Will Self

After reading about Will Self, from what Wikipedia had to offer, I found some clips of the author/critic on the television show News Night and a speech he gave about if he ruled television. He is clearly of the leftist persuasion. However, the speech and the footage both demonstrate his disdain for classes, demographics, or perhaps more abstractly for simply categorizing people for the sake of ordering things. This is somewhat evident in the first portion of our reading; however it is hard to get a sense of exactly how he is being satirical with his categorizations until the character Dave 2 arrives. That is, in the beginning of the reading there are many references to the colleges, and college life of those who surrounded the young couple Carol and Dan. Particular attention is paid to their disposition as one that is sort of dominated by the fact that these persons are of middle class status. Class status appears again when he notes the Carol’s father’s weeding speech which was intended to be condescending, but instead, went uncomprehend. However, it seems that the most evident satire that has been presented pertaining to class, or classes of people, is when Dave 2 appears in the picture. Dave 2 is described in a sort of biblical sense while also maintaining an ability to drum home, “the simplified fallacies of Dialectical Materialism”(43). Prior to that he is described as a, “double gazing salesman”, and between the two descriptions, both within the same paragraph, there is immediately something discontinuous about Dave 2. The rhetoric descriptions surrounding the inspirational cards that Dave 2 carries as “quasi-devotional”, further bolster the notion that Self, is ardently opposed to the sale, or peddling of ideas, perhaps in a way reminiscent of scholars like Adorno and Benjamin.