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Will Self’s Transgressive Fictions
Brian Finney
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, by Will Self. Grove/Atlantic, 1998
[1] Where Kingsley Amis has come to be seen as the father figure of British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, and his son, Martin Amis, has replaced him in that capacity in the 1970s and 1980s, the spirit of Britain in
the 1990s is epitomized by Will Self. This may come as a surprise to the American reader. Self burst on the British literary scene with a tour-de-force, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991). Martin Amis himself praised this first collection of short stories as the work of “a very cruel writer--thrillingly heartless, terrifyingly brainy” (Heller 126). Self was immediately hailed as an original new talent by Salman Rushdie Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge, A. S. Byatt and Bill Buford. His second book, two novellas, Cock & Bull (1992) elicited mixed reactions from the reviewers, partly attributable to the startling sex change that each of the two protagonists experiences. However, when he published his first novel, My Idea of Fun (1993), a number of the critics moved in for the kill. The novel opens with the narrator telling his readers that his idea of fun consists of “tearing the time-buffeted head off the old dosser on the Tube” and “addressing” himself to the corpse (4). One critic called it “the most loathsome book I’ve ever read” (qtd. in Barnes 3), while another considered it “spectacularly nasty” (Harris 6).
[2] Self’s subsequent books have all contained elements calculated to enrage or shock various sections of his readership. He has published two more collections of short stories, Grey Area (1994) and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998), two further novels, Great Apes (1997) and How the Dead Live (2000), a novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (1996), and a collection of essays and journalism largely centered on drugs and mental health issues, Junk Mail (1995).
[3] Discomforted commentators have focused on Self’s unusual childhood and early adulthood to explain his literary obsession with sex, drugs and psychosis. Born in 1960 in East Finchley, London, Self started smoking marijuana at the age of twelve, graduating through amphetamines, cocaine and acid to heroin which he started injecting at eighteen. He remained a heroin addict throughout his time at Oxford University which he left with a third class degree. Eventually in 1986 he entered a treatment center in Weston-super-Mare where he claims that he cured his addiction (Shone 39). This did not prevent him from hitting the tabloid headlines in 1997 when he was caught taking heroin in the toilet of Prime Minister Major’s plane while covering the general election for the Observer newspaper. Self continues to inhabit the borderland between middle class literary life and that of the drug underworld. “I feel a sense of doubleness,” he has said. “I will take occasional excursions into my old world, and I live, I suppose, with a kind of Janus face” (Heller 127).
[4] “Writing,” he has remarked, “can be a kind of addiction too” (Heller 149). His distinctive writing style which incorporates this doubleness has been as much a subject of controversy as have his disturbing fictional scenarios. From his first book onwards he has shown a command of vocabulary well beyond that of the average reader or - to their annoyance - most reviewers. Reactions differ widely. Responding to the charge that he uses too many words, Self quotes a friend’s remark that “they never told Monet he used too many colours” (Moir 5).
[5] Self’s public persona then seems to have become an anomaly and a constant source of controversy. The violence of the response to his self-consciously transgressive writings seems out of proportion to the provocation. However, the notion of excess and transgression does appear to offer a way of reading Self’s work and of understanding why certain readers are driven to respond to it with such violence.
[6] Most critics have assumed that Self is a kind of Gothic satirist of contemporary Britain. Those reviewers who have defended his fiction as an important contribution to the contemporary cultural scene have tended to represent him as a satirist in the tradition of Juvenal, Swift and their successors. Sam Leith, reviewing Great Apes for the Observer is typical when he remarks that “he works as a sort of wildly horrified Gothic satirist” (16). In Junk Mail Self shows a keener awareness of the moral ambiguities and complexities of the satiric genre:
Satire is an art form that thrives best on a certain instability and tension in its creator. The satirist is always holding him or herself between two poles of great attraction. On the one side there is the flight into outright cynicism, anomie and amorality; on the other there is the equal and countervailing pressure towards objective truth, religion and morality. (172)
[7] Self sees himself as much a social rebel as a moral satirist, one who is more interested in shocking his middle-class readers than in reforming them. “What excites me,” he has said, “is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable” (Glover 15). Self shares with earlier thinkers and writers of the twentieth century this conception of being born into an unstable world. In particular, his work evokes the ideas of Georges Bataille who felt that social taboos and their transgression were wholly interdependent. Indeed, Bataille argues, it is only by transgressing taboos that we simultaneously contrive to endorse or modify them. Each is dependent on the other: “Organised transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is” (Eroticism 65). Bataille is representative of a complex view of the modern condition that reconciles Self’s need to shock us in his seemingly arbitrary scenes of animal torture and human excess with his claim to be occupying the high moral ground of the moralist. How else are we to understand a writer who talks approvingly about “the social and spiritual value of intoxication” (Junk Mail 19)? In a century disfigured by events such as the holocaust, Hiroshima and ethnic cleansing, Self maintains that the modern writer is driven to parallel forms of excess and transgression:
ours is an era in which the idea and practice of decadence - in the Nietzschean sense - has never been more clearly realized [. . .] [F]ar from representing a dissolution of nineteenth-century romanticism, the high modernism of the mid-twentieth century [. . .] has both compounded and enhanced the public image of the creative artist as deeply self-destructive, highly egotistic, plangently amoral and, of course, the nadir of anomie. (Junk Mail 58)
[8] Bataille and his poststructuralist successors characterize the twentieth century as the era which breaks radically with the search for absolute knowledge and total illumination. Total illumination (in the Hegelian idealist sense that Derrida deconstructs in his essay on Bataille) ends in a kind of blindness, because it hides the presence of base materialism. Hegel’s homogenizing philosophical system obscures the heterogeneity of material existence. Material existence embodies non-knowledge, eroticism and obscene laughter. Chance too is a part of heterogeneity, the other of any homogeneous system. 1 This post-Nietzschean view of the world is shared by Will Self in his fiction. According to Nietzsche reason is no more than “a system of relations between various passions and desires” (387). In Self’s world passions and desires are exposed as the real factors motivating human conduct. In his eyes British society is characterized by “the insistent iconization of violence and sensuality” (Junk Mail 209). Self gleefully seizes on these iconized elements and uses them to destroy the boundaries between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. For Bataille the heterogeneous “is what is expelled from the *homogeneous* body, be this body political, textual, or corporeal” (Pefanis 43). Self’s primary interest lies in transgressing the limits of homogeneity, whether they are social, psychological, sexual or linguistic. Yet he is simultaneously revealing the presence of a limit in the very act of transgressing it. The Fat Controller in his My Idea of Fun does not triumph over the homogeneous world around him; in murdering the woman who had merely been rude to him in the restaurant, he exposes and delineates the limits that construct and constrict that world by transgressing them - and in the process questioningly reinscribing them not necessarily exactly where they had been before.
[9] The implications of Self’s transgressive view of the modern world spill over to affect his handling of subjectivity and of language that offers subjects different positions to occupy. Like Bataille, Self is interested in the moment, as Foucault puts it, “when language, arriving at its confines, overleaps itself, explodes and radically challenges itself in laughter, tears, the mute and exorbitated horror of sacrifice, and where it remains fixed in this way at the limit of its void, speaking of itself in a second language in which the absence of a sovereign subject outlines its essential emptiness and incessantly fractures the unity of its discourse” (Language 48). Like Bataille, too, Self employs sex and eroticism to effect these transformations in the interaction between language and subjectivity. “Sex,” Self writes, is itself “a profound language” (Grey Area 282). He feels that “it is during periods when pornography infiltrates high art that there is the greatest level of creative innovation” (Junk Mail 145). Driven by the fates of sexuality, his characters are repeatedly depicted as mere puppets manipulated by the language of eroticism.
[10] Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, his recent collection of eight short stories, offers a set of variations on this theme. In “Dave Too” nomenclature overrides individuation to such an extent that all the characters merge into a single name - Dave. Each character appears “puppet-like,” manipulated from above by a giant Dave “trying to coax dummy Dave into a semblance of humanity” (Tough 76). In the last novella-length story, “The Nonce Prize,” a prisoner convicted of child abuse turns to writing stories characterized by their “peculiar absence of affect.” “The author might have felt for his creations in the abstract, but on the page he manipulated them like wooden puppets, like victims” (Tough 225). Self seems instinctually to incorporate the poststructuralist premise that the human subject is a construct of language.
[11] Self’s fictions of excess confront us with the predicament of our era, one where, as Foucault expresses it, “the interrogation of the limit replaces the search for totality” (Language 50). Where once we might have looked for complete explanation and transcendence, now all we can do is to transgress society’s boundaries so as to uncover our lack of completeness. Satire depends on a belief in a world of commonly accepted norms. But a fiction of excess concentrates on exploring the boundaries of those homogeneous norms, the boundaries between taboos and their transgression and between language and silence. In drawing a line in the sand in the very process of seeking freedom through excess, Self is rediscovering something like the sacred in the very act of being profoundly immoral. The mistake is to assume that he is adopting only one of these positions. He is celebrating both the act of transgression and the reinscription of limits at the same time. The point of constantly subjecting all such limits to the caustic scrutiny of one who trangresses them, is that the reinscription frequently involves drawing new limits, often more than one ata atime, that differ from those that satisfied Self’s predecessors. No limits are sacrosanct. Interrogation of the limits of Western society at the end of the twentieth century, not satirical portrayals of the breakdown of such limits, is what all Self’s fictions are primarily attempting to do.
[12] Two stories in his latest collection of stories, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, exemplify this unusual position that Self occupies in the satirical genre. The title of the first story in the book, “The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz,” makes ironic allusion to Fitzgerald’s celebrated satire of Americans’ pursuit of unimaginable riches in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922). At first Self’s story appears to be offering a similar updated satire of the contemporary drug culture’s search for an infinite high. Two ex-Jamaican brothers living in a north London suburb discover a huge seam of pure crack cocaine under their house. Danny, the older one, proceeds to take the same precautions against its discovery by the greedy world outside as did Braddock Washington in Fitzgerald’s story. He puts his drug addicted brother, Tembe, to work as courier and seller of the high-grade crack, while refraining from smoking any himself. As we follow Tembe making his deliveries, the story positively invites us to take a conventional social view of the degradations to which crack reduces Tembe and his wealthy customers. It renders Tembe impotent and pathetic and the craving it induces makes his wealthiest client, an Iranian, get down on his hands and knees and comb the carpet for spilled crumbs of crack: “His world had shrunk to this: tiny presences and gaping, yawning absences” (Tough 18).
[13] However at the climax of the story the Iranian invites Tembe to smoke his latest delivery with him. Tembe is overtaken by the greatest high of his life:
For the crack was on to him now, surging into his brain like a great crashing breaker of pure want. This is the hit, Tembe realised, concretely, irrefutably, for the first time. The whole hit of rock is to want more rock. The buzz of rock is itself the wanting of more rock. (21)
Why would anyone transgress the limits if there weren’t at least the promise of a charge of pleasure greater than anything available within the limits? And that charge comes ultimately not from the chemical effects of the substance, but from the desire for or anticipation of the pleasure it will give. Pleasure is located in the consciousness, as the narrative makes clear:
The drug seemed to be completing some open circuit in his brain, turning it into a humming, pulsing lattice-work of neurones. And the awareness of this fact, the giant nature of the hit, became part of the hit itself [. . .] (21)
[14] After he has put the pipe down he feels “all-powerful,” “[r]icher than the Iranian could ever be, more handsome, cooler” (23). The story concludes with his controlling brother, Danny, back home “chipping, chipping, chipping away. And he never ever touched the product” (23). The story effects a “volte-face” in these concluding pages by raising the possibility that Tembe’s cult of excess makes as much sense as the non-addicted world’s confinement to the limits. At first the reader is invited to occupy a position within those limits, a position which is then exposed in the last pages as one bred of ignorance and of a refusal to pursue the pleasure principle to its natural conclusion. Yet the story is far from a partisan defense of the crack habit. The humiliations and degradation which it produces among its habitués is powerfully portrayed for much of the story. But the ending, like a gust of wind, erases that clear line in the sand which the reader was encouraged to take for granted until the last two pages.
[15] In the last story in this book, “The Nonce Prize,” it is Danny who attempts to impose limits after he has changed positions with Tembe, becoming the addict after his brother has kicked the habit, and falling victim to a Jamaican drug king whom he had cheated before the opening of the first story. The drug king frames Danny, leaving him drugged in a room in which he discovers just before the police arrive the murdered and dismembered corpse of a young boy who has been injected by syringe with Danny’s semen. He is arrested and found guilty as a pedophile murderer. For his own safety has to be separated from the rest of the prisoners in a wing reserved for nonces or child molesters. As a self-respecting drug dealer, Danny is nauseated at being taken by the rest of the world as a sexual pervert. Even this pursuer of excess in the world of drugs has his limits when sex is directed at children. His one aim is to persuade the prison governor to return him to the main prison where he can lose his identity as a nonce. The governor encourages him to attend a creative writing class with two other child molesters all three of whom enter a competition for the best short story submitted by a prisoner that year.
[16] With this metafictional move Self focuses on the specifically linguistic and narrative aspects of the whole question of transgression and excess. Whereas Danny writes a realist fictional account of his and his brother’s experiences as crack dealers that bears an uncanny resemblance to the opening story in the book, one of the other two genuine nonces, who has actually killed one of his child victims, writes a story describing a man’s intense love for his dead wife’s cat. The writer asked to judge the entries, on reading this story, gets “the sense that awful things were happening - both physically and psychically - a little bit outside the story’s canvas” (238). He concludes that “it was one of the cleverest and most subtle portrayals of the affectless, psychopathic mind that he had ever read” (238). It is not until he arrives for the prize giving that he comes to confront the writer in person whom he is told is a child pervert and murderer. Only when it is too late does he realize that the author of the story, far from being “a compelling moral ironist,” “was a psychopath,” that “there hadn’t been a particle of ironic distance” in his story (243).
[17] Limits are defined by language. In a poststructuralist world such definitions are continuously subject to slippage. As a result of a verbal argument in court Danny has been mistakenly categorized as a pedophilic transgressive, while the true pedophile has convinced at least one sophisticated reader and literary expert that his narrative is that of someone who clearly recognizes (through his use of irony) the limits dividing the act from its distanced narration and placement. How then are we to determine the distance separating Self from his transgressive subject matter? One man’s limit is another man’s transgression. Danny fixes his limit which the nonce clearly needs to cross to experience pleasure. Verbal limits have as little durability as a line in the sand. What the final story ends up suggesting is that the line can only be drawn by the reader or interpreter of language. There is no objective limit. Each of us can only discover his or her limits by performing, narrating or reading acts of transgression. This final story makes clear that, while he may be able to transgress the limits of the social majority for us in his fictions, we have to reinscribe our own limits. He can liberate us into a world of partiality and temporality, but only we can decide where to draw our own tentative and vulnerable line in the ever-shifting sands. In facing his readers with the necessity of making such a choice he can be seen to be writing against the very emptiness that he is too often assumed to be reproducing.2
Notes
1. Bataille introduces the concept of heterogeneity in “La Structure psychologique du Fascisme,” in La critique social 10, 11 (1933, 34), the review coedited by Bataille and Boris Souvarine. The essay is translated in Bataille’s Visions of Excess, 1985.
2. I would like to thank Michael North for his helpful suggestions for revising an earlier draft of this essay.
Works Cited
- Barnes, Hugh. “Dangers of a Little Self-Knowledge.” Herald (Glasgow) 12 Mar. 1994: 3.
- Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986.
---. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
- Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.
Ed. Donald F.Bouchard. Ithaca, New York, 1977.
- Glover, Gillian. “Will, His Heroin Habit and a bad case of Self Abuse. Profile.” Scotsman 1 May 1997: 15.
- Harris, Martyn. “This Boy Must Try Less Hard.” Daily Telegraph 28 Oct. 1995: 6.
- Heller, Zoë. “Self Examination.” Vanity Fair June 1993: 125+.
- Leith, Sam. “He’s a Wimp. She’s a Chimp.” Observer Review 11 May 1997: 16.
- Moir, Jan. “Interview.” Daily Telegraph 23 Nov. 1996: 5.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968.
- Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
- Self. Will. Cock & Bull. New York: Random, 1992.
---. Great Apes. New York: Grove, 1997.
---. Grey Area and Other Stories. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1997.
---. How the Dead Live. New York: Grove, 2000.
---. Junk Mail. London and New York: Penguin, 1996.
---. My Idea of Fun. London and New York: Penguin, 1994.
---. The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Together with Five Supporting Propositions. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.
---. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
---. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. London: Bloomsbury, 1998.
- Shone, Tom. “The Complete, Unexpurgated Self.” Sunday Times Magazine 5 Sep. 1993: 39-42.
Copyright 2001, Brian Finney
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