‘This Great Torrent of Verbiage’: Will Self and the Satirists

In 1994 Self wrote an essay concerning the state of English culture in which he suggests that despite the apparent self-loathing, exhaustion and parochialism exhibited by the English novel (as opposed to the English-language novel), the form is thriving as a site of cultural interchange, invention and perversity. Entitled ‘The Valley of the Corn Dollies’, this article portrays English culture as a site of productive antagonisms: colonizer and colonized; bigoted and liberal; introverted and expansive; radical and conservative; monarchical and democratic; a land of both opportunity and inequality; of tradition and modernity. It is as a site of profound and complex oppositions that Self locates what, for him, is its greatest strength: ‘I believe, personally, [England is] the best possible country for someone with a satirical bent to live in. I’d go further: England has the world’s top satirical culture.’1 In a review of Rude Britannia, an exhibition of British comic art and cartoon held at Tate Britain in 2010, he not only claims that ‘the satiric taproot is sunk into British soil’, but comments on how crucial ‘its rigorous propagation has always been to our constitution — both political and psychological’.2 Since the post-war period, which saw unprecedented levels of devolution and decolonization, faltering economic performance and the coupling of technological advancement to national achievement, British culture — and English culture in particular — began to foster a myth of national decline in the face of rising international competition and the steady transition from empire to commonwealth.