A recurring trope with regards to death in our culture is that of its threatening inconspicuousness; we are, for the most part, distanced from the physical processes of death, and unprepared to deal with it on its arrival. However, while this is in one sense a recent phenomenon, this trope has in fact been explored long before the rise and fall of modernism. Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, uses an anamorphic skull to foreground the theme of death as a concealed presence in life. Viewed head-on, the skull is an insignificant blur, but from the side, it asserts its true appearance, reminding the viewer of their own mortality. Similarly, Self crystallises this societal anxiety in the form of Lithy, a lithopedian foetus belonging to Lily Bloom, the cantankerous protagonist of How the Dead Live. Like Holbein’s skull, Lithy’s unknown existence in the abdominal folds of Lily Bloom acts a symbol of death’s dormant, silent residence, erupting in cacophonous karaoke only when Bloom herself kicks the bucket.

Even the cover of the novel delves into this compulsion to hide our mortality. The Bloomsbury paperback edition of How the Dead Live features Damien Hirst’s sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: a title that neatly summarises the anxiety that we have been considering. In an earlier work, Pharmacy, Hirst lays bare the pharmaceutical industry’s promises to sweep death under the carpet by eerily recreating a high-street chemist’s, empty save for the corpses of flies killed by a bug-zapper. Similarly, Self, and his self-proclaimed Buddhist allegory How the Dead Live, in which the afterlife consists of a banal, karmic mirror to one’s living years, foregrounds the failures of this materialistic approach through a comedic normalisation of non-Western spirituality.

Indeed, as the name suggests, the supernatural Dulston is as monotonous as any penumbral province of the living, suggesting that Judeo-Christian promises of the afterlife have upset the natural symmetry between life and death, even if it is, in the case of Lily Bloom, a symmetry of suburban ennui. That Bloom’s demise from cancer is somewhat sadistically drawn out over a considerable chunk of the novel’s narrative arc further conveys Self’s spiritual/satirical intentions. In one review of the novel, the character of Bloom is criticised as being merely the “construction of an entire life, just so we can get to the punch line of her death”. However, viewed in the light of Self’s adoption of Buddhist spirituality, and of what he himself notes as the “perennial” influence of The Tibetan Book of the Dead on his work, then this accusation becomes a pithy comment on the use of non-Western notions of mortality to foreground our own preoccupations with death, and the detrimental shadow they often cast over life.

Moving on to consider the role of the corpse in popular culture, we see how Self’s transgressive impulses inevitably lead to lashings of coronary prose. Considering that Self counts JG Ballard, an author who frequently recounted with glee his formative dissection lessons at university, it’s not surprising to find that Self has followed suit in his own exploration of the cadaver. However, what is particularly interesting in Self’s graphic descriptions of the corpse is his awareness of their greater social symbolism. No more so is this prevalent than in Self’s depictions of The Motos, a race of man-pig mutants that are ritually slaughtered by the future society imagined in The Book of Dave. In a theological debate between two of the novel’s characters, The Motos are referred to as “sacred creatures”, a description that apparently clashes with the “spraying pink mist” of their execution. However, converting the human body into a symbolic site, of which an entire society can claim ownership, is one of the most prevalent ways in which death and the corpse have been historically engaged with. Indeed, Self cites the description in Samuel Pepys’ diary of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison as an influence on the “maroon tides” of the Moto slaughter, and their greater social significance; the paradoxical revulsion/attraction of the dead body is intensified by the corpse’s status as an object of state power.

The role of Moto slaughter in the primitive mythology of Ham reflects that of sacral kingship in the formation of ancient states, as explored in Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The Hamsters, with their Fathers-4-Justice-scavenged religion, typify the early stages of theological development, a stage in which, as both Frazer and Self demonstrate, the sacrifice of the human body plays a pivotal role in establishing fertility rituals. In the execution-free Britain of today, Self’s own consideration of the symbolic corpse is directed towards the cult of celebrity. Self interpreted the media coverage of Jade Goody’s death from cancer as indicative of our morbid obsession with:

“… death, and more specifically, our collective need to at once gaze fixedly upon the memento mori of other people’s extinction, while carefully averting our eyes from our own extinction and that of our loved ones.”

For Self, the celebrity corpse is one over which we all attempt to claim ownership; just as Goody’s body was appropriated in life to function as a symbol of countless disparaging social stereotypes (the chav, the underclass racist, the blonde bimbo, etc), so her death saw her fashioned into another set of exploitable symbols, many of which (such as the need for repeated cervical smears, and the speed at which cancer can spread), foreground our attraction/revulsion to the human body as both a distraction from our own physical vulnerability, and a reminder of medicine’s often devastating shortcomings.

Will Self is an author who continues to devote reams of unrelenting and richly imagistic prose to the exploration of our most private neuroses. Despite this, the increasingly public taboo of death and the corpse is one that is, as we have seen, equally pervasive in his fiction. Indeed, as Brian Finney notes, Self’s first novel, My Idea of Fun, opens with the narrator declaring to the reader that his “idea of fun” entails decapitating a commuter and “addressing” himself to the corpse. It seems that, in this inaugural passage, Self prophesises one of the recurring themes of his taboo explorations; as a keen psychogeographer, Self seemingly admits that he cannot help but wander into the most widespread of psychic territories in our culture; that of death and the corpse.

An essay by Joe Barton, a final-year undergraduate in English language and literature at Newcastle University.

If you have an essay on any aspect of Will Self’s fiction, perhaps degree or postgrad work, that you’d like to post on this site, please email us at info@will-self.com for consideration.

Nick Cave risked upsetting his friend Will Self, who loathes writers who read out anything other than the first chapter, by reading a section towards the end of his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, at a packed Old Market Hall in Hove on Wednesday night.

For much of the evening it was the Cave and Self deadpan double act. Self asked him why he came back to write prose after 20 years since his debut, And the Ass Saw the Angel. “I got asked to do it,” was Cave’s straight-bat reply.
“So, Madame Bovary. C’est moi. Is Bunny Munro you?” asked Self.
“No,” replied Cave.

Not since JG Ballard’s Crash (1973) has a character been so obsessed by a celebrity’s pudenda – the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne’s rather than Elizabeth Taylor’s. “Those descriptions are dark and invasive,” Cave admitted. As part of his book tour, he went to Ottawa recently. “I was terrified,” he said. “I’m sure the publishers sent me there deliberately.”

Talking about his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, published 20 years ago, the ever-besuited Cave said that there had been no distinction between himself and the character, and that it had been a very destructive and unhealthy process. “It took 20 years to realise that writing a novel needn’t be life-threatening,” he said.

There was a rather tortuous question relating to something Cave said earlier this year about Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, being better equipped than he is to be the “voice of the people”. “I was being ironic,” he said, as if it was all too obvious. “I don’t like being preached to by a millionaire.”

Cave started out writing The Death of Bunny Munro as a screenplay, when he was asked by the director John Hillcoat to write a story about a travelling salesman. Self, who also has experience of adapting a screenplay into a novel (Dorian: An Imitation), asked Cave facetiously, and rhetorically, “Did you just widen the margins and delete the references to ‘Exterior. Day.’?” Cave emphasised how’d he’d set it in Brighton because he wouldn’t have to go too far when they were filming it.

It hasn’t really been said that much in reviews of the book, but The Death of Bunny Munro is also a satire on British lad culture, on the worldview of Zoo magazine. Cave agreed with Self’s assessment of Bunny Munro as “a monstrous man” in the mode of Humbert Humbert or Patrick Bateman, but that nevertheless “there’s something of ourselves in them”.

Cave displays a fondness, and talent, for neologisms, especially using nouns as verbs – “tarzanning the curtain”, “goblinned” – and much is made of the name of a local concrete mix company, Dudman … At one point, Cave even repeats the phrase “baby blasted mothers” from the Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!.

The Death of Bunny Munro is a novel, an audiobook and an app – Cave said that he was very proud of the audiobook (he’s a big fan of them, apparently) and spoke about the 3D work that Arup Acoustics did for the audio. “It’s spatialised to give it an hallucinatory feel,” he said, slightly awe-struck by what they’d done.

There was a rather detailed question from the audience noting the similarities with Self’s 1993 novel My Idea of Fun (which also features a sex killer in Brighton, Self realises – seemingly for the first time), but Cave admitted that he hadn’t read this particular novel of Self’s and said to him in mock exasperation, “You could have told me!”

“There are several ends to the book in a way,” said Cave, diplomatically trying to silence the groans when someone in the audience gave away something key to the plot. Self, typically, was more abrasive: “You should get out less often,” he told the questioner.

Chris Hall

My Idea Of Fun
– Will Self

Observer
‘This is a brilliant first novel, obscene, funny, opulently written, and, of course, agonisingly moral’

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
‘No one else I can think of writes about contemporary Britain with such elan, energy and witty intelligence. Rejoice’

“I think the previous two reviews are evidence enough that this book needs to be read…anything that can sway opinion so widely demands attention. It’s a dirty, smart, sickening, hilarious book, and no matter which (if any) of these four descriptions you agree with you have to admit that it is a brilliant piece of work. I read it a few years ago and it is now in the possession of an acrimonious ex girlfriend, so I’m just here to buy it again. I strongly urge you to also. ” – A Reader

Read all Amazon.co.uk reader reviews

“Mr. Self’s “Cock & Bull: Twin Novellas” and the story collection “The Quantity Theory of Insanity” were prologue. Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. For intelligence and ambition, for inventiveness, comedy, heartbreak and ferocity, for his representation of the human interior as occupied and vandalized by science and business, Will Self belongs in their company.”

Read the full review