Transport, Technology and Ideology in the Work of Will Self

Durham E-Theses Transport, Technology and Ideology in the Work of Will Self GLEGHORN, JAMES,MARTIN How to cite: GLEGHORN, JAMES,MARTIN (2017) Transport, Technology and Ideology in the Work of Will Self, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12135/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Transport, Technology and Ideology in the Work of Will Self James Martin Gleghorn Thesis submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies Durham University 2017 Contents List of Abbreviations …………………………………………………………………………………………. 2 Statement of Copyright ……………………………………………….………………………………….. 3 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Chapter 1: Ironic Entrapment and Fundamental Instability: Will Self’s Literary Aesthetic …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 42 Chapter 2: The Book of Dave …………………………………………………………………………… 85 Chapter 3: Driving Fiction ……………………………………………………………………………….122 Chapter 4: Walking to Hollywood …………………………………………………………………. 164 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 198 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 208 1 List of Abbreviations D – Dorian DM – Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe FF – Feeding Frenzy GA – Great Apes GA&OS – Grey Area and Other Stories HtDL – How the Dead Live ‘iA’ – ‘iAnna’ JM – Junk Mail L - Liver MIoF – My Idea of Fun PG – PsychoGeography PT – Psycho Too QToI – The Quantity Theory of Insanity S – Shark TBoD – The Book of Dave TB – The Butt TTTFTTB – Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys U – Umbrella WtH – Walking to Hollywood 2 Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 3 Introduction ‘Pop ate itself years ago – and for the last half-decade we’ve merely been listening to it burp.’ (FF, p.viii) This is Will Self’s typically bodily and delightfully crude summary of the apparently sorry state of British popular culture, suggesting that such a concept no longer has any actual solid substance or reality. Self made this remark back in 2001, and in addition to the suggestion that this has now been an extremely long burp, its timing is curious. This is because, to all appearances, culture in late 1990s Britain was booming. The cultural tags synonymous with the era - namely Cool Britannia, Girl Power, Britpop – attest to this exciting period of creativity; a period in which, of course, Self himself was a prominent, even notorious figure. This mood was matched by a sense of political optimism, which culminated in the seemingly refreshing rise to power of a new, young Prime Minister. Herein lies the beginning of the problem for Self, however. Tony Blair’s vacuity ensured he became a figurehead for the ideological qualities of that entire epoch towards the turn of the millennium and beyond. Interpretations of ideology and collective delusions and manipulations feature heavily over the course of the following thesis, and Self’s comment on how ‘Pop ate itself’ provides a clue as to how they work in relation to his own thinking. Taking its origins from Marxism, an ideology works here as a belief system that instils both individuals and collective societies with a conviction in their own agency, even as they actually and unknowingly become bound up in various oppressive systems, organisations and regimes. In Marxist terms, capitalism played the most significant role in this form of insidious cultural entrapment, and although it would be wide of the mark to define Self as an actively dogmatic Marxist thinker he remains a staunch critic of the tools and effects of capitalism. In turn, this criticism plays a significant role in evidencing the libertarian, socialist and green leanings that form Self’s beliefs and writing. 4 This helps explain the influence of the Marxist thinker Guy Debord (1931-1994) on Self’s work. A central part of Debord’s theories was the belief that commodities and the mass media were the ultimate ideologies, and he uses what he feels is the logical end point of this argument and the kind of society this leads to as the first thesis – and opening statement of intent – of his seminal 1968 work, The Society of the Spectacle: 'The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.'1 This idea of direct experience being reduced to ‘mere representation’ is essentially what Self channels when he surmises that our self- consuming popular culture has led to us instead only experiencing its gaseous reverberations, even more so because the spectacle itself has an all-consuming quality to it. Debord’s influence on Self becomes increasingly manifest in light of another of his theories – psychogeography – and its accompanying practice – the dérive. Psychogeography is the idea that there is an inherent and causal link between physical locations and psychological states, and the dérive is the practice of exploring – both literally and figuratively – these varying states by undertaking extensive walks across different locations. The rationale behind this was an attempted form of escapism from the entrapping routines of work, production and capitalism that characterise spectacular society. Self, meanwhile, is a writer with a similar, long-held fixation with the effects that a given location has upon its inhabitants and travellers, to the extent he named his own collections of travel journalism after Debord’s theories. The two works – Psychogeography (2007) and Psycho Too (2009) – illuminate the ways that Self experiences places himself, and shed some light on his own motives for undertaking what, on many occasions, read as being extremely arduous journeys. Perhaps the most succinct 1 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1995), p.12 5 explanation of his motives, particularly in Debordian terms, comes in a walk across the South Downs, during which Self explains that ‘I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography.’ (PG, p.69) This all sounds wonderfully idealistic, but the question that practices such as the dérive invariably raises is simply, given the all-consuming nature of the spectacle, whether achieving any meaningful form of escape is actually possible, and even if it is possible, what meaning and form such an escape would entail. These questions dog both Self’s travel writing and his writing at large, not least because a prominent characteristic of his work is the awareness of how difficult transcending this kind of society, and recoupling human and physical geography, genuinely is. The effect that this awareness and his engagement with contemporary ideologies have within his work is one of ironic entrapment, and his writings on place and transport are themselves very much entwined within this entrapment. One way in which they play out, for instance, is through the ways that people – including Self himself – experience the differing geographies of a city. He uses his own city, London, and its iconic, artful Underground map as an example of how this works: Some of us even live more in the diagram of the tube than we do in the physical reality of London… you disappear down a hole in the Mile End Road and then pop out of another one in Chalk Farm. Some people’s whole lives must be like that, with no coherent sense of the city’s geography; they must find it impossible to circumvent old lovers, evade defunct friendships. (FF, p.39) Self suggests that while the tube map purports to offer an easier way of being connected to the entirety of London, it does so at the cost of essentially removing a dimension from its regular users’ lives, as they become trapped in a two-dimensional landscape haunted by and indistinguishable from memories of failed personal relationships (the short story ‘The End of the Relationship’ provides an example of this, when the point on the diagram known as Camden Town becomes inexorably and depressingly synonymous with the 6 promiscuities of the narrator’s cheating boyfriend). As this cycle of entrapment continues, those caught up within it become increasingly disconnected from the reality of the city and its physical geography. Self’s analysis of the potential psychological pitfalls of the Underground map is a comparatively archaic example of the kind of entrapment that defines so much of his writing. A detailed example of what this entrapment constitutes comes in miniature in his two very different pieces of Dubai journalism. The first of these charts Self’s epic 2008 walk from Shepperton in Middlesex to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The weariness that permeates Self’s piece of extended journalism is a stark contrast to the bemusement of a shorter, later article in which Self discusses ‘The night I was trapped in Dubai Airport’. While stuck in the airport overnight, Self realises that the slogan for the shopping centre at the Burj Khalifa proclaims it to be ‘The Centre of Now’2. This capitalised Now equates the present to an aggressive, entrapping form of consumerism that, far from being confined to one shopping centre, is spread across Dubai’s entire landscape.

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