Perversion the Social Relation

192 E. L. McCallumis not a drive that is reckoned in Brooks's narrative theory, although ifconfronted by such a possibility he might allow that it figures in Freud'sBeyond the Pleasure Principle, given Brooks' claim that "it is indeed sodifficult to say what Freud is talking about in this essay—and especiallywhat he is not talking about." 9 Indeed, the death instinct and the lifeinstinct are not the only drives Freud elucidates: he also briefly distinguishesepistemophilia, the drive to know. As a way toward sketchingout what this other dimension of drive might be, and to emphasize thelinguistic dimension of the drive in general, I'd like to begin by positing,perhaps too glibly, that both White Noise and Accident are undergirdednot by a Todestrteb, or death drive, but by Deutschestrieb, or as I wouldperversely prefer to translate it, Teutonophilia—the drive to be German,or to be with Germans, to, in short, engage in German.In Accident, the Teutonophilia germinates in the cloud, in the radioactiveparticles from the Ukraine driven to Germany on prevailing winds,but at another level we see Teutonophilia in the text's repetitious concernwith recent German history, the reverberations from World War II—thewartime actions of neighbors, the friends who had been exiled by Hitler,the immediately postwar typhoid epidemic, the emergence of nuclearpower that is now, in 1986, plaguing them. This German drive—dare Icall it fahrvegnugen?—circulates in the text but is not an individual impulse.The parallel should underscore the notion that drive is not somethingindividual or willful, but a force that arises and might even workthrough permeation rather than propulsion.In White Noise, by contrast, the Teutonophilia aligns with the protagonist,Jack Gladney, given that Jack's obsessions function aroundthings German. It is linked to the text's manifest concern with the deathdrive. Jack Gladney's repetition compulsion, seen for instance in his obsessionwith watching his children sleep, is clearly a textbook case ofstaving off the threat of death, or at least change; watching them sleeppunctuates his trajectory from crisis to crisis, providing a stable momentto return to, but it also manifests his own longing to return to stasis,sleep, quiescence. The threatened change, however, is not death, not theeffects of the Airborne Toxic Event, nor even the constant stream of newproducts in the commercial market with which change is equated in theterms of the text. The threat of change is the threat of the narrative climax,the moment that portends the end of the narrative.