Free Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions by Hal Duncan Page A

just draw a line at the New York Dolls or the Sex Pistols, and say, punk starts here, and nothing before that, nothing outside the historical context of the New York or London punk scene circa 1976, can truly be considered punk. We could carry on from this and argue that Television were a punk band, regardless of their twenty-minute instrumental tracks, regardless of the music’s stylistic intricacy, rich with sync opated guitars and complex rhythms, simply because they, unlike The Stooges, were part of this historical context, in the right place at the right time, playing CBGB in 1976.
    But there’s a problem. If we examine the actual characteristics of the m usic—what it’s doing, how it works—and the attitude of insolent aggression that went along with it, The Stooges are way more punk than Television ever were. Listen to the confrontational shambles which is The Stooges’ last concert, recorded on the album Metallic KO . Listen to the fuck-you lyrics of “Cock in My Pocket,” Iggy’s hectoring of the audience, the stripped-down, ramped-up sound of a classic guitar, bass and drums combo playing (when they are actually playing) with energy in inverse proportion to their skill. Look at the cover where Scott Asheton in full Nazi regalia can be seen cradling an unconscious and bloody Iggy Pop. Not punk? If that isn’t in the spirit of ’76, fuck knows what is.
    If we could dismiss these similarities with a claim that The Stooges were simply a formative influence upon punk, we could say the same of the New York Dolls, maybe even The Ramones. Malcolm McLaren would have us b elieve, after all, that punk only truly came into existence with the Sex Pistols. Given that this album was recorded only a few years before the punk label became common currency, however, on the basis of shared characteristics alone, a simple widening of historical perspective could surely lead us to argue that The Stooges are not simply proto-punk but in fact embryonic punk, aesthetically every bit as punk as the bands that followed in the chaos of their wake but historically situated in a period of gestation, before punk proper was born and named.
    Hey, what’s the point in having your cake if you can’t eat it too?
     

A Flash of Lightning
     
    There’s a point to this:
    Does Frankenstein sit in the same relationship to Science Fiction as The Stooges do to punk, or is that relationship more analogous to that of The Velvet Underground and punk? The answer, it seems to me, is the latter. For all that it extrapolates from the scientific theories and experiments of its period, positing the monster as a patchwork of body-parts reanimated by scientific craft rather than magical skill, the novel is as commitedly Gothic Fiction as Wuthering Heights or Northanger Abbey , infused with a tremulous fear of the uncanny (where the incredible meets the monstrous), and so informed by that horrorific mode of Romanticism that the Rationalism of Science Fiction stands in stark contrast. The world that Shelley’s aesthetic inhabits is not the exotic alien planet of the Campbellian pulps but the desolate wilderness of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare or Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog , a world of storms and nightmares, mountains and icy wastes. Its dynamics is not a matter of reason applied to the marvellous but rather of unreason loosed with the monstrous.
    The reason I do not, with Aldiss, class Frankenstein as the birth of Science Fiction is that in its ultimately Romantic stance it is far better understood as the death of Science Fiction . There is no lightning bolt in the novel bringing life to the monster with the electric vitality of science; that is a spurious invention of the movies. Rather the lightning in Frankenstein is there to paint the creature in sudden stark relief as a monstrum —to coin a phrase analogous to Suvin’s novum for the quirk of narrative, the rupture in equilibrium, that sits as linchpin of Horror