Will Self and Contemporary British Society

G. Matthews

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137486561
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

This stimulating and comprehensive study of Will Self's work spans his entire career and offers insightful readings of all his fictional and non-fictional work up to and including his Booker prize nominated novel Umbrella.

1

‘This Great Torrent of Verbiage’: Will Self and the Satirists

In 1994 Self wrote an essay concerning the state of English culture in which he suggests that despite the apparent self-loathing, exhaustion and parochialism exhibited by the English novel (as opposed to the English-language novel), the form is thriving as a site of cultural interchange, invention and perversity. Entitled ‘The Valley of the Corn Dollies’, this article portrays English culture as a site of productive antagonisms: colonizer and colonized; bigoted and liberal; introverted and expansive; radical and conservative; monarchical and democratic; a land of both opportunity and inequality; of tradition and modernity. It is as a site of profound and complex oppositions that Self locates what, for him, is its greatest strength: ‘I believe, personally, [England is] the best possible country for someone with a satirical bent to live in. I’d go further: England has the world’s top satirical culture.’¹ In a review of Rude Britannia, an exhibition of British comic art and cartoon held at Tate Britain in 2010, he not only claims that ‘the satiric taproot is sunk into British soil’, but comments on how crucial ‘its rigorous propagation has always been to our constitution – both political and psychological’.² Since the post-war period, which saw unprecedented levels of devolution and decolonization, faltering economic performance and the coupling of technological advancement to national achievement, British culture – and English culture in particular – began to foster a myth of national decline in the face of rising international competition and the steady transition from empire to commonwealth. Self is quick to note that the strength of a nation’s identity is not directly correlative to the vibrancy of its culture but, in a culture of striking oppositions and self-criticism, satire stands as one of the key expressions of British national identity. Economic inequality and rampant class division are two of the most enduring issues within English society and they find particular valency in cultural appropriation; Self cites the middle-class appropriation of football fandom as a particularly apposite example. However, the great strength of English culture is found in the fact that it is not one singular, homogenized culture but engaged in a continuous series of synergies with diverse cultures from around the world. Nevertheless, Self comments that ‘the superstructure of English culture is still overwhelmingly white, middle class and metropolitan’ and expresses fears that English culture’s liberal, tolerant and polymorphous strengths could be lost in the name of nostalgia for a fabled English past.³ Implicit throughout Self’s argument is the notion that a healthy culture is a culture that possesses a strong satiric tradition that generates and sustains a critical and questioning attitude towards power, justice and the status quo.

Twenty years later Self published a companion piece entitled ‘How Has England Changed since 1994?’ in which he gives a far more negative appraisal of satire and English culture. Rather than seeing satire as a critical intellectual tradition that points towards an ‘underlying vigour in the nation’s primary institutions’, Self, influenced in part by fellow satirist Jonathan Coe and his essay on Boris Johnson for the London Review of Books, now offers a strident critique: ‘far from standing in a dynamical relation to the exercise of power, the whole tendency in postwar English snook-cocking – from the so-called “satire boom” of the 1960s, all the way through to the politico-shit-kicking of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It – has been implicitly to legitimise the status quo’.⁴ Coe’s complaint is that satire in the post-war period has attacked systems of power and authority without distinction to the extent that satiric critique has become a rhetorical weapon used by those in power, with Boris Johnson standing as the emblematic self-deprecating ‘buffoon’ who evades criticism through laughter. I would suggest that this is not an issue confined to the satiric tradition but, following Andrew Gibson, point towards the failed politicization of English as a discipline, or rather the dynamic between radical English departments and the wider conservative and parochial English culture that Self bemoans. Gibson questions whether English can still be read as ‘oppositional’ and whether it has ‘not even become, as a Lyotard or a Baudrillard might argue, “effective in opposition” in the parliamentary sense – in other words, in its own small way, more helpful to established power than an opposition qua opposition can afford to admit?’⁵ Although Self laments the demise of satire as an effective mode of critique, the crux of Coe’s argument hinges on the loss of distinction between criticism of individual policies or politicians and all politics, and in this respect, although Self laments his younger self’s myopia, his appraisal of ‘postmodern’ culture in the earlier essay already hints at the vitiation of satiric potency due to the tendency for subversion to eventually become assimilated within the dominant culture. Turning to journalism Self deplores the perennial culture of advertising and the ‘vast amount of highly self-reflexive material: journalists writing about journalists, about television programmes, about the way in which certain cultural phenomena have impacted (but not about the phenomena themselves)’.⁶ Self is highly critical of the term ‘postmodern’ when used to excuse almost any example of cultural self-reflexivity and contests the claim that divisions between high art and low art are steadily being eroded; he suggests instead that this is a new form of cultural appropriation rather than the genuine creation of new opportunities to open out high art to a wider audience. Self’s critique rests on the notion that despite the layer of irony appended to cultural objects, said cultural objects continue to exhibit their more pernicious tendencies, and too often self-reflexivity simply becomes an excuse for bad art. Following Robert Heath’s persuasive analysis of the psychology of advertising in Seducing the Subconscious (2012), Self argues that advertising functions on an affective rather than rational basis and is at its most effective when the consumer pays the least conscious attention. Despite the demise of traditional lifestyles in the face of Thatcherism in the 1980s, Self notes the emergence of a previously unheralded enjoyment in the act of consumption itself, evident in advertisements that not only celebrated products but rendered such enjoyment ironic. Citing the iconic Carlsberg advert created by Saatchi & Saatchi in 1973, Self notes that ‘an advertiser that pokes fun at its own product is perceived by the consumer as so confident in its worth that it can afford to do so’ and argues that such self-ironizing confidence rapidly crossed over into the world of politics.⁷ Self is concerned that the tools of satire are being co-opted by the establishment as a self-reflexive defence against critique, rendering oppositional discourse impotent.

Self’s two ‘state-of-the-nation’ essays help position his oeuvre between the twin poles of satire and postmodernism. On the one hand, Self’s politics are anti-essentialist and, like the majority of postmodern authors, he employs fragmentation, metafiction, self-reflexivity, irony, parody and intertextuality, combines features of high and low culture, displays incredulity towards grand narratives, and incorporates elements of magic realism. The productive antagonism that animates Self’s work relates to the hidden paradox located within postmodern fiction in general – what Linda Hutcheon has dubbed ‘complicitous critique’ or postmodernism’s ‘ability to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge’.⁸ Nevertheless, the stylistic tropes associated with the postmodern are central to Self’s political project, which seeks to denaturalize the dominant ideologies of contemporary British society, including capitalism, patriarchy and biopolitics. Self’s heterogeneous body of work is united around a desire to demonstrate that what is typically regarded as natural or eternal is actually culturally constructed. In this respect he can be positioned as a postmodern author whose ethics rest upon a hierarchy between self-reflexive representations that acknowledge their own cultural construction and essentialist discourses that present cultural, historical and political representations as secure and eternal. The problem is that, taken to its logical conclusion, the potentially endless possibilities heralded by the postmodern risk almost entirely devolving into a condition of radical indeterminacy in which all distinctions become problematic and subsequently a matter of cynical indifference. Claire Colebrook identifies a subtle distinction between postmodern irony and the satiric tradition that rests on the difference between irony’s ability to elevate the speaker above the concerns of the everyday and satire’s ‘lower’ emphasis on the emergence of ideas from what the sceptics called bios or life. The criticism or judgement of the overarching view of metaphysics requires a perspective that can step outside and delimit Western metaphysics but in doing so paradoxically affirms the groundless nature of all discourse. The reason for Hutcheon’s ‘complicitous critique’ may lie then with the fact that the postmodern ironist is critical of hierarchy and authority, which are revealed to be contingent, while simultaneously positioning the speaker as an authority suspended above metaphysics. By contrast Colebrook claims that satire debunks the high ideals of human aspiration by accentuating the body, ‘low’ culture and the vulgar: ‘far from ideas or concepts existing in some realm above human speech, the traditions of satire emphasize the meaningless, material and inessential emergence of ideas from life’.⁹ Satire is critical of the elevation of irony and focuses attention instead on the speaker and his or her contexts. Rather than seeking an authoritative voice in ideas or concepts suspended in some realm beyond human speech, satire points to those experiences that are not yet organized or codified into structures and ideals. In this respect Self’s prose bears similarities with the monstrous discourse of The Fat Controller in My Idea of Fun:

When he paused, it seemed to me only as if this great torrent of verbiage had been momentarily blocked by some snag or clotted spindrift of cogitation, and I felt the power of his thought building up behind the dam, waiting to sunder it. (MIF 41)

Self’s fictions are self-reflexive sites for a barrage of sceptical interpretations of art, culture, society, philosophy, history, economics, architecture and criticism itself. Instead of simply positioning Self as either a postmodern writer or a satirist, my purpose is to show how he incorporates both traditions into a complex and evolving dialectic that self-consciously evokes the ‘oppositional’ status of literary discourse in contemporary British society.

‘Some chants from failed cultures’ (QTI 75)

Self’s extensive vocabulary works to defamiliarize the quotidian but also paradoxically demonstrates that the raw materiality of life will always stand in excess of even the most virtuoso uses of language, thereby highlighting the inadequacy of the signifier with regard to the signified. By positioning life as always already exceeding forms of representation, Self implicitly elevates spontaneity over discipline, chaos over order, and satire over authority. Self’s fiction harkens back to the satiric roots of critique and is itself opposed to rational or institutionalized methods of criticism. In this respect his work speaks to the concerns of the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who, in Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), establishes a distinction between cynicism or enlightened false consciousness: ‘that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has laboured both successfully and in vain’ and kynicism, the ancient satirical element of critique that counteracts abstraction and the dialectic of enlightenment reason.¹⁰ As Timothy Bewes states, it is ‘polemically opposed to the kind of idealized “objective” critique that masquerades as something more respectable’.¹¹ The irony advocated by postmodern writers is simultaneously challenging and elitist, critical of authority yet hierarchical. As Colebrook argues, it claims ‘a point of view beyond the social whole and above ordinary speech and assumptions’.¹² By contrast satire focuses on the human as animal. The great achievements of culture and civilization, mankind’s religious ideals, his scientific discoveries, artistic feats and technological achievements, body-enhancements, aspirations and high principles are confronted, in satire, by the squalor and materiality of the foetal ape. Although man may seek to elevate himself, often through ironic distance no less, satire reminds us that he ultimately remains bound to desire and the material needs of the body. The monstrous, animalistic and scatological body is a recurrent satiric trope; as Valentine Cunningham notes, man in twentieth-century satire is commonly depicted as ‘devoid of spiritual life and intellectual worth, a parody of civility and culture, repellent, charmless, disgusting’.¹³ Whereas irony presents forms of language or poetic modes, historical events and moral positions as finite in relation to the infinitude of thought, satire emphasizes the otherwise repressed desires of the body and consequently deflates all elevated ideas and moral precepts by returning them to their material base.

The contrast between the carnality of the body and the lofty ideals of the mind is the common theme throughout Self’s first collection of short stories, entitled The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), in which elevated academic, medical and juridical discourse is used in order to make banal and seemingly absurd observations about everyday life. ‘Understanding the Ur-Bororo’ satirizes anthropology as a discourse that purports to offer an elevated ‘scientific’ view of indigenous species through a simultaneous reversal and doubling of its gaze. Not only does the narrative offer a view of the ‘exotic’ yet inexorably dull Ur-Bororo tribe, it offers a glimpse of contemporary British society through the anthropologist’s lens. The narrator first encounters a nascent anthropologist named Janner (a regional nickname for people from Devon, and Plymouth in particular) at college, and due to their peripheral status in relation to the rest of the student body they soon become close friends. Although the ‘fungoid’ and ‘waxy’ Janner is an anthropology student and is eventually to become renowned, to the narrator at least, as ‘The Anthropologist’ (QTI 71), his discourse is reminiscent of that of the satirist:

He was an excellent conversationalist, witty and informed. And if there was something rather repulsive about the way catarrh gurgled and huffled up and down his windpipe when he was speaking, it was more than compensated for by his animation, his excitement, and his capacity for getting completely involved with ideas. (QTI 70)

The satirist is also playful, humorous and witty, but takes delight in displaying decadence, corruption and disorder, typically by emphasizing bodily functions, which are represented in this instance by catarrh. At the same time, satire is never simply moralizing and neither is it merely splenetic, malign and grotesque; instead, Self’s description is a salutary reminder that satire is designed to please and is, at heart, an intellectual form. In this, and other passages throughout the narrative, Self portrays the satirist as an anthropologist who is critical of the customs and norms of his home environment. In this respect satire is a politicized form of anthropology, which speaks out against decadence and corruption by signalling the institutionalized structures and naturalized ideologies that enable vice and folly to take place.

‘Understanding the Ur-Bororo’ is influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955), itself a highly reflexive and self-critical exploration of the ‘exotic’ Other. Lévi-Strauss drew on structuralist linguistics to read different cultures as systems of symbolic communication by assessing the axioms and corollaries that underlie them. It was on this basis that he argued that the binary opposition between the ‘savage’ mind and the ‘civilized’ mind was an artificial distinction since different social groups would appropriate different structures for various social activities such as the marriage economy or death rites. Consequently his work suggests that the ‘savage’ mind functions much the same way as the ‘civilized’ mind, indicating in turn that the underlying structures behind all human activity are universal. From 1935 to 1939 Lévi-Strauss journeyed throughout Brazil and lived for some time with the Bororo tribe. Self appends the prefix ‘ur-’, meaning ‘primitive’, ‘original’ or ‘earliest’, but also simply signalling the inarticulate sound typically uttered in place of a word that the speaker cannot bring him or herself to express, which gestures in turn to the trope that defines Self’s version of this ‘exotic’ tribe, namely that, in sharp contrast with Lévi-Strauss’s experience with the Bororo, they are interminably dull. Although Lévi-Strauss records that ‘even when they are not in ceremonial garb, the men have such a passion for ornamentation that they are constantly improvising adornments’, the Ur-Bororo are ‘unrivalled in their meanness and lack of decoration’ (QTI 80).¹⁴ The tribe members also lack supplemental semiological systems such as body and facial tattooing and cicatrization, and uniformly dress in the traditional Ur-Bororo garment: ‘a long shapeless grey shift’ (QTI 86). Although the Ur-Bororo possess a conceptual language of animism and kinship rituals, Janner observes no attempt at propitiation or performance: ‘the Ur-Bororo speak often of various religious beliefs and accepted cosmological situations but always with the implication that they are at best sceptical. Mostly the “nuance” implies that they are indifferent’ (QTI 83). It is in this respect alone that Self’s Ur-Bororo resembles Lévi-Strauss’s description of the Bororo, for whom religion is taken for granted rather than treated with reverence:

ritualistic gestures were performed with the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘The Magus of the Quotidian’
• 1 ‘This Great Torrent of Verbiage’: Will Self and the Satirists
• 2 ‘The Unfailing Regularity of Dr Busner’: Will Self and the Psychiatrists
• 3 ‘These Artisans of the Body’: Will Self and the Doctors
• 4 ‘Fucking and Fighting’: Will Self and Gender
• 5 ‘A Psyche Available for Product Placement’: Will Self and Consumption
• 6 ‘Dissolving the Mechanised Matrix’: Will Self and Psychogeography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index