Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 207ming the edge of the verbal and the expressive, distancing and immediacy,the narrator says that "very close to me, in my dream, a giant,nauseatingly putrescent moon had swiftly sunk down below the horizon.A photograph of my dead mother had been fastened to the darknight sky." 33 Here the distance of the voice is supplanted by a radicaldedistancing of the moon, and being awake is swapped with dream. Thespatial disorientation—between closeness and distance, real and imaginaryspace—evinced by such exchanges in this passage enacts the verydispersion of the perverse drive. Moreover, the replacement of the moonby the mother's representation rehearses the association of the moonwith death, and marks a shift from the relative and prophylactic safetyof language to the more contiguous, seductive, magical mode of visualrepresentation. There is no resolution, only a resolve to continue. Thefinal line, set apart in its own paragraph, reads, "How difficult it wouldbe, brother, to take leave of this earth." 34For its part, White Noise ends with a turn toward particles, and waves.The last chapter opens with a wild drive, one parallel to Jack Gladney'sTeutonophilic journey to Iron City, but performed by his son Wilder onhis tricycle. Wilder takes off on his own and miraculously crosses a busyhighway, only to tumble into a muddy inlet of the highwayside creek,rescued by a "passing motorist, as such people are called." 35 The chapterconcludes with Jack's musing on the newly rearranged supermarketshelves, a disruption that re-particle-izes the clientele. "They walk in afragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen inthe aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic,trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat." u The elementsof the formerly smoothly working shopping trajectory have brokendown into their components, re-formed as the cluster, the fragment;people themselves are no longer humanist agents capable of masteringand navigating their surroundings, but elements in the system, subordinatedto some other organization, some other drive. "But in the end,"Gladney tells us, drawing to the literal end of the story, "it doesn't matterwhat they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped withholographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly.This is the language of waves and radiation." 37There is something to the fact that the narrative of White Noise drivestoward particle-ization, only to then be subsumed into wave. This hap-