Will Self

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Will Self on the writing of Dorian – Guardian, July 2003

January 29, 2006

It’s a wild, Wilde world

Will Self knows something about repressed, homosexual, aristocratic drug addicts

In 1998 I was approached by Joan Bakewell and her then husband, Jack Emery, to consider doing a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Some money came from Jack and more from Channel 4. Without this commission I don’t think that I would ever have considered adapting Wilde, let alone re-novelising him.

Rereading the original I saw that one of the things which I’d always found curious about the novel could be the springboard for a new approach. In Wilde’s Dorian 16 years pass, but the only way they are measured is through the moral dissolution of the protagonist – no social, cultural or historical change is registered. It occurred to me that if I wanted to set my adaptation approximately 100 years after Wilde’s (and there were good reasons for this; I’d always viewed the novel as a strange anticipation of the shape of a liberated gay culture) then there were two concurrent significant 16-year periods available. It was 16 years from the first stirring of the HIV/Aids epidemic until the introduction of Haart (Highly active anti-retroviral therapy), which spelt the end of public perception of the disease as a threat in the west. And these were the same 16 years as the ones between the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer and the latter’s death.

I began work on the script, taking as my model Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I. The film is great, but arguably the script is still greater, a literary work in its own right with superb – almost Dostoevskian – stage directions. Screenwriting friends kept talking to me about useful computer programs, but I eschewed them; it didn’t seem such a hardship to type “INT DAY” every few lines. Other friends would bang on about various adaptations of Dorian – there have been a lot of them over the years – but I ignored them as well. What was the point? Setting aside the fact that I was writing an adaptation – and therefore the material was a given – I’ve never understood the mania writers have for examining the similar works of others. In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays. As for the business of writing a screenplay as against prose fiction, it didn’t seem such a big deal. You just make the margins wider and type “INT DAY” or “EXT NIGHT” where appropriate.

Nevertheless, despite finding Emery perfectly simpatico, and meeting with an equally simpatico John Maybury, who was interested in directing the film, I found work on my Dorian script slow to the point of being tranquillised. Having spent years more or less confident that what I typed would end up being what the reader encountered, I found the idea that there would eventually be input to my script from accountants, men wearing sleeveless anoraks and (gulp!) actors impossible to stomach. I broke off to write a novel, a non-fiction work and then to edit a collection of my journalism.

Eventually I became so late with the project and poor Emery was so despondent that I seized upon the only possible way of completing it: I’d done about two-thirds of it in script form, why not make the margins narrower and delete “INT DAY” and “EXT NIGHT” where necessary? Then I’d end up with a recast Dorian Gray all ready for Jack et al to adapt for the screen. Besides, the whole business of my work appearing on the screen has always seemed highly problematic to me. I hold with Martin Amis’s dictum: “Don’t believe they’ve made a film of your book until you rent the video.”

So, Dorian was born. I found it easy enough to finish my re-novelisation, and sometimes, but not always, ease is a good sign. Overall, I’m fairly pleased with the book, and satisfied with the wide disparity in its critical reception. As dear Oscar remarked: “When the critics are divided the artist is in accord with himself.”

Setting my version in the aristocratic, gay, druggie milieu of the 1980s wasn’t too difficult, as I’d spent quite a lot of the 80s in – surprise, surprise – an aristocratic, gay, druggie milieu. So it was with considerable annoyance that I confronted a member of an audience whom I read to at last year’s Soho festival (upon hardback publication). This woman said to me: “I enjoyed your reading, but I find your characters altogether unbelievable. I mean people like Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray couldn’t possibly exist, could they?” Ignoring the fact that these (fictional) characters were Wilde’s rather than my own, I snarled at her: “Just how many repressed, homosexual, aristocratic drug addicts have you hung around with in your time?” And when she conceded “None”, I rested my case.

[Link to the original article]

How The Dead Live – New York Times

January 29, 2006

Tom Shone, October 2000

“Will Self’s new novel consists of a monologue by a Jewish mother who goes by the name of Bloom. So naturally, the first thing you do upon picking up the book is flick to the final page to see what the last word is. And sure enough, instead of ”yes” — the word used by James Joyce to end ”Ulysses” — we find the contemporary negative ”Not,” as used by Mike Myers in his canonical postmodern masterpiece, ”Wayne’s World.” A serious literary allusion, or a snickering joke? A dialogue with a classic or mere punkish self-adornment — the literary equivalent of Johnny Rotten wearing a T-shirt of Queen Elizabeth? Practiced Self readers will know that the answer is all of the above, with a good helping of impudence thrown in for good measure.”

Read the full review

The Book Of Dave – The Observer’s “essential reading” predictions for 2006

January 29, 2006

Alex Clark, January 2006

“In rather less sombre vein, Douglas Coupland’s jPod (Bloomsbury, June) is a typically satirical take on the new breed of supergeeks and, in itself, an update of the bestselling Microserfs. Meanwhile, Will Self’s new novel, The Book of Dave (Viking, March), takes us to a post-apocalyptic London in which a cabbie’s memoirs become the unexpected inspiration for a new religion. Look out also for new books from Helen Dunmore, Alan Warner, AM Homes, Jake Arnott and Clare Morrall, and a much-anticipated debut in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (Fourth Estate, May).”

Read the full article

The Sweet Smell Of Excess: Will Self, Bataille and Transgression

January 29, 2006

A lengthy and coherent analysis of Will Self’s work and its similarities with the writing of Georges Bataille by Brian Finney:

“Self sees himself paradoxically both as a moral satirist and as a social rebel who is more interested in shocking his middle-class readers than in reforming them. ‘What excites me,’ he has said, ‘is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable’ (Glover 15).

Self shares with earlier thinkers and writers of the twentieth century this conception of being born into an unstable world. In particular, his work evokes the ideas of Georges Bataille who felt that social taboos and their transgression were wholly interdependent. Indeed, Bataille argues, it is only by transgressing taboos that we simultaneously contrive to endorse or modify them. Each is dependent on the other: ‘Organised transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is’ (Eroticism 65). Bataille is representative of a complex view of the modern condition that reconciles Self’s need to shock us in his seemingly arbitrary scenes of animal torture and human excess with his claim to be occupying the high moral ground of the moralist. How else are we to understand a writer who talks approvingly about ‘the social and spiritual value of intoxication’ (Junk Mail 19)? In a century disfigured by events such as the holocaust, Hiroshima and ethnic cleansing, Self maintains that the modern writer is driven to parallel forms of excess and transgression:

ours is an era in which the idea and practice of decadence – in the Nietzschean sense – has never been more clearly realized … [F]ar from representing a dissolution of nineteenth-century romanticism, the high modernism of the mid-twentieth century … has both compounded and enhanced the public image of the creative artist as deeply self-destructive, highly egotistic, plangently amoral and, of course, the nadir of anomie. (Junk Mail 58)”


Read the complete essay

How The Dead Live – Guardian Review

January 29, 2006

Elaine Showalter, June 2000

In How the Dead Live, Self has transformed one part of this premise into a full-length account of necropolitan London. In his satiric geography, the young dead – the “morbidly mobile” – go to find work in the States or the Gulf, but the older dead simply live on either north of the river in Dulston or south of the river in Dulburb, their placements assigned by the Deatheaucracy Office. Their mornings are busy with the Full Dead breakfast and their evenings filled with the 12-step meetings of PD (Personally Dead). Freddy Ayer, Ronny Laing and Laurence Olivier have Dulston flats; almost all the dead smoke, drink, and sleep around, and all they need to keep up with the urban deathstyle of the rich and famous is Goodbye! magazine.

Read the full review

How The Dead Live – Observer Review

January 29, 2006

Adam Mars-Jones, June 2000

“Beneath the headlines, Self’s style is no less contorted, without even a second-hand immediacy: ‘Fleet feet fled through flesh’ runs one sentence. There’s a fatal blurring even in relatively straightforward descriptions: ‘He was bald save for a horseshoe of brownish furze, wore a white T-shirt, the trousers from a long-since dismembered suit, and a scowling mien on his crushed, Gladstone face.’ Is wearing a scowling mien on your face really any different from scowling? And hasn’t the dictionary meaning of ‘furze’ – a plant with yellow flowers and thick, green spines, a synonym for gorse – been supplanted by irrelevant associations, as if it was a portmanteau word meaning furry fuzz or fuzzy fur?

That Self can do better than this is shown by the 20-odd pages set in Australia. Lily’s junkie daughter, Natasha, succumbs to a visionary spell and so does her maker. The scales fall from his eyes and he is able to render landscape, culture, character again. Here he risks one of the few purely lyrical sentences in the book, his homage perhaps to the famous passage in Ulysses about the heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit: ‘…stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity’. The moment is almost fine enough to survive being repeated word for word six pages later.”

Read the full review

Dorian – Observer review

January 29, 2006

Jonathan Heawood, September 2002

“He brings events forward to June 1981, the summer of the Royal Wedding and the Brixton riots, a time when, according to Self, ‘Britain was in the process of burning most of its remaining illusions’. In this world of style and insubstantiality, Basil Hallward’s oil painting has become an installation called Cathode Narcissus, in which Dorian’s divine form revolves endlessly across a bank of video monitors. Where The Picture of Dorian Gray both defined and mocked the decadent movement, Self aspires to do the same for postmodernism. Where Wilde had Huysmans, Self has Warhol. Where Wilde epitomised aestheticism, Dorian: An Imitation is riddled with reflexivity. And where the original novel was compelling but only incidentally amusing, Self’s adaptation is brutal and sometimes hysterical.”

Read the full review

Perfidious Man – Guardian Review

January 29, 2006

Reviewed by James Hopkin, December 2000

“This book of photographs and text is an intriguing collaboration between the photographer David Gamble and that portraitist of a grotesque humanity, Will Self. Gamble has snapped all manner of men at work and play, from celebrities and artists (Hockney, Hawking, Bruno, Crisp) to hippies, sailors, drinkers and protesters.For the most part the pictures are unposed and spontaneous, framed to give us a glimpse of masculinity in process. Or should that be in crisis?”

Read the full review

Dorian interview – The Observer, September 2002

January 29, 2006

Robert McCrum talks to Will Self

“Observer: What’s the relationship of Dorian to The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Will Self: It’s an imitation – and a homage. As a complete and professed rewrite of a classic, I think it’s unique. The Picture of Dorian Gray is the prophecy and Dorian is the fulfilment.

Obs: What gave you the idea?

WS: The idea came through the suggestion that I adapt Wilde’s Dorian Gray as a film. The minute I started looking at Wilde’s original, this idea came unbidden. I’d never have approached the idea of doing it as a novel, I approached it as the idea of doing a screen adaptation, and when the screen adaptation ran into the sand, through my own inability to complete it, I decided the only way to get the thing out was to turn it back into prose.”

Read the full interview

Things To Do In Dulston When You’re Dead – Will Self How The Dead Live Eye.net interview 2000

January 29, 2006

Andre Mayer turns in a good piece on Self for Canadian magazine Eye Weekly:

“It has always been interesting to me to create a completely alternative set of worlds for my fiction to take place in,” Self admits in a phone interview from his home in London. “It’s so much more interesting to write about something that is both real and seemingly unreal. It places the reader in a state of questioning about reality itself.”

Too true. Self’s version of the great beyond — like his myriad spins on life — is by turns ridiculous and banal. The afterlife is governed by the shadowy Deathocracy, which, as you’d expect, is an agency of do-nothing buffoons. Meanwhile, Dulston’s deceased inhabitants still hold jobs. They go about their normal daily functions — eating, smoking, shagging — despite the fact that all their senses are impaired, which seems to be Self’s way of saying that modern life has gotten cruelly perfunctory. It’s inspired satire from a writer who is notoriously acidic, but Self insists the message behind How the Dead Live has been largely misread.

“I’ve read review after review about how this is a book that proposes that when you die in London, you move to a strange, crepuscular suburb called Dulston,” Self says, quick to dispel the novel’s alleged universality: “This isn’t what the book says at all. This book is about what happens to Lily Bloom when she dies. This is her death, and the levels of reality that are contained within the book are connected to her psyche.”

Read the full interview online

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Elaine
Will Self's latest book Elaine will be published in hardback by Grove on September 5 2024 in the UK and September 17 2024 in the USA.

You can pre-order at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Will’s Previous Books

Will Self - Will
Will
More info
Amazon.co.uk

  Will Self - Phone
Phone
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Shark
Shark
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Umbrella
Umbrella
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
More info
Amazon.co.uk
  Walking To Hollywood
Walking To Hollywood
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Butt
The Butt
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Grey Area
Grey Area
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Great Apes
Great Apes
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Cock And Bull
Cock And Bull
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
More info

Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  My Idea Of Fun
My Idea Of Fun
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Book Of Dave
The Book Of Dave
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Psychogeography
Psychogeography
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Psycho Too
Psycho II
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Liver
Liver
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
How The Dead Live
How The Dead Live
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Dorian
Dorian
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Feeding Frenzy
Feeding Frenzy
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Sore Sites
Sore Sites
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Perfidious Man
Perfidious Man
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Bloomsbury  
Penguin

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