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of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual
competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely
convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t
think that literary art is a competition of any sort.
CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other
day then?
WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart
from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephemeral
applause of certain kinds?
CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to
a wider audience…
WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giving
and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based establishment
represents a kind of infotainment service
for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point
it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t
really change someone’s life or supply that missing
X factor that makes them exponentially increase
their involvement with the world or with literature.
Those things are not what make a work last. The
only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And
that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless
examples of that, of books that have lasted that you
wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting.
I’ve just finished writing a long introductory
essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky.
I mean who would have thought that Junky, published
back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to
BUY Will Self books online from and
back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for
35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become
probably the greatest confessional novel about
heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I
think undoubtedly so.
CH: That must have something to do with his subsequent
notoriety though.
WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing
else it would still stand.
CH: Junky’s very hard-boiled isn’t it?
WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it.
CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he?
WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts
towards later theories and fictional methods that he then
took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but
actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in
my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels,
that it’s on a par with Nausea or The Fall.
War and pacifism
CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay
that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They
wanted to know why this position is marginalised by
the media?
WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of
armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion
at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t
had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think
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