Perversion the Social Relation

194 E* L. McCalluma drive since he steals the neighbors' car to arrive smack in the midstof the old Germantown in Iron City, carrying the German-made gun, a"25-caliber Zumwalt automatic" (253) his father-in-law gave him. Obsessivelyand remarkably, as he closes in on Willie Mink, Jack both narrateshis plan and announces it as his plan, as if in a desperate hope thathis plan might become performative, enacted through its enunciation:"My plan was this" (312) or "This was my plan." Only in the first iterationis the plan in the present tense: "Here is my plan" (304). All thesubsequent announcements of the plan are in the past tense, while allthe expositions of the plan are in the present. The splitting of the tensemight signal the splitting of the drive, between the repetition compulsion,which seeks a previous state, and eros, which rejuvenates. But Iprefer to see this tense shift as the marker that shows the transformationof the life drive into the death drive, and that it is precisely this transformationthat makes it impossible for Gladney to carry off the murder.Killing Mink would drive toward too great a change, would in fact conjointhe two characters to create something new. At the same time, theexplicit fragmenting of the narrative into levels of showing and telling,the conscious highlighting of the process of narration through the permutationsof "this was my plan," signals how the narrative is beyondJack's control. It is one (albeit critical) sign that Jack's individuality isdriving toward particle-ity.So in the face of threatened change, the narrative retreats into repetitionand resolves to end. Only here, because the narrative is not undergirdedby the death drive but by what I have been calling Teutonophilia,the repetition serves to disperse rather than consolidate. The pursuitends at a hospital, where Jack and Willie are both treated for their gunshotwounds by German nuns. Jack seeks to gain favor with the nunsby speaking German. Their repartee of simple German words escalatesinto a vertiginous volley of existentialist exchange in English, and Jack'sinterrogation culminates in a reversal of the power dynamic, puttinghim back on the bottom, subjected to a torrent of German: "She wasspraying me with German. A storm of words. She grew more animatedas the speech went on. A gleeful vehemence entered her voice. ... Ibegan to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She was reciting something,I decided. Litanies, hymns, catechisms. ... Taunting me with scornfulprayer. The odd thing is I found it beautiful" (320). This torrent provides