Perversion the Social Relation

200 E. L. McCallumthe news reports of the airborne toxic event; reverberations from themid-century war or even the typhoid epidemic divert the narrative fromits appointed end.This double drive structure plays out in the text's trajectory of events.Against the advancing cloud, Accident plots the narrator's brother undergoingbrain surgery for a tumor. The skilled precision of the surgeonscontrasts with the diffuse drive of the tumor cells and their parallelin the particles coming from Chernobyl and the narrator's meditationson the self. Freud tells us that "the ego is the precipitate of abandonedobject-cathexes and... it contains the history of those cathexes." 23 Accident'snarrator shares Freud's science-influenced view of the precipitatedego, as she muses on the "connectors between the neurons called Synapses'below the cellular level of the brain—the connections which bringus life"; 24 together these descriptions present a pixelated view of whathad seemed whole, coherent. Notably, this pixelation is depicted on thepaperback's cover, which has a veil of dots—are they radioactive particlesor newsprint pixels?—over a bucolic scene. Pixels are things weare not supposed to see as individuated; we look through or past themas they constitute the image we are supposed to see—like radioactivity,which is also invisible. The conjunction of pixelation and precipitatehere recalls the particle; without going so far as to collapse these intothe same thing, in all three there is this sense of individuated componentsthat in themselves might be insignificant, but their organizationunites into a completely different, efficacious force. The important thing,then, is the mode of organization, and this is precisely why the drive,why narrative, and why perversion are important; they all serve as modesof organization. Where the emphasis is on fragments, pixelation, it becomesmore difficult to perceive the force of the drive. That is why structuraldiffusion, this pixelation, makes Accident seem less, shall we say,driven than White Noise.But the narrative does have an aim toward which it drives; not onlyis the narrator's mind focused on her brother's surgery as she involvesherself in quotidian activities of gardening, meal preparation, errands,and bicycling, but the narrative wraps itself around the convention of aday in the life. This temporal organization is stronger in Accident thanin White Noise, which, though its finalchapter details a sunset, nonethelesssimultaneously unknots the closure even as it ties things up. Accidenthas proleptic moments, such as when we are told the brother will be