WILL SELF : KNIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

-First, why choose a woman to be the main character of this story ?

-W S : Well, in a theological sense, the inspiration for writing a novel was my experience with my own mother’s death, she died of cancer in 1988, and indeed the biography of the character of Lily Bloom is the same as my own mother’s : born in 1922, immigrated from the USA to Britain in 1958, died in 1988, so, you know, as a novelist, you work with the material you know best. I had this experience of my own mother's death, which influenced me profoundly, and when I came to want to write something about death and the nature of death in Western society, I already had the example of this woman’s death. If I look for more theoretical explanation of why it would be a woman, it’s because I wanted to examine family relationships, I wanted to look at the legacy of parents and children, in a sense as a closed system. Women tend to define more by family relationships than exterior advances ; I wanted to deal with characters who felt themselves to be passively influenced by time rather than to be the agents of change, within systems, and all of this made sense with the women protagonists ; also, as a writer, it’s simply exciting for me to write as a woman.

-Was it easier for you to use a woman ?

WS : I think if it had been a man, most men are preoccupied by their career, and I didn’t really want to write about somebody preoccupied by his career, I needed to write about preoccupied by what’s between their legs, by the sex and their emotions, so it kind of had to be a woman in a way.

-The short story : the north London book of the dead : an appetizer to this book ?

-WS : A precursor, an appetizer, yes. I was very influenced, when I was in the university, twenty years ago, by reading the « Tibetan book of the dead », I was fundamentally influenced by Eastern philosophies in a way, and I have used this concept of the Western version of the Tibetan book of the dead three times in my fiction : in the story, « The north London book of the dead », one chapter of « My idea of fun » which shows another recasting of that idea, and then in the novel, « How the dead live », there’s the same idea again, approached from a different angle. So it all represents this influence of Eastern philosophy on my thinking.

-Was it your first intention to do a short story ?

-WS : I wrote the « North London book of the dead » in 1989, ten years before I wrote « How the dead live », so it’s more a perennial idea of mine. It was published in France only last year but was written a decade ago. I didn’t have any thoughts to turn it into a novel at that time, this idea came much later.

-Do you believe yourself in reincarnation ?

-WS : Well, I don’t really believe in that : I’m open minded, so possibly ; I think that people who have a very dogmatic view about metaphysical reality make quite bad novelists : you have to remain in a state of engagement and interest an searching, always. How could I know about reincarnation ? I would be like one of those people who say they were heroes in another lifetime that would be an awful thing to be, it would be mad...

-If yes, in what or who would you like to be ?

-WS : Not the same than Lily, anyway : for dying again because both your parents take heroin overdose and you’re only one and a half years old ? That would be awful too ! No, so far as I do, at least to feel sympathetic to old Eastern philosophies, I would rather achieve enlightenment rather than to be reincarnated at all, I would rather let go the ego and identity in that way.

-Reincarnation as a way to change the future for Lilly, as she want to reincarnate in her daughter’s baby ?

-WS : No : Lilly is condemned to a bad reincarnation because of her attachment to her ego, because she cannot let go, in a Cartesian sense of the thinking eye, she’s obsessed by that. We all are, we all think the most important thing is to be ME : we put a lot of work into it. We get up in the morning and, for at least one hour or two, consciously or unconsciously, you work very hard to be Jean Paul ; I must be Jean Paul today, I wouldn’t be Will, that would be too mad and confusing, so I must be Jean Paul. Lilly is an extreme example of this because even death do not affect that . Phar Lap, her spirit guide, is an illusion ; you’ve died and your identity is not that significant, but she’s carrying on being me, with all the consequences.

-Have you been tempted, like the 19th century romantics, to kill yourself just to see what’s beyond the door ?

-WS : I think to some extent long term drug addiction is a form of suicide, and then anybody who’s an addict is suicidal ; I think you have a suicidal impulse then often you romanticize that and you think maybe, just as drug addicts think they are experimenting with drugs so they think they are experimenting with mortality with life and death, and so yes I’ve been afflicted by those kind of thoughts. It’s true very much of the French avant garde, the Surrealists, the Dadaïsts, the Situationists, all those groups had a romantic obsession with death, as going back to Lautréamont, and Shelley and the English romantics as well and the German too, going back to Werther, but, you know, I’m now more interested in life, I think.

-You know the Jack Brel’s words : dying is not important, but getting old... ! Is age something you’re afraid of ?

-WS : I think I’m the same as many people in our society : middle age is difficult for us, because the post sixties generation in particular are now in majority, this is why youth culture is getting older. You have people still writing a lot about rock music and drug culture and who are now middle aged, really, when we wore jeans, you know. Middle age is a difficult concept for us, because we don’t want to assume the responsibility and everything implied by middle age, but personally I’m very interested in being older. I’m gonna be forty in a few days : It’s great !

-This story is really really funny as usual, despite its subject : you even have to pay taxes of your past life to be able to reincarnate ! Death isn’t a life !

-WS : I think it’s a difficult novel for people to quite understand, because on one level it is a philosophical novel about nature of life and death and really, everything that happens to Lily after she dies is apparent to her coma, so Dulston and the fats, « les graisses » in French, creatures of her fat, her dead child, this all is her own psychic protections, Dulston his her own underworld, but through this she sees our world and she has very penetrating I think hysterical critic of the world we live in as well, so there are the two aspects of the novel, the philosophic and esoteric as well, and, you know, obviously it’s indicated by the title « How the dead live » : we are the dead as well, we are the living dead, I think because of our own fear of death, of our own attachment to ego, our obsession with the commercial and the materialism.

-And is this humor a way to cheat death ?

-WS : I think humor is like an orgasm, a kind of spontaneous catharsis of reality itself, of absurdity of existence and it’s integral to my writing and to my world’s view : I couldn’t write a book without jokes, I couldn’t do that, I just wouldn’t know how to do it.

-You said, about cigarettes, it’s a good way to die without fattening !

-WS : Yes ! Smoke without guilt attached anymore, but you know, even smoking is a kind of absurd thing, it’s like a drug’s addiction, one of the worst : it kills you and doesn’t do much for you, it’s socially acceptable : how bizarre ! It’s like humans having a genius for inventing things that are very crap, and the cigarettes have been refined and refined and refined, until it’s absolutely purposeless ! It’s different to traditional smokers who use nicotine as a drug of prophecy : they takes vast quantities and they’re stoned out of their brains and they see visions ; we just smoke this a little like pills, they call it in America, slang for cigarettes is « pills », so it’s like a pill we take every few minutes and it doesn’t make you feel much better, so what is it the fuck about ?

-It’s like in « Great apes », when those people go to clubs every night and they drink and smoke and they don’t know why...

-WS : Yes : I think that the opening of « Great apes » is very sad and depressing, the protagonist is very close to a mental breakdown, which he have, of course... It’s really interesting to see, because as it says in the introduction of my book that I really believe that chimpanzees will be extinct in the wild in the next twenty years and I think we will feel really strange about ourselves, humanity will be very odd to have killed those creatures who are so close to us : you can take a blood transfusion from a chimpanzee, and that’s philosophically very interesting and disturbing.

-You’re in France now for another reason too, in Lyon, where you wrote a big newspaper : can you tell us about it ?

-WS : Guy Walter, who’s a writer, approached me as he was given the job to curate a number of exhibits in Lyon, of a visual artwork created by writers, so he asked me to do one, and I said I would, so I made this giant newspaper, three meters high, two meters wide, eight pages, standing in a gallery called « l’ennui », « Boredom », and it’s an satirical comment on newspaper and on news in our culture, where it is more of a con trick, an illusion : we all read the newspapers, we think it’ll make us well informed, and really we know nothing ; the newspaper is almost a tool of oppression, so all the articles in this newspaper are about nothing, with no external references, no proper name, no place, no time, nothing. There’s a story about a serial killer who kills serial killers, a disease created by doctors, doctors have found a cure for but they cannot administrate the cure because they would reinfect people who have this disease created by doctors, and so on. I wrote this piece in English, and then I translated it into French with a computer program so there’s a computerized fancylation that creates a kind of dreadful French, really bad French, because I think that French people in particular have a vanity about their language : if you write a satirical newspaper in a perfect French, nobody would get it, and so forth ! So that is for Lyon.

-And don’t you miss sometimes you past as a journalist ?

-WS : I still work again as a journalist in London, I wrote for the New statesmen a piece on Guy Debord and the situationists recently, I’m gonna write another piece for them, I’m gonna go at Dérives in Paris this afternoon and I’ll write about that for another magazine in London, I broadcast for the BBC on politics, but I don’t do quite as much as I did as a journalist. I enjoyed journalism a lot, but I think there’s a problem with British newspapers and magazines, problems which you have here as well, being that editors are less prepared to commission big pieces, everything has to be very short now and that’s not very interesting to me : I think that if I want to spend a week or two on a subject, I want to write ten pages rather than one.

-And what about music ? You recorded some stuff for Bomb the Bass some years ago : have you never been tempted to do it again ?

-WS : There’s one thing I would like to do with a friend who’s a reggae musician, a kind of rock opera, a reggae opera, but he never gets his acts together ! But it could be really good, we did some work on it, and there’s a piece because the subject matter lends itself to music, but it’s not my main thing. Bomb the bass did a good piece, but it was him, not me, I just read. That was years ago, eight or nine years I did that with Tim Simonon : he just phoned me up and say : »Would you come to the studio ?», and I said : »How much money ? », and he said « 500 pounds in cash ». I went there, took the money, brought some drugs... like a musician ! Today, I listen to Sibelius ! Today, I’m forty, and I listen to classical music ! (laugh) I have great difficulties with music, I think it’s recovering from a lot of depression, I don’t have an advanced musical taste, really, I still am catching up with music and I have difficulties with it. I listen to a lot of different things, from Tricky’s last album to the reissue of Miles Davis’s « kind of blue ». Phar Lap is looking like him ? Well, I’ve been enormously influenced by jazz, because of my half brother, fifteen years older than me, who gave me his record collection when I was a kid, so I have the original albums of Coltrane, Miles Davis etc and this was the first music I listened to, as a kid. My brother is a bass player, and I really grew up with the consciousness of jazz before rock music, and that also gave a consciousness of the underground culture that preceded the sixties.

-Books in French are translated one or two years later than they are published in English : so you surely have a new book under way ?

-WS : Yes, I’m doing at least two things : in 1998, a producer approached me and asked me to write a screenplay of Oscar Wilde’s « Portrait of Dorian Gray », so I had this idea to transpose this from the1890’s to the1980’s, to the gay scene of the 1980’s in London and New York, and so I’ve been working on this play on and off for the last three years, but I know it will never get made into a film because it is too extreme and too long : it’s now three hours long, nearly, and too literary as a script ; the film makers don’t like scripts which have too much fine writing in it, I don’t think they can absorb it, so I’m turning it into a novel, so I re-write Oscar Wilde ! I also write with an illustrator, Martin Rowson, who’s a famous cartoonist, and he will do the illustration for it. We made « The sweet smell of psychosis » and we work very close together. So we’re doing that, and then I’ll write another novel as well, I have an idea for it. I don’t know, I like to think I wouldn’t be that surprised if I didn’t have more ideas, now that I have written a lot of books : eight works of fiction but they keep coming, so what can you do ?

As we leave, Will Self reminds us that the next day is the anniversary of William Burroughs's murder of his wife. Three days later, there will be a terrorist attack on Manhattan's twin towers and the Pentagon. How the dead live ? How the living die ? Like bastards, for sure...

Interview made in Paris by Jean Paul Coillard, September 8th 2001.

Thanks to Virginie Petracco from l’Olivier.