Will Self

Will Self: A Critical Dictionary

Dr Jeannette Baxter, a senior lecturer in English at Anglia Ruskin University, was one of the contributors to Will Self and the Art of the Contemporary in March, the first conference on the work of Will Self. Here she introduces her Critical Dictionary:

Critical Dictionary: Or My Idea of Fun by Jeannette Baxter

“A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words but their tasks.” – Georges Bataille

 

“Surreal” has become something of a standard term for reviewers when describing the writings of Will Self. To give just a few examples: while Great Apes offers up a “surreal satire on the human condition” and The Quantity Theory of Insanity engages the reader in a range of “darkly surreal” scenarios, Grey Area, Walking to Hollywood and Psychogeography map out variously “surreal” intersections of physical and psychological landscapes. Self’s most recent, Booker-shortlisted novel, Umbrella, has also been characterised as being simultaneously “funny, sad, [and] surreal”. What’s not at all clear from these reviews, however, is what we are meant to understand by the term surreal. All too frequently it seems to me, it is used somewhat arbitrarily in discussions of literature, film and popular culture to mean something that is a bit odd, weird or shocking. In other words, surreal has become something of an empty descriptor, and this, I fear, is how it predominately functions in reviews of Will Self’s writings.

Critical Dictionary: Or My Idea of Fun is a creative-critical response to this. Based (very) loosely on the critical dictionary published by the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille, my Critical Dictionary attempts to open up productive ways of thinking about the relationship between Self’s writings and surrealism. However, it seeks to do this by not only refusing to establish or explain any explicit connections between the two, but also by resisting any move to define what surrealism might mean within the contexts of Self’s writings. This is partly because surrealism has always been – and continues to be – caught up within an anxiety of definition. And it’s also partly because the question we should be asking is not what surrealism is, but what are its functions and its effects? Indeed, it’s precisely this line of questioning that fuels the original surrealist critical dictionary, which I’ll now say a few words about.

The Critical Dictionary (Dictionnaire critique) was published in 1929 and 1930, and it featured as a section within the dissident surrealist magazine Documents, which was edited by Georges Bataille and Carl Eisenstein. Across its two-year publication, the Critical Dictionary published, in no particular order, 38 dictionary entries, which range across subject matter as various as dust, architecture, slaughterhouse, materialism, Buster Keaton, camel and hygiene. Some of the entries are made up exclusively of quotations: some of these quotations are attributed, and some of them aren’t, which means that they are left to float freely across the text. Other entries take the form of short, pseudo-essays, which are often fragmented in form and associative in terms of their content. Crucially, what unites these entries is their impulse to parody the traditional, homogenising dictionary format, which strives to organise knowledge and reality into neat and definable terms. Bataille put it well when he said: “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words but their tasks.” What’s at stake in this deliberate move away from definitions, then, is a desire to liberate the irruptive forces of language beyond meaning and towards experience.

But it’s not only the irruptive forces of language that the Critical Dictionary concerns itself with. A further irruptive dimension is visual. Most – but not all – dictionary entries are presented in relation to an image of some kind. But, in each instance, no move is made at all to address, let alone explain, the relationship between image and text. Like the textual entries, then, the visual entries are never explained away: instead they exist in tension with the textual passages they ostensibly accompany, while also somehow reaching out to, and forging a strange logic between, the other dictionary entries.

Composed in the spirit of surrealist play, Critical Dictionary: Or My Idea of Fun presents six entries: Death, Metamorphosis, Un/Fold, Insanity, Photography and Scale. And, like the original surrealist text, my Critical Dictionary is incomplete and in process.

To see the Critical Dictionary, go here.

Self & I

Will has written before about the time he spent living with Matthew De Abaitua – his “live-in amanuensis” – in the 1990s, most notably in the Independent in 2008:

“Thirteen years ago, Matthew – who is now a talented novelist in his own right – spent a six-month sojourn as my live-in amanuensis and secretary. It was a thankless task: so far as I can remember I was completely spark-a-loco. We were living in a tiny cottage in Suffolk, and I was given to harvesting opium from the poppies that grew wild in the field margins, then driving my Citreon deux-chevaux across the same fields, solely by the light of a horned moon, Matthew placidly crammed into the passenger seat.

“Bizarrely, he retains affectionate memories of his secretaryship, saying that I taught him how to prepare lobster, and also impressed upon him the importance of convincing foreign journalists – who had come to interview me in my rural fastness – that we were an elderly lesbian couple, akin to the Ladies of Llangollen.”

Now De Abaitua has written more about this Withnailesque period for Five Dials, which you can click through to at his website here.

Watch ‘Obsessed with Walking’

Watch some clips from the fascinating 30-minute Australian film Obsessed with Walking by Rosie Jones, which follows Will Self around Los Angeles “doing field research” for his book Walking to Hollywood and interviews him at home in London too.

Obsessed with Walking clip 1

Obsessed with Walking clip 2

Obsessed with Walking clip 3

To listen to the director talking about why and how she made the film, go here. For more information about the film, visit the Flaming Star Films website. To buy a copy of Obsessed with Walking go here.

Mortality, the corpse and the fiction of Will Self

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Mortality, the Corpse and the Fiction of Will Self.

Death, according to Jacque Lynn Foltyn, has replaced sex as the 21st century’s definitive taboo. While the valance has long since been ripped away from the collective Victorian piano leg, the corpse, meanwhile, has become primed with symbolic explosives, threatening the very foundations of society built upon the mythology of modernist progress. Be it the computer-generated cadavers of CSI Miami, or Gunther von Hagens’ reality TV autopsies, Foltyn argues that the human corpse has become an increasingly pervasive object of revulsion and attraction in our culture, a site of anxiety about medicine’s failure to conquer, but enthusiasm to hide, death. With all this in mind, it’s not surprising to find that the fiction of Will Self – an author who frequently weaves his narratives in, around, and beyond the boundaries of taboo – is one who showcases several literary autopsies, in which death and the human corpse are explored with a surgeon’s eye (and, more often than not, a coroner’s tongue).

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.

A critical essay on Leberknödel from Liver

Liver Let Die
Will Self’s newest collection, Liver, contains a novella, Leberknödel, that is set in Zurich and has a protagonist called Joyce Beddoes. Call me an obsessive Irishman, but put “Zurich” and “Joyce” together and you automatically come up with James Joyce, who wrote a number of chapters of Ulysses in Zurich, died and is buried there. The link seems obvious to me. When you discover that Self’s Joyce eats a meal at the famous Kronenhalle (James Joyce’s favourite hangout and the place where he ate his last proper meal) and that she has reserved a plot in Fluntern cemetery (the very same cemetery where James Joyce lies buried), then you know that the sequence of coincidences is not a sequence of coincidences. Strangely, in British reviews of Self’s book in the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement, not one critic has picked up on this. If the allusions to James Joyce were simply decorative then perhaps the reviewers could be forgiven for leaving it unmentioned. But to miss the ghostly absence of James Joyce in this occult novella is to read a different story then the one Self has written.

Leberknödel tells of a Birmingham woman called Joyce Beddoes who, suffering from terminal liver cancer, travels with her daughter to Zurich where she has arranged for an assisted suicide. While there, she experiences an estrangement with her daughter but also a sort of miracle whereby, it seems, she gains another chance at life. James Joyce’s first port of call when he left Ireland with Nora Barnacle was Zurich. He returned during World War One when he worked on Ulysses, possibly the greatest English language novel of the 20th century. He returned again to Zurich as a refugee from Fascism, only to die in January 1941, shortly after his arrival. His final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, had been published in 1939.

Self’s Joyce Beddoes was known to her late husband Derry (why is he called after an Irish town?) as “Jo Jo”, which would give her the initials “JJ”, as in “James Joyce”. But in many ways she is the inverse of James: Joyce is her first name, it is his last; she is an English woman, he an Irish man; she comes to Zurich seeking death but ends up applying for refugee status, he came to Zurich as a refugee seeking safety from Fascism; she dines at the Kronenhalle and it marks a type of resurrection, he dines at the Kronenhalle and collapses into the illness that will kill him; she arrives in Zurich with her despised 33-year-old unstable daughter who she allows to be arrested and locked up in a women’s prison, he arrived in Zurich without his beloved 33-year-old daughter who he was forced to leave behind in a mental asylum.

Joyce Beddoes stays at the Widder Hotel in Zurich’s old town. One evening she ascends a nearby hill, from where she gazes over the old town centre at the foot of the Zurichberg, divided by the River Limmat “that flowed into the long lake”, the Zurichzee. (In fact the river flows out of the lake – if this is a mistake, it is Self’s only one.) Dublin is a city that lies below the Dublin Mountains, divided by the River Liffey that flows into the sea at Dublin Bay. So what does Self’s Joyce feel as she gazes upon the town that she has never seen before? She feels what James Joyce must have felt – Will Self tells us: “The city gave her a curious sensation of déjà vu.”

As she descends the hill to return to her hotel she has an accidental encounter with three Catholics, which will change her life. They are just leaving a little catholic shrine, when they fall into conversation with her. I wondered about this catholic shrine. Could Self have meant the Augustinerkirche (which James Joyce frequented)? But it is a church and Self clearly refers to a “little shrine”. Then the penny dropped. Just a few steps from the Widder Hotel is a small square known, informally, as The James Joyce Corner. On the corner is a literature museum, and tucked away upstairs one finds the small James Joyce Foundation. This indeed has many of the hallmarks of a shrine.

The foundation’s members, like the adherents of a catholic cult, preserve the works and relics of their saint. Here you will find all of Joyce’s published books, including translations, as well as secondary works. Postcards and letters of James Joyce are carefully preserved, as well as relics, such as the Dubliner’s original death mask and his famous walking cane. Once a year, followers of the Joyce cult can partake in an organised visit to the Holy Land. It’s called the Dublin Pilgrimage. The cult surrounding Joyce began during his own lifetime. When the very first copy of Ulysses arrived from the printer in Paris, it was put on display in a glass case in Shakespeare and Company Bookstore and people came especially to gaze at it in reverence, as if it was a sacred object. Joyce surrounded himself with devotees, 12 of whom, including Samuel Beckett, were given the task of writing positive reviews of the book. He called them his “apostles”. Even earlier, when writing Ulysses in Zurich, he had his adepts, such as the artist Frank Budgen. One of his “friends” of this period, a Zurich man called Weiss, like Judas, would later betray him. Joyce Beddoes is befriended by one of the trinity she has just encountered outside the shrine. His name is Weiss.

A few days later, Joyce Beddoes finds herself being treated to lunch by Weiss and his partner, Marianne Kreutzer (possibly a reference to James Joyce’s lover in Zurich, Martha Fleischmann). Weiss informs Beddoes that the restaurant has always been a haunt of famous writers, including “Durrenmatt, Keller, Mann, Frisch”. But where is James Joyce in this list? No disrespect to Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, but surely James Joyce was the most illustrious of the restaurant’s literary patrons? Even today, when booking dinner, you can still reserve “the Joyce table”. Indeed, the Kronenhalle’s proprietors proudly display on the walls their own original photos of Joyce, much like, well, sacred relics. One could defend the proposition that the Kronenhalle has become something of a temple in the contemporary cult of James Joyce. But the protagonists in this novella seem blessedly ignorant of this fact, and the reader is kept by Self equally ignorant.

Beddoes unwittingly orders Leberknödel soup (liver dumpling soup). The victim of liver cancer tastes the liver broth: “Fleshy dumplings floated in the life-giving broth and Joyce spooned one up and bit into it, releasing tangible pulses of flavour.” James Joyce’s last meal here resulted in his ulcer perforating his intestines and led to his death, but for Self’s Joyce, the meal is “life-giving”.

Joyce Beddoes leaves her miraculous meal, and Weiss and Kreutzer install her in an apartment at Universiteitsstrasse 29. The apartment is the centre of their cult, for it is here that a little saintly girl called Gertrude once lived and, having died of leukemia, she, according to the believers, intercedes to perform miracles, including reversing cancer. But if there is a ghost at work at Universiteitstrasse 29 it is not called Gertrude but probably answers to the name James Joyce. It was in this very house that Joyce lived while working on Ulysses. Again, the protagonists in Self’s novel are oblivious that they are living in the shade of the great Irish writer, and Self’s readers are equally left in the dark.

James Joyce was intrigued by the Zurich spring festival of Sechselauten, in which the spirit of winter is burnt on a gigantic wooden pyre. Although there is nothing sexual about the festival, he, dirty old man that he was, obviously thought otherwise. Sechselauten appears in Finnegans Wake as “Ping-pong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez” and “ringrang, the chimes of sex appealing”. Joyce Beddoes attends the festival in one of the most extended episodes in Self’s novella. She then meets Weiss on the steps of the Opera House (one of James Joyce’s favourite venues) and this leads into the novella’s only sex scene. It is graphic, even crude; in a word, Joycean.

Self’s Joyce finds herself aimlessly wandering though Zurich. She is beginning to read the city, much like Leopold Bloom and Stephan Dedalus in Dublin. She passes Fluntern Cemetery often; once she briefly reflects that that path leads to her grave. She seems to be unaware that it also leads to the grave of another Joyce, James, who has lain here since 1941, it’s most famous resident by far. But again, Self informs neither his hapless character nor his readers.

One day, at the height of summer, alone and forgotten by the traitor Weiss, Joyce Beddoes feels the warm wind, known as the Foehn, blowing over the city. James Joyce, like many others, hated this wind. It appears in Finnegans Wake as “in the wake of their good old Foehn”. The line echoes the book’s deathly title, Wake. Self’s Joyce feels that the Foehn is “smothering her”. It is a harbinger of the end.
Throughout Self’s novella, Joyce’s relationship with her 33-year-old highly strung daughter, Isobel, forms an undercurrent of unease. She grieves that the daughter was always closer to her husband, the late Derry. His pet name for his daughter was “Izzy”. Isobel is highly strung and has had a succession of broken relationships with unsuitable men. James Joyce loved his mentally unstable daughter, Lucia, deeply. As she slipped into madness, she attempted to have a number of hugely inappropriate sexual relationships with men. In Finnegans Wake, the main character, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, has a wife, Anna Livia, and a daughter called Isabel. She desperately seeks a male mate. But the husband-father covets her as his daughter-wife. He calls her “Issy”.

Clearly, the life and work of James Joyce forms a rich source for Will Self’s tale. His is a fictional analysis of the ethics of euthanasia, or assisted-suicide. But at a deeper level, he has written an intertextual tale that gains a deeper meaning only when the older text is approached and recognised. But why, may one ask, is James Joyce never directly referred to? Why, when James Joyce is so obviously present, does Self keep him hidden? When Joyce Beddoes’ liver cancer was first diagnosed, her doctor informed her that the cancer had not originated in her liver, but its origin was “occult”. He explains that this term simply means that they don’t know. But “occult” means secrets or hidden. The origin of her disease is hidden, and its “cure” must remain equally hidden. Jame’s Joyce’s presence in the novella is hidden; hidden from his namesake, the sad Joyce Beddoes, and hidden from the reader. This hiddenness, this gaping absence, is decisive to the story.

Will Self has written an intriguing work of cultic (and Celtic) ghostliness. It is a story laden with a plurality of meanings, where nothing is as it seems, where even the current of the River Limmat can be reversed. British reviewers must be an overworked and under-read bunch of people to have missed it. To quote James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake: “Yssel that the Limmat?”

By Paul Doolan
www.pauldoolan.com

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 Sweet Smell Of Excess: Will Self, Bataille and Transgression

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

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