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.

The Book Of Dave will be published in the USA on November 28th by Bloomsbury USA. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

From Publishers Weekly
[Starred Review] Self, the provocative British raconteur who used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to map London (How the Dead Live, 2000) is taking another literary shot across his home city’s bow. In his gleaming new puzzlebook, Self creates a dystopian future London, ruled by a cynosure of priests, lawyers and the monarchy. He invents Arpee, the musical language they speak that is based on a sacred text, The Book of Dave, which also serves, satirically, as the society’s moral and legal foundation. And who is this deity named Dave? An embittered London cabbie from the distant past – the year 2000. As the book opens, the kingdom of Ingerland is ruled by the elite and ruthless PCO. (Self is riffing on the Public Carriage Office, London’s transit authority.) People live according to The Book of Dave, which was recovered after a great flood wiped out London in the MadeinChina era. Flashing back more than 500 years, cabbie Dave Rudman types out his idiosyncratic, misogynist, bile-tinged fantasies while in a fit of antidepressant-induced psychosis and battling over the custody of his child, Carl. His screed becomes both a blueprint for a harsh childrearing climate (mummies and daddies living apart, with the kids splitting time between them) and a full-blown cosmology.

As Self moves between eras, he divides the book between Dave’s story and the story of the great Flying (slang in the future for “heresy”). The latter involves the appearance of the Geezer (prophet) on the island of Ham (Hampshire) in 508 A.D. (after the “purported discovery of the Book of Dave”), who claims to have found a second Book of Dave annulling the “tiresome strictures” of the first. He is imprisoned by the PCO and mangled beyond recognition, but, 14 years later, his son, Carl Davish, travels from Ham to New London, determined to create a less cruel world that responds to the “mummyself” within. Self’s invention of a future language (including dialect Mokni, which combines cabby slang, cockney and the Esperanto of graffiti – and, yes, a dictionary is provided) is wickedly brilliant, with surprising moments of childlike purity punctuating the lexicon’s crude surface (a “fuckoffgaff” is a “lawyerly place,” while “wooly” means sheep). Self is endlessly talented, and in crossbreeding a fantasy novel with a scorching satire of contemporary mores, he’s created a beautiful monster of the future that feeds on the neurotic present – and its parents.

From Booklist
[Starred Review] This searing satire maps the unraveling of London cabbie Dave Rudman’s life – and the resulting Book of Dave he prints on metal pages and buries in his former backyard after his ex-wife cuts off visitations with his son. Meanwhile, sometime in the twenty-sixth century or beyond (dating of the period is pegged to “the purported discovery of The Book of Dave”), England has entered a second Dark Age; the country, now called Ing, is broken apart by rising seas and spiritually bankrupted by the twisted teachings of Dave, which mix mad misogynistic dictates with the legendary knowledge of London streets (”the runs and the points”) that the city’s cabdrivers must internalize. On the former heights of Hampstead, now known as the isle of Ham, villagers live side by side with the gentle motos – walrus-like creatures who talk like lisping human children, products of twenty-first-century genetic engineering.

As present-day Rudman slowly reclaims his life, the future sons of Ham seek out Dave’s rumored second book – the one recanting his earlier ravings and giving mummies and daddies permission to love each other again. But as Dave’s ex prophetically muses, “everyday life was made up of a series of small botched actions, which, although instantly forgotten, nonetheless ruined everything.” This is as rousing an indictment of organized religion – and especially fundamentalism – as readers are likely to encounter in the post-9/11 canon. (Frank Sennett)

“It’s hard not to put Riddley Walker at the centre of The Book of Dave, if only because, like Self’s novel, it is written in a constructed post-disaster dialect, with its own glossary. But the difference between the two men is anger, and how anger manages the comic sensibility. Typically, Hoban’s amused gaze hunts and pecks from place to place and, though it never settles anywhere for long, eventually assembles a sort of magpie nest of cultural items from which the possibility of humanity can hatch. Self is obsessive. His intellect swings across its subjects like a headlight, and, once it locks on, won’t let go until it’s seen what it wants us to see. There’s a great rationality – it’s almost as dismissive as J G Ballard’s or John Gray’s – and great rage, but is there any of the tenderness Hoban always achieves? Well, in a weird way, this time, there is. Michelle and Dave aren’t caricatures. They’ve messed up their lives, but they’re encouraged to stumble towards some sort of self-knowledge. This time even the psychologists – Zack Busner makes a predictable appearance – seem benign, and achieve something like a cure.”

Read the full review

Will Self – The Book Of Dave

The Book Of Dave is published on June 1st 2006