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The Will Self interview
Matthew Collings talks to British writer Will Self.
Matthew Collings: Why do you think culture is so interested in bad behaviour?
Will Self: I think there are various currents of badness. There are malicious rivers that run into a confluence in the present. I think one very, very strong tendency is a kind of pornography of badness, the idea of culture being an arena within which people participate vicariously in the badness of individual creators and artists.
MC: So they delight in something shockingly naughty and evil going on somewhere else …
WS: That's right.
MC: … that part of them would want to do, but of course, the main part is a bit busy doing other more responsible things.
WS: That's absolutely right — artistic and cultural figures act as proxies for the desires of the mass in that way.
MC: This might be an odd question — maybe there isn't an answer -but why has that type of badness perhaps become the main type now?
WS: I think that in the post-Second World War period in Western cultures, there simply isn't enough sense of danger about for the mass. I also think that there is an attenuation of the connection between what Bohemia stood for traditionally and the kind of mass lifestyle/cultural options on offer. So I think there's no point any more to the avant garde or to the Bohemian. And badness rushes in to fill the vacuum.
MC: OK, so there's no point in being different to the mainstream, because there isn't really a mainstream. Everyone's a bit 'pseudo-ly' different compared to the old days when you could be radically different.
WS: That's right, you can't be radically different. I mean, if you go back to the bad cultural figures in the 19th century, they genuinely did stand outside social mores; they really were outlawed in that way. And there isn't that kind of outlawing any more.
MC: Now there's a diluted version of that kind of almost heroic badness into a generalised, rather empty kind of badness that everyone partakes in.
WS: And there's a pathologisation of it. Rather than it being a moral question of badness, it's bad mental health or bad hygiene. They don't wash and they're destroying their health and they're bad in that sense. The avant garde has been absorbed into the mass, and at the same time, the mass has become polymorphously dull in that way.
WS: Yeah. You think that there is a sense of experimenting with or exploring danger and frightening things in the absence of a really big dangerous thing like a war?
WS: Yes, it's a playground. Take, for example, the post-war rise in drug culture in Western societies. It's a kind of slalom of toxicities. Instead of actually going up on a mountain and skiing down it, you go up on a mountain inside your head and ski down it, flipping through gates in that way — it's a substitute. At times when the mass of the population really were in danger, then it became an absolutely ludicrous idea that any one individual should encapsulate danger in that way, or badness.
MC: Do you think the relationship between now and, say, Byron's time is merely one of a diluted version of what we had in the past, or do you think there's something more special about now or even something quite similar to those days?
WS: I also think that there is a progression and a dialectic that links the Byronic and high Romantic notion of the artist or the cultural creator as an individualist, as being separate from the mass of people, as being a wanderer in the sea of philosophy and creation, set apart from his fellow men. A kind of Nietzschean figure up on the hill. I think there's an absolute connection between that and the modernist notion of the artist-creator also as an individualist, also as separate from the mass of humanity, and even the post-modern idea of the creator as well. In fact, I think that they all stand in lineal descent from one another and I'm not sure there's that much difference. You know, it's always struck me that the modernist notion of the individual creator is just as Romantic as the Romantic idea.
MC: So do you think that we're all still a bit Romantic?
WS: Totally.
MC: That the time before Romanticism was incredibly different to what we've got now, or is the time since Romanticism rather similar?
WS: It's not only similar, I'd go even further and argue that modernism is more Romantic than Romanticism ever was. It seems to me that the whole point about the idea of the bad, different, amoral, outsider kind of creative figure is that he stands as a substitution for the notion of the religious prophet. And increasingly, as we move into more and more secular, more and more materialist cultural confluences, so that kind of creative figure takes on more and more of the appurtenances and the garb of this kind of prophetic figure. It becomes a quasi-religious role.
MC: You've talked about this being more or less Romanticism that we're still in, and yet the popular idea of Romanticism is of something swooningly sincere, utterly heartfelt — it might be expressing violent contradictions but it's absolutely sincere. Whereas the popular idea now is that sincerity is virtually impossible. No one really believes in anything, or if they have things that are a bit like beliefs, they're rather passive beliefs.
WS: I don’t want to get involved in casuistry, but it's a kind of insincere sincerity, if you like. It's a kind of sincerity broken down into its component insincere parts and then reassembled in the act of transgression. That's what it seems to be like. The great secular saints of the modernist and post-modernist movement achieved their final ascension into the empyrian through that, largely.
To reinforce my thesis that there is a direct line of inheritance from Romanticism through to post-modernism, you only have to look at who the great modernist outsiders were — you know, William Burroughs or Francis Bacon. These were sado-masochistic homosexuals with drug and alcohol habits who lived completely outside the normal channels of society and culture. And these are the kinds of figures that link Romanticism to post-modernism.
MC: What do you think is the difference between the aspirations of William Burroughs and the aspirations of anyone in the contemporary culture world, this funny mixture of high and low?
WS: Well, I think that we're at the fag end of that. I don't think that the new cultural era has dawned yet. And it's notable that as much as there's a mirroring between 19th- and 20th-century cultural development — between the post-World War I period of re-evaluation of all cultural values and the high point of Romanticism in the 1820s after the Napoleonic wars — so you could argue that, in the first two decades of the 21st century, we're likely to see something similar, that cultural dialectics demand this. Whether or not we'll be provided with the necessary war of holocaust in order to provoke people into these kinds of thoughts or not, I don't know. But it would be neat if that were what was to happen.
But as regards bad and transgressive cultural figures now, they are but the decadent fag end of the period, just as the Aubrey Beardsleys and even characters like Oscar Wilde were the decadent fag ends of Romanticism in the 19th century.
MC: Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Toulouse Lautrec and the other fabulous baddies of that time had a much more epic feel about their badness and transgression, whereas now, as you say, it is rather empty play-acting of badness now — that there was a charade that was magnificent and now it's a charade that's farcical and silly.
WS: Yes, it's medicalised, as I say. I mean, you can't be bad by being a sodomite, but you can be bad by not using a condom.
MC: When a really successful and good baddie like William Burroughs is pursuing badness, is it badness he's pursuing or is he pursuing something else through badness?
WS: I think it's a kind of a bizarrely positive cathexis for him, to borrow psychoanalytic terminology. Burroughs was a drug addict, so his impulse towards drug addiction was the same as any other drug addict. He was a homosexual at the time when homosexuality was reviled and beyond the pale. And these things worked to his advantage. What's really bad about his work is that it's disruptive of form. It attacks the notion of literary form. And his ideas attack the notion or the sanctity of the modern Western capitalist economy.
MC: But it's a sort of sacrilegious thing about art that he wants to do rather than necessarily a sacrilegious thing about life. It's just that the life stuff frees him to achieve the art.
WS: No, I think that was the life he lived and he happened to create that art. You can imagine, in Magritte's formulation, that people can live a high — be bourgeois in their lives and be extreme or avant garde in their reveries and their dreams. I don't think it necessarily links together. I just think it's convenient that there are these figures who are kind of sacrificial cows, because once you've tee-ed Burroughs up as an addict and a homosexual, you don’t have to look at the great pertinence and punch of his actual artistic critique.
MC: The other side of what you've just said is that actually no one can be bothered to look at the art anyway. All they want is a bit of exciting naughtiness now.
WS: Yes, I think the problem is that it then becomes conflated and that people see them as two sides of the same coin. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time that I've been asked whether I thought that taking drugs or behaving in an extreme fashion was integral to my work, then I'd be an extremely wealthy guy. In fact, I'd never need to publish again. That's not really the case, you see. The point is that the creation of art and maintaining a posture of genuine criticism towards the prevailing culture is extremely hard and determined work. I tend to be vitiated by bad or debauched conduct.