Perversion the Social Relation

2o8E. L. McCallumpens in Accident, as well, only through its anxious vacillation around thetheme of contamination—a cloud of particles serves as the occasion bywhich the narrator can ponder the wave connections in which she is embedded,familially, historically, linguistically, technologically, globally,networks that exist beyond her own immediate existence, beyond language,beyond the separation imposed by distance and death. The binarythat is decoded on the products at the end of White Noise has the dualnature of particles and waves: On the one hand, it is simply the bar codeon the product, but on the other hand, it is that which particle-izes theshoppers and the items seemingly indiscriminately.A perverse narrative would be, then, not simply the narrative that dalliesin the middle, but one that posits an end only to transform it—like aparticle to a wave—into something else, into a Môbius strip of a story,narrating the edge of what can be told. We need perversion as a narrative,beyond what narratives of perversion already exist—in Freud, forinstance, and now more widely in queer studies. Perversion as a narrativefigures a space where the narrator is telling a story that is a problembeing figured out, not where he or she already knows the end and wantsto tell you how we arrived there. These perverse narratives do not drivetoward a static, prior state of existence, untroubled knowledge, or anidentificatory union between narratee or reader and narrator or protagonist.Rather, they drive epistemophilically toward the in-between, theedge where the language sometimes obtrudes as particles, fragmentingand dissolving narrative, and other times as waves, seamlessly carryingforward on the narrative drive. The perversity of these novels is preciselythat White Noise could be a textbook case of the death drive as narrative,or Accident an exemplar of the life drive. At the same time, each providesa textbook case of a perverse narrative, driven by the structures outsideof consciousness, the particles/waves that scan the codes of writing, barcodes, tumors, life, and death.Notesi Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans, and ed. James Strachey(New York: Basic, 1962), 28.2 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986).3 Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day*s News, trans. Heike Schwarzbauer (New York: Noonday,1989).