In Conversation with Will Self

Will Self is one of those increasingly rare and precious figures in contemporary British culture; a polemical and voracious man of letters with an oceanic intellect that crashes in prolific waves upon the sprawling beach of his fiction and journalism. He is a writer who fully personifies Montaigne's notion of the 'observed life'.

That Self is still able to provoke ire and fascination in equal measure renders him a castaway on the desert island of literary notoriety along with perhaps only Martin Amis. (Bret Easton Ellis' purchase on the island may have slipped somewhat in recent years, leaving him hopelessly frolicking in the social media froth, whilst the unlikely figure of Hilary Mantel may have parachuted down in recent weeks after the furore of her story 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher', but it remains to be seen as to whether she makes herself at home or seeks a swift and redemptive airlift.)

His recent provocations on George Orwell, the impending demise of the serious novel, and the cult of the 'dickhead hipster' amply demonstrate how Self has long sought to use his prose as a wrecking ball to dismantle the collective delusions and popular myths of our society.

I've gone to the Archway Methodist Church to see Self give a reading from his new novel 'Shark' as part of the 'Archway with Words' literary festival, and thereafter to hopefully cadge an interview, a long-held personal ambition. As the Q & A session winds up, the nerves begin to race around the circuitry of my body as if they were late for an important meeting with a host of other electrochemicals.

Having answered a battery of questions from the diverse audience and sat at the end of a production line of people wanting their books signed and selfies snapped, he is quite reasonably tired and keen to keep things brief. "I can only spare you 10 minutes or so", he stipulates as we mooch outside so that he can smoke. My mind begins to panic over the catalogue of questions I had stored up; I begin to rifle through them like a frantic homeowner choosing prized possessions to rescue from rising floodwater.

We sit on a bench adjacent to the Archway intersection where Junction Road collides with Holloway Road amidst a staccato rhythm of sluggish traffic punctuated by the streamlined shriek of emergency sirens. Fumbling with my tatty sheet of questions prepared the night before, I begin to appreciate just how out of my depth I may be, attempting to engage in conversation with one of Britain's most intimidating intellectuals, as though I were a tennis novice trying to sustain a rally with a Wimbledon champion.


MJ: In your new book Shark, the image of the shark manifests itself in all kinds of allegorical forms. Do you like to think of the shark as being the menacing threat of our own irrationality, or even insanity, constantly swimming beneath the surface of our psyche?

WS: Yeah, I think that is the main meaning of the title, but specifically this idea that the release of nuclear fission into the world was a new kind of demonism. It’s not that people hadn’t been irrational or crazy beforehand, because clearly they had, but I think the inception of nuclear warfare made everybody psychotic in a strange way. It’s somewhere in the book that Zack Busner thinks, ‘how can you respect any authority or government when you know that they’re stockpiling the means for your total annihilation?’

The theory that was so influential on R.D. Laing, and the other anti-psychiatrists, was the ‘double-bind’ - it’s basically like mummy saying [aggressively] ‘I LOVE YOU!’ It’s two conflicting messages at once, and particularly for those of us who grew up in the Cold War, we felt the very solidity of the world being totally called into question, the fact that it could shiver and liquefy before your eyes. It’s a very shark-like thing.

MJ: Do you think there’s any weight to the notion that our collective cultural fascination and foreboding of them stems from the shark’s evolution many millennia ago to a specimen of near-perfection? They are symbolic almost of an ‘anti-progress’ which goes entirely against the humanist ‘faith in progress’ towards some kind of unattainable ideal. Do we perhaps have species envy?

WS: Yeah, I hadn’t really considered it in quite that light, but it’s an extremely good observation. I didn’t so much think of that, and I kinda wish I had actually!

I reviewed a book called Deadly Powers about the origins of human nemesis, which really goes back to Aristotle and beyond, that human art starts in the mimicry of animals. Of course, the top predators are incredibly important in the mythology of the traditional peoples, and normally sharks are used to construct chimeras (mixtures of humans and animals), so that idea is very much lying behind it.

But yes, I think that’s right, you’ve put it very well, they fly in the face of the Enlightenment; they’re ‘steampunk’ in a sense that it’s a genre founded on the idea of discontinuous technology. But the paradox of steampunk of course, is that this world is steampunk, we live in a world of discontinuous technologies and it’s really just a camp form of that.

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Thankfully by now I feel I've piqued Self's interest somewhat and as he lights up a neat roll-up the pleasant aroma of herbal tobacco drifts in curlicues around the bench.

MJ: Through your writing I discovered a writer that I now love more than I think any other – J.G. Ballard, who you’ve said was a mentor-figure to you. I remember reading Crash when I was about 18 and it really did change my life in some way...

WS: Yeah, it is a great book.

MJ: Do you share Ballard’s wary, but almost gleeful, ambivalence about the onward march of new technology? Or do you think humankind is gradually surrendering itself to technological advances that it really shouldn’t?

WS: I share Jim’s curious ambivalence. I find it, not so much in shiny, flashy gadgets, but in the city. I loathe what money is doing to this city [London], how it’s grinding any sense of community or comity out. You know, the big thing about London was that municipal socialism worked here in a way and it did level things out a bit, but that’s all now being thrown into reverse. But at the same time I can’t help but love the Shard! I find all that big construction really exhilarating.

MJ: I really like the fact that the guy who designed the Walkie-Talkie building [William H. Rogers], the one that burns people’s cars, designed a similar one in Las Vegas that did exactly the same thing and no one thought to do any kind of preliminary investigation into the guy’s past form...

WS: Yeah, but that’s just a fuck up isn’t it, it is quite funny.

No, I find high buildings exhilarating. I went down the Crossrail tunnel the other day; it’s useless but you can’t help but be amazed by these civil engineering projects, and the city’s always like that, it’s always ambivalent. And I think in our era, the Enlightenment project looks very threadbare, so even the technology and progress ‘boosters’ are finding it hard. It’s no coincidence that ‘sustainable’ has become not a buzzword but a kind of ‘nonce word’.

MJ: Yeah, it means nothing...

WS: Yeah, ‘I went for a sustainable shit’. Oh really?!

MJ: It’s like ‘growth’, what does ‘growth’ actually mean?

WS: Well, sustainable does mean growth now. It has a very strict meaning of course; it comes from environmental science, and it means the behaviour of a species that isn’t a long-term threat to the environment. But now it just means anything you want it to mean!

Taking this as my cue, I steer the conversation towards politics, trying to explain the ideological joust that charges on within my mind. On the one side is the leftist hope of a society removed from authoritarian power structures that mollify, impoverish and perpetuate social divisions, with people taking control of their own work and lives. And on the other side, is the nihilistic quicksand that I find it impossible to wrench myself free from. I bring up the philosopher John Gray's work regarding the idea that we have scant free will, we are not masters of our own destinies, and humankind is too adverse to mutual co-existence, as all the while we swaddle ourselves in a comfort blanket of myths and delusions. I ask whether Self experiences such conflicting emotions and how he comes to resolve them...

WS: John Gray’s amazing book Straw Dogs came at a very interesting time, because the Iraq War really was the point at which the old ideas of internationalist socialism really fell crotch-first onto the vaulting horse of history. It really exposed that aspect of the socialist project completely, and I think it became very difficult after Iraq to think of yourself unproblematically as a socialist. But I have to say, John, as we’ve since become friends, is not at all pessimistic, he’s a stoic at heart.

MJ: I dunno, maybe it’s my age...

WS: Yeah, you can’t be that stoical at your age. When I was your age I was just insane, absolutely fucking mad. And actually, what I regret not doing was just having an ordinary job that brought me into contact with people, because it makes for great copy. I did all kinds of jobs but I didn’t become a full-time professional until I was about 28, 29. So, I wouldn’t feel that you’re wasting your time in that way because, as you’ll know yourself from writing, it takes a while to find your voice, and you can’t rush that, you need to write a lot of words, grow a bit older and have a job, save some money.

But it does get easier to be stoical as you get older; it sounds naff, the idea of being able to comprehend the extinction of humanity with some equanimity, but you can.

MJ: I look forward to it!

Those familiar with Self's oeuvre will recognise the thematic evolution from his obsessive ruminating on the 'motorway verse' in surreal short fiction such as Waiting and Scale in the early-90s; to his long strides into psycho-geographic terrain from the late-90s on, with his Psychogeography collection and Walking to Hollywood.

Being something of an amateur flaneur myself, I ask him whether he has a 'dream' psychogeographic walk that he has yet to undertake...

WS: There are lots I’d like to do and there’s lots I’ve planned that haven’t come off yet. Tehran is laid out very well for psycho-geographic expeditions, because the airport is positioned south, and the city is built up the flank of a hill, so in about two days you could walk and see the city as a whole. So I’d like to do that one. I’d like to walk from here to Paris through the Channel Tunnel.

MJ: Can you do that?

WS: Well there is a service tunnel. They found this Russian guy sort of staggering about near the English-end of the tunnel not long back; he’d walked the whole way!

MJ: I found it bad enough walking through the Rotherhithe Tunnel... it takes about two years off your life...

WS: Oh yeah, you don’t wanna do that. But there’d be no carbon monoxide down in the Eurostar...

MJ: What I’d really like to do is a psycho-geographic walk in Talinn, Estonia, where Andrei Tarkovsky filmed Stalker. I think that whole landscape would just be phenomenal to explore.

WS: Yes! That would be very interesting, good idea. I haven’t read it but Geoff Dyer wrote that book about it - Zona. It’s not my favourite ‘Tarko’ though, my favourite’s Solaris. I was actually in Priypat [the city of Chernobyl] ...

MJ: Yeah, I was there this year!

WS: Right! The thing is; you know the Chernobyl meltdown happened in Reactor Hall 4, and where does the writer say they are when he answers the phone in the Room of Knowledge? - Room Number 4!

MJ: That’s fascinating.

WS: Yeah, there are all sorts of weird correspondence.

MJ: So did Stalker in some way prophesise Chernobyl..?

WS: Actually, I went to CERN in the summer and wanted to walk around the Large Hadron Collider. I did the walk aboveground, and then went down at various points to talk to wonks. It was really interesting actually, because as a psycho-geographic walk you start in Geneva, more or less where Rousseau was locked out of the city and you end at Voltaire’s villa. So I’d thoroughly recommend that, it’s basically a 3-day stroll in the sub-Alps.

MJ: I had a thought the other day that, has Guy Debord’s ‘spectacle’ been realised in some way by the web? Are the heirs of the Situationists, by some bizarre twist, Google Maps, seen as how they reconfigure the globe entirely to the whim of their own commercial imperatives?

WS: Well it’s just algorithms. What it hasn’t got is the derive, let alone the detournement. So it’s not quite Debord-ian what Google do, but yeah, it’s here, it has arrived. But while I talk meliorist, I am personally quite pessimistic. It’s hard not to see that elements of people’s psyches are going to become seriously commoditised, people are going to start having product placements in their dreams.

MJ: I think in the not-so-distant future, people will be defined more and more by their digital profiles, their ‘online selves’, instead of being defined by what clothes you wear or what products you buy, it’ll be the ‘labels’ attached to your digital profile.

WS: I’m sure that’s right, it’s a very age-geared thing. I didn’t have a 2G phone or a wireless-enabled phone until about 2 years ago, and when I got it I was hopelessly addicted to it. It was comic. I’d excoriated everyone around me for spending their lives looking at their crotches and there I was full-on obsessed for about 5 or 6 months, still powerful for about 8 or 9 months, and then just over. Completely over, like it had never happened. And now the technology has no affect for me at all, in that way.

MJ: I’m 25 so I’m just old enough to remember having to corral my parents into letting me dial up to the internet for maybe 10 minutes every evening. Kids growing up now in a digital landscape will have no conception of life without it...

WS: Well that just shows how you can’t help but valorise the Gutenberg culture, because all the clued-up, smart young people I know are all trying to ‘age themselves’ out of being ‘digital natives’, and you’ve done it most eloquently. You’re right, it’s 2004, when people start to get wireless and broadband in and outside the home, that’s the moment it all changes. I always maintain, if you were a child at that point then you’re different. But you’re arguing that you weren’t a child at that point, if you see what I mean?

MJ: The screen really is a primitive instrument now isn’t it? The next stage is already beginning with Google Glass...

WS: Yeah but is anyone really bothering with it...?

MJ: Well no, no one’s going to want to wear those clunky glasses for any serious period of time, but as soon as you get the functionality, Google contact lenses perhaps, that symbiosis with technology, I think the Screen Age will pass into history.

WS: Yes that’s true, but it’s very powerful, the screen and the frame. The conception of Euclidean space embodied in all framing is very deeply encrypted and relates to a Panopticon-view of the Judeo-Christian deity, and certain kinds of ideas about how the world really is, that are highly congruent with systems that we’ve handed our lives over to in general.

So all I would say is, you think how long particular skeuomorphs endure, the screen is certainly going to be a super-powerful skeuomorph and it’ll take a lot to wean people away from replicating it. It’s replicated in transport systems - you drive looking at a map on a screen, you sit in a train staring out of a screen. And the screen is old; it’s as old as easel painting in a way, so I wouldn’t count it out that fast. But it will be generational, because people like me – what do we fucking know?! Nothing!

MJ: I already feel too old for it…

WS: Right, so how am I going to know anything about it?!

I mean, take Ballard, why was he so prescient? Well, let’s boil it down, what was he prescient about? He was prescient about the commoditisation of personae, the form of modern celebrity...

MJ: The media landscape...

WS: Well yeah, but what did he specifically get right? He got right that environmental problems were going to be a major feature. But he always said to me that that was a bit of a hunch. I mean, what causes the sea rise in The Drowned World is sunspots!

MJ: I always think his short fiction is where he was most prescient. There are two short stories in particular. Billenium, a story about a future city in which everyone’s so tightly crammed in, it’s so over-populated that people have to go out in synchronised waves of street traffic; everyone’s time is heavily mandated. And the other is The Intensive Care Unit, where he almost prophesises social media, about the family who are only in contact with one another via screens.

WS: Yeah but that goes back, I mean E.M. Forster wrote that story The Machine Stops, H.G. Wells has got the interweb in The World Brain, so it’s out there. The thing about futurity in the 60s was that it wasn’t that people didn’t prophesise all these things, because they did, but the things they really believed in, it sounds preposterous, but it was stuff like interstellar travel.

MJ: Moon colonies...?

WS: Yeah! Right up until the moon programme ended, because once it became evident that it was no long economically viable the whole fucking thing just collapsed, it had been huge. It was gonna be jet packs, everyone would have a fucking jet pack!

MJ: James Bond-style...

WS: They would only be small, not big cumbersome things. Totally ease-full private transport. Moon colonies; interstellar travel; food in a pill…

MJ: Now we’ve got ‘dirty burgers’ instead!

WS: Right, nobody gave a shit about food in the 60s ‘cos it was so bad. All I’m saying is that everything Ballard may have prophesised was accented out of the whole scrim of things people were imagining at the time, and though clearly a lot of it never actually happened, it didn’t mean they didn’t spot the things that did.

MJ: Maybe their moon landings is our Singularity theory. Those wonks in Silicon Valley creating some kind of human-negating system that is kinda terrifying, but will it happen? Probably not.

WS: Well it haunts my youngest child’s nightmares, the Singularity theory. Somebody should look into it, because I think it’s becoming a pathological and anarchic, Gnostic heresy. If I was fucking around on computers a lot now aged 13, I think stuff like that would really freak me out.

MJ: I understand your arguments about the death of the novel, and I’m with you a lot of the way, but do you think the problem is more to do with the fact that there isn’t as yet a coherent ‘internet literature’ that accurately explores what it’s like living in a digital landscape.

WS: Yes there is, it’s called computer games.

MJ: Yeah, but is there the same intellectual stimulation?

WS: Not yet. But it’ll come.

MJ: Will there be a Ulysses of the digital world?

WS: Why not? The problem with video games is that the conventions of how to modulate personations haven’t been figured out yet, because it has to be done by trial and error. They have to consider what’s going to make people feel simultaneously a degree of identification, and that strange thing that readers of fiction experience, of still feeling that there is a conditional element to the characters’ behaviour, that your empathy towards them has some psychological reality to it, and, as you say, at the same time the objectivity to be discursive or intellectual with it.

MJ: I think there’s an elitist thing that comes with it as well though. A lot of people decide to read the ‘high culture novels’ in order to show off about it. That has to stick around surely, the aesthetics of the book shelf that people use to identify themselves?

WS: I think that’s exactly what won’t make the cut actually. And that’s what’s so disturbing. All you see in the street are shelves that people have thrown out. It’s a total interregnum in the whole parameters of what it means to be intellectual, educated, cultured; it’s just game over in that sense.

Revelling in the conversation, I had scarcely noticed that half an hour had gone by, until Self rises from the bench and asks which direction my home is. "South", I reply. "Ah, come on then", he says and we march off across the intersection towards the bright light of the tube station, glancing up at the monolithic Archway Tower that Self remarks has yet to be enveloped in proposed cladding like a Cristo art installation.

It's only as I get to my feet that I realise, having neglected to eat anything since the morning, my head feels like a bubble of water diluting the nervous energy that had hitherto been sustaining me. As we head down the escalators and along the gullet of the underground, I can't help but visualise myself as an overly-eager Mickey skipping along in the wake of the sorcerer's robe.

I remark at how satisfying it must be to prod the hornets' nest of the blogosphere with his latest essay provocations. "Yeah it's fucking funny", he affirms with a wry smirk, "and there's worse to come".

We board the Northern line heading south, Self stretching out his legs like a rower laying out his oars. We talk on about the nature of futurity and the digital landscape; the devaluation of literature since the 'democratisation of culture'; and about John Gray's "new obsession with concision", trying to defenestrate thousands of words from his latest work-in-progress. "Maybe soon he'll end up just writing on Twitter", I comment.

The stations tick down from Kentish Town to Euston, and we move on to modern politics and satire. Self theorises that the movement of mockery from Monty Python to Private Eye and so on has paradoxically defused the efficacy of satire by the state's bringing it in-house. Characterised most explicitly by Boris Johnson, a man who succeeds in satirising himself. We agree that 'The Thick Of It' is little more than an excruciatingly well-observed fly-on-the-wall show.

By this point, my hunger-induced fugue seems to amplify the torrent of air that shrink-wraps the train with harsh sound between each station. Over the years of reading his work I must have compiled mental dossiers of questions, and yet I find my mind suddenly stalling at the intersection of conversational roads; the rhythm of the train massaging my forebrain towards sleep. It feels like my brain has been suffused with lactic acid, throbbing with intellectual ‘burn’, as though I’ve endured a session in the gym with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s likely raised barely a sweat.

To be fair, Self also looks visibly tired as we shudder and grind through Charing Cross and Waterloo. I’d often thought how stimulating a derive across the city in his company would be, and yet I never contemplated the notion of worming across the same distance by tube. By the time we arrive at Stockwell, the Northern line feels like a fraying rope enervating my consciousness, and I’m near-hallucinatory with hunger.

As we exfoliate out of the tube's pores onto the city skin once again, I thank Self for his more than generous apportionment of time and he in turn bids me a warm farewell before schlepping off in the direction of home.

It’s a well-worn aphorism that you should never strive to meet in-person anyone you hold in admiration, since they are almost duty-bound to disappoint. Walking home though, I don’t feel I can say this about Will Self. Though he might (knowingly) aggravate some, I feel certain that figures of his intellectual stature in our contemporary culture are in austere supply and long may he persist in roving through the creative waters like an iconoclastic shark.