Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
is a subjective reader are full of shit. Just as I am trying
to break down my resistance to writing books, so
I suppose at the same time, I am trying to break down
peoples resistance to reading them. Book’s aren’t life,
they are just books.”
Somewhat ironically however, Self is a believer in
the text as a non-factual body of words which stems
from his early attempts at writing. “I had a great deal
of difficulty with the feeling that I didn’t have anything
to say, that everything had been written already and
which really bedevilled me.” As a result Self has go
on to essentially redefine his role as an author. “I think
of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building
things. You are removing things, chipping away at
language to reveal a living form, I think I am merely
the midwife in that sense.”
True when you consider that he has delivered some of
the most provocative fiction of the last ten years. Self’s
stories are “a fundamental assault”, not just on the over
indulgent and emotional realism of contemporary fiction,
but on “the antinomies of organised social living”.
“People always say that they are full of sex, and drugs
and violence … I am not writing Jane Austen, but they
are only full of those things in so far as it is necessary
for them to mirror what I am trying to describe.” Believing
that a writer should have the courage of his own
perversions, Self sees his work as “perverse only in the
sense of the willingness to look upon the things that
BUY Will Self books online from and
other people regard as serious. I regard myself as quite
a puritan. I am quite a prudish person”.
The scene however in the concluding story of the
new collection, ‘The Nonce Prize’ of a murdered
child , the victim of a pederasts, whose dismembered
body, dressed only in a Toy Story T-shirt, is bound
to attract criticism. Yet for Self, “an image like that
has a total necessity, the mixing of the mundane with
the extremely horrible. Of course it is deliberately
shocking”, but what he plays on is our sense of simultaneous
aversion and innate attraction to the dark
of human nature; the necessity to explore the depths
of human potentiality. In a period in which politicians,
priests and the press are agonising about how
to find a basis for morality, Self’s ideas, lubricious as
they seem, are in fact profoundly principled. For the
author they represent “a chronic jouissance” which
reflects how people are increasingly finding consummate
enjoyment within signs of guilt, despair,
violence and death. “I am alluding to possibilities
that we know are actualities. Just as sex and drugs
continue to have their own pornography, the focusing
of sexual relief into ritualised posture, the need
to engage in a constructive relationship with power
or with society, with having children or the meaning
of generations. All these things seem to be subjected
to their own pornography. I hate that about modern
society, it is revolting.”
469
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