CityLife

Self on the joy of text

Will Self

WILL Self has a typically pungent phrase to sum up the burgeoning literature festival scene.

“They’re the Nuremberg rallies of the bourgeoisie, aren’t they,” the 48-year old Londoner says in that lugubrious snarl. “They are where the middle class go nowadays to affirm that it’s cultured and affirm that it’s still the middle class.” 

The writers who flock to those festivals are, Self (right) observes, “like early Christians; they’ll go anywhere in order to carry the gospel”.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be cynical about them,” Self says of literature festivals.

“Having said that, Martin (Amis) is a major figure in contemporary literature, a brilliant critic and writer, and his association with Manchester has been fruitful for the university and for him and I’m only too happy to support it.”

'A need for solid, sexual excitement'

Phew! So Self IS happy to be heading our way to join Amis – professor of creative writing at Manchester University – on Monday in a discussion about literature and sex as part of Manchester Literature Festival. 

“I think there will be a lot of very sexually-aroused people in the audience,” Self jests.

“We’re not wanting to shock the city fathers and mothers, or stray into pornography, but there’s obviously a need for some solid sexual excitement.”

So where do you start? With a bit of bawdy Chaucer? Lady Chatterley’s Lover? One of Jackie Collins’s bonkbusters?

“It will take us all the way from the polymorphous interspecies sexuality of Greek and Indian mythology, through the ribaldry and peasant high jinx of Chaucer and Boccaccio and Rabelais, to the insidious sexual naughtiness of Laclos and the French decadent school to the repression of sex in the Victorian era, at least in the English-speaking world, then into the taboo-busting of Joyce and the modernists, and then on into the bohemian writers of the 20th century,” Self says. “We’ll cover the waterfront!”

'Brilliance'

Almost certain to feature in the debate is Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita. “It seems to me that what Nabokov does in that novel is something really disturbing. He uses great writing to eroticise people, to excite people sexually in a wholly inappropriate way, in other words, to make paedophiliac sex appear sexy,” says Self.

“Incredibly, Lolita was the highest-selling book ever in the US when it came out – 120,000 copies in 12 weeks. It’s a sign of its brilliance. It’s a very clever and insidious thing to do.”

One point of the discussion will be that only really in anglo-American literature and – in the great span of literature – only in the comparatively recent past did writers not write about sex.

“When you are younger, reading Victorian novels, the question uppermost in my mind was: ‘Did they have sex? Am I missing something here?’,” says Self. “When I was 12 or 13 or 14, and I started reading Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot or   Austen, I didn’t know what was going on. When I was older I could decode it and understand what was going on and the extent to which the taboo did practically operate, as well as the taboo on describing the taboo.”  

Some TV adaptations have taken to making the implicit sex in some classic novels a little more explicit.
 
'A lot of sex is bad sex'

“Where there was sex, I think it’s reasonable to put it back in, if indicated in the text using the conventions of the time that sex did occur,” says Self. “But in a lot of Austen, it probably didn’t happen, so therefore there isn’t a case for it. Certainly in the Austenian world, as much as the Austenian novel, sex before marriage for a lady was an absolute no-no.”
 
But sex in the 21st century novel is well-nigh compulsory. And many great names – including Self – have been rewarded for their endeavours with a Bad Sex Award.
 
“I never really understood those awards, and I didn’t like Auberon Waugh, personally. He started it,” says Self. “It doesn’t really bother me. It’s just a bunch of London layabouts who fancy themselves as literary types. It is pretty feeble.
 
“On a more serious level, I think the sex I write about is bad sex. Am I writing accurately about bad sex, in which case maybe it’s good to be nominated for the prize?

“To the extent that I have written about sex, I think I’ve written about it with some honesty. A lot of sex is bad sex. A lot of sex is objectively bad. It’s promiscuous sex that’s essentially soulless and often soul-destroying. It’s semi-rape or ravaging. It’s sex that is deformed by pornographic expectation. I think most sex people have is bad sex.”

Martin Amis and Will Self discuss Literature And Sex on October 12 at 6.30pm at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, Cosmo Rodewald Hall at Manchester University.