Irvine Welsh: 'I'm the same kind of writer as I am a drinker. I'm a binger'

When Irvine Welsh began writing 20 years ago, he hadn't much of a clue how to set about a novel. To get himself going, he hammered out 100,000 words, telling himself it was "just my launch pad to get into what I need to write about" – and sure enough the trick worked. The first 100,000 words were duly discarded, and lay forgotten for years, while the debut novel – Trainspotting – turned its author into a literary superstar.

Six more novels later, Welsh had an idea to dig those old words out again. They were stored on floppy disks he couldn't even read, so he found a data recovery expert on the internet, posted the disks off, and wondered what, if anything, would come back. "I was terrified that it would just get lost in the post. But if it was meant to be it was meant to be. I just thought: 'Oh well, I can't even remember what was on them anyway.'"

When the words returned safely, Welsh figured the next step would be straightforward. "Naively, I thought, well, I've got 100,000 words here, this should be all right," and so he sat down to write a prequel to Trainspotting. But immersing himself once again into the violent, darkly comic, chillingly affectless, uproariously chaotic world of his famous fictional junkies, Welsh ended up writing an epic so weighty and sprawling, it leaves Trainspotting looking like a footnote. "I just got into it," Welsh grins cheerfully. "It was fun. It was like meeting a bunch of old pals."

Read the rest here.

imitation

In the morning Robert announced that later he would go down to the lake and drown himself, if he wasn't too tired, or if he wasn't feeling too lazy.

He took comfort and joy in the thought, and the announcement of the thought - he knew, indeed everyone knew, that he would always feel lazy and thus, his proposed suicide was a simple, warm, thought that justified his sadness and made other people uncomfortable and therefore was almost as good as the real thing.

There were three other people in the room that morning. Rosie, his wife, a crumpled ball of a woman. Edna, his mother, whose skin was now the colour of cold breakfast tea with a few drops of condensed milk in it. And Leo, Robert's imaginary friend, who stood in the doorframe of Robert's bedroom with his arms folded across his chest and a rather slow, easy smile that sharply molded his sour-cream face into a study of lines and angles.

Robert, who in that moment lay in a bed wearing a black bathrobe and stained underwear, was a man that had done much in doing very little. He had tried his hand at poetry in college, but struggled terribly in thinking up a rhyme for "when love is lost," and so put down his leather bound notebook somewhere and hadn't looked upon the thing since. In his youth he had read many books, and saw many movies, and scrutinized many paintings, and in all of them he had offered a sort of cold admiration that weighed the banalities and immensities art as "just about the same."

It was with this same cold admiration that he looked at the reality of his family, all stood around the perimeter of his small twin bed, each possessing, in his eyes, a certain bright, cheerful ugliness that both fascinated and disgusted him to such a degree that he found in fact he didn't actually feel anything at all.

Robert gazed at Rosie, with her soft rolls and bulges, the wiry hairs on her chin that looked like a family of flies had drowned in a vat of milk before the cheese was made, the small beads of eyes that should have been hazel but looked almost piss-yellow in the morning light, and he wondered not if he had ever loved her but rather if he had ever liked her. She was lovable in her grotesqueness, her unspeakable devotion to him, her very good pork pies that came to him every Thursday or Friday afternoon on a plastic tray with a gradually peeling photo of their wedding day on it. She was worthy of a very matter-of-fact version of his love that manifested itself in either ambivalence or complete obliviousness. But she was not likable - she was too plain, too good, too simple to be liked and that, Robert thought, was probably the reason Leo was so keen about killing her.

Cock and Bull: A Review

In some ways, Will Self's 1992 novella Cock and Bull "works" before the reader even begins, simply in the development in a cleverly shocking premise - in one story, an unfulfilled woman grows a penis. In another, a man grows a vagina in the back of his left knee. It's just shocking, just crude, just strange enough to peek a reader's interest because both stories hinge on an impossibility that is as seemingly perverse as it is intriguing. There are simple, comic immensities in Self's work, but there is also an intense awareness of those immensities, like a comedian who explains the punchline to a rather good joke. Thus the clever awareness of how clever the set-up is breaks the fourth wall not in an engaging, but an unpleasantly jarring manner.

Self's takes a mocking approach to gender roles, presenting a flat, dull character in Carol - a plain, unmotivated college drop out who knows words like "phallocentrism" but cannot apply the word in a real, concrete way. Carol is married to Dan, a walking and sometimes talking metaphor, an impotent, effeminate man who makes Carol feel "less like a woman" when around him. His growing alcoholism, and their withering sex life, lend to Carol's feelings of complete disillusion with a life she has been essentially drifting through since college.

It is when Carol decides to take ownership of her body - through abstaining from his hard partying ways and, later, through masturbation - that she discovers her "frond." As Carol's penis grows, she becomes more assertive and dismissive of Dan, goes out into the world. As her penis grows, so does her freedom, her impatience, and ultimately her violent agression. Her actions become, gradually, more and more "masculine" in the stereotypical sense - culminating in a final, brutal act.

The same supposed reversal in behavior occurs too in "Bull," where John Bull is a journalist who grows a vagina behind his knee, and later finds himself in a strange, abusive affair with his doctor. Bull, once a rugby player, then a sports journalist, then forced to review a cabaret act (the event which leads to his new "growth") gradually becomes more and more feminine, dealing with PMS and other physical and hormonal fixtures of being a woman.

Self's ability to mold his unreal plots into something malleable and almost (almost) familiar is often masterful, as is his ability to anticipate and then in the same movement crush the expectations of the reader (most interestingly executed with his use of three narrators in "Cock"). But despite this ability, and despite his supposed attempt to satirize gender roles in a post-modern culture, there is a disconcerting fog of the misogynistic that hangs over both stories. This fog cheapens a device that could have been elevated to a more clever and even more humorous commentary on sex and gender.

Both stories, instead of shedding an interesting light on gender and sex by mocking sexist stereotypes of both men and women, celebrate and perpetuate them. Men who don't act "manly" enough become, literally, pussies - literally and figuratively emasculated - worthy of only being viewed as sex objects, worthy only of rape - as women, in Self's world, obviously are. By that same term, women who are not in touch with their femininity and cannot (or will not) find men to bring out that femininity by being real men are men themselves. But, because of their stupidity and their weakness, they cannot filter or harness all that precious male testosterone - they become monsters instead.

What's left is really just so many pretty turns of phrase, some interestingly executed experimentation, some shock value, and an all pervading sense of disappointment. The best jokes are ones that, after that initial raucous burst of laughter, leave you thinking - maybe not a lot, maybe not enough to change your day (or your mind), but certainly enough to linger somewhere in the subconscious. But there is a banality, a blankness in the digestion of both stories. Thus, "Cock and Bull" essentially amounts to a joke that ends with the punchline: "To get to the other side."

Ch-Ch-Changes

It's not quite a metamorphosis story, but the 2007 film Teeth came to mind almost instantly while I was reading Will Self's Cock and Bull. In Teeth, a sixteen year old girl's vagina undergoes a transformation of sorts the way Carol's does in Cock. Only, in Teeth, her vagina literally grows teeth.

The characters are similar in that they undergo not only physical but mental and emotionally changes throughout their stories. Carol, initially complacent though bored with her life as the wife of an alcoholic, regains her power through brutal means. in the same way, Dawn O'Keefe finds power in her transformation, by dominating those who would attempt to dominate her sexually.

There is an element of humor in both works, though I believe the humor is a lot more overt in Teeth and plays more on the absurdity but also the horror of a hormonal teenage girl, raging around town, biting guys penises off. Will Self's humor is a lot more subtle and a lot more subversive - and the change that his main character goes through is not a gimmick, and not playing on more obvious themes of male vs. female. In that way, I think the story succeeded. We spend enough time inside Carol's head so that her actions - while shocking - make sense for her character.

I also think that the insertion of a storyteller, someone once removed from Self...himself...was an interesting tool. it creates a dynamic where the author, Self, is both distancing and bringing the reader into the story. By having a narrator narrating someone else narrating the tale, he anticipates but also manipulates our reactions to the final, bizarre climax of the story. I suppose the main reason why Teeth so quickly came to mind for me was that the story had a very cinematic quality - people so often say that about literature just to say it - but I guess what I mean is that it had an atmosphere and a tone that for me matches the visual landscape of Teeth, and would be interesting to see presented in that way.

Here's the trailer for Teeth below:

On Guts, and The Guts Effect

With Guts, Chuck Palahniuk wanted to take the everyday, the mundane, and turn it into a horror story. In that, he certainly did succeed. As I read the story I found myself thinking back to some of the labels we've given so-called transgressive fiction over the semester. One constant trope seems to be an element of unease - something about these stories makes us uncomfortable. That certainly could be said for Crash, which presented us with a singular and peculiar take on human behavior and human sexuality - a portrait that was graphic but also rather detached and almost clinical in its approach.

What struck me about Guts was the mixture of the ick factor, and humor. It was almost like a sort of highbrow, twisted scene from some teen sex comedy like American Pie. Compared to the British authors we've read who've used humor in their pieces, Palahniuk employs to me a much more matter-of-fact but in many ways subtle brand. The humor is not a trick or a trinket in the story that he pulls out from time to time to show how clever he is. It is deliberate, and instills within the reader a sort of false sense of security. You think you're reading one story, then by the end everything shifts - there is still an element of the absurd, but it's not absurd enough not to make one feel squeamish as one reads about the "corn and peanuts" in the narrator's large intestine.

There's also a sense of "truthiness" to Palahniuk's story that we've yet to really see in other work we've read. The worlds of Crash, Money, and Nights at the Circus seem otherworldly and foreign to us in many ways. The world of Guts and even The Guts Effect, despite their absurdities, seem very steeped in reality - perhaps because the author goes to such lengths in both pieces to insist that they are things that have really happened, and perhaps that lends itself as much to the feeling of discomfort as anything else - to think that, yes, there are some people out there crazy(?) enough to try this stuff.

I was delighted by The Guts Effect which, just like Guts, began as one thing and ended up as something different altogether. This idea of the author's explanation for his work has always interested me - that's why I'm fascinated by DVD commentaries and Q&A's - for every artist their is always the question of intent. Of what they intended by their work. Of what they intend for their audience/reader/whatever to take away from it. And there is also the strange aftermath of taking in a painting or a movie or a book that will always, always, have nothing to do with the author at all. So then, there is the question - what is the point in the author's explanation? Who, exactly, does it serve? Is it useful in any way?

I think The Guts Effect is a fascinating look at the author in dialogue with his own work, and with his audience - spelling out his intent, but also anticipating the reaction to his work - in fact, making the reaction so very cartoonish that he seems to lampoon the whole exercise altogether. The piece, too, is transgressive - it takes an old form and turns it on its head, it points a finger directly at we, the readers of the piece. It turns the world into fiction into fiction into fiction.

In that way, I think the pieces are like little echoes of what we've already been reading. I do feel that there is a quality in all our books, especially in the recent Nights at the Circus, which seems to be trying to make sense of the world through storytelling. And by taking the traditional forms of storytelling and turning them on their heads, taking literary allusions and placing them in new contexts, using suicide notes to explain the story of a life, challenging the seam between reality and magic - they create new ways of looking at literature and the world we're living in today, tomorrow, whenever.

Martin Amis on JG Ballard

I found a review Martin Amis did on JG Ballard's Crash and the movie adaptation by Cronenberg. Interesting to read the thoughts of one author we've discussed on another author we've discussed. I found his thoughts on the film in contrast to the movie especially interesting, I think a lot of his gripes with how the film was executed really hit the nail on the head as far as what the film was missing, for me at least. An excerpt from the piece:

Cronenberg had to take this vision and submit it to the literalism of film. He
has also chosen to transport it through time: close to a quarter of a century.
And it seems to me that all the film’s dissonances arise from that shift. In 1973
the automobile could be seen as something erotic, conjuring up freedom and
power. In 1996 the associations point the other way, towards banality: car
pools, leadless fuel and asthma. Nowadays the poor old jamjar conjures up
nothing more than a frowsy stoicism. Cronenberg might as well have gone with
tail-fins, flared trousers, mini-skirts and beehives, so remorselessly does the
piece insist on its historical slot. The sex feels pre-Aids; the work-shy
sensualism feels pre-inflation; even the roads feel pre-gridlock. These cavils
may seem pedestrian -- but car culture feels pedestrian, too, as the millennium
nears.
On the other hand it feels delightfully nostalgic, and triumphantly retro, to sit
in a theatre watching an intelligent and unusual art movie. Cronenberg has
somehow found the cinematic equivalent of Ballard’s hypnotic gaze: the
balefulness, the haggard fixity. By excluding all common sense (and therefore
all humour), obsession invites comedy, and Crash is almost a very funny film.
By a similar logic, the monomaniacal interestingly frail. Cronenberg’s ending
isn’t there in the Ballard; it achieves a tragic modulation among all the
gauntness and passivity.

If you want to read the entire essay, you can view/download it here.

Unreality in Carter's Circus

In reading the first chapter's of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, I found a jarring difference in the voice of the narrator to the past books we've read in the class. There isn't the stale, clinical observations of John Ballard nor the frenetic, scattered stream of conscious of John Self. We are not being told the story by a singular character, but by someone outside of the story and outside the time the story is being told, and in this way we are situated in a peculiar way almost in the seat of Walser himself, or more likely in the body of some fly on the wall in Fevvers' stuffy dressing room.

What really struck me about the story so far is its altogether literary-ness - if that makes any sense. Automatically, we're thrust into a rather long and winding story, both "enchanted and disgusted" by Fevvers, stuck in our chairs until she's finished telling her tale. And in the frame of that tale are even more tales, and suddenly her journey takes on a mythic, almost fairy tale like slant.

As her story deepens, there is for the reader and for Walser a sense of pervading unreality. What the hell is going on? You're wrapped up in questions, many of which Walser asks himself throughout the story - in a bid to make sense of what's being told to him. There are the mysteries that are presented by the very existence of Fevvers. There are mysteries that beg practical answers like - does Fevvers have a navel, if she was hatched from an egg? And why should she have arms when wings are in fact arms? etc. But There is also the eerie feeling that stems from the story seeming to just go on and on - highlighted in this passage on page 53 of the novel, Chapter 3:

"On the soundless air of night came the ripple of Big Ben. Lizzie slammed the door as she came back to put the kettle on the hissing stove; the mauve and orange flames dipped and swayed. Big Ben concluded the run-up, struck - and went on striking. Walser relapsed on the sofa, dislodging not only a slithering mass of silken underthings but also the concealed layer of pamphlets and newspapers that lay beneath them. Muttering apologies, he bundled together the musky garments, but Lizzie, chattering with rage, snatched the papers from him and stuffed them away in the corner cupboard. Odd, that - that she did not want him to examine her old newspaper. But, odder still - Big Ben had once again struck midnight. The time outside still corresponded to that registered by the stopped gilt clock, inside. Inside and outside matched exactly, but both were badly wrong. H'm."

In this passage, we have what is one of the most (seemingly) real things in the world, Time, juxtaposed with a strange sense for both the reader and Walser that time has suddenly stopped or become unreal, taking on the quality of the cherished clock Fevvers managed to save from the Nelson Academy. This is not the first time throughout the night that, outside, Big Ben chimes. And on each occasion, Fevvers and Lizzie seem to be totally uncaring of this strange anomaly, even insisting that Walser is wrong and that, each time is the first time it Big Ben is striking midnight.

By creating this uncertainty of time, Carter creates an uncertainty in the story Fevvers is telling - an uncertainty of whether she is or is not telling the truth. By each chime of the clock, Walser finds himself falling deeper and deeper into the tale. At the first chime, he is greatly disturbed, but by this passage, while it gives him a moment's pause, all he can muster in response to the strange occurrence is a "H'm." Since time in the real world is bending to accomodate Fevvers' tale by mimicking the clock in her story, it seems as if to lend validity to her story or, if anything, at least make whether it is true or not less of an issue. It is the telling of it that is the thing.