An evening with Will Self | Hillingdon Literary Festival

I've been at Brunel for five years this year and when I came to Brunel I think I was working on a novel called umbrella that was the beginning of a trilogy of novels well I didn't when I was working on the novel I didn't know it was a trilogy when I finished it thought what am I going to do next suddenly the idea for two other novels fell into my mind so to speak and so the first novel was good on bro the second one is called shark which I wrote while I've been teaching here and I'm gonna be finishing the third novel in the trilogy which is called phone early next year and it'll be published in June of next year so Brunel has been good to me you know I've kind of worked on a substantial midlife trilogy of novels here rather than you know some people say will you come and teach in academia you won't write on the contrary I found it incredibly stimulating here I found the interaction with my colleagues and with the students very helpful actually for work and so I don't take that view now the the the trilogy of novels is concerned with the relationship between mental illness technology and war and my theory is that each of the major conflicts of the last hundred years has introduced a new kind of madness to our society and indeed the technology which we tend to like to look at in our culture as being something that we cleverly invent it's really just kind of that happens to us now give me my example to the First World War very very puzzling in a certain way why we should have a war that is essentially fought there's a great military historian called John Keegan he talks a lot about what's called the killing zone on the battlefield which is the area where people actually get killed and the killing zone for the first world war was a long snaking strip of ground that in some places with bow Maori even two miles wide and in some place it's only two or three hundred yards wide it stretched all the way from the Belgian border in Flanders all the way down to the Swiss border in the south east of France so and and that by nineteen 1940 when the British Expeditionary Force fought their first engagements in the brick stacks of eep it was a fluid fast-moving war and by 1915 by the summer of 1915 that's worth thinking about this the French army had lost more men than all allied armies lost in the Second World War together you know if you ever want to criticize the French or you know kind of it was very fashionable thing in Britain when I was young instill to regard the French as cowards and collaborators you have to think about what their experience of the First World War was it was devastating for the French absolutely devastating more men died at their doing over a million men died at Verdun in 11 months and all French soldiers anyway 1940 1942 by machine guns you have the British Lewis gun and the British Vickers machine gun well in one engagement during the First World War I think I'm right about this a British Vickers machine gun was fired continuously for 23 hours with only changing to fill up the water cooling for to cool the barrel to change the barrels I think that changed for barrels because they became warped from the heat of firing but otherwise it was continuous firing it fired over I think this is rye during that period three-quarters were million rounds one gun okay so in 1900 Henry Ford are opened the first car production line for the Model T in Detroit so it strikes me that what you see in Flanders is the sequel to mechanization itself to mechanical production the best way to think of the first world war is it's the impact of mechanized technology on humanity humanity doesn't invent it it just comes because what are the first most obvious consequences of mechanization cars and deaths and they go hand in hand as only six years that separates the Model T production line from this great sneaking assembly line of death that passes right across France in that way and I were very interested in an illness that all of us will delay Oliver Sacks the neurologist wrote a marvelous book about called awakening that's about these and you might see in the movie of it with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams that was made so this was a disease called in careful itis lethargica it was a brain disease the afflicted people at the end of the serve the First World War and in the first cases reported in 1917 and the symptoms of this disease were like the human body had become a machine they were things like what what's called bye-bye neurologists Festa nation moving very very quickly like this or pal Alania repeating phrases repeating phrases repeating phrases all kinds of tics like this as if the human body had somehow become something that was a machine in that way so I thought that was kind of odd so my first novel centers on this cluster of illness technology and war and then this novel shark is centered on the Second World War and specifically on an event that happened on the 30th of July 1945 when the USS Indianapolis was cruising from got its own Guadalcanal to Leyte in the Philippines and this this ship the USS Indianapolis was the last American ship to be sunk in the Second World War it was attacked by a Japanese submarine i58 that fired two torpedoes out here one of them hit the magazine and the whole ship went up it went down I think in six minutes and there were a thousand men on board the ship and they went into the water into the end of the Pacific Ocean South Pacific Ocean and because of what was called in the colorful military vernacular of the time that a snafu situation normal all up they weren't logged as having not arrived at Leyte so nobody knew the ship was missing it was a screw-up because they will within and now as flying time and for hours sailing time of help but they won't found three days and when they were found after three days I think let only about 120 men came out of the water and the rest of them had died from exposure they died from drinking seawater and going crazy but most of all they died from sharks was the biggest shark attack ever recorded in human history and has anybody ever seen the movie Jaws yeah you remember Quint the shark fisherman and you remember Hooper the cuddly marine biologist played by Richard sites of call-and-response literary festivals Richard Dreyfuss you remember the scene when they're on the all car quints shark fishing boat and they have a kind of competitive jewel of sharks cars you know and they stopped pulling out their trouser legs saying all that was a mako that got me on and at one point Quint it pulls up his sleeve to show a show and and Hooper sees he's gone two two on his arm this is what's that - - and he says it's the Indianapolis and of course Hooper being a shark specialist knows the story and says you were on the Indianapolis were you and of course that's why Quint has become this a have like bigger because he was in the water for the three days with the men being killed by sharks now what they don't really get into in the movie is what the Indianapolis was doing in that part of the Pacific then where the ship had sailed only three weeks before from San Francisco it had left San Francisco and it had sailed straight across the Pacific making Hawaii in a record time and it went straight on from Hawaii heading in the same direction aiming for somewhere called Tinian Island and on Tinian Island it offloaded the only cargo it carried heavy cruiser with a thousand men on board the only cargo was a 12 foot cubed plywood box and a small lading case sealant cylindrical container about this big and what it was as you've probably guessed it was being delivered to something called the 509 'the composite Division of the US Army Air Force has anybody got it yeah yeah you know what it is it's the fissile material for little boy the first atomic bomb that was ever dropped and the bomb casing Antillean island was the forward base for the Enola Gay for the for the plane the super fortress that bombed Hiroshima this is how a novelist things but I accept that it's unusual way to think about things it's just imagine why let's just imagine that mother nature if she exists objected to the release of all of that plutonium into our atmosphere and into our oceans the first human human caused radioactive poisoning in our environment ever perhaps she object is so much that kaput capriciously in arbitrarily she decided to punish the poor young men of the Indianapolis is representative it was a collective punishment against humankind a collective and proleptic punishment because the Indianapolis was sunk four days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima okay so that's the conceit out of which this novel grows that something very very strange happened out there in the Pacific and I believe that ever since that bomb was dropped humanity has been a little bit crazy a little bit crazier than it was even before there's been a certain psychotic age to events since the 6th of August 1945 when they let us not forget 125,000 people were killed in a fraction of a second and I don't know I mean the consequences of the radio and those were civilians mind they were not military personnel and well I think happened really and I think it's still going on now there's a concept that comes from an anthropology school Gregory Bateson is the idea of the double bind and the idea of the double bind is when you play somebody in an impossible situation is rather like the catch-22 that comes out the second war as well it's often applied in psychology a lot so you know a mother says to a child and the furious mother sister small child I love you and the child doesn't know what to think right the child is placed in an impossible situation because clearly the mother doesn't really love them at all yeah but the message is the actual data content is that they do and I think that's what then what mutually assured destruction in the Cold War was like for everybody we've all grown up in a colossal double bind because on the one hand we want to believe in our governments believe in them in the benevolent nature of the state particularly in democracies which we elect and on the other hand the government and in this cases it's your namesake has her finger on button now and I don't know whether you heard them are marvelous Prime Minister I can't help but admire for how and I speak as a lifelong unilateral disarmament Ryden debate when mrs. Meir was asked whether she would be prepared to push a button that would kill and I think it was Dennis Skinner the notorious beast of Bolsover that put the question to her who mr. mr. prime minister would you kill 125 he knew the figure of the number of people who died at Hiroshima where the mrs. may said yes yes I would and actually that is the kind of leader you want but that's a leader who's placing you in a double bind now he doesn't love you because if mummy does push the button then Vladimir is going to push the button - and we're all brown bread so we're all in a double bind we're all in the situation where the institution that we wish to protect us is in fact liable to murderers and that's kind of a crazy world we live in there and I think it all begins here in the South Pacific on the night of the 30th of July 1945 so I'm just going to finish off by reading you a brief passage we know that it's costly long like all writers giving the opportunity to read from my own work it can go on forever it's like the scene in a handful of dust at the end you're just gonna be so now I've got to find the page always the most difficult thing because I've taken to writing books with no chapters why did I do that because it only it makes it very hard to find anything in them at all why did I start writing books on it I I realized that it is because of computers because actually text is all searchable now yeah I also started writing books with cultural references in them that nobody will care at all okay I say when you think about when you think about writing period any any writing about the past yeah when you read a book about the First World War for example you think oh yeah that's really what the First World War was about actually when you stopped to think about it the writer is basically written about the things you already know in order to make it seem credible you know do you really know what was in the head of a young soldier going over the top in 1914 you don't even know what pens he was wearing yeah you don't know what his digestion was like I don't know about you that normally conditions what my days like yeah you know I think there are a lot of writing about the past is actually the past we already know it's not the real past which is kind of utterly unknowable and the reason is that the novel as a traditional art form has to be contained within the Codex this is its platform so it needs to be comprehensible it needs to be internally self referential you can't have stuff in it that people don't really know because that's going to ruin their reading experience but we don't really read novels in that way anymore we have different forms of knowledge technology that enabled us to go right through the text and the fine so why do novels still try and pretend that we don't have computers and we can't last for long so this is written from the point of view of a young man called Claude who is on the USS Indianapolis when it's sunk Clawd unties the tapes of his life vest and the kid some poor stupid heck like all the rest raises his hands automatically so they slide down and out of the armholes you're welcome and would sir like to try another sports coat the hands are poised for a moment Claude sees there's no skin or flesh on them at all only cooked tendons stretched over white florets of knuckle bones then it's the last roll that dice my friend and they're gone already ten feet down sinking fast the kids long-sleeve denim shirt Will's about him his bell bottom dungarees were and his pillbox hat oscillates a white dot hopping from word to word across the seas scream talk about the moon floating in the sky looking at a lily on a lake the kid is 20 feet down now his arms up and circling his feet down and revolving the other way his hips swing as he hula hula z' into the deep it doesn't seem so very deep due to the amazing clarity of the water Claude experiments turning his whole head because his eyes sockets are filled with gritty sand he sees the sea turn from green to aquamarine to cobalt blue to silver blue to silvery to silver white and then vanish completely as I push my head up her skirt mm-hmm finest ear protectors a fellow can get flesh filled nylon fitted snug to the head and dried with talc the kids maybe 40 feet down now yet his dancing plummeting body can still be clearly seen happy top keep talkin happy talk a wright-patterson field combat veterans had told Claude that when their parachutes collapsed falling men spun even as the ship they bailed out of flipped up on its wing and spun away from them while the crowd fighter that had scored the hit wheeled away too so everywhere in the sky could be seen spinning things talk about the moon Claude supposes if the sinking kick could only tip is head back he'd see my face floating in the sky but really it's too late for that the kid must be nearing full fathom friggin five and the sun rays which Claude sees flicker fingering boots tin cans and other slowly descending debris can no longer touch him the kid has almost reached the Emerald city's limits Claude wonders what sort of a how'd you do he'll get from the welcoming committee that circles him their long gray bodies zigging sagging and circling evasive Lee what are their names ah yes Ivan shark fury shark Admiral him Aikido that bird Fang and the sinister Barracuda there's obviously no possibility of Claude warning the kid let alone saving him but for his own satisfaction at least he wishes he'd had the patience to decipher that day's photograph a useless mishmash of letters and numerals as he watches the first inquisitive shark nuzzle the kid's belly only spools through his own soggy head am eighty five nine r45 HJ eighty at least Claude thinks I've taken my vitamins and he feels for the morphine syrettes he took from the emergency packs in the rafts last of the bulkhead by the radio room reassuringly they're still in the button-down pocket of his shirt but how long can it be before the seawater happy tox its way up the hypose and ruins all those healthy vitamins all mine this food those other lunkheads the green hands running round like they were after coos and the sad sack sailors trying to corral all those farm boys prairie boys banjo picking freaks so as to herd him over the side none of them had the smarts to pick up any supplies before they took the dive yes Claude Snickers to himself they're all lesser men men who didn't volunteer for the secret squadron which is why they mostly flipped their wigs when the torpedoes hit those who didn't flip them when they saw their shipmates flying towards them across the tilting deck the fleshy streamers flayed from their arms and legs flapping in the hot air blasting from the burning fuel flicked them at the grotesque sight the skin angels in flight behind them flames flaring from the smokestack flipped up as the skin angels flocked to the fantail where two crazed by pain to recall the layout of their own ship if they'd known it to begin with they slithered about in its dying blood bilge water piss and turds from their heads melted ice cream and still fizzing soda from the dungee dunk stand before launching themselves screaming over the taffrail Claude had seen the money was on board their fledgling wings spread in the hellish light it seemed still more of them once he was struggling in the water as the mass of the sinking ship dragged him back all those shocked by his searing slide down the hull and the cold impact of the waves Claude realized either his abandonment of the ship had taken a fraction of the time it seemed well there must be a great host of skin angels for there they'd been high above him each one silhouetted against the lows scudding clouds for a couple of seconds then launching into the air managing maybe two or three futile wing beats before being swatted by the Indies slowly revolving screws quick Henri the flat and crumpling among all the other black flies into the sticky pool of fuel oil that lay molasses on the heaving waves waves that now cradle Claude so tenderly embrace me you irreplaceable you raising him up then he easing him gently down that's not Claude things get too far down cuz then I'll find myself with Royster deutscher little oyster down in the slimy sea you ain't so different lying on your shell bed to the likes of little old me accepting that royster toy stir you somewhat moister then I would like to what the did you do that for the dumb his name is go record or something like that pulls Claude's head from the water tearing the sweetly salty sheets from his shell bed Neptune's muffled sub aquatic realm is conquered by this the hurting discs of the noonday Sun the long hard swell of the open ocean and on the slope of that swell the disintegrating chain of men Claude has deprived of the link by untying the kid's life vest and letting him sink so just to give you a little illustration of what I'm talking about here okay so you may have noticed I write in a slightly different style I don't write with an impersonal third-person narrator I write with what is called mana perspective or narration so you're sort of in the characters head but you can only interpret the world through him okay so I'm trying to get inside the head of a young man in the Pacific Ocean in 1945 an American would you know all of his references would you know for example why is he going on about he's watching the ship has been upended it hasn't been upended it's gone up like this the back of the ship is called the fantail and all of the ratings have gathered on the uppermost portion of the ship when they jump off the ship and this actually happened the screws the propellers of the vessel are still turning so as they come off the ship Claude sees them first as being what he thinks of his skin angels because the heat from the burning ship has stripped the flesh from their bodies and is forming these streamers of skin so he sees them as angels when they jump off the boat the revolving screw hits them and knocks them and into the oily water he says molasses it looks like molasses the water and he sees them as flies being swatted for a minute so what comes into his head at that point is quick Henry the flit right Flay it was an insect repellent and that was its marketing slogan in the America of the 1940s okay so it was a bit light for mass get smash or you know but how would we know that how would you know what was in the head of a man in 1945 in terms of the immediate cultural references that he might draw on or interpret his experience which is why I put it to you that most of the period fiction you've been reading your entire lifetime is utter thank you

Channel: Brunel University London

Views: 12,663

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: Brunel University, Brunel, University, Uni, Education, Student, Students, Undergraduate, Postgraduate, London, West London, Higher Education, Campus, Courses, Course, Study, Research, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK, Brunel University London, Hillingdon literary Festival, Hillingdon, Literature, Festival

Id: qKKwYNSi9TE

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2016