Perversion the Social Relation

2o6E. L. McCallumNarration is inherently social; it seeks to bond narrator and audience,but at the same time it necessarily must transform that relation, disturbif not disrupt. If Brooks wants to claim the death drive for narrative, hecan do so only for the aims and end of narrative. But both of these narratives,Accident and White Noise, have a perverse relation to their ends,precisely because they deal with contamination, which persists chronically,without ending or resolution, without continuation or renewal.They thus illustrate a different aspect of the drive—the compulsion todisperse, to ride the edge between language and narrative, knowledgeand meaning, is not at all comparable to stasis or growth. Contaminationoffers the site for change, the transformation that Todorov foundessential to narrative, but change in itself does not produce narrative;narrating produces narrative. The reading of Teutonophilia in each textbrings us to the edge between language and subject, and of all the thingsthat cannot be said, all the moments in each text that break down intoparticles of language—a word, a list of brand names, an advertising slogan—theseall are produced within what can be said, the story that is thetelling of what cannot be expressed. It is not the indirect representationof the ineffable, but the narration of the impossibility of representingthat is told, a narrative that is truly perverse. The mode of perverse narration—andnot every narrative is perverse—presents an opportunity tostage the threat to cohesive individual subjectivity within a context thatdoes not threaten human life. Perverse narration makes perversion safefor the social; or to be less sloganistic, if the real does unite the psychicaland the social, the death drive does not rule alone.To illustrate this claim, let us pause to consider the ambivalent, perverserelation of the novels to their ends. Accident, I have already discussed,perversely begins with its projected end, with a moment beyondthe narrative's moment of enunciation, so that when the day ends, theconvention brings us to nightfall and the end, we have only the impossibilityof continuing to narrate, to speak. The narrative trajectory movesfrom being embedded in the process of narrating, aware of itself as narration,to the edge of the infinite and unknown, and the problem of representingin any medium. The narrator recounts being awoken in themiddle of the night by a voice and a crying; this voice called from faraway and is counterbalanced by her realization that "the crying camefrom me, as I noticed after quite some time." 32 By contrast to this rim-