Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 201fine but lose his sense of smell, but for the most part we are kept in thepresent, be it morning, afternoon, evening, or night. Most importantly,however, for our sketch of the drives, is that structurally the text pushestoward closure, resolution, an end to the day, knowledge of the successof the surgery, completion of activities. Although any day-in-the-life-oftext has a predetermined ending—nighttime, but occasionally dawn—what are we to make of this death-drive structure of conclusion, giventhat Accident's concern with radioactive contamination is by definitionnot a one-day gig? This death-drive structure, therefore, turns out to beperverse: as we arrive at the end, the narrative fragments, particle-izes,condenses meanings, rather than resolves into quiescence.The tension between the limit of the day-in-the-life genre and thesubject of radioactive contamination goes beyond simply a tension betweenform and content. As I noted earlier, Brooks insists that narrative'sdeath drive aims toward conclusion. In Accident the destination isalready reached at the outset as the novel begins in the future perfect."On a day about which I cannot write in the present tense, the cherrytrees will have been in blossom. I will have avoided thinking 'exploded,'the cherry trees have exploded, although only one year earlier I couldnot only think but also say it readily, if not entirely with conviction." 25The future perfect is a perverse tense, positing origin from the vantage ofwhat is ahead. If the signifier always gains its signification retroactively,the future perfect perfectly reverses that temporality of meaning. It seeksto unify the moment of narration with the moment narrated, to close thegap between telling and tale. Like contamination itself, the future perfectrelies on contiguity, but where contamination's contiguity is spatial,the future perfect's is temporal. Contiguous temporality is admittedlya bizarre notion, since spatiality is the dimension through which contiguityconventionally operates; contiguous temporality seems to divvy uptime's flow into particles. Temporality, moreover, is more often viewedas a smooth trajectory, in which certain moments might be singled outof the flow, but nonetheless the sense of the dynamics of time relies ona non-pixelated, non-fragmented understanding. Analepsis and prolepsisin narrative can serve to fragment time and disrupt the flow. Likethe sedimentations of meaning around certain fragments of languagewordsor phrases activated by the radio, as we saw above—that signalthe workings of the life drive's combinatory powers, a contiguous temporalityof the future perfect indicates the life drive at work in time as