Perversion the Social Relation

i$6 E. L. McCallumthreaten to disperse as much as they serve to cohere, we see that Jack'sadulterated German speech is reprised as Accident's narrator, a writer,also encounters instability in language. Despite the distractions of herbrother undergoing neurosurgery and the cloud of radioactivity movingacross her town, she tries to work: "I sat down on my swivel chair,looking through the pages, reading individual sentences, and found thatthey left me cold. They, or I myself, or both of us had changed and I wasreminded of certain documents where the true, the secret writing appearsonly after chemical treatment, whereby the original, deliberatelyirrelevant text is revealed to be a pretext. I saw the writing on my pagesfade and possibly disappear under the effect of radiation." 12 The subject'sinstability—"they, or I myself, or both of us"—is as ambivalentand slippery as Jack's command of German and situation. The conjunctionof Accident's and White Noise's linguistic crises suggests that it's notsimply a matter of Gladney's failure to master German speech, nor ofAcctdenfs narrator failing to master German writing, but rather that ifwe are viewing contamination through the drive, language is at issue—serving either as the prophylaxis so we can contend with contamination,or as much a function of the contamination itself.The hope that "the true, the secret writing" might appear only afterthe page is contaminated by chemicals reveals a rather perverse desirethat something true will be revealed in this airborne toxic event. Thishope is one that Jack likewise desperately seeks, and arguably thinks hefinds either in discreetly watching his son Heinrich master the situationin the evacuation hall by authoritatively fielding the questions and concernsof a growing crowd of evacuees, or in his subsequent rounds ofdoctor visits, thinking that the means of his own death—the ultimatetruth for each of us—was revealed when his exposure to the cloud wasregistered on the medical evaluation instruments at the evacuation center.Jack is sure he's going to come down with some kind of long-termcontamination, but his belief is also never confirmed. In both instances,the perverse hope homes in on the moment of transformation, when theagent acts to rearrange the organization of cells, crowds, text, and thusmeaning. This drive toward transformation, then, is what is really atstake in the novels' Teutonophilia. It is a transformation that must transpireoutside the realm of conscious or human agency, which is why wemust perceive it to be mapped at the level of the drive.