Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (9 page)

To map the genre device(s), as Lake puts it, is a different enterprise from mapping the discourse in which those devices are set as criteria of conve
ntional templates and those templates named as genres. It is to map the dynamics of the devices themselves, to map the strangeness.

Of Sonnets and Conventional Templates

After all, the thrill you get from a good sf story is not that dissimilar to the thrill you get from a good magic trick. Wow, did you see that, was that r
eal? What if it was real? Part of what sf does is make us look at something impossible, beyond our reach, beyond our ken—and think of it as if it were real, as if we might at some point have to deal with it.

Paul Kincaid

To approach strange fiction from my seat in the SF Café, I leave behind the
Science Fiction
I’ve declared dead, leave it at the point its birth, but take with me the nominal label of SF. Because with that discourse of SF as a subset of SF, we have a useful springboard into the notion of the conventional template versus the aesthetic idiom, the idea of a generic form with consensual/conventional strictures versus a mode identifiable by its characteristics but in which those features (e.g. strangeness) are simply potentials of narrative itself, such that to group the karass of texts using them is simply to recognise that their writers were working in the same fundamental mode.

But perhaps, in order to clarify what I mean in the distinction of templates and id
ioms, the following might be a better springboard in the first instance, a sonnet, titled “A Sonnet Lumière”:

My love is like a red, red fire,

My heart on flame but out of luck.

You are my death, my funeral pyre.

Ripped out and torn and blown to fuck,

My heart explodes with my desire

To die beneath your monster truck.

I offer this, this tawdry verse

Nail-gun it to my dead eyelids

Then light the fuse, blow up my hearse!

My hopes are krushed; my life is shit.

Put your behemoth in reverse,

Drive over all my shattered bits.

[From here the MS can’t be read,

The last two lines reduced to shreds]

It’s not Shakespeare, and I’m not sure what class of sonnet the rhyme stru
cture puts it in, but it’s fourteen lines and a volta in the last couplet. The following might be a sonnet…or it might not. It’s from a series of twelve called
Still Lives
:

Grave me an ode upon a funeral urn,

Sonnets of black and ochre, fine-lined grace

Of classic forms museumed in space

And time. Now put a bullet in it. Turn

And scan history as a war-torn foreign place:

See Babylon fall on your TV sets, see Baghdad burn,

Humvees patrol the road of no return,

The trials of grunts. Soldier…about-face.

Will you paint pictures of sweet fruit to mask sour taste

Of spoiled milk spilled from broken churn?

Or will you, poet, as a panther in the sheepfold, pace,

Savage and true to forms of new rhythms—fuck the rhyme?

Turn as a corpse behind a car, hung from a streetlight, a dead soldier.

Turn, twist and turn poet; use the sharp edge of the serrated volta.

I include this because in some respects it fits the sonnet form—fourteen lines and a volta—but it also deliberately fucks with the conventions. It may not succeed, but what I was trying to do there was have multiple voltas rather than just the one, and a complete rupture of rhyme scheme. Question is: is it still a sonnet?

My answer to this is, yes, it is; there’s nothing in the rules to say you have to
limit
yourself to one volta. Others might disagree; the break in rhyme structure might well be taken as a step too far by some.

One might well see Science Fiction as a comparable template of conve
ntions, my point is, but I’m not so sure about SF.

I have some sympathy for those who’d grump huffily at the idea of a sonnet playing fast and loose with rhyme and metre, because I have a similarly thrawn reaction at times, with certain other types of free verse where…well, let me illustrate it with the following “Ode to a Poet,” which is most definitely
not
a sonnet:

The poet spoke a while,

Then paused.

He spoke again, spoke for a time and then

He paused

Again. I listened as he started up once more

And paused.

And then went on to bore us all. It was as if the way

He paused

Was just to add a sense of weight, as if

A pause

Is somehow deeply meaningful, as if

That pause

Is not just fucking ponderous, as if there’s any reason why

That pause

Is not just a fucking way of

Fucking breaking fucking prose up

Into bite-size chunks,

Making those fucking bite-size chunks

Sound so fucking important when

It’s just some fucking bullshit

With no rhythm and no rhyme,

No fucking poetry or patterning at all,

No literary bite, no verbal claws

Just

Blah blah.

Pause.

Blah blah. Blah blah blah.

Pause,

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah.

Pause.

Blah blah.

Fucking pause.

I think that we should flay the shite,

Write sonnets in his blood

And then make drums out of his hide,

Sing as we drag his body through the mud.

This does
not
have fourteen lines and a volta. It is, however, a poem. It’s not terribly poetic in places, I grant you. Indeed that second verse is deliberately designed to parody a type of not-terribly-poetic poetry, to simulate the sort of poem that makes some of us (on days when we’re feeling particularly snarky) mutter darkly, “That’s not a bloody poem; it’s just prose chopped up into bits.”

I include this as illustration of a somewhat reactionary attitude I’m not m
yself immune to. More extreme and committed reactionaries will often express a similar sentiment in regard to works presented as being of a certain idiom but which, to put it bluntly, fuck with the conventions of said idiom, whether it be poetic or prosaic: that’s not a poem because it doesn’t rhyme; that’s not a story because it doesn’t have a proper plot; that’s not SF because…well, because it doesn’t satisfy some non-negotiable criterion.

Of course, the fact that I present that poem
as
a poem means that I’m tacitly accepting that the form of poetry it criticises is nonetheless poetry, that you can indeed chop up prose into bits, lay it out in lines and call it a poem. I just think the result is shite. I like my poetry to have the sort of formal structures of the sonnet. I reckon a sonnet does have to follow the rules. But I also want to fuck with those rules, to add extra voltas, or breach the tightly strictured rhyme scheme, to do something extra
twisty
.

Yes, I’m conflicted.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is the difference (and conflict) between a strictured generic form such as the sonnet, where the conventions of the template have been negotiated to the point they’re now non-negotiable criteria, and an aesthetic idiom such as the poem, where some readers may well bristle at the absence of characteristics that are expected as part of a local tradition, but will do so wrongly, the idiom itself opened in definition such that what we’re really dealing with is a fundamental mode of the medium. The question I’m leading to is this: is SF really comparable to the sonnet, or is it better seen as analogue of the poem?

It’s no doubt obvious that my stance as regards strange fiction leans toward the latter, to put it mildly. My stance is perhaps, however, not the prevailing one. Well, if you i
nsist your science fiction is a sonnet…

In the SF Café there are a fair few arguments over the music on the jukebox. There are those who hate punk rock (because they are idiots) and those who love it (because they are not idiots); even among the latter there’s a disagre
ement not unlike those arguments over the roots of this thing we call
science fiction
. To wit: there’s no doubt that both The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were heavily influential to punk rock, but does this mean we should class them both as punk bands?

Put it this way:

With The Velvet Underground, we have the far more complex sound of art rock and an attitude more that of the bohemian auteur than the suburban anarchist. Associating this band with the genre of punk at any deeper level than that of influence seems a pretty spurious claim. But The Stooges are a different matter. While they’re more generally considered a garage band, and a seminal one at that, the distinction between early ’70s garage and mid ’70s punk is largely a matter of labelling. Somewhere between The Sonics (Chuck Berry on strychnine) and The Ramones (The Beach Boys on speed), garage rock seamlessly morphs into punk. The Clash song “Garageland” makes that lineage explicit, in fact, acknowledges the origins of punk in garage. So at what point does garage
become
punk?

We could 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?