Will Self on the End of Satire, the Rise of Fascism and Writing His Own Death
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Will, first of all, you have been suffering from secondary myelofibrosis while writing this novel, how are you now?
Well, I nearly died in September. I wrote The Quantity Theory of Morality on steroids in about six weeks. Then this last six weeks, I’ve had the comedown. When you’re on high doses of steroids, it’s like mega-amphetamines. It was extraordinary. Nelly [Self’s wife] said it was like watching an automaton type. I typed the book in one draft. Well, I wrote a lot of the manuscript in a single draft. It’s tight as fuck, everything fits. But basically, it was like a doctor-induced mental breakdown. Over Christmas, it was fascinating, I basically cried nonstop for about three weeks. Nelly would wake me up and I would start screaming and saying I wanted to die. It was that bad.
I’m definitely going to write a book about being on steroids because I think you can see the steroid character in The Quantity Theory of Morality. It’s a hard book. It’s got facets like a diamond, it seems to me, it’s chiselled in that way. Part of the joke of Quantity Theory is that the joke is self-evident. In other words, I hope for the reader, the uncanny feeling of having the same story told over and over and over again is that you actually perversely find it realer and realer although it should be more and more unreal.
I’ve just finished reading the manuscript. It’s a notable return to the style of your first book, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Can you tell me why you wrote it?
The fundamental satirical project is this: for the last thirty years, the western bourgeoisie, in the Anglosphere, have viewed charity like a sort of ethical offset, that you can buy goodness and go on being a greedy prick the rest of the time and having your wine cellar and flying around the world, just as long as you give a bit to charity. That’s a view that neoliberalism encourages. That’s going back to what we lost with Thatcherism, we lost the fundamental – and frankly – the Judeo-Christian ethical perspective on greed. We bought the Gordon Gekko line, even if we dressed it up in Boden and Laura Ashley, that ‘greed is good’.
I went to Oxford and I grew up in a middle-class academic household. And because of my work and everything else, the cohort of people who I was friends with at university – one of them is in the House of Lords, one of them is the head of a major media organisation, and so on and so forth – because of my education, my friends are now among the great and the good, so-called. And they’re a bunch of pricks and they deserve to be fucking told it. I’ve been telling them for years, while, as Rob Brookman says in the novel, still sticking my bony knees under their dining tables. No wonder I’ve ultimately lost them as friends. You would do, wouldn’t you?
How do the people you know usually feel about appearing in your fiction?
Not good! [laughs] When my ex attacked me publicly in the media, all my friends deserted me because they didn’t want to stand up to Twitter. It was the year of Me Too, and Twitter was perceived as so frightening that they all just turned tail. I went to one after another of them and said, why won’t you support me publicly? And they just gaslighted me over it. So I sacked them, mostly. Or they sacked me.
Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat.
We began in a world with twice as much literacy as we have now. We’ve lost 50% of literacy in the last fifteen years. So, that epiphenomenon of writers like me being attacked and abandoned by our friends running scared of social media was part of the progression towards illiteracy and the fundamental inability to morally deliberate, which now characterises our society and which will propel us into authoritarianism, like America. That’s what the book’s about.
Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat – particularly humans who, instead of conceptualising in isolation and being able to think inside their own heads, only think through their engagement with others. That’s where fascism gets going, or social movements that depend on a kind of hysterical level of identification. What books and the ability to read books do is present a barrier that prevents you from being able to avoid moral deliberation at some point.
The most shocking thing for me in the last few years has been if you ask almost anybody how they judge whether an action is right or wrong, unless they’re a religious believer, they have no answer for you at all, except emotivism, except I think things are good that I like. I think things that I don’t like are bad. They don’t have any way of assessing good and bad. There are good reasons for that – multiculturalism. We’re presented with a lot of different moral systems in the same country at once. So, how do we choose? Well, we’ve got to deliberate.
We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence, which is when we were brokering the integration of different ethical systems into some kind of workable, decent country. Instead, we’ve abandoned reading books. We’ve abandoned deliberating.
We’ve abandoned reading books…
When I started writing, it was a totally different culture. I’m completely forgotten. My books are pulped. Penguin, my publisher for over twenty years, have lost the computer master files of my books. There’s no digital master files of the finished copies of my books at Penguin, and they published me for twenty years.
You get your own file at the British Library, but your publisher’s deleted the digital files of your work?
Isn’t that funny? Well, it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I mean, they just don’t care, I wasn’t making them money. Somebody’s probably deleted them.
I struggle with this idea that you are ‘not read’. It’s something you have been saying for at least the last ten years. You once said that the novel would become like easel painting, a kind of specialist medium for a select audience. But even if that’s true, is that really the same as ‘not being read’?
You just cannot imagine what the past was like. When I was in my mid thirties, I would give a reading to five hundred people, young people. Then, afterwards in the lineout, I’d say to a young woman ‘how would you like me to sign your book?’ and she would say ‘I’d like you to sign my body.’
Ok, so maybe there are no literary ‘rock stars’ anymore, but does that really mean you’re not read?
Well, there are a million indices! Book sales, royalties, library loans. There are other agencies that are concerned with collecting authors’ rights, authors’ licensing and copyright services, foreign sales, audio, etc., which I’ve done for many, many years. Everything has collapsed. My library income from library borrowing – remember library books? – twenty years ago, I used to get anything up to 10K a year from library borrowings. Fucking hell, man. Yeah, no, I am not read. Trust me. I know.
Let me bring us back to the novel. It’s a novel quite preoccupied with death. The last chapter, ‘The Principal Mourner’, features a sort of procession of funerals, including your own.
We’re a society that’s forgotten death. If you go to Pepys’s church, the church that Pepys worshipped at in St Olave’s, there are huge skulls on the gateposts as you go in. As Rob Brookman says in ‘The Principal Mourner’, ‘the way that death was acknowledged in the past was in stone’.
There’s a quote in that chapter that seems to me to sum up the whole spirit of the novel:
Like many contemporary funerals born of the denial of death, this one was delightfully informal – after the eulogies, people just stood around muttering nothing for a while, stunned yet again by the way, if you void life of any serious talk for ninety-nine per cent of your waking existence, it’s so very difficult – if not impossible – to summon any profundity when you need it, beyond pro formas and mere politeness.
I agree. You’ve picked up on a line I was particularly fond of because that is the truth. People would always ask me to read eulogies at funerals. I am the Principal Mourner. Every single one of those stories is true.
What was interesting, reading this novel and knowing that you’re unwell, is that though it’s very funny, it’s also incredibly moving. Do you think other readers will feel that way?
No, but come on, you have to acknowledge my genius as a writer because I refuse to allow you to identify with me. You know, that’s the joke. I won’t let you subside into, oh, poor Will, nobody went to his funeral and now he’s dead [laughs].
I think satire’s over. I really do. I think satire goes with liberal democracy.
It’s really just that I’m devoid of sentimentality. I’m a real satirist. I really want my punches to land. I’m serious. Even someone like Stephen Colbert in the States, he takes a phenomenon like Trump, and he turns it into an epistemic emergency that you can live with. You shouldn’t live with epistemic emergencies. When the very basis of knowledge and understanding is threatened, you should get off your arse and fucking do something.
How do you feel about The Quantity Theory of Morality being read as your last book, even if it turns out not to be?
I think that’s brilliantly funny. I’m taking the piss out of everybody’s sentimentality. I don’t think anybody dares to write their own death scene in books. I mean, let alone when they’re seriously ill with cancer and might not survive. I mean, that’s fucking balls of steel, isn’t it? I’m just saying, look, you really are superstitious, aren’t you? You really are a primitive bunch. So, how can we use your primitiveness as a heuristic to give you a little smack and persuade you to stop shitting in your own nest? Which is what you’re doing at the moment.
No, none of that bothers me. I’m serious though. I’m deadly serious, of course. I’m really worried. There’s a concept in political science called the Overton Window. It’s the idea of what people can conceive of within a given political system, what’s allowable. And of course, the Trump phenomenon is the smashing of the Overton Window, and it was smashed here by Brexit as well. But the thing is, people still try and hold it up and look through it and not see what’s happening around it.
The Quantity Theory of Morality seems to me a very psychogeographic novel. It’s hard not to draw connections with ‘The North London Book of The Dead’, the first story in your first book, and How The Dead Live, your subsequent novel. Both feature Lily Bloom, a character based on your mother, who has died of cancer, but continues to roam North London. In Quantity Theory, you return to your original prose style, to your first title, but also to Hampstead Garden Suburb, where you’re from.
I went back to the Hampstead Garden Suburb and walked round it a lot because I thought, you know, if I’m dying, I’m having my old age quickly. There is an abiding preoccupation throughout the early work with the city as a phenomenon, but in all honesty, writing Quantity Theory of Morality, it was about my English side, yeah. It’s a book about England. After Elaine I wanted to write something – if it was going to be my last book – I wanted it to be about England.
Weirdly, this is a joke, but it’s true. I asked the AI about Hampstead writers and it didn’t mention me, but it did mention Zadie Smith. I got absolutely furious with the AI and said, ‘Zadie grew up in fucking Willesden, which is like four miles away. I’m a fucking Hampstead writer! I’m Will Self.’ I got quite defensive and it said, ‘Well, no, the point is that the reason why I picked Zadie, not you, is Zadie’s a canonical writer and you’re not.’ And I said, ‘What? Zadie is a canonical writer and I’m not? How the fuck did that happen?’ Knowing full well that it was true. Arguing with my AI [laughs].
Doris Lessing said about your first book in 1991, ‘absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in – and wish we didn’t’. How does writing satire thirty years later compare?
I think satire’s over. I really do. I think satire goes with liberal democracy. What they’re doing on the late show now is ridicule. It’s not satire. You ridicule your enemies. You satirise your political opponents. Satire is elegant, you know, it’s a way of not fighting, really. The aim of satire is the moral reform of society without bloodshed. It’s drawing people’s attention to their follies without necessarily having to attack them in that way. I think that in particular satire grows out of the binary. It depends on a dialectical method where the opposition are annulled by mutually observing their absurdity. It’s part of a progressive parliamentary system where people are involved in civic deliberation. It’s actually a living form, satire. It’s not just laughing at shit saying that other people are behaving badly. Satire is part of a moral philosophy and part of the society. So, I think the kind of satire that I’ve written my whole career is over. And that’s why I end it in the book. I announce the death of satire, and then the death of the satirist in the book itself. It comes with one specific line where you know it’s over. The laughs have stopped.
You know, believe it or not, I’m not a humanist in the narrow sense, but my values are art and love, not money and power. They really, really, really are. All I’ve dedicated myself to in my own life is art and love. I’ve done all right, and thank God, despite being married three times and having children, I’m not bankrupt, but I live modestly. I’m not obsessed by money. The only other thing I’ve been interested in is loving people in one way or another.
This is a society whose destiny is to suffer either a genocide or a toxic environmental collapse. So, what are you going to do about it?
For me, Proust defines prose. He says a beautiful line of prose will take one moment of experience and another moment of experience and lift them above the time in which they’re present into an eternity in which they are joined together by a single beautiful line of prose. And that’s what I tried to do in my high-art work, and even to some extent in this book as well. I do think of myself, believe it or not, as a poet. I’m not writing content. I believe style and content are one and the same thing. By trying to write this book – it’s in a different style, but it’s still virtuosic – I’m trying to say, let’s not lose this. Let’s not lose this ability. For me, one of the fun things about The Quantity Theory of Morality, like all my work, is it goes all the way from the Bakhtinian, carnivalesque, obscene jokes to the most rarefied poetry within the same text. It’s hard to think of any other writer who could have a twenty-two inch long phalloplasty and moving, elegiac writing about death in the same book.
You told me you were hoping this novel might reach a younger audience. How is that looking?
It’s a book very much for my own children, about the society they’re building, and it’s a warning. It’s minatory, isn’t it? It’s warning you not to slide into fascism, not to slide lazily into authoritarian thinking. So, no, I cannot adjust anything much to gain younger readers. I rely on people like you, frankly, to read it and say, you know what, this is happening to people of your own age. Now, I do increasingly see it like a tiny little guerilla band who are kind of lost behind enemy lines. Because actually, it’s non-trivial. You say you’ve got friends who read me and you can discuss me and say, therefore, you know that I’m read. But I’m sorry, you are absolutely the exception. If you’re totally honest and think about it, most of the young men you know don’t read a novel from one end of the year to the next. They really don’t and they have no interest in it at all. And guess what? That’s also true for my generation, particularly of people who think they’re men. I say think they’re men because I’m so critical of patriarchy now that I don’t even believe in masculinity as a construction because look at who’s top man at the moment, Donald Trump, a pervert who numbered a sex offender among his close friends. I mean, this generation is disgusting.
What I’m trying to do in this book is to say to younger readers: seize your destiny. In other words, what I’m saying is this is a society that looks like its destiny is to suffer either a genocide or a toxic environmental collapse. So, what are you going to fucking do about it? Are you going to book another flight? Are you going to buy another consumer item? Are you going to sell out your love of poetry and your love of your fellow human being for more comfort food on Deliveroo? Is that really going to satisfy you?
Will, thank you for speaking with me.
Thanks, Alex.
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Will Self is a writer, he lives in South London.
Alex Dommett is a writer based in London. He holds an MA in Literature from UCL.
Image details: Will Self Reading at Texas A&M, 2013, Texas A&M University-Commerce Marketing Communications Photography
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