{"id":36866,"date":"2012-08-09T15:06:47","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T19:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=36866"},"modified":"2012-08-09T15:06:47","modified_gmt":"2012-08-09T19:06:47","slug":"larger-than-life-an-interview-with-will-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/09\/larger-than-life-an-interview-with-will-self\/","title":{"rendered":"Larger Than Life: An Interview with Will Self"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>\n<!--\n.tab { margin-left: 40px; }\n-->\n<\/style>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/willself.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/willself.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"willself\" width=\"330\" height=\"332\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-36886\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/willself.jpg 330w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/willself-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/willself-298x300.jpg 298w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Last August, I interviewed Will Self\u2014whose latest novel <em>Umbrella<\/em> has just been long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize\u2014in his London home. I had been given two weeks to prepare and I was quite terrified. My terror was warranted; I had spent the last ten days immersed in his hallucinatory fictional worlds, composed of seven novels, three novellas, and countless short stories. Through these parallel and often overlapping fictions, Self has constructed a relentless critique of our institutional failings, hypocritical cultural mores, and political inadequacies. My fears, notwithstanding being intellectually dwarfed, were largely to do with the sheer madness of many of his writings. Here was the writer who, over the years, had invented:<\/p>\n<p class=\"tab\">1. A man who wakes up with a vagina behind his left knee and has an affair with his (male) GP (<em>Bull: A Farce<\/em>);<\/p>\n<p class=\"tab\">2. A parallel Earth populated by nymphomaniacal and exhibitionist apes seen through the eyes of its most prominent experimental psychiatrists (<em>Great Apes<\/em>);<\/p>\n<p class=\"tab\">3. The afterlife taking place in the purgatorial London district of \u201cDulston,\u201d a suburb populated uniquely by senseless, chain-smoking dead people, haunted by their aborted fetuses and old neuroses, and living out the rest of infinity in dire office jobs (<em>How the Dead Live<\/em>);<\/p>\n<p class=\"tab\">4. A postapocalyptic London governed by a religion based on a cab driver named Dave\u2019s insane writings to his estranged son in the 2000s (<em>The Book of Dave<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>And then there was the public figure\u2014an acerbic satirist of towering intellect, a giant man of letters with a rhetorical bite strong enough to tear a lesser being apart. By the time I rang on the doorbell, Will Self had, to my mind, transmogrified into The Fat Controller\u2014the Mephistophelian antihero in his <em>My Idea of Fun<\/em>\u2014ready to shred me from limb to limb for my idiotic questions and inadequate readings.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I was silly, of course: He was very accommodating, and the interview went adequately, not to say well. Upon arrival, he made me a cup of tea and ushered me past Manglorian\u2014an astonishingly yappy Jack Russell\u2014up the stairs into a study filled from top to bottom with books, Post-it notes in grid formation, and a prominently placed photograph of Francis Bacon. Languorously smoking a single roll-up in a cigarette holder, my host answered a series of (idiotic) questions with wit and eloquence for the best part of two hours.<\/p>\n<p><strong>When did you start writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When I was twenty-five I got a job through a series of accidents running a small corporate publishing company. Around that time the first Mac desktop computers were coming in so I saw the tail end of marking up galleys and getting scans done and saw the beginnings of the modern production process. The physical praxis of making magazines catalyzed me and got me going, and also trained me as a writer, funnily enough. It was just writing who, what, when, where, and why, writing to length, writing to order\u2014that helped me to discipline myself to write the first book.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Was that<em> The Quantity Theory of Insanity<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes. I started it when my then-wife was pregnant and wrote it over that year. I think it started life as a series of riffs or gags that I would tell people. And then I started putting them together to see how they linked up to some extent.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you mean stories you told people in the flesh?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes, kind of. I\u2019ve always enjoyed bullshitting people. I still enjoy it. Saying something like, \u201cThey\u2019ve done a study recently that proves that actually there is only a fixed amount of sanity to go around in any given society or indeed sub-societal group,\u201d is the kind of thing that I would say as dinner-party conversation, and then I would embroider it and see if I could get people to believe it.<\/p>\n<p>Quite early on I got the idea that the stories were going to be interlinked in various ways. In some ways the story cycle was a strategy for not attempting a novel, but it was also a genuine belief in a kind of fictional load, that there were things you could do with this kind of\u2014dare I say it\u2014partially deconstructed form of narrative fiction that you couldn\u2019t do with a conventional novel.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It\u2019s striking that you seemed to base each story in that first collection on a strand of the social and medical sciences. Was that a conscious decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Somebody said all male writers\u2019 first books are acts of parricide and that book is a satire on academia and the social sciences among other things. My father was a political scientist and it was clearly an act of parricide. It takes the piss out of my father and his friends and their irrelevance as I saw it and the perniciousness of their discourse and the way in which people believed it.<\/p>\n<p>It was done with a slight of mind though. I almost managed to hide it from myself. I still write things now that are very obviously attacking people, sometimes people I know, and then I\u2019ll be slightly appalled that they\u2019ll be terribly pissed off and angry about it because I can\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n<p>But <em>The Quantity Theory of Insanity <\/em>wasn\u2019t done highly consciously\u2014I didn\u2019t sit down and think, \u201cI\u2019m going to write a book satirizing the social sciences.\u201d I definitely was interested in satirizing and taking on psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychiatry\u2014the \u201cpsy\u201d professions and the body of theory that lay behind them. That was much more conscious. The wider academic stuff was part of the atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you write by hand or by computer?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve done everything over the years. My mum died in 1988 and left me an Amstrad PCW 9512, which was a very primitive word processor. It probably had as much memory as my ten-year-old mobile phone. I wrote <em>The Quantity Theory of Insanity<\/em> partly on an office computer and partly on that Amstrad. We had an office on Southwark Street in a building called the Hop Exchange. It was the old dealing room for hops, a rather beautiful building just by Borough Market. I used to try to be in there by 6:30 <small>A.M.<\/small> and attempt to write for a couple of hours before the rest of the staff came in, and that\u2019s how I wrote that book.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d write on screen, print it out, correct the type, rekey it, and then do it again after that. I was primarily writing on a word processor, but then bigger, faster computers came in, the internet arrived in about 1995\u201396, and I began to get slightly technophobic. I wasn\u2019t enjoying the technology much, having been quite enthusiastic when I was running this business and adopting all of these machines. I didn\u2019t go completely luddite for a while though. <em>Dr Mukti<\/em> was the first book I wrote on a typewriter in around 2003. I\u2019ve written all of my books since on a manual typewriter.<\/p>\n<p><strong>To get away from the Internet?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>To get away from the Internet and from the subsonic sound of a computer. I come in to my study every morning and I write first drafts on the manual and I don\u2019t even turn the computer on until after lunch. I don\u2019t like having the machine on in the room. I find it very weird and oppressive. The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.<\/p>\n<p>I know other people aren\u2019t like that and don\u2019t have that problem, but I sure as shit do. And the real sea change was of course broadband\u2014the fact that you can be seriously trying to write something and you can click a few buttons and watch somebody being anally penetrated with a Lewis gun, it\u2019s incredibly distracting isn\u2019t it? Or you can buy some shit you really don\u2019t need with a few keystrokes. I mean, that\u2019s not good, is it? It\u2019s not helpful.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What\u2019s your latest novel, <em>Umbrella<\/em>, about?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Have you ever read Oliver Sacks\u2019s <em>Awakenings<\/em>? After the First World War there was an epidemic of a disease called encephalitis lethargica, which is a brain fever. Of the people afflicted with it, a third of them died, a third of them completely recovered, and a third of them developed a post-encephalitic syndrome where they subsided into weird comas. They remained frozen in these comas for years and years and years until this drug called L-dopa was synthesised. It was a dopamine drug that awoke them.<\/p>\n<p>My character is a woman who develops encephalitis lethargica after the First World War and goes into a comma for fifty years until being awoken in 1971, but she really personifies the technological mania of the twentieth century because the symptomology of the illness is ticcing, spasming, repetitiveness, myloclonic jerks\u2014it\u2019s very strange.<\/p>\n<p>It struck me that it was like having a body that was regimented rather than having a fluid machine, and I thought it was interesting to hypothesize that there was some strange relationship between the pathology and technology itself. That kind of scenario, I suppose, shows you in a nutshell what\u2019s different about the way I approach books compared to more conventional writers. I can\u2019t imagine anybody else who would dream of writing about that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It\u2019s striking how much you\u2019ve written about sanity, or about the way it\u2019s categorized and medicated.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m totally obsessed by it. Totally obsessed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Did you read too much Foucault in your twenties?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I read a bit of Foucault; I didn\u2019t read a huge amount of Foucault. I read a bit of R. D. Laing; I didn\u2019t read a huge amount of R. D. Laing. I think in part my own experience of addictive illness is why I write about it because it\u2019s a type of mental illness or mental malaise. It very much put me in touch with insanity on a personal level. I ended up being with quite a lot of people with what would be loosely defined as the major mental pathologies\u2014schizophrenia, manic depression\u2014and I ended up also being around a lot of \u201cpsych\u201d professionals as well. My oldest friend is a psychiatrist and I always got a lot of stories off him.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of theorists I was more influenced by Thomas Szasz\u2019s <em>The Myth of Mental Illness<\/em> and his concept of the therapeutic state. When I was a very disturbed young man I felt my sanity under threat and picked up on Szasz\u2019s thinking and started to think as Laing did, that sanity was\u2014a bit like the realist novel\u2014a socioculturally determined construct.<\/p>\n<p>This may sound rather like a feeble answer, but I\u2019m always amazed that other people don\u2019t write about these things because they seem to me so obviously fascinating. If you look at our society since Freud and later Foucault, and you look at the influence of the psych professions, it\u2019s just grown and grown and grown and grown and grown to the point at which therapy and the discourse of therapy is present in all media all the time. Are the looters and rioters mad or are they bad? It\u2019s everywhere. All of these things have interested and preoccupied me because of personal experience and because I think that they are linked to the way the world has evolved in my lifetime.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you still believe that sanity is a sociocultural construct?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Umm, yes. That doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s not also an illness, but I also think there are ways of behaving that are perfectly acceptable in our culture that could easily be seen as pathologies by other cultures. I think one should be mindful about that. Absolutely.<\/p>\n<p>Martin Amis said that one way to distinguish a novelist is that a novelist gets up in the morning and \u201cWhy cars? Why huts with wheels at the corners? Why escalators? Why toothbrushes?\u201d There\u2019s that Martian perspective and it\u2019s easy to see it in terms of the material world, a kind of inability to suspend disbelief in it, but you\u2019ve got to apply that persistently Martian perspective to the world of ideas and social mores as well.<\/p>\n<p>I think that\u2019s what draws me back to psychosis, which is the biggest and most obvious refusal to suspend disbelief in society and culture as it is presented to us. It\u2019s a refusenik posture. Over the years I\u2019ve been stalked and followed by a number of psychotic people, and one of the most recent ones was absolutely convinced that she\u2019d come back from the future to warn me that the machines had taken over and that I was one of the only people\u2014she\u2019d read my work\u2014who could stand out against them. When I tried to say to her, \u201cActually, you\u2019re schizophrenic, and I\u2019m calling the police now to have you sectioned,\u201d she said, \u201cAh, yes, you see, that proves that the machines have got to you already.\u201d At that point I think, Well, you might have a point actually. Maybe the machines have got to me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>When writing about these types of insanity, when writing about dreams, hallucinations, or visions as in <em>My Idea of Fun<\/em>, you often, if not always, delve into the realm of the fantastic. A lot of writers that could be labeled realist have also treated madness, like Dostoevsky with <em>Crime and Punishment<\/em>. Do you feel that using the fantastic trope is the best way of getting at these subconscious workings of the mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not really interested in depth psychology per se. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m trying to say, \u201cWhat is going on here?,\u201d because that presupposes a naturalistic world that is a given. I don\u2019t think all of Dostoevsky\u2019s work even does that. If you think of<em> Notes from the Underground<\/em>, that\u2019s kind of a mad book. I\u2019m not attempting to say things about individual psychopathology; I\u2019m attempting to say something about social psychopathology. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m trying to investigate through creating characters or even through mixing fantasy and reality; I\u2019m not trying to say anything about where one ends and the other begins, even. It\u2019s much more that I\u2019m interested in saying something more oblique about the kind of society in which we do live, or seem to live.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You write about the body a lot. <em>Liver<\/em> is a good example\u2014there are frequent descriptions of the body and its functions that are almost Elizabethan, as if you were trying to revive the concept of the four humors. Is this something you are conscious of, this fascination with the body?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I just don\u2019t understand why other people aren\u2019t preoccupied by the body. I just don\u2019t understand it. You can read novels\u2014and I don\u2019t read a great deal of novels\u2014that never consider the body. In a way, it\u2019s just as simple as nobody ever having a shit in a book whereas it seems to me that the condition of somebody\u2019s digestion is of almost paramount importance to their mental state. So much fiction seems disembodied to me, and so connected with a kind of cultural and political establishment, in whose interest it is that we be disembodied\u2014particularly in Anglo-Saxon culture which is so antipathetic to sexuality, sensuality, and bodily experience.<\/p>\n<p>If you write a novel in which nobody has a shit, nobody pisses, farts, cuts themselves, nobody has an awful fugue where they are aware of their blood circulation or their swollen liver or the wheeze in their lungs or the spot on the line of their jaw\u2014what are you saying about the world at that point? You\u2019re saying that the important thing is nothing to do with embodiment. You\u2019re saying that the important thing is that we\u2019re not like animals, whereas of course we are animals.<\/p>\n<p>Again it\u2019s not something I do with great consciousness but I can see \u2014I\u2019m not a fool\u2014that objectively that\u2019s clearly what I\u2019m doing. I\u2019m absolutely assaulting the disembodiment of a lot of our culture. In orthodox realist fiction people often sit down to eat a meal and all exchanges of conversation are clearly audible and succeed one another. Nobody talks over each other\u2014how do you express that in a novel?\u2014and the meal usually lasts about half a page.<\/p>\n<p><em>An extended version of this interview was originally published in print in <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewhitereview.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">The White Review<\/a><em>, a London-based arts and literature quarterly cofounded and edited by Jacques Testard and Benjamin Eastham. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>[tweetbutton]<\/p>\n<p>[facebook_ilike]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last August, I interviewed Will Self\u2014whose latest novel Umbrella has just been long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize\u2014in his London home. I had been given two weeks to prepare and I was quite terrified. My terror was warranted; I had spent the last ten days immersed in his hallucinatory fictional worlds, composed of seven [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[8386,8383,1745,8382,1050,1049,1268,8384,8385,2627,7740,75],"class_list":["post-36866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-dostoevsky","tag-foucault","tag-francis-bacon","tag-lethargica","tag-london","tag-man-booker-prize","tag-martin-amis","tag-r-d-laing","tag-thomas-szasz","tag-will-self","tag-world-war-i","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Larger Than Life: An Interview with Will Self by Jacques Testard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 9, 2012 \u2013 Last August, I interviewed Will Self\u2014whose latest novel Umbrella has just been long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize\u2014in his London home. 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