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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com about “how disturbing it was to realise that style was personalty, and that our sense of self was nothing but mannerisms and negative emotions.” Lily gets a job at Baskin’s Public Relations when she is dead, “typing up still more releases on fresh kitchenware, country club launches, innovatory thermal socks BUY Will Self books online from and – whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation.” (There is a great A.J. Ayer joke, in that “death hadn’t thawed his notoriously glacial logic”, and “only such a relentless rationalist could gain any succour from these, the nervous tics of the afterlife.”) � 466 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Interview [published April 1998] Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist No other author in recent years has divided the critics with such relish as Will Self. With three novellas and two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, he has established himself as one of this country’s most inventive and original prose writers. However, far from accepting suggestions that after being portrayed as the enfant terrible of fictional satire, he now seeks the reward of critical respectability, Self remains as defiant as ever. “My work is intentionally divisive. In a way I have failed if I even get to that point. For a satirist to think in those terms would be absolutely ridiculous.” Certainly, while Self is the main contender to the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, he refuses to think of his writing as aimed at any notion of inclusion, however redundant, within critical tradition of the English literary canon. “The role of critics in terms of re-interpreting the novel for subsequent generations, as a blueprint, as an analogue of the culture itself is a legitimate view. Yet at the same time writers, like any other artist can fall victim to all forms of vanity in consideration of their own gifts, BUY Will Self books online from and and one of the chief sources of vanity interestingly is any notion of posterity.” Clearly Self is walking a tight-rope between his role as writer and literary mediator, between reporter and involved spectator. However, what sets him apart from his contemporaries is the unique perspective his work offers of the pre-millennial era, the (post)modern fin de siècle. His is a fictional world of serial killers, pederasts, and petty bourgeois angst, a mixture of high art and low life which reflects the mundanity and artifice of the contemporary zeitgeist. “If you can get a contemporary cultural reference into the book, get away with quoting Richard and Judy and you are confident it is going to stand, then you have done your job, you have translated the contemporary into the timeless.” It is Self’s willingness to acknowledge his literary inheritance, along with his reference to popular culture as a source of inspiration and ‘immutable intertextuality’, that distances him from the more incestuous and anachronistic impulses of contemporary fiction. Inspired by the likes of Céline, Nietzsche and Dostevesky, he shares with them a rage and revulsion, at what Sartre 467 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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