Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 189some drive, not simply as an expression of that drive, but as a channel towhich the unity or coherence that perversion disperses might have beendisplaced, where the particles can be maintained in some form of organization,be it more chaotic than linear. Psychoanalytically, the drive isassociated with the organism's relations outside itself, but as psychoanalysishas been taken up in literary studies, the drive has come to beconnected with narrative, which might seem a vantage point by whichthe impersonality of the drive is more clearly viewed. In fact, narrative'sjuxtaposition with the drive ends up obscuring the fact that there is noindividual in either narrative or the drive. And yet, narrative is inherentlysocial; the telling of stories is unavoidably embedded in our socialorganization, our relations to one another. Thus my interest in thisessay is in how narrative's sociality could possibly work on a nonindividualistparadigm, and I suggest that for narrative to do so requiresperversion's partiality, dispersion. The drive provides a theory or inevitabledetour through which we can work out the question of how therecan be perverse narrative. Contamination, deeply perverse itself, as thenonhumanist, nonindividualist paradigm of driven dispersion, presentsthe epigrammatic figure for my concern. To begin, then, let us considernarratives of contamination and their work on or with the drive(s).In the postmodern canon, Don DeLillo's 1984 novel White Noise offersthe most likely literary example of the culture of contamination; the featuredimpurity is the Airborne Toxic Event, which takes up the middlesection of the novel. 2 But there's another text that uncannily has almostexactly the same features as White Noise: an airborne toxic event, presentedby the protagonists in a first-person narration that emphasizesthe quotidian, at times ventures upon meditation, or is interrupted bythe media, with the specter of Nazism in the background and the Germansin the fore, and a narrative drive toward closure at the end of theday—be it sunset or nightfall. This text is Christa Wolf's Accident: ADay's News (1987). 3 Perhaps it was just what was in the air in the mideighties,but I think something more drives the convergence of these twonovels' realization of contamination. What novel realization about thedrive germinates in the convergence of these two contaminations?There's little question, at first glance, that Jack Gladney, protagonist/narratorin Don DeLillo's White Noise, exhibits a strong deathdrive; it is easy to see his obsession with death, with who—he or his