Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 195a perverse resolution for the novel and for Jack, reaffirming his placeon the edge of the mastery of German, not entirely outside language,but definitely more subjected to than in control of it. It is perverse, becauseit fragments, sprays, storms. To speak, to be subject to the forceof discourse, but not fully within narrative—because narrative requiresan end, a point from which its action can be retroactively recalled—isto seek to seal the gap between narration, the moment of the telling, andthe action or state narrated. Narrative's own iterability—the fact thatnarrative must always, structurally, be repeatable—guarantees againstthis gap being sealed. Narrative is thus always already fragmented—thedrive that structures narrative, however, might be working against ortoward that fragmentation. The spray of German affirms not just Jack'sdrive to engage German, but what Teutonophilia figures in the novel:the perverse drive to dispersion of the individual subject, and of the narrativeitself. Rather than a drive to be German, it is a drive to be a germ.Using White Noise's Teutonophilia as a paradigm of the drive shouldnot mislead us, therefore; as Accident's Teutonophilic cloud reminds us,the drive is not contained in some particular individual, even if it serveso&ensibly to individualize or particularize. Jack Gladney's struggle towardmastery seems like it would illustrate the individualization ofthe drive, yet the alignment between character and agency is too easy.Rather, Jack's ambivalent understanding of German—restricting himselfin his conference address to words and forms that are primarilythe same in either language, for instance—provides a paradigm for usto understand the Teutonophilic drive as a vector running on the edgebetween subjects and language, not the directive impulse of a discreteindividual organism. That we don't know or particularly cue into theTeutonophilia in either text underscores the textual rather than the subjectivelocation of the drive; its rhythms pulse in the cadences of the text,not so much in its melody. As Freud himself notes of the death instinct,it manifests itself indirectly, in contrast to the obviousness of the life instinct.We don't even see any German in the DeLillo novel: except forone line of "Gut, besser, best," it is all narrated rather than shown indialogue.If we return to Accident with this expanded view Teutonophilia affordsof the perversity of the drive, not specifically as a German thing,but as the instinctual tensions between subjects and language that