I am wont to make mention, with some regularity, of my childhood discovery of William S. Burroughs by way of an article in DETAILS magazine. I do this because I have long interpreted the Event of that discovery as the key catalyst of a pubescent transformation for which the mischievous gods ought damned well be held accountable. I jest. I guess. The article in question presented itself to me in 1993, a few months before I would turn fourteen. It would be a number of years before I would begin to intravenously inject narcotics, a kid of about twenty soon to begin grad school, but my reading habits were to be categorically altered in a manner both providential and terrifically immediate. I also recall reading about Will Self in DETAILS. His book COCK AND BULL, comprised of two related novellas, had come out in October of 1992, and I remember a writer from that magazine—a magazine, I want to insist, you should hardly denigrate a thirteen-year-old Canadian boy in the early 1990s for his having read semi-religiously—making the predictable associations born of the writer’s name(s), finding some mild merriment in the idea that the literary universe of the writer in question hardly seems to have much space for either rigid self or for ironclad will. More or less. I don’t mind telling you that the contract-scribe at DETAILS put it more cutesily. WILL, these many years later, finds the author himself playing around with this business…to almost uniformly fruitful ends. The book is sold to us—almost aggressively, and I believe counter-productively—as a memoir, but a memoir in the third person, Will, our hapless young addict and novitiate would-be man of letters, assessed by his author, his future self, with distance and something like dispassion. Anybody, like myself, who knows addiction directly, who is still out there flapping in the gale or has embarked upon some kind of halfway workable program of recovery, knows that the addict will and does experience various phenomena of dissolution, atomization, atrophy, loss of control, and the progressive erasure of any illusion of free choice. The self is reduced to particulate, the will is comprehensively hijacked. WILL the book presents all manner of bravura variation on this theme. When the author Will Self places himself at a remove from the Will whose misadventures and baleful lows he catalogues with singular élan, he is immediately putting himself in a position to do and/or insinuate a number of things. Part of this is clear from the epigraph borrowed from Aleister Crowley: “I’ve often thought that there isn’t any ‘I’ at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of delusion.” And sure enough, when we immediately meet up with Will, subject of this supposed memoir, we meet him more as its estranged object, on Clapham Road, musing betimes on the subject of his literary mentors, Crowley and “Brother Bill” Burroughs, “the immemorial quality of the drug culture he was swagged in, its ossified moth-eaten mores and tatty mythology,” and bemoaning the fact that he “doesn’t have a methadone script—doesn’t have twenty mils of green gloop to pour on the wateriness of his own dissolution.” The grim slog, the junkie rounds and roundelay, the flirtation with bodily annihilation...as way of life. “I’m sweating, he thinks, and soon enough I’ll be immobilized.” Will is despicted attempting to trade two Danishes for a bag of smack from a connection who has very recently told him to fuck off, he will meditate upon a girl named Amber who lives like an insect trapped in the amber of her junkie parents’ paralyzed lives, and he will dwell on his own “necrotic flesh” with fiendish (which is to say characteristically dope-fiendish) perversity. How all of this relates to possible crises of will and self ought to begin to appear fairly self-evident. Varieties of dissolution will return throughout the book, such as during the recollection of an Australian idyll: “he’d curl up into the Dreamtime, allowing his troubled thoughts to become nothing more—or less—than the reverie of the Earth itself.” And of course one cannot forget Brother Bill Burroughs’ nickname among the street kid cognoscenti of Mexico and Tangier. Will certainly doesn’t. El hombre invisible. This is the ultimate manifestation of the junkie anonymity which Will tells us is part of the palliation the lifestyle promises. No surprise, then, that when Will finally does find himself in institutional care late in the book, one adjunct of “the Therapeutic State,” a lay counsellor, will predictably start making the same not-super-clever wise-ass associations made formerly by that writer for DETAILS, pointing to the irony of both given name and surname in the context of a clinical regimen that places great focus on “the addict-alcoholic’s diseased will” and which finds Will, now twenty-four years of age, as arrogant as ever in some respects but with the shit having most definitely been kicked out of him such that a level of demoralization has been attained, asking himself if his addict-self might not ultimately be just like his proper self: “the most spineless of individuals, completely lacking in any determination or fortitude?” Having come off the cycle of three increasingly breathtaking “modernist” novels, eminently Virginia Woolf-like in the particularities of their sprightly poetical finesse, Will Self is at his best ever as a prose stylist, still riding that particular crest. I very much enjoyed reading certain highly-honeyed passages of WILL out loud. Part of what we decree poetical here extends beyond the execution, the matter of language languaging à la Mallarmé, and toward the basic methodology of this imaginative autofiction they insist on calling a memoir. Let us consider the word Spirit, a concept absolutely central to German thought and German philosophy, where the word is Geist. When the disruptive and volubly precocious kid Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud declared Je est un autre, young Arthur was in a certain sense busy doing German philosophy by other means. Spirit isn’t just a capability allowing one to know, intuit, place imagination at impossibly large scale, or to feel deeply. Spirit is more properly the cradle of the capability for a position of remove, perhaps especially as it pertains to matters of self, will, and world. Will Self writing in the third person about Will is already the assertion of the forces of Spirit. The author then proceeds—in terms of basic methodology—by opening a secondary philosophical dimension. The book is in fact comprised of five sections written in a present tense germane to the field of a given frame of reference— May 1986, May 1979, April 1982, April 1984, and August 1986—such that the Will who is more object than subject becomes quite explicitly—Heraclitus and flux being invoked repeatedly—the Heraclitean river into which one cannot step twice. Will’s actions and internal dynamics are considered in the present tense from within the confines of each of these temporal frames, though there is regular recourse to past tense as any given Will processes past events and occurrences from the standpoint of each of the given frames. Indeed, the book is written in a contingent present tense (or five present tenses) that not only looks back but which tends to fragment quite turbulently, the river of flux hardly a calm one. Recalling earlier days from the standpoint of 1979, and further reflecting upon days earlier yet, Will considers “a time when world and Will were one and the same.” Will and world will become less and less one in subsequent frames, and when we get to April 1984, Will kicking opiates (hardly for the first or last time) in a YMCA Hostel in New Delhi, the present tense frame for long stretches threatens to get totally lost, turbulence having attained its ultimate ascendency. When Will does end up in treatment at The Lodge in August of 1986, this in large part precipitated by events from May of the same year with the detailing of which the book commences, the world begins to reassert an uncomfortable coherence, at least in compassion to the sections which immediately precede it, thus finding Will also in a potion to grapple with the damage wrought be his runaway self, this deathly figure bearing his curious name, an abject and very tall golem possessed by forces of grandiosity, insuperable monomania, and toxic heedlessness. Will becomes aware, though he is still more than a little loath to get cozy with the twelve-step set, that self-pity is the great pitfall of having to have a self, poison to the addict. All of this is very much the case. I know all too well. Part of the original sickness is the split disgust, half of it directed at the world, half directed at the self. Much of our world-relating when we are young is manifested in the institution of the family and the domestic scene. Will Self captures much of this stuff with his trademark mastery of literary technique. Consider Will on the subject of his father (from the standpoint of 1979): “And if he wasn’t writing one of his interminably boring books on town planning or public administration, Will’s father might well be found wedged in the narrow defile of the upstairs lavatory, a linen-backed Ordinance Survey map rugging his knobby knees, his distempered flannel underpants down round his lumpy varicose ankles, and his reading glasses tipped forward on his long nose, as he imaginatively promenaded and complacently shat.” There is American mother as well, her various maxim-like sayings (waste not want not, doesn’t care was made to care) routinely perverted by her embittered son. We also have a lovely/nasty little passage concerning neighbours: “there are the Smith-Simonses, two doors down, with their absurd and recently acquired hyphen—imaging they can somehow pole-vault their way into the upper-middle classes with this little typographic stick.” Simonses in its basic clunky euphony has a certain consonance with the Simon Says, and we might note that the false and tacky “typographic stick” is to a certain degree analogous to Will’s own tendency to fancy himself a regal descendant of his favourite chemically-augmented literary outlaws. At Oxford in August of 1982, “living in a tall, steep-gabled Victorian corner house in Jericho for this, his final year,” the womanizing, dope-greedy Will, already cynical about the “the Therapeutic State” and prone to both fatuous self-mythologizing as well as odious self-pity, maintains superficial alliance to a coterie of fellow high-society dopers, none of whom, naturally, attain primacy in his heart over and above smack et cetera, and one of whom happens to be the outrageously dissolute aristo Caius, a posh junkie and scion whose comradeship Will obviously both relishes and disdains, the two intractably selfish and vain and tunnel-visioned men subsequently coming to something like loggerheads on the Indian subcontinent in 1984. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of the background, or merely of recent cultural history, will be able to discern that Caius is based on Edward St Aubyn, author of, among other things, the five autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, and thus, on that account, a man whose fictional alter ego came to be played in a widely-regarded limited television series by Benedict Cumberbatch. Many reviewers, especially in Britain, take exception to Will Self’s apparent self-satisfaction, especially when it becomes supplemented by venalities and cruelties discharged at Edward St Aubyn, whom folks have evidently come to revere quite soppily. One woman writing a typically heinous bit of idiotic click-bait for the GUARDIAN—what an insufferable microindustry that!—is especially gleeful is taking Mr. Self to task for presenting his younger self as experiencing a bit of queasy jealously over Caius's having been raped by his own father, a man early-twenties Will is proud to insist likes him more than he ever has any of Caius’s other friends. Is it a vile thing to think? Why, yes, of course, it very much is. But it is also a declarative element within the barbed-wire tangle of pathology. The confrontation of hideous internal business, its exposure to harsh light, is the beginning of doing right by that mandates meant to save your ass. You get better, or you die, or you continue to endure agony worse then death. You know it if you have been forced to come to know it as I have, myself a continually recovering addict with six-and-a-half years clean and sober. Will Self the author is revisiting the flux from which he emerges, immersing himself in it. We will recall Kierkegaard’s assertion that life has to be lived forward but can only be understood backward, holding this up next to Self's repeated supposition of effects that precede their respective causes. As a cynical Oxford shit, Will will make jokes to himself concerning a childhood friend who has himself begun to sink low into the morass of dependence: “but Mike’s mother had been a nurse before her marriage, and he still respected antisepsis, if not the law.” Later he will have to start looking at the hurt in others, hurt he has very often directly caused. It is not only a matter of owning the hurt, but of simply and viscerally beholding it, doing this without resorting to drugs…and doing it repeatedly. Let me be a Buddhist for a moment: discipline is born of right conduct plus repetition. This is precisely the precept Will is beginning to intuit in August of 1986. I have no illusions that Will Self is a terrific guy. In terms of his public pronouncements and even some of his essays, I have occasionally very much thought he seems like a bit of a daffy prat. Readers of WILL, the book which bears its author’s given name, will be unable to deny that the author is able to look down and distinguish some of this in himself, very often with bracing sobriety, though the verbiage can be decadent. It is not to be overlooked that twenty-four-year old Will begins to own his calumny in terms of the treatment of his long-suffering girlfriend Chloë, or that he begins to absorb the death of a friend such that he might do something other than damage with it. Waking up to self manifests both as a continued manifestation of self-disappearance, but also of nebulous other-directedness. Above all, I have been quite categorically convinced by Gregor von Rezzori’s assertion in THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL that the literary writer much find ways to address the presence of the self within the frame of reference, in fidelity to the breakthroughs of Werner Heisenberg. I see WILL as a book that has risen to that specific task. You may call it a memoir. Go well on right ahead. Hell, it’s your funeral.