EAST Kilbride, 1974: I’m 12 and I buy 10cc’s Sheet Music then bug my old man for hours about the lyrics. Dad, what’s a palooka? What does “juju” mean?
Who’s Norman Mailer? Reading this new collection of Will Self’s essays you can’t help but imagine his own kids giving him a tougher grilling: “Hey, you’ve put velleity and vermiculated in one sentence. Is that even English?”
“Pater, stop calling my girlfriend my inamorata!”
It’s well known that Self’s vocabulary is extensive; he might even say “prolix”.
Okay – he’s wordy. As your Auntie might remark: he’s swallowed a dictionary! There are some right doozies in here, as with one sentence on Kafka that includes the words “legerdemain”, “jejune”, and “anomie”. Self makes Jonathan Meades sound as terse as Hemingway.
Will doesn’t exactly major in “willed sparseness”, a quality he admires in Kafka. But he is on to us – readers and reviewers alike.
Self knows his writings can be hard work: his sentences require concentration and he diagnoses “the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations”.
He argues persuasively that reading indiscriminately helps you learn to discriminate. As for literary critics, “themselves a dying breed, a cause for considerable schadenfreude on the part of novelists, (they) make all sorts of mistakes”. Aye, fair enough: it’s only proper we highlight Self’s strengths.
Here’s Will on YouTube talking about “The Dead”, Joyce’s great short story, and it’s quickly apparent he has a serious talent for the synoptic. Synoptic, like minatory, is one of his favourite words – and it appears repeatedly in this new collection. He admits to being “suspicious of synoptic schemas” but that’s precisely what he’s great at; he’s a terrific pedagogue and his summaries are not, as he worries, in any way spurious.
He’s succinct and informative here on Kafka, Australia, Chernobyl, W.G. Sebald, cybernetics, Conrad and The Shard. Memorably, he calls Dubai, “a last-chance saloon at which all the formal decadences of the West have come home to die”.
Self admits to a kind of referential mania: he revels in his internal search engine (his brain), his ongoing “workout of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas”. He admits: “Once bitten by a mania for associative thinking, you can’t tell where you might end up”. In his Kafka essay we get jump cuts from Catch-22 to sulphonamide antibiotics, from tuberculosis to Theresienstadt. But he’s as focused as a hawk when he accuses Kafka specialists of thinking prosaically rather than poetically, mocking that they “bungee jump into the oblivion of academic publication ... bouncing back up to receive tenure”.
His own poetic fan-boy tendencies soar as with this on Sebald: “His was a forensic phenomenology that took into account the very lacunae, the repressions and the partial amnesias that are the reality of lived life”.
Simultaneously he warns that readers must keep authors firmly grounded: “The urge to project holy motives on to writers in this godless age is quite as strong as our desire to damn them to a hell no one believes in.”
Writing about Self’s personal life is inescapable given he’s done much of his growing up in public. He says: “In 1986 I was on a prolonged binge that put me in rehab.”
Which brings us to junk and an essay on William Burroughs who, we learn here, Self thinks intended to kill his wife. Self’s own ex-wife, the Motherwell journalist Deborah Orr, appears briefly when she helps him get rid of some of his library – a “book pogrom”.
Difficulty shouldn’t put us off him but obscurities might. Self uses the phrase “aces in the hole” when referring to the Fukushima plant workers struggling to control the meltdown, but is Billy Wilder’s film of said title that well known these days? The real worry here, as with any collection, is repetition.
There’s a risk (to rip off an old NME pun on the aforementioned 10cc) of serving up ennui old iron. Self’s book generally avoids this trap. Some will prefer these essays to his novels.
Why the titular essay has a question mark and the book itself does not is left unexplained. What a tease. Self concludes that reading is a form of striving, a hustle. Oh, and that Norman Mailer was a palooka. Bad juju.
