Will Self makes jokes but doesn’t smile. We didn’t see his teeth even once, during a talk he gave last night at the University of Kent. Darwin College Senior Common Room was full. Students and one or two professors were sitting on the floor and there was a buzz of expectation that fell silent when Will entered, accompanied by Dave. Dave seemed around the same age as Will, with black hair and black clothes, an aging rock star look. He was too relaxed to be the unhappy Dave of The Book of Dave, but whether he was a mate, someone from the university or a minder, we were never told. He sat in the easy chair looking at Will’s back, while the author sat on a hard upright chair, swinging and cantilevering his long, thin denim clad legs in the gap between him and the audience, seeming uncertain of the form of the event.
He began by reading us a short story called The Minor Character. He stood up to read and, like an actor, switched on his charisma, his unmistakable voice taking on authority, conviction and polish.
The piece is a witty and scathing portrait of wealthy, fifty-ish Londoners. It introduces many minor characters who variously have dinner together, go away for the weekend to the country, have affairs and break-ups, come out as gay, develop cancer and finally, in the case of the most minor of minor characters, die alone at home. The narrator of the story, a character called Will, of whom we learn hardly anything, decides to have nothing further to do with this circle and disappears himself, getting rid of mirrors to avoid looking into a void. Will challenged us to decide what the story was about no one ‘gets’ it.
He then read a short extract from Walking to Hollywood with a more fantastical content,in which the ‘Self’ character, mildly insulted by someone in a shop, develops movie-like superhuman powers which enable him, literally, to stick all the sweets in the shop up the man’s arse, described in a wonderfully extravagant and surreal prose.
There was Q&A and a couple of themes emerged. One was aging and the body. Will referred many times, both directly and indirectly, to the age of the audience compared to his own. Walking to Hollywood in part, is about the loss of the shared culture of film that was part of Self’s youth, compared to today's‘Balkanised’ age of screen watching. He mentioned how the death of his mother and birth of his first child in his late twenties helped him find his authentic writing voice. That was when he realised that he could no longer reinvent himself. Excretion came up many times. Will told us the ‘key’ to the first story was the narrator likening the back of a dustbin lorry to a filthy anus. In Walking to Hollywood , he describes three bowel movements and then defends including them by saying, he had many more. He became animated when complaining about how most characters in literature are disembodied, that the taboos on writing about bodily functions are still strong. He described how, in his current writing, he reminds himself to include ‘minor ailments’ on every page.
At this point, he suggested that obsessing about minor ailments are common to everyone of any age but, looking around the room, and including myself, only a couple of years younger than Will, I’d say, only up to a point. There’s much material here that could be approached psychoanalytically, not least the way in which Will’s own relationship to his, incidentally attractive, body, has been destructive, suggesting what Freud might call an anally expulsive personality that has fed into his prodigous creativity. But perhaps that’s better explored in a PhD thesis …
The other theme, of course, was writing. One former student, hit the jackpot, correctly identifying that The Minor Character is about the writing of stories and the impossibility of capturing ‘character’.She came to this conclusion as there were ‘too many characters’ in the story. He gave good advice to a stuck novelist to plough on through a first draft before thinking of editing. He ranted about the eulogisation of Dickens as a way of preserving a certain picture of what literature is. My own take on Dickens is that he is so highly rated because he’s televisual and we live in a televisual age. Will has just written the screenplay for a TV version of The Minor Character which seems paradoxical as it’s a story about writing a story and we were told several times how the director and the ‘accountants’ who make up a TV production team, didn’t get it.
And so much more … This was an entertaining evening, hearing exciting prose in a beautiful voice. I came away stimulated, with a variety of takes on the world, some insightful, others silly. I wish he’d let himself smile, especially at his own good jokes. And who on earth was Dave?
