Will Self is still, to the shame of the reading world, best known for his early, outrageous satirical works, such as Cock and Bull and The Quantity Theory of Insanity. As with his reputation for bad behavior in public, at which media interest has also long been arrested, this renown is no longer entirely applicable. It is hard, to be sure, to keep up with the many (eleven!) fictional works by this prodigious voice (not to speak of his gigantic output in the department of nonfiction), and yet this interview means to convince you that it is time to do so. What does a novelist do when the public glare has shifted toward some newly crowned twenty-something with dubious credentials and bad prose? The novelist writes his most imaginative, most dazzling, and most moving book yet, in this case a pre- and post-apocalyptic tragicomedy in which the most repressive religion on earth seems to have been established in the ruins of one London cabbie’s life, circa 2002. The Book of Dave, which will be published by Bloomsbury in November, has its own language, it has Mad Max fashions, it has genetic experiments gone awry, and an obsessive love for the A-Z. What could be better? The conversation that follows took place through a series of emails in early 2006. |
I: Technology
Rick Moody: I’ve heard that you recently renounced the personal computer, at least for the purposes of literary composition. Can you discuss?
Will Self: I write too fast that’s one of my problems. I think of myself—perhaps as a result—as too glib and facile a phrase maker. I write too fast—because I think too fast. I count on the ability a computer gives you to cut, reorder, and shape material on the page rather than in your mind. Also, I loathe the aesthetics of the PC—it’s a bogus window into a wider world, its garish colors and gimcrackery: the gewgaws of pixels. We already live in a world toolmediated by screens: the windscreen of the car, the TV, the PC—it’s conceivable that there are individuals who spend more time looking at screens than they do at soi-disant reality. I loathe also the superabundance of the computing realm, the idea that some stoner downloading Metallica has more computing power at his fingertips— to the power of 100—than they needed to send men to the moon.
RM: And yet, despite your resistance to the PC, you have recently begun blogging, I notice, in addition to doing occasional television appearances as well. Do you see this sort of media work as completely separate from putting words on the page, or is it somehow usefully related? And what is your response to the blogosphere in general?
WS: Well, I confess, I may be writing some blogs for my own site, but I don’t read other people’s. One of the problems is that my computer equipment at home—in line with what I’ve said above—hasn’t been upgraded since 1996. My Luddite stand (or sheer laziness) means that I lack the power and the programs to read a lot of Web sites on my home machine—so I go out to cybercafes to write my blogs. The conceit is that I’m going to wander farther and farther from home, posting my blogs as I go. I do think electronic publishing is likely to further subvert the print media in the next few years, but I’ve no doubt that the medium isn’t altogether the message. Simply because there’s another way of making views known, it doesn’t mean that good style, research, or engaging opinions aren’t required. There’s an aspect of the internet forums that presupposes—and enacts!—that old canard that everyone has a novel in him. I don’t think everyone does at all—and the Net is a medium which unfortunately makes it easier for those who have bad novels, and miscellaneous other screeds, to get them out. As to my involvement in other media— TV, radio, print—I’ve always been in two minds about this. I was very keen on acting when I was younger, I also did some standup and—like you—played some music. I also wanted to be a full-time writer and make a living. From around 1990, when I published my first book, I built the two careers in tandem. In the early years I certainly did need the money that journalism brought in—but I also liked the way in which it brought me into contact with the wider world. I found other opportunities— like teaching creative writing, or doing more literary essays—too rarefied: I was already getting enough literature writing fiction. However, latterly I certainly could’ve scaled down my other media activities and concentrated more on fiction. In part I feel insecure about doing this, and in part I’ve become, predictably, addicted to the lure of the quick deadline and the weekly byline. I’m not exactly ashamed about this—there’s an honorable tradition in London of being both a Grub Street hack and a perfectly serious novelist. The two are not incompatible. But as I say, I am conflicted.
RM: Yet another of your recent projects involves walking from airports to major cities around the world. What brought this about, what cities have you visited so far, and how has the experience instructed you?
WS: Um, I may have overstated this! So far I’ve managed only four airport walks—all in the UK. But I hope to walk from JFK to Manhattan the next time I come to the States, and from LAX to the Chateau Marmont. In part the airport walks are a form of derive—or “drift” as the French Situationists styled it—a way of subverting how contemporary society imprisons us in an ordered, economically controlled environment. By walking where everyone else drives, or is otherwise mechanically conveyed, you begin to explore the environment in a new way. When I walked from central London to Heathrow Airport I felt that I might, quite possibly, have been the first person ever to do this journey in this way—certainly in the postindustrial era—and that I was more profoundly in virgin territory that I would’ve been had I found myself paddling up some distant tributary of the Amazon. When I reached the traffic tunnel under the runways that leads to the terminals, I found a sign saying: “No Pedestrian Access: Go Back to the Renaissance.” The Renaissance is in fact a hotel on the peripheral road where they run a shuttle-bus service to the terminals—but nevertheless I felt overseen by the society of the spectacle. In general, I love walking—it puts a brake on a society crazed by its own ability to travel at high speed. It stops me thinking, and it allows me to reach places— often ones near to hand—which others don’t bother with, because they’re leaping over them on their way to Seoul and soullessness. Needless to say, I abhor tourism. I’ve been doing a series of radial walks, whereby I walk a hundred miles from where I live in London along the cardinal points of the compass. Even here, in one of the most populous countries in the world, you can walk for hours—days even—barely encountering a soul. People say they live in the country—but they don’t. They live in their Mitsubishi Inuits, driving their children to pony club. Or else they sit in their houses and gardens. Walking long-distance through southeast England I often feel like a Vietcong infiltrator, creeping along a green tunnel into the heart of the West. |
