This chapter explores the presentation of various landscapes throughout DeLillo's oeuvre with a focus on the representations of the city in Underworld and Cosmopolis, and the American West – in particular desert landscapes – in Americana, End Zone, Underworld and Point Omega, examining how these landscape perspectives are rooted in a white male patriarchal construction.