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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
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