We
live, by and large, Panglossian lives, reading purpose into the world,
and into ourselves. Confronted by our bodies, we wonder at our watchlike
precision. Each part of us does something. A heart pumps blood. A skull
shields the brain. Eyes see. Hands grip. The liver…
At this point, we begin to lose
confidence in a craftsmanlike creator. Not that the liver serves no
purpose; on the contrary, the liver has incredibly many functions:
glycogen storage, decomposition of red blood cells, plasma protein
synthesis, detoxification, bile production – and that’s not even to
mention its regulatory abilities. When we look at the liver we see, not a
tool for living, but a living thing – and this is a much less
comfortable proposition. Like Dirk Bogart’s Servant, the liver
intimidates us by its efficient ubiquity.
Liver is not body horror in the
science-fictional sense – for a moving and melancholy admission that our
bodies are not our own, watch the films of David Cronenberg. Liver is
something else, and for afficionadoes of Self, something entirely
expected. It is satire. In Self’s vision, our livers are more valuable
than we are, more able; above all more alive. The liver is the only
organ in the body that can self-regenerate – and still we contrive, over
our lives’ course, to squander its magnificent estate.
The four lobes of Self’s liver are
stories, casually interlinked. Structure is relatively unimportant here,
and the weakest story comes last. That said, Liver contains by far the
strongest Self fictions in years, as the denizens of Soho’s Plantation
Club, ‘aping the mores of Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, and lapsing
into the secret language of formerly outlawed inverts,’ cast a miasma of
grain alcohol over successive protagonists: a terminally ill hospital
administrator; a demigod-like Hoxton ‘creative’; a drug-abusing Peter
Sellers fanatic.
Self’s
writing is not new. It is not radical. (Describing Birmingham in terms
of metastisis, it declares its conservatism.) Self’s satire is
profoundly classical, rooted more in Alexander Pope than Jonathan Swift.
Poor diseas’d flesh takes plenty of collateral damage, as when a
character’s ‘massively engorged liver passed beyond mere macrovesicular
steatosis into the irredeemably gothic realms of steatonecrosis,’ but
contemporary behaviour is Self’s real target. ‘Confronted with the
nobility of feeling, high culture and deep spirituality,’ Self, like the
‘Martian’ of his first story, Foie Humain, ‘sees nothing but the
stereotypic behaviours of anthropoid geese.’
of course, mere distance is only the
beginning. Satire depends for its success upon a pitiless accuracy.
Self’s prose, however much it veers drunkenly between the appetizing and
the nauseating, is almost always on the nail: proof that the more
accurately you describe a thing, the more surreal it appears. An old
woman hussled towards extinction by her daughter’s poor timekeeping. The
determined alcoholic gavage of a hapless barman. A homeless boy eating
‘a sweet bun seamed with beef’ in a burger bar. This is either the
poetry of alienation, or the 20/20 insight one acquires in the face of
approaching death. Self plays both sides, nowhere more affectingly than
in the collection’s magnificent centrepiece, Leberknödel.
Joyce, a retired hospital
administrator, knows that her cancers will not stop ‘until they had
toppled the sovereignty of consciousness itself, and replaced it with
their own screaming masses of cancerous tissue.’ Appalled at the ‘bad
habit’ of terminal decline, she arranges her own suicide. Seemingly
reprieved, she finds, however, that her living has become as much of a
bad habit as her dying. Having taken the Martian’s-eye view of gooselike
humanity, she cannot reverse the process. She has thrown off the veils
of meaning, and now looks objectively at her life, her world, her
friends, her sot of a daughter – and finds that she has already killed
herself.
The
highest office of any intellectual activity is the acquisition of
knowledge. Fictional knowledge is both essential and fleeting, and the
test of its truth is vague and long-winded, as works are strained
through successive filters of fashion, criticism and cultural shift. Ayn
Rand once ranked with Tolstoy. Flaubert was reviled by his
contemporaries. Self usually affects contempt for this process,
presumably because worrying about the value of his art will only
distract him from the ephemera so essential to it.
Leberknödel (liver dumplings to you)
may be an exception. There’s a different kind of ambition at work here.
An eye to posterity in that playful nod to Flaubert, as Self gleefully
italicises every middlebrow cliché passing through Joyce’s dying mind.
Like Madame Bovary, Leberknödel sets satire aside in favour of a spiky
yet humane morality. Our bodies are not ours. Nor are our feelings. We
think our perceptions are ephemeral, but they are rooted in a physics
that will outlast us. Redeemed, secured, and left to herself, Joyce even
manages to argue herself away.
If
humans are such delicate tissue, why satirise them? For Self to kick the
floor out from under himself in this way is no mean achievement.
Liver’s hysterical grotesques – The Poof, the Martian, His Nibs, the
Cunt – cannot and are not meant to hold.
Joyce
will endure.
