Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 199The death drive maintains this extension in part through its reliance onrepetition, but concomitantly through its correlation with the symbolicregister. While Copjec's and Lacan's views hinge on language, their delineationsparallel Brooks's mapping of the role of the drive in narrativeto defer, delay the end. Like perversion, and perverse as it is, this viewof cause radically thwarts the conception or sustenance of an individualsubject.Cause, then, is some failure within the compulsion of repetition; narrative,in contrast, is a combination of this failure to repeat—cause—and the organization of the excess or side effects of signification of theautomaton. Narrative may be punctuated by repetition but can neverbe purely repetition, for repetition becomes nonnarratable. Narrative,therefore, is as fundamentally engaged in the life drive as in the deathdrive. But more, narrative must involve transformation, and the roleof perverse fragmentation in relation to transformation may becomeclearer if we examine this life drive at work in the contamination texts.The instinctual effect of contamination in Accident is, as we saw inthe passages cited earlier, a disorientation in language. The fragmentsptoduced by perversion are even more obvious in Accident than in WhiteNoise. Instead of smoothly linked forms—sentences, phrases, narrative—the narrator encounters words, vocabulary lists, particles. "The scientificword is Contaminated.' Fm learning new words while you sleep,brother," she intimates early on; "nuclids—another word I have justbegun to learn." 20 But as the day progresses the ineffable becomes moreher concern: "Everything I have been able to think and feel has gone beyondthe boundaries of prose." 21 Yet if the words fragment, become discreteand static, the words also coalesce and germinate new meanings.Hearing the reports of people leaving from Chernobyl that noon, thenarrator remarks: a evacuation,' brother, is one of those words whichwe won't be able to separate from our own experience for the rest of ourlives." 22 The life drive's combinatory powers work through language,meaning sedimented upon meaning, even as the death drive's stasis seekingpushes on through narrative, stripping the accumulated meaningsback to one, returning to the current moment, the story at hand. Inthis instance, the life drive's binding might be seen to work against narrativeas a singularly directional impulse, instead pushing toward thenonnarratival or multiply narratival. "Evacuation" must be restricted to