‘A Polaroid of the Grail’: Will Self’s Approach to Naturalism

Abstract

On October 17, 2002, Will Self and Jonathan Coe delivered two papers that strove to tackle the following question: ‘Is a true literary Naturalism possible or even desirable?’ Whereas Coe chose to tell the story of B.S. Johnson and his obsession with Naturalism, Will Self summarised what he construes as the history of Naturalism to underscore his own rendition of this literary tradition. Far from presenting his readers with an academic definition of this term, Self chose to resort to apparently contradictory theories. Borrowing some tenets of French naturalism, Will Self also diverges from these seminal texts to redefine this literary concept. Self’s own naturalism seems to rely on the animality of the body and a subversive use of the notion of realism. For Self, the verisimilitude of the naturalist novel finds its origin in the Wildean notion that life imitates art and in Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Self’s need to ‘say something true with lies,’ bespeaks the way he sees the world. Thus, Self’s naturalism and realism rub shoulders with ‘dirty magical realism’, a phrase coined by Self, and demands the reader’s suspension of disbelief.