There will be an Audience with Will Self at the Guildhall Arts Centre, Grantham, 7.30pm next Thursday, June 17. For details and to book tickets, follow this.
On Evil by Terry Eagleton
In March I was on the panel for an edition of Question Time filmed in Canary Wharf. The big news that week — I say “big” but “awful” might be more accurate — was that Jon Venables, one of the ten-year-old boys convicted in 1993 for the murder of the toddler James Bulger, had broken the terms under which he had been released on licence and was being returned to jail. Now we have the further atrocity exhibition of two boys — aged 10 and 11 — convicted of an attempted rape on an eight-year-old girl. With such crimes as these, surely — we must collectively ask ourselves — it becomes possible to explain them only by positing the existence of some exceptional depths of inner darkness?
It was predictable that a question concerning Venables would be put to the Question Time panel: the killing of Bulger (I refrain from using the term “murder” for reasons that will become apparent) had gripped the nation. While there were some of the usual liberal suspects who protested at the idea of ten-year-old children being put on trial for murder, English law remained quite unambiguous: the age of criminal responsibility was — and remains — just 10.
Terry Eagleton, in his book-length essay entitled simply On Evil, is quick to home in on the Bulger case as deeply illustrative of our contradictory thinking on the subject. He quotes one of the police officers who dealt with Robert Thompson and Venables as saying that the minute he clapped eyes on one of these culprits he “knew he was evil”. Eagleton observes that while the policeman seized upon the term as a badge to ward off the possibility of liberal apologias for the dreadful act, in fact the ascription of “evil” does nothing of the sort. It is by no means clear that anyone could be held responsible for being born evil.
This is precisely the contradiction that James Hogg teases out in his 1824 classic whatdunnit, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In the novel, a young Calvinist Scot encounters a mysterious figure who informs him that he is one of the elect (in other words, predestined for Heaven), and so encourages him to embark on a murderous spree on the basis that everything he does must be good by virtue of his exalted state.
Eagleton of course will have read Hogg, and the queasy equivalence between the non-responsibility of the virtuous murderer and the evil one wouldn’t be lost on him. As well as being a cradle Roman Catholic, he has also been a card-carrying Marxist. Although Eagleton may be heterodox in relation to both systems of thought, it’s nonetheless these two totalising ideologies that inform his quest for evil. For Eagleton evil is very definitely innate in humans, being a sort of French plaiting of Schopenhauer’s universal Will to Life, St Augustine’s Original Sin and Sigmund Freud’s thanatos or Death Drive. We are all born with this lust for annihilation, just as we are all born with an equal and countervailing drive towards going forth, checking out some nice tourist destinations and fruitfully multiplying. If I understand Eagleton rightly, evil arises not simply when individuals deviate from the good (this is mere wickedness) but when they try to cope with their own overpowering fear of death, pain and destruction by wreaking it on others.
Eagleton, of course, has to account for the great charnel house of the 20th century — its mass murders and genocides. On the face of it, this is where the commonsensical view that there is a line to be drawn between the merely bad and the downright demonic should favour the existence of Christian evil. Certainly Eagleton’s version of it allows for a distinction to be drawn between individuals who were carried away or coerced into abetting genocides and those who instigated and even gloried in them. But I’m not sure that he makes his case; he wants the Holocaust to be qualitatively different from all other mass murders, and so judges that it was almost uniquely purposeless — or, rather, was a collective enactment of the evil individual’s insatiable lust for autonomy.
The mass murders of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, by contrast, Eagleton believes did at least have a point — but did they, beyond the naked exercise of power? Surely inciting an entire nation to turn upon itself in an orgy of highly personalised violence — as Mao did — is just as bad (or evil); as is a regime such as Soviet Russia, where people were murdered with supremely brutal inefficiency.
And then there’s the worrying spectacle of those bureaucrats of death such as Adolph Eichmann, who inspired Hannah Arendt’s ringing phrase “the banality of evil”. With Eichmann Eagleton seems to want to have it both ways: the office manager of the Final Solution gave exhaustive testimony before his Jerusalem trial in 1961 — mind-numbingly boring to read — but while one is left with an impression of Eichmann as insanely deluded, vain and ambitious, it’s not at all clear that he was abetting murder to assuage his own fear of death. Eagleton acknowledges the potential for evil in all of us — so might not its banality be because it is everywhere we look?
Eagleton’s problem is that he needs evil to be special, different and achingly banal all at once. He needs this because his view of what human beings are remains very deeply conditioned by his religious upbringing and his political sympathies. For Eagleton humans are, first and foremost, rational beings with the capacity for freedom of will. Of course, being a superannuated Marxist as well, he also can’t help seeing them as mired in a false consciousness that stops them moving towards God/communism.
On the Eagleton definition, we cannot really know whether Thompson and Venables were evil or not — any more than we can absolutely “know” that anyone either is or is not evil. To have a definitive answer we would need to get inside their heads in a godlike fashion.
I fear that for Eagleton the debasement of the term “evil” is of a piece with the loss of Christian faith in the West. For the fact about evil is that it exists in a purely historical sense: there is no evidence for it in religions that much predate the Christian era — nothing in Eastern religion, Plato or even Biblical Judaism. It comes into the world through the teachings of Jesus as redacted by St Paul, and probably resulted in part from a cross-fertilisation by the very Manicheanism that Christians are always at pains to disavow (even unto burning such heretics at the stake). In other words — and to be fair to Eagleton, he doesn’t really dodge this — no Christian God, no evil.
Chantez-vous français?
“Each morning at approximately 8.45am any number of yummy mummies, trolling their kids and dogs across the balding sward of Clapham Common might witness this curious spectacle: a tall, slightly cadaverous man, pacing along at speed and ignoring the Jack Russell that nips at his heels while addressing an invisible interlocutor in heavily London-accented French.
“‘Non, elle n’est pas allée dans un magasin de chaussures,’ he tells his inner demons, and then, ‘Elle lui a dit bonjour’. Yes, it is indeed me, listening yet again to Chapitre Dix of the Berlitz audio tape. Indeed, I have listened to it so many times already that despite these playlets being brief and purely instructional I have come to harbour strange ideas about their characters.
“Take Sylvie Féraud, for example. It’s she who regularly cruises past Paris Modes during her lunch hour, and who ‘a vu un tailleur dans la vitrine’. She’s a haughty miss, Sylvie, and thinks herself several cuts above the sales assistant. When the poor girl says the suit she’s tried on is ‘merveilleux’, Sylvie almost snarls back, ‘Mm, c’est vrai, mais je trouve que la jupe est un peu courte pour le bureau.’ Hm, I’d like to take that Sylvie Féraud down a peg or two – if only my French were up to the job.
“But it just isn’t. I’m still keeping on with my lessons, and my teacher, Arlette, persists in taking me forward at a brisk pace. We’re on to the conditional tense now, so, if I had been in Paris last weekend I would’ve been able to liberally insult Sylvie Féraud – would’ve, were it not for the fact that I need Arlette to coach me through every temporal and hypothetical convolution, pursing her lips and gesturing frantically, as if by so doing she could force my tongue to dance like a faun in l’après-midi.”
Read the rest of the third part of Will Self’s Guardian Education series here.
System Armed
Don’t shit where you eat is as good a maxim as any other – but I just can’t keep it in. A few weeks ago the genial young man opposite got a new jam jar. It’s metallic green in colour – but then aren’t they all, and just as obviously has profile tyres and an allusion to a spoiler, rather than the spoiler itself. It also has a disconcerting habit of soliloquizing: “System armed!” it croaks when he locks it, employing tones suitable to a grizzled CIA interrogator applying electrodes to a recalcitrant Islamist. “Stand back, system armed!” it croaks when a pedestrian walks by – presumably because they’ve triggered some kind of sensor.
Lying in bed of a late night, having screened out the drunks wending their way back from the pub and the agonised ecstasy of copulating foxes, and the traffic on the main road, and the bellowing of late jets hunkering down over the metropolis, I was still assailed by that “System armed!”. In a world of intrusions this was one too far. I took it up with my neighbour. “Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, “it is aggravating, but I got the car like that and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it … but I’ll try, really.”
Somehow I don’t think he made that much of an effort; after all, the “System armed!” is of a piece with his weapon dog, and the bars in front of his front door, and the CCTV system, and the fact that he appears not to work regular hours … Still, live and let live, I say: he’s always cheerful, and seems oddly to be a steadying influence on the younger and more feral yoof who wander up and down the street, deranged by their yearning for the unobtainable and their surfeit of boredom. As for “System armed!” over the weeks I’ve come to integrate it into my mental life. “System armed!” the car croaks, and I think to myself, I’m glad – truly I’m glad.
Enterprise improv
Will Self is going to be at the Enterprise Pub in Chalk Farm, north London tonight for the Express Excess cabaret, and will be on stage at 10pm with Matt D’Abaitua doing improv. For details go here.
The Spartan Girl
I am sorry, oh so sorry, that I ever suggested Baroness Thatcher should’ve been torn apart by urban foxes back in the early 1980s, before she could lay waste to generations of the British working class. I hope this won’t disqualify me from becoming the leader of the Labour Party – a post which I have absolutely no desire to occupy, and therefore probably should.
It was typically insensitive of me to call in a vulpine strike on Jah Thatch, who, as everyone knows, was only the passive instrument of historical change rather than its initiator. As for foxes, who but an absurd and sentimental urbanite, who refuses to acknowledge that what’s on the end of his fork is an abused fowl, would characterise these vicious and unprincipled creatures as the vanguard of the revolution? Perhaps now, at long last, after the tragic attack on the baby girls in East London, the long-awaited pogrom against London’s foxes will finally be initiated?
And who better to don the red coat and tootle “Tally-Ho!” than my own local Labour MP Kate Hoey. After all, it was Hoey who chose a superb opportunity to bury bad news, by announcing on the very day that Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by armed police at Stockwell tube station in her constituency, that she would be assuming the chairmanship of the Countryside Alliance. Obviously, it’s impractical to hunt urban foxes on horseback, but I can see no reason for not putting the many hundreds of so-called “weapon dogs” who roam the parks hereabout to some sort of useful employment.
And if not the dogs, then why not their owners as well, many of whom are second-generation unemployed – the sons and daughters of people who lost their jobs during the great culling on the 1980s. It would seem an elegant solution to both problems to set these folk to the maintenance of dog packs and the manufacture of hunting tackle. Which brings us neatly full circle: eliminating foxes and unemployment with a single measure. Of course, it leaves Thatcher still alive – but then that’s a given, n’est ce pas?
Dreams of Leaving
Uncle Vladimir said: recount a dream, lose a reader. But for those of us who remain committed transcendental idealists the opposite remains the case. Indeed, I’d sooner hear about someone’s dreams than anything else. I’d far rather they took me by the hand and led me through the warped corridors and funhouse apartments of their dreamscape, than bored me with details of their propery acquisitions.
In Wiltshire for the weekend, the M4 is retrospectively rolled up and stashed away in a carpet warehouse of dead roads. I lie on eiderdown, bluebottles buzzing from meadow through drapes, then round my sleepy head. My sons organise painfully exact tableaux of the D-Day evacuations and I urge them to shoot at the advancing 002. scale Wermacht with air pistols. The man with the neat white moustache who’s obsessed by fishing (Catherine Martell’s husband in Lynch’s Twin Peaks?), stands talking with two of the same – and me – over glasses of elderflower presse. This could perhaps go on forever…
But no, there is late morning, and coffee and toast, and the newspaper with its own rumpled dreamscape. The Prime Minister has been in Cumbria, talking about how a community can get over this sort of thing… Strange, as the Anglican Church withers away, so the executive – who after all appoints the Primate in the first place – takes on the cod-spiritual duties of the established church. No wonder no one can get it right.
There is talk of a new Tory MP, famously dashing, to whom posh totty is attracted like flies to… yet he does nothing. Sometimes… Clovis drawls… I think the asexual hide behind the widespread assumption that they must be gay.
Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, at Tate Britain
“A few weeks ago, a famous – and famously beautiful – young novelist found herself unfortunately seated beside me at an otherwise impeccably Hampstead dinner party. Bemoaning the state of British arts in general, she animadverted concerning our undoubted satirical prowess: ‘It’s easy for us, it’s what we do – we just lift an arse cheek and out it comes.’ Actually, I’m not sure she did say the arse-cheek bit – but it was words to that effect.
“Esprit de l’escalier it may’ve been, but I found myself, days later, wondering why exactly it was that we should feel at all shamefaced about our singular collective ability to guy, to poke fun, to take the piss and otherwise generally excoriate. Now comes Rude Britannia, an exhibition of satiric art and cartoon which, if any were needed, provides ample confirmation of not just how deeply the satiric taproot is sunk into British soil, but how crucial its vigorous propagation has always been to our constitution – both political and psychological – while its massy canopy has, for centuries, protected our civil liberties, such as they are.
“Rude Britannia takes a broadly narrative and historical approach to graphic satire, while allowing for sub-sections to treat of the political, the bawdy and the absurd. Beginning in the mid-16th century, with text-heavy allegorical and emblematic prints, the exhibition canters brusquely through the great ribald explosion of the 1700s – Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson et al – on through the expansion of print in the Victorian era, and the concomitant democratisation of satire; then presents such wayward and decadent figures as Beardsley, before shepherding in the celebrated 20th-century cartoonists – Low, Scarfe, Steadman – eventually coming up to date with generous space allocated to such nominally “fine” artists as John Isaacs, Sarah Lucas and David Shrigley.
Read the rest of Will Self on an exhibition that celebrates the great British satirical impulse in art in today’s Guardian Review.
Killer Kaleidoscopic
A migrainous day: suitably, perhaps, as the research I’m doing at the moment jumps off from Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings – a book that deeply impressed me when I first read it, and continues to do so – and he is notoriously a sufferer. My mother had skull-splitting three-day migraines that sent her, reeling like a Mafioso gunned down, to the mattresses. Mine are somewhat different, and only appeared after I’d banged my head on a wall in frustration during a holiday in Lanzarote.
The symptoms are precise: a patch of prismatic distortion grows in the left-hand corner of my visual field, then expands in semicircular bands until it covers the whole field of both eyes (I also have binocular vision due to a strabismus, and so am insistently aware of the duality of my visual field, perhaps this explains my liking for fictions that take place in parallel worlds?), in a pattern that can best be likened to a kaleidoscope. It’s pretty, and would be quite like the effects of a hallucinogen, were it not that instead of euphoria there’s only a dull thrum of a headache. It doesn’t disable me, I don’t have to lie down, it fades fairly rapidly – usually within 20 minutes; yesterday’s all-dayer was an exception – and it appears brought on either by caffeine/physical exertion, or – and most bizarre this – hill walking over 3,000 feet.
Nevertheless, when these migraines first appeared a few years ago, I foolishly embarked on the usual battery of tests courtesy of our great socialised medicine, and ended up seeing an ophthalmology consultant at St Thomas’s in London. They did the test where they squirt a dilator into your eye and then scan the retina (my GP’s assumption was that I had a tear). While the nurse was doing this, the consultant – who appeared to be playing up to some idea of himself – scanned the drawings I’d made in my notebook of what I could see during the attacks. “Didn’t you look at these!” he expostulated. “Haven’t you examined this man’s very helpful drawings!” he berated her: “This man has migraine! This is a classic migraine! We’re wasting his time – and ours!” When he calmed, I asked him who, if not he, I should consult about the kaleidoscopes intermittently rammed in my eyes. “Oh, I don’t know,” he spluttered, “a neurologist, I suppose – if you can be bothered. After all … ” I had told him about the lack of headaches and the 3,000-foot onset point “it’s not like you have a bad case!”
All in all a most gratifying waste of public resources.
***
Newsnight calls asking me to go on this evening to discuss the Cumbrian shootings: ‘We’re looking for someone to speculate on what it is about these remote, rural communities, largely white – ’
“Look,” I interrupt, “I’m going to stop you right there; much as I’d like to come on the programme I know next to nothing about remote, rural, largely white communities – I’m very much your urban, multi-coloured kind of a guy … ”
But am I? After all, plenty of people have been shot dead in the immediate purlieus of my south London home over the past few years, and I know just as little about the socio-cultural nexus of their motivations (if such a thing could be said to exist) as I do about those of this killer. Still, I’m confident someone will be persuaded to shoot their mouth off on Newsnight in my stead – if there’s anyone more trigger-happy than a gun nut, it’s a member of the London commentariat.
Liverish London
Last week, sitting for three days in a studio booth in Queen’s Park recording the talking book of Liver with the very able Patch McQuaid of ID Audio. We got a rhythm going: reading, fluffing a line, he picks me up intuitively – on we go. Ah, but the voices! The croaking piss-artists of Foie Humain, the Schwitzer-Deutsch of Leberknödel, the snappy ad-men of Prometheus and the whining junkies of Birdy Num Num.
Who will listen to this stuff? I’ve never been huge on talking books myself, and back in the day the demographic – older, plusher, Mondeo-folk – seemed to be beyond the horizon of my work … but now? Well, now I am those folk – oh, yes, oh yes indeed. And to confirm this I run into some guy in the street who recalls meeting me first with Barney X (notorious junky) in Oxford in 1980, then in Freddy B’s flat in 1998 (another of the same, and his flat is the setting for Birdy Num Num), and that latterly he is in touch with James Z (notorious junky, the model for Prometheus in the story of the same name). In truth, I can’t remember who this guy is – but given his CV is this surprising? I told him about the book, omitting to mention the strange coincidence: his knowing two of the mise-en-scenes there depicted. I don’t know if he’ll read it – he’s in a half-way house for recovering addicts – but by the time he’s back on his feet, the talking book should be available.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- …
- 145
- Next Page »
