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 brian james schill

Shame and the

Politics of Punk Fiction
Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood
alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor
and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that
withered at the touch? Or where was he?
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In an episode from the final season of a certain

Reagan-era crime drama, Dr. R. Quincy, medical examiner, investi-
gates the murder of a male teen killed inside a Los Angeles nightclub
during a performance by punk band Mayhem.1 The victim’s punkette
sweetheart, while not the actual assailant, is charged with the homicide
primarily due to the testimony of her progressively mortified mother,
who has told investigators feverishly that she had of late been coming
home to find her daughter “burning cigarette holes in her arms, shred-
ding her clothes to bits, taking pills, and locking herself in her room
listening to that violence-oriented punk rock music that does nothing
but reinforce all those bad feelings.” Awash in such histrionics, the pro-
gram—today a cult favorite among punks, spawning the band Quincy
Punx and the song “Quincy Punk Episode” by the postpunk group
Spoon—insists that the parent of such an embarrassing child heed the
signifiers punk subculture flaunts and act with quick aplomb to expunge
its degrading influence.
Many years following the demise of Quincy, M.E., Aaron Comet-
bus and his self-deprecating cohorts Sluggo and Little Suicide attempt
to escape their inner–San Francisco punk squat by taking up residence
at a low-rent bungalow in Berkeley they affectionately christen “Double

Arizona Quarterly Volume 69, Number 4, Winter 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Arizona Board of Regents
issn 0004-1610
134 Brian James Schill

Duce.” Translating the affair into a serial novel, Cometbus, having wit-
nessed months of depraved apathy by his housemates, finds himself
aggravated by his fellow punks’ chronic inability to create something
productive from the self-loathing they have formalized through their
adopted names. “What other culture is so critical of itself?” the narrator
lectures his colleagues one evening:

What other culture strives to build up traditions and

costumes, only to shun them? . . . we are punks and we jump
through hoops to deny the very culture from which our daily
life revolves . . . .
Let us remember who we are, and the fact that our failure
and misery is but a tribute to our culture, the lifestyle of the
true believer. (61)

“For Shame!” (61) Cometbus scolds finally, demanding that his collec-
tive recognize the power embedded in its filthy, embarrassed response to
its late capitalist milieu. Sadly, the speech is for naught; over the novel’s
remaining pages a chagrined Cometbus can only document his mates’
self-conscious, escalating degeneracy—and their inability to exploit
such feelings as useful means to any ends.
Selected for their contrasting points of view and nonmusical con-
text, these scenes reify the generalized and well-documented atmo-
sphere of embarrassed self-hate embedded within punk rock subculture.
Police, parents, and even punks agree: punk, in all senses of the term,
is a disgrace, and this air of shame has stood firm for punks across time
and place—in spite of the genre’s evolving aesthetic. Noting how punks
“have always seemed emotionally if not outright physically crippled—
you see speech impediments, hunchbacks, limps” (273), rock critic
Lester Bangs saw in punk a self-hate well established by the mid-1970s
and observed how most punk music “merely amounts to saying I suck”
(225). Countless examples from subsequent punk scenes on both sides
of the Atlantic suggest such shame is representative; recounting his
days singing for early 1980s hardcore group Black Flag, Henry Roll-
ins, in an overstated tour diary eventually published as Get in the Van
(1994), mopes from his “shed” that he often wondered, “why [do] I go
out on stages in front of people[?] Maybe it’s because it’s the most alien-
ating, humiliating, emptying thing I have found” (175). Around the
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 135

same time in Manchester, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis lamented in “Isola-

tion” from his band’s posthumous album Closer (1980): “I’m ashamed
of the things I’ve been put through / I’m ashamed of the person I am.”
Curtis’s dirge followed postpunk pioneers Public Image Limited’s Metal
Box (1979) album, which included the energetic “Memories,” John
Lydon’s indictment of punk generally, if not Sex Pistols manager Mal-
colm McLaren specifically. “You make me feel ashamed,” Lydon yodels
before his new band, “It should be clear by now / Your words are useless /
Full of excuses / False confidence / Someone has used you well.”
Back in the States, Minnesota group Hüsker Dü’s “punk opera”
Zen Arcade (1984) detailed the disgrace of a teenage, likely homosex-
ual, narrator who laments his sense of failure—“Mom and Dad . . . I’m
not the son you wanted, but what could you expect” (“Whatever”)—a
tragedy of late capitalism (“Newest Industry”). In the early 1990s Kurt
Cobain, leader of the Hüsker-influenced Seattle group Nirvana, likewise
laid bare his low self-image throughout his band’s career, particularly
on Nirvana’s final studio album In Utero (1993) where Cobain admits,
in three separate songs, “I think I’m dumb” (“Dumb”), “I have very
bad posture” (“Pennyroyal Tea”), and “I’ll take all the blame / Aqua
sea-foam shame” (“All Apologies”).2 Finally, consider Portland, Ore-
gon-based, indie-punk group Modest Mouse; in its 1998 single, “Never
Ending Math Equation,” Isaac Brock wails: “I’m the same as I was when
I was six years old / . . . Oh my God, I’ve got to, got to, got to, got to
move on / Where do you move when what you’re moving from is your-
self?” (emphasis added).
As representative of many others, each of these examples suggests
that punk shame can usually be attributed to its subjects’ inability to
outpace either the selves to which they are bound or the alienating soci-
ety they feel has generated in them both restlessness and self-hate. Punk
progenitor Richard Hell long ago crystallized punks’ anxiety over such
a generalized binding, explaining to Punk magazine co-founder Legs
McNeil:

Basically I have one feeling . . . the desire to get out of here.

And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyse, you
know, why I want to go away . . . . See, I always feel uncomfort-
able and I just want to . . . walk out of the room. It’s not going
136 Brian James Schill

to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that,

it’s just to get out of “here.” (Holmstrom 62)

An avid reader of poetry and philosophy, Hell was at the time of this
statement anticipating Emmanuel Levinas’s essay On Escape (1982),
which articulates the distress of being forever “riveted to oneself . . .
the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself ” (64). Joan Copjec
later observed in reference to Levinas: “The sentiment of being riveted
to being is one of being in the forced company of our own being, whose
‘brutality’ consists in the fact that it is impossible either to assume or to
disown it” (100). This riveting, if Hell’s experience is symptomatic, ini-
tiates punks’ desire for “mobilization”—Levinas’s term—in all its forms
from anti-capitalism to self-hate to their infamous affinity for “offen-
sive” signifiers: pierced faces, torn and threadbare clothing, swastikas,
“bondage” gear. This desire can be traced to the earliest punk groups
and continues today.
As Hell and so many other punks have come to realize, however,
the sustained articulation of such embarrassments in punk music sug-
gests a pathology not well doctored by song, for as Hegel long ago
remarked in his lectures on fine art (1835),

Mere bugle-blowing and drum-beating does not produce cour-

age, and it would take a lot of trumpets before a fortress would
tumble at their sound as the walls of Jericho did. It is enthusi-
astic ideas . . . which achieve this . . . and not music, for music
can only count as a support for those powers which in other
ways have already . . . captured the mind. (909)

Commiserating with Hegel, and realizing that a fleeting and intangi-

ble punk sound is simply unable to provoke a triumph over, as McNeil
put it, “everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life” (334),
punks—Hell among them—initiated a shift toward narrative literature
rather early in their history, developing, over the course of thirty years,
an extensive body of punk fiction, the subject of this essay.
Cometbus notwithstanding, the bulk of self-identified “punk”
novels too display an obsession with what Lord Alfred Douglas praised
as the “loveliest” of passions and its consummate triumph over the sub-
ject. Take, for instance, Jamie S. Rich’s Cut My Hair (2000), whose
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 137

young punk subject, Mason, constantly devalues himself, noting his

weakness (58, 65, 108), foolishness (60), and self-resentment (116,
183), wondering if punk itself represents a “banding together of the
shamed” (64). Or consider “Punk Life,” Mark Perry’s inaugural entry
in the punk short story anthology Gobbing Pogoing and Gratuitous Bad
Language (1996), whose speaker bemoans the “punk life—a sad life /
the lure of the flesh / something to take us out of the shit / coming
home from work drunk / getting felt up by some sad old bar queen /
crying of shame” (5). Moreover, J. D. Glass, author of the coming-out
novel Punk Like Me (2006), explores the shame of her heroine’s clos-
eted homosexuality and her shifting, if omnipresent, embarrassment in
coming out. Confused, humiliated and alarmed after sharing an inti-
mate moment with her best friend following their visit to New York
punk club GBGBs, Glass’s budding lesbian narrator wonders: “Was I
still Nina? Was I still even a girl? Still human?” (89).
These examples all follow The Punk (1977), a “closet punk” novella
by Gideon Sams. Subtitled “the first punk novel” by its publisher, The
Punk labors to show the humiliation spike-haired teenage protago-
nist Adolph Sphitz feels at every turn. Adolph’s parents are violently
ashamed of their only son—his police officer father attempts to throw
him out; his conversations and physical interactions with his girlfriend
Thelma are awkward at best; he is under constant threat of assault by
roving gangs of “Teds”; and the only work the punk can find—working
for the fishmonger or cleaning lavatories—leaves him marked with a
repulsive odor that refuses to wash away.
Its camp notwithstanding, The Punk paved the way for what has
become an identifiable, subgenre of fiction in the English-speaking
world: stories about punks by punks. This transition to fiction functions
in two concomitant ways for punk subculture. First, novelization allows
punks to formalize, document, and even classify, their liturgy of shame,
creating, along the way, a more cogent typology of punk desires: the
anticapitalist travelogue, the punk bildungsroman, and the coming-
out novel—all of which constitute the bulk of fiction whose narrator/
subject affiliates with punk subculture. Combined with punk music
and its signifiers, these novels form a more robust punk “assemblage
of enunciation[s],” to quote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who in
their work on Kafka also addressed the subject’s desire to identify “lines
138 Brian James Schill

of escape” (46–47). Second, and more importantly, inscribing what a

phonologically indistinct punk music merely makes implicit and fleet-
ing, the punk novel turns the masters’ Deleuzian “machine” against
itself, better translating and subsequently dismantling the assemblages
to which punks are penitently joined. In this way punk fiction moves
through the shrill spectacle of punk music, both too easily ignored and/
or recuperated by industry, more successfully reasserting punks’ “hys-
teric” subjectivity, as Jacque Lacan puts it in his Seminar XVII (Other
Side 129). The result of this shift, and this combination of theorists, is
a punk corpus of always-already political “minor literature” that not
only recalls Kafka’s deterritorialization of language and mirrors his tran-
sition from short to long form, but ultimately highlights rather than
hides both the origins and effects of its subjects’ piquant “hontology,”
(Lacan, Other Side 000), which ultimately turns punk shame into a sort
of triumph.

lines of escape
A further reading of Rollins’s memoir makes clear that touring with
a band of eccentric, anxious punks was often an isolating and madden-
ingly bureaucratic venture. In an interview following Black Flag’s bitter
dissolution in 1987, Rollins describes guitarist Greg Ginn’s demeanor as
reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial (1925), explaining how,

He would come up to you and say, “Stop it!” I would say, “Stop
what?” He would say, “You know what you’re doing, stop. I’m
not going to tell you again.” I would say, “Oh, okay.” Welcome
to the world of Kafka. (Sinker 88)

Rollins aside, Kafka remains a common point of reference in punk

scenes across the globe. Groups with an obvious Kafka bent include
Brazilian group Kafka and Scottish punks Josef K. Furthermore, George
Gimarc argues in his Punk Diary (2005) that Howard Devoto of the
Buzzcocks and Magazine was attempting to “set Kafka to music” (85).
As Rollins and his cohorts imply, then, Kafka’s absurdist, mechani-
cal tone permeates much of punk culture and serves as a useful point
of entry for exploring punk shame, and especially its eventual fictional-
ization. Deleuze and Guattari too demonstrate that while Kafka is not
interested in music as such, he is committed to exploring sound, par-
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 139

ticularly sound “connected to its own abolition” (6), a phrase that is,
perhaps, the best description of punk one will find. If Deleuze and Guat-
tari are correct in arguing that the Czech author’s prose is concise (or
intentionally interminable), anti-metaphorical, self-defeating, cacoph-
onous, and “meaningless,” is not punk music akin? Think Lou Reed’s
Metal Machine Music. As Hell and Cometbus suggest, punk culture
evokes its subjects’ anxious, inchoate stab at escape from its evolving
milieu, serving as the articulation of its authors’ “immanent” desire and
attempted circumvention of the parent culture’s bent-headed capitula-
tion to bureaucracy. Punk not only works to offend popular sensibilities
but literally seeks to dismantle the governing cultural landscape as a
way of escaping “here,” wherever here may be.
Evidence of this restless outlook emerges in punks’ own penchant
for the “becoming-animal” theme Kafka describes in, among other short
stories, “The Metamorphosis,” “Investigations of a Dog,” and “Josephine
the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Each of these stories, Deleuze and Guat-
tari tell us, function as “absolute deterritorializations” that seek the dis-
solution of “all significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit
of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux”; such “lines of escape”
simultaneously serve to “flee the director, the business, and the bureau-
crats, to reach that region where the voice no longer does anything but
hum” (13). So it is that punks’ musical texts (records, performances)
function like Kafka’s briefer tales in that they often turn on the con-
cept of becoming-animal, not only deterritorializing popular music and
American culture broadly, but seeking severance from an exaggerated
Oedipus (government, religion, family), both of which punks exploit in
seeking an escape from their shame and its source.
Over the course of several decades, an evocative pile of punk songs
and performers that channel Kafka’s becoming-animal theme has taken
shape: The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” wherein Iggy Stooge claims
to be a “street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” (this from a
man who performed wrapped in dog collars and tailpieces); the Germs’
“Manimal”; Wire’s “I Am the Fly”; the Cramps’ “Human Fly,” com-
posed primarily of guitarist Bryan Gregory’s droning riff and lead singer
Lux Interior’s vocal buzz throughout; Nirvana’s “Very Ape”; Candy
Machine’s “Animal Suit”; and, more recently, Q and Not U’s “So Many
Animal Calls,” which wonders of the “people and animals all waiting
around,” “How do they make those sounds?”
140 Brian James Schill

One particularly illustrative example is the Dickies’ “You Drive Me

Ape (You Big Gorilla).” During performances of this song, suggestive
of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” the band would don monkey
masks as singer Leonard Phillips jumped around his mates pretending
to pick and eat nits from their heads, singing: “Swinging around from
every town to town / I swing around and I never come down / City is a
jungle now this is it / Every time I look at you I go ape-shit.” Groping
about the stage, cursing the increasingly automated “civilization” that
produced his bestiality, Phillips draws clear allusions to the simian nar-
rator of Kafka’s “Report” who explains, in anticipation of Richard Hell,
“No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in
any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove
to be an illusion” (Complete Stories 253–54). Consider also The Stooges’
seminal “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog,” Lou Reed’s bow-wow-meowed
“Animal Language,” and the Dickies’ “Poodle Party” (Phillips barks
throughout much of the track), all of which recall the “conclusion” of
The Trial wherein K laments the circumstances of his death—“Like a
dog!”—and how his murderers’ gaze guarantees “the shame of it must
outlive him” (229).
Early on, Kafka realized that his more concise attempts at deterri-
torialization could not succeed because they had, according to Deleuze
and Guattari, “no room to develop.” Lacking space, short stories are too
easily “re-Oedipalized” by a paternal culture as a result of their nature—
“still too formed, too significative, too territorialized” (15). This sce-
nario repeats itself in punk music culture; as punk was easily converted
into “New Wave” by the market in the late 1970s, the accusation of
“sellout!” was cast about among bands and fans and remains a common
charge. According to artist Frank Kozik, punk was, rather effortlessly,
“taken over by the system and everything’s punk rock now” (Sinker
187), having been co-opted by the recording industry, mass media, and
other mechanical Names-of-the-Father into another banal commod-
ity.3 Like Kafka’s shorter stories, then, punk music and performance,
with their short, often overwhelming, bursts of inarticulate sound, are
too limiting and likewise fail to produce a sustained, tangible lifeline,
requiring punks to either abandon the subculture, which many did (and
do), or alter their medium to better convey and overcome their igno-
miny.
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 141

In response, and mimicking Kafka, many punks have turned to

the novel as a more effective tool for both articulating their shame
and escaping the culture-self to which they are bound. Rich’s Cut My
Hair is only the most obvious in this regard; Mason takes to following
a punk group called Like A Dog (whose followers are dubbed “dog-
gies”) and relating Kafka to his own experience throughout. “I could see
why [band leader] Tristan had chosen Like A Dog as the band’s name,”
Mason muses after reading The Trial. “It was so powerful, said so many
things. Perhaps that was why his lyrics dealt so much with fear and
cowardice” (64). What Mason fails to appreciate but Rich recognizes
is that Tristan would be better served abolishing his band and writing
fiction. In articulating a less formed, less territorialized shame on paper,
despite its inscription, punks sidestep the obstacles that emerge from (or
are embedded within) punk music culture, and more effectively weaken
the bindings that keep punks joined to both themselves and the society
they refuse—or at the very least better identify and animate lines of
escape. Taking up Lacan’s challenge in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
(1970), they do so by embracing, embodying, and “hystericizing” the
humiliation and anxiety produced by the increasingly shameless market
economy that surrounds them.

punks ‘on the road’

Before punks’ literary hystericization can be explored in detail,
“punk fiction” must be defined more clearly. Like the tired debates over
the term “punk” itself, identifying what is (and is not) a punk novel
is admittedly tricky. There have long been novels—Finnegans Wake
(1939), Naked Lunch (1959), Blood and Guts in High School (1978),
The Kafka Chronicles (1993)—that are “punk” stylistically in that they
are “loud,” grammatically mischievous, nonlinear, rabidly vulgar, and
“cut-up.” Likewise, there are countless examples of novels that while
coherent stylistically or linguistically are “punk” in terms of their pru-
rient, violent, and “unmarketable” content—Henry Miller, (homo)
erotic fiction, or contemporary “splatterpunk” author Poppy Z. Brite,
whose own entry in Gobbing Pogoing and Gratuitous Bad Language! has
little to do with punk rock proper. While the “punk” nature of such
writers is worth exploring, I must be clear that I am not thinking here
of Kathy Acker or William Burroughs, who arguably composed fiction
in the same way many punk groups write/wrote and performed music:
142 Brian James Schill

disjointed, violent, quick, calculatedly caustic, and informal. Neither is

this essay about the genres to have emerged that have appropriated the
term: steampunk, cyberpunk, and so on. The punk fiction surveyed in
this essay is much easier to classify in that it refers to a growing genre of
contemporary literature that simply happens to feature punk protagonists
(in much popular culture since the 1970s “the punk” represented the
antagonist) who discover, inhabit, and remain in or abandon the punk
music subculture. It also is typically penned by self-identified punks
themselves.
What ties each of these novels together thematically is not only
the emphasis they place on their subjects’ disgrace and binding but also
the fact that almost every “punk novel” tends to fall into one of three
subtypes: the travelogue or “tour diary,” coming-of-age teen novel, or
coming-out tale. Some punk novels even blend these types, generating
the coming-of-age travelogue, as with Charles Romalotti’s Salad Days
(2000), or the lesbian bildungsroman, epitomized by Kristyn Dunnion’s
Mosh Pit (2004). In terms of the first category specifically, there are sev-
eral punk novels on the market that feature caution-to-the-wind sub-
jects who, disenchanted with the boring, repressive, consumer-based,
and typically white lives, abandon their families, jobs, and other respon-
sibilities for the road, often with band in tow. Examples include Double
Duce; Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo (1993), an account of fictional
Canadian punk band Hard Core Logo’s hasty, debasing reunion tour;
and Steve Wishnia’s serial novel Exit 25 Utopia (1999), a collection of
punk “road” stories Heckler magazine described as “a cross-pollination
between Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road”
(back cover)—the latter, an important reference for many punks.
Take as exemplary in this regard Hell’s Go Now (1996). In Hell’s
premier novel, punk-junkie-writer Billy Mud is charged with driving a
1957 DeSoto Adventurer convertible from Los Angeles to New York
in order to reunite the car with its owner Jack, a publishing industry
entrepreneur. Accompanying Billy on the journey is Chrissa, a French
photojournalist and Billy’s former lover. Jack has commissioned the trip
with the intent of developing a piece of creative nonfiction out of the
adventure: Billy’s poetic interpretation of “Big mongrel America” (91)
circa 1980 paired with Chrissa’s photographs of Americans both urban
and rural. As the narrative evolves, Billy finds himself participating
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 143

in one degrading scene after another: casual and dirty sex, the physi-
cal horrors of withdrawal, a shameful inability to kick his drug habit,
waning self-confidence, and the long-distance dissolution of his band.
The punk comes to a realization about himself—particularly his humili-
ated purposelessness—as the couple’s journey ends in Billy’s hometown
when the Adventurer suffers an irreparable breakdown and Chrissa
abandons Billy after he seduces his aunt.
What has brought Billy to this point? America itself. The market.
Oversized automobiles, postwar wealth, and an atomizing political cul-
ture. Jack’s goal, he admits brazenly, is that Chrissa and Billy recapture,
in the interest of selling nostalgia to aging baby boomers, the “rocka-
billy” America of the 1950s, the America of Elvis and Kerouac, “espe-
cially in the pockets that are still practically like the nineteenth century
electrified” (44). To inspire himself for the trip, which he regards as
an occasion to escape both himself and any number of Names-of-the-
Father pressing down upon him, Billy purchases a wardrobe’s worth of
vintage clothing. But instead of building a concrete antistyle around
the intentionally “American” attire, in each city he stops Billy has to
defend his citizenship and prove his “being” there, even getting asked,
in Kerouac’s San Francisco no less, “What country are you from?” (67).
Although Billy echoes Sal Paradise’s pursuit of meaning from On the
Road, Hell’s repetition is a calculated dig at the Beat touchstone. In a
clear departure from Sal, Billy, the reluctant solipsist who dresses dis-
tinctly American, is fully estranged from everyone and everything, an
alien in his own State, to which he is bound but from which he gets
no recognition. And as the wardrobe episode suggests, the more Billy
engages the market or sates his desires—the more he consumes and
fucks—the more isolated and ashamed he feels.
This shame only intensifies Billy’s desire to escape, to locate the
source of his binding and possibly seek its destruction. So it is that Billy’s
search leads him directly to Freud’s “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (80)4
—his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, where the novel reaches its
wretched conclusion at the home of Billy’s aunt. Wandering around the
literal place of his birth Billy searches for his childhood home; finding
the house, Billy describes the structure as “a perfect representation of a
child’s idea of a house” (153), and it is at this moment that Billy is con-
fronted by his impossible Lacanian Real: the line of escape he had been
144 Brian James Schill

pursuing for thousands of miles was false all along, having only brought
him to the Father’s door.
Disoriented by this insight, Billy, with perhaps a nod to Kerouac’s
repeated references to aunts, stumbles over to his aunt’s home. Making
one last effort at escape and taking the Name-of-the-Father for himself,
Billy reinterprets Oedipus by making consensual love to his mother’s
sister in the town of his birth. Just as the scene is reaching a climax,
Chrissa, who had been away taking photographs of the city, intrudes
on the couple and obliterates Billy’s subjectivity by snapping several
images of his act, immortalizing Billy’s blank, disgraced two-dimension-
ality. Thus is Billy’s humiliation objectified, riveted to the photograph.
In the end, Hell replicates not only Kerouac’s conclusions on having
sought one’s self on the road, but in a stark rebuke reduces the Beat’s
mystical, and ultimately mercantile, elitism to dust. In so doing, Billy
creates and conditions his own subjectivity and constructs for himself
a viable, or at least symbolic, line of escape—not the journey but its
inscription. As Hell puts it in the novel’s conclusion:

I’m on my knees before you. The words are on their knees . . . .

All the words. All the words since the beginning of time. The
ending is words. The person in a cloud of them, like a cloud
of bugs. Step back, the person is emerging, elsewhere, emerg-
ing like a creature from a dead carapace or cocoon or a penis
from a foreskin to resume his life outside our observation. The
deformations he suffered for being inaccurately described are
shuffled off. (174)

For a riveted being whose construction of self and binding have been
subject to logos all along, it is the written word Billy exploits to escape.
Through the written word, that is, Billy not only embarrasses the self-
satisfied Sal Paradise, but illustrates the failure of punk music culture,
which, like Kerouac’s expedition, is simply too “Gnostic” (as Greil
Marcus long ago recognized) and disengaged to create the conditions
for a genuine escape. He creates instead a concrete, deterritorializing,
and ultimately anticapitalist metasubject, manufacturing a more stable
and critical dialectic and giving himself a sense of unbound being that
appears only alongside an inscribed, humiliating, narrative enunciation.
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 145

venus in furs
Shame and escape are often the basis of the second of punk fiction’s
three subgenres as well: the (often confessional) coming-out novel.
Although less popular thematically than other variations on punk
shame, homosexuality and androgyny have long been part of punk cul-
ture. The Velvet Underground—whose name is borrowed from Michael
Leigh’s book describing America’s sexual underground—recorded and
performed songs detailing homosexuality and sadomasochism, includ-
ing “I’m Waiting for the Man.” In the late 1970s and 1980s (an era
that featured Patti Smith’s lesbian elegy “Redondo Beach” and the
Ramones’ ode to male prostitution “53rd and 3rd”) punk’s sartorial
androgyny was notorious, as was its attraction for those in the gay and
lesbian community, as Dick Hebdige and Lucy O’Brien argue. And in
the 1990s patriarchy and heteronormativity were challenged outright
by the “Riot Grrrl” and “queercore” punk factions, respectively. Such
emphases by punk subjects not only authenticate one particular defini-
tion of “punk” but illustrate Lacan’s characterization, from The Other
Side of Psychoanalysis, of the “hysteric” whose “effeminate” subjectivity
is constructed in opposition to the masculine, patriarchal “master signi-
fier.” As Lacan summarizes in his Seminar XVII,

The subject himself, the hysteric, is alienated from the master

signifier as he whom this signifier divides [into fading and
meaning] . . . who refuses to make himself its body. [So] let’s
give him the gender under which this subject is most often
embodied. She . . . goes on a kind of strike. (94)

Like punk’s storied bondage fetish, Lacan’s characterization of hysterics

allows us not only to see punk as “castrated” or non-masculine—domi-
nated by the Father through his Law and prohibition of jouissance—but
as ashamed by and seeking a Kafkan/Deleuzian escape from his embar-
rassing machine. After all, even Deleuze and Guattari note Kafka’s
influence on the “homosexuality” of punk style and subjectivity. Inter-
preting Kafka’s fascination with tight clothing—including the buckled-
and-belted policemen of The Trial who are in turn whipped by a flogger
described as donning a “dark leather garment which left his throat and
a good deal of his chest and the whole of his arms bare” (84)—the two
philosophers argue that “Today still, these are the clothes of Ameri-
146 Brian James Schill

can sado-masochists” that signal in Kafka a “Homosexual effusion” and

“[reunite] all these points [of the assemblage, arrange] them in [a] spe-
cific machine which extends across the whole field of immanence, and
even anticipates it” (68–69).
Reading punks as a collection of Lacanian hysterics who update
K (whose own romantic exploits in each of Kafka’s novels imply K’s
repeated dishonor), we see how such “humiliated” subjects seek to move
past their emasculated subjectivity by “procuring” themselves through
several mobilizations: protesting the master’s bureaucratic discourse and
seeking escape from it; subverting the master’s modes of production and
distribution, including his Deleuzian war machine; “hystericizing” their
own disgraced discourse rather than repressing their anger, despair, and
anomie; and committing ritual violence, principally against the self.
Combining Deleuze and Lacan, then, are writers of punk coming-out
fiction. To J. D. Glass’s lesbian punk shame (which certainly built upon
Acker’s “punk” project) we add Lorrie Sprecher, whose punk narra-
tor Melany describes, in Sister Safety Pin (1994), her embarrassment
in browsing lesbian books at a women’s bookstore (33), her shame in
coming out (143), and her humiliated rage in even considering paying a
nominal bail fee following her arrest at a Gay Rights rally, rather than
remaining imprisoned for, as she interprets it, committing to her sexual
orientation and punk subculture (203–12). Furthermore, Hell’s second
novel, Godlike (2005), and Abram Himelstein and Jamie Schweser’s
Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing (1998) give voice to queer poets and les-
bian Riot Grrrls, respectively, and otherwise explore directly “punk”
homosexuality. Or, as narrator Rockets Redglare, a fourteen-year-old
runaway and disciple of Los Angeles punk bands Germs and X, describes
the homoerotic “secret” he harbors from his foster home days in Thorn
Hillsbery’s What We Do Is Secret (2005),

I reckon the secret’s the part you can’t tell. Like I can put in
words how scared Jake was that day, the physical signs I mean.
His lower lip trembled and a twitch started winking one of
his eyes and how the blood just drained from his face . . . . I
can’t tell you what it felt like, being there, touched by his fear,
and shame too it must have been, sharing it. Or what passed
between us, besides words. How for the first and only time,
after living in the same house for ten years, breaking bread and
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 147

breaking wind and breaking promises, we somehow connected.

(169)

More than any other punk novelist, Hillsbery achieves the tone
and complexity of the best of gay literature, for instance James Bald-
win’s Giovanni’s Room, which details its characters’ shame in their
orientation and their inability to escape the cultural dominant that
marginalizes them. Throughout Baldwin’s novel, narrator David paves
the way for much of queercore fiction, expressing a complicated shame
about his sexuality and admitting his emigration to France was a flight
from self. And as Jacques, one in a series of older gay men Baldwin char-
acterizes as undesirable, admits to David, “Me, I want to escape . . . this
dirty world, this dirty body” (35).
Upping the ante on Baldwin, Hillsbery includes in his novel a
scene wherein Rockets is induced by his friend Blitzer to hustle for the
first time. Seeking the means to purchase the pair’s drug of choice, Des-
oxyn, from a downtown dealer, Rockets and Blitzer solicit sex in The
Spotlight on North Cahuenga in Los Angeles (the equivalent of Guil-
laume’s Paris club in Giovanni’s Room) where they pick up Bill, “Dog
Groomer to the Stars” (and English version of Guillaume) (74). At
Bill’s uptown apartment, the groomer plays a Betamax cassette record-
ing of his late 1970s appearance on The Merv Griffin Show while Rock-
ets undresses, smokes a joint, and aggrandizes Bill’s wit and wisdom,
playing his agreed-upon role as voyeur to Bill’s self-grooming. As Bill
is finishing his task, Rockets finds himself nauseated by his apparently
heroin-laced marijuana cigarette; unable to repress the reflex, he vomits
on the groomer—“Right at the magic moment. No! Punk rock! Oki
Dog and fries!” (82). Horrified and ashamed, Rockets apologizes pro-
fusely, offering reparations for sullying Bill’s fantasy. Unscathed, Bill
himself apologizes for spiking the joint, insisting the young punk played
his part perfectly: “He puts two bills in my hand, and a business card. He
pats my shoulder. ‘You said all the right things’” (82). This assurance,
too, humiliates the young narrator profoundly, perhaps solidifying his
decision to flee Los Angeles at the novel’s close.
Like punks’ affinity for bondage gear—pregnant with Hege-
lian implications—this scene crystallizes how the punk coming-out
novel allows the analyst to read punk music culture, through Lacan
and Deleuze, as a hysteric “she” who, overflowing with surplus shame,
148 Brian James Schill

struggles (unsuccessfully) against her loss of jouissance-knowledge. The

guardian of this knowledge is the master-father, who speaks first and
articulates the punk subject’s knowledge and joy for her by control-
ling her means of production and ultimately keeping her bound to this
imbalanced state of being. The novels, in response, imply an escape,
however, allowing the producer to circumvent the re-Oedipalization
that punk music, Riot Grrrl for example, was never able to achieve—
Bikini Kill’s “Revolution Girl Style Now,” quickly becoming the Spice
Girls’ “Girl Power.”

a minor literature / a literature of minors

The sprawling, staccato tone of What We Do Is Secret serves as a
useful prelude to the examination of two final, concomitant, points
about punk fiction, illustrated in Deleuze and Guattari’s description
of Kafka’s minor literature as a new collection of statements that both
“insert themselves into old assemblages and break with them” (83).
Such a body of work is constructed by a minority group within a major-
ity language and retains three imperative features: it is highly deter-
ritorializing, political in nature, and collective. On this last point,
the “collectivity” of minor literature is a result of the scarcity of talent
within the collective—palpable in punk fiction. Ultimately, such a
lack is beneficial in that it “allows the conception of something other
than a literature of masters” so far as the enunciation of each individual
author “constitutes a common action . . . even if others aren’t in agree-
ment,” making literature itself a unifying, revolutionary enunciation
(17). With this argument in mind, take the following excerpts from
punk fiction, each of which advance punk’s tradition of, as Bikini Kill
singer Kathleen Hanna calls it, “fucking with language” (Sinker 64):
Hillsbery’s singsong, metered prose—potent with all varieties of cant,
referential winks, and neologisms—is a superlative example. As Rock-
ets muses in the novel’s second chapter, recalling the death of his hero
Darby Crash in Ronald Reagan’s America:

So okay, maybe shaving’s still a novelty to yours coolly, here

and now in the flutter and wow, mourning in America, year
one, A.D. After Darby. But am I over and I mean cradle to 45
Grave my thirst for the worst, oh most defiantly. (9)
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 149

And in his early, sardonically entitled Punk Novel (1980), Bad Al

goes out of his way to deterritorialize language and offend the sensibili-
ties of his readers (and publisher!):

So this ain’t a novel

So what
Look how ya grovel
Thinkin’ ya got somethin’ hot
So yer daddy’s
the man of the house
and late at night he
puts on a see-through blouse
and butters his ass and blows
out gas and makes a pass
at somebody else’s daddy. (12–13)

Although Faulkner it is not, Punk Novel raised the stakes for punk fiction
by blazing an early trail for a deterritorializing use of language in print
that reached its apex in Hillsbery and in Frank Portman’s coming-of-ager
King Dork (2006). The latter remains the premier punk bildungsroman
over and above the glut of such novels by or about punks, including Joe
Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned (2004), The Punk (written when Sams
was only fourteen), Cut My Hair, John King’s Human Punk (2001), John
Sheppard’s Small Town Punk (2007), and Joshua Furst’s The Sabotage
Café (2007), whose runaway punk protagonist not only admits to feeling
“queasy and shameful” (117) but at one point seeks to embody shame,
dismissing a more formal tattoo for “something harder on the eyes, some-
thing that would make people look away in shame . . . a splotch” (100).
In Portman’s debut novel, narrator Tom Henderson and his lone
friend, Sam, failing to fit in with the rest of the “fake” people who
comprise the Hillmont High student body, spend their days listening
to punk records, working on album covers for their imaginary bands,
avoiding the fists and insults of Hillmont jocks, and dozing through
insufferable public school literature courses that focus on improving
students’ vocabulary and laud J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,
upon which King Dork hinges and Tom has “been forced to read . . . like
three hundred times” (12). Putting aside Tom’s sardonic, intentional
150 Brian James Schill

mimicking of Holden Caulfield throughout—he repeats such Caul-

fieldian lines as “I swear to God” (72, 73, 110, 120) and “[goddam]
phony” (28, 167, 185, 246)—what allows Dork to rise above its cohorts
is how Portman explicitly characterizes his young punk as given to
an at times brilliant misuse of language. The device ultimately deter-
ritorializes not simply Salinger’s novel, but his entire tongue and the
industry that exploits its fans and fastens hysterics such as Tom to their
heritage, forcing him, for instance, to find symbolism in the fact that
he is reading his deceased father’s dog-eared copy of Catcher. When
Tom’s mother discusses with Tom her late husband’s relationship with
Tom’s pedophilic associate principal Teone (Holden’s Mr. Antolini)
near the novel’s end, Tom ejaculates almost instinctually that Teone is,
among other soubriquets, “mal-efficient.” Having meant “maleficent,”
Tom follows both Lacan’s and Deleuze’s lead, noting sarcastically “The
trick is to make the mispronunciation have a totally different mean-
ing from the correctly pronounced word. My education was starting to
bear fruit” (266).
This anti-Oedipal inversion of the master’s language has been part
of the novel all along; earlier Tom and his classmates mime their Eng-
lish teacher in turning “bête noire” into “bait-no-are-eh” and “wanton”
into “wawntawn” (16). Later Tom translates from French a note, tucked
inside one of his father’s books, containing the term ramonée, a conju-
gation of the infinitive ramoner, or “to sweep a chimney” (174). In the
context of the note, Tom discovers that his father was not a chimney
sweep, but used the term as a sexual metaphor. The significance of this
reference in the context of punk—the Ramones—requires little eluci-
dation. So determined is Portman to deterritorialize Salinger, in fact,
that his novel reads not only as a Catcher parody, but a fatal proxy. The
novel’s hardcover publisher Delacorte made brilliant use of King Dork’s
content by appropriating the 1960s-era crimson-covered Catcher (pub-
lished by Bantam Books, Delacorte’s sister firm—both currently operate
under the Random House umbrella), the title of which has been rubbed
out and replaced with a blue-pen-scribbled “King Dork” on the sur-
rogate (Fig. 1). In this way Portman’s novel literally erases the original
Catcher.
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 151

Fig. 1: Images Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

King Dork cover design by Angela Carlino.
152 Brian James Schill

And in perhaps the most complete assemblage of these enun-

ciations and generic types, then, Michael Muhammad Knight’s The
Taqwacores (2004)—“a Catcher In the Rye for young Muslims” (back
cover)—describes the growing pains and various embarrassments (of
accent, religious extremism, and skin color) of narrator Yusef Ali, a
Pakistani American student living in a Muslim punk house in upstate
New York. The novel opens, following an epigraph entitled “Muham-
mad Was A Punk Rocker,” with Yusef stumbling into his living room
late one night to find, among other passed-out punks, a spike-haired
punker kneeling silently on a flattened pizza box and facing an east-
erly hole in the wall (baseball-bat-induced) indicating qiblah—the way
to Mecca. Explaining the origin of term “tawqacore”—a portmanteau
combining the Arabic word for “piety” or “divine consciousness” with
hardcore—one of Yusef’s friends suggests the pair head out west some-
time to catch a few punk shows:

Get a van, make like an interstate jam’aat . . . . And along the

way we’d round up all the queer alims, drunk imams, punk aya-
tollahs, masochistic muftis, junkie shaykhs, retarded mullahs,
and gutter-mouthed maulanas we can find, just load up the van
’til we can’t fit no more and then have guys hangin’ off the side
like in Rawal-fuckin’pindi! Shit man, down the i-90. And it all
ends in Khalifornia. (28)

Challenging Portman’s best effort, Knight takes pains, with much

effrontery and on behalf of both punks and Muslim Americans, to twist,
invert, and deconstruct his parent tongue and culture both linguisti-
cally and thematically, forcing his way into the master’s discourse in
order to disassemble and escape it. Thus are the grammar and syntax of
punk fiction necessarily extreme, difficult, and “bad”; of this there is no
better example than the aforementioned anthology. In taking the mas-
ter’s language and form to its limit, punk fiction ceases to be the repre-
sentation of punk (a book “about” punk) but is itself “punk.”5 Through
a flexible, creative use of diction, that is, such enunciation itself deter-
ritorializes, resists, and offends the master-father. Taken as a whole,
and looking to the typology outlined here, punk fiction—whose widely
inconsistent authors each speak for a community—forms an appropri-
ated assemblage of literature that expresses its alienation, anger, shame,
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 153

and anxiety with both the status quo and itself more effectively than
punk’s too easily re-Oedipalized, effluvial, pop music culture. The result
is a cacophonous and “irrational” corpus of texts that actively refuse
the master’s discourse and, like Kafka, resists the urge to surrender to
nationalist impulses or an obscene, trite symbolism.
Punks accomplish all of this through an overbearing emphasis on
shame. More than any punk record or performance, that is, punk fiction
both states its community’s difficulties more productively and improves
upon its forebears’ arguments by expressing, even cultivating, punks’
deep sense of shame not only in being itself, but in their inability to dis-
engage themselves effectively from the master’s discourse—which the
typically white, middle-class punk community reluctantly recognizes
as its birthright. To understand the radical dynamics of this move, we
mine specifically Lacan’s Seminar XVII in more detail, the conclusion
of which provides both an ontological and political rationale for what
punks’ literary expression of shame accomplishes.

(h)ontology
With the May 1968 student protests as its backdrop, The Other
Side of Psychoanalysis sketches out Lacan’s four psychoanalytical dis-
courses—the master, hysteric, university, and analyst. After wondering,
in his final lecture, why his hysteric audience is not more ashamed of its
recent emotionalism, Lacan asks why the master’s discourse—capital-
ism—has maintained its power, in spite of his audience’s disquiet (181).
To begin an answer in advance of Deleuze, Lacan slogs into a homily on
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), noting that despite the fact that
Hegel locates Absolute Knowledge with the slave, it is evident nearly
two centuries after Hegel that in no way is the world “approaching the
ascendancy of the slave” (171). But if Hegel—“the sublime representa-
tive of . . . university knowledge” (171)—is mistaken, the slave is forced
into two related conclusions: either the hysteric is not the location of
Absolute Knowledge and her ascendancy is a sham, and/or the master
is cheating the hysteric, pilfering her knowledge for himself. This is
the hysteric’s embarrassing reality; rather, because any knowledge she
might produce is ultimately recuperated by the master—Deleuze’s re-
Oedipalization—the hysteric loses both knowledge and Truth, remain-
ing forever bound.
154 Brian James Schill

Nevertheless, advises Lacan, as the “hole from which the master

signifier arises,” shame is useful to the hysteric if she would only enter
that hole (189). What capitalism tends toward—Lacan and Deleuze and
Guattari all note—is convincing the sequestered, bound subject that
pride and value are located exclusively in individual freedom, need, and
accumulation, and in the satisfaction of an ultimately insatiable series
of evolving desires. In so doing, the master’s discourse also eliminates
shame as a consequence of meaningful being in pursuit of accumu-
lation and gratification. This is why Lacan says that his audience of
embarrassed (and ultimately bourgeois) hysterics must become shame.
In a shameless market culture where affect, and perhaps meaningful-
ness, are increasingly prohibited by the master-father, to embody the
shame of desire itself and any emotional outburst that might result is
to immerse oneself into being and more effectively muffle the master’s
voice. End this prideful countercultural nonsense, Lacan implores of
his seminar students; stop hystericizing and be the masters you were
born to be—but do so with a self-conscious embarrassment, and throw
this humiliation in the masters’ (and thus your own) face. In making
this argument, Lacan posits a neologism, pairing the French “shame”
(honte) with ontology to produce hontology; shame is meaningful being,
and the hysteric does herself a favor in recognizing and utilizing this
notion (180).
Such advice has been adopted by punk novelists; unable to escape
their riveted, faded shame via punk music, they have turned to a collec-
tive and political form of enunciation not only recognized by academy
and industry, but less limiting or “co-optable” than pop music as such by
virtue of its “tangibility,” articulating their collective shame by objec-
tifying and normalizing it. That is, punk fiction is symbolic of what the
Lacan of Écrits called a “cut” in the real offered by language (“Direc-
tion” 260–61). The Taqwacores especially signals how such inscribed
enunciation can better help its producers and consumers generate
new, significant lines of escape. Writing in 2003 Knight imagined his
novel in advance of any actual, identifiable Muslim-punk subculture
in the United States. It was this collection of words, the object-novel
itself, say members of the movement’s most popular bands, The Komi-
nas (“Bastards” in Urdu), Secret Trial Five, and Vote Hezbollah, that
inspired them to form Muslim punk bands and start a genuine—“non-
symbolic”—scene (Maag).
 Shame & the Politics of Punk Fiction 155

Punk writers such as Knight transcend not only their musical but
literary forebears who merely identified—but neither engaged nor over-
came—the postwar subject’s hysteric urge to escape her increasingly
alienated self and her embarrassment in riveted being. After all, did not
the “Beat” writers, in the end, fail to salute and exploit the shame they
write into their narrators? Salinger’s reclusion reflected his acceptance
of the master’s segregating discourse, as did Kerouac’s prototypically
American individualism and preoccupation with (sexual) self-fulfill-
ment, long ago identified by Michel Foucault as merely a capitulation
to the bourgeois economy’s “deployment of sexuality” in the service of
its control of bodies. Baldwin—although more piercing, provocative,
and politically relevant than his contemporaries—did escape for much
of his adult life, and it is this expatriate’s flight that betrays the tension
in his novels about marginalized characters who seek endlessly a line of
escape only to fail.
Recognizing such failures, contemporary punk novelists—who
embrace, embody, and objectify their shame—better challenge the mas-
ter’s discourse. Especially important in this regard are Hell, Portman,
Hillsbery, and Knight, whose novels have been the most deterritorial-
izing of the genre, dismantling the master’s assemblage by enunciating
their shame on a public scale far less recoupable than either punk music
or Beatnik prose, both of which find themselves riveted to the contem-
porary culture industry. If these writers are any indication, then, punk
novelists—whose embarrassing work first emerged alongside Margaret
Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s market obsession—have recognized
the errors of their ancestors both musical and literary and are more
effectively pressing the critique of a shameless, global, capitalism that
has only ballooned since punk’s birth.
University of North Dakota

notes
1. Quincy M.E. aside, several popular American television programs from the
1980s dealt with the lead characters’ embarrassing “punk problem” for an episode,
including Mama’s Family, Alice, and Silver Spoons. The music cited in this essay was
originally released on vinyl lp and cd, but most of it now can be found online.
2. His biographer would go on to document Cobain’s chronic shame in his
sexual self (Cross 49, 55, 230), drug addiction (260, 275), and success (4).
156 Brian James Schill

3. See “The Function and Field in Speech and Language” for Lacan’s descrip-
tion of the nom du père that Deleuze and Guattari apply to Kafka.
4. “Where It [the Id] was, I [the Ego] shall come into being.”
5. Certainly this argument could also be applied, in another essay, to authors
whose form, if not content, is “punk,” including Burroughs, Acker, Mark Amerika,
and Ouvroir de Littérature Pontertielle authors such as Harry Mathews, et al.

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