What Happened?

by Hanif Kureishi

  Nevertheless, even as we speak we also wonder, according to the tough logic of the superego, if we are more monstrous than we can bear. We believe that if we were good, we wouldn’t have aggressive or violent thoughts, forgetting that monstrousness is useful in art, which, to be effective, has to be pushed to an extreme, making the audience tremble. Art emerges from what Nietzsche called ‘inner anarchy’, and never from so-called decency. This anarchy is a formidable tool, a method of generating thoughts you never knew you had. You are more original than you ever knew.

  Of course, a critical faculty, of judgement if not ruthlessness, is essential. Any artist must be able to look over their work with a clear, impartial eye, reading it through and dismissing this or that, and retaining the good enough. But the form of ferocious superego activity which Freud noticed is not part of the interesting difficulty of the work. It is not part of the struggle all artists have with their material and subject, and has nothing to do with the actual engineering of art. It is outside it, throttling it before it begins, telling the writer that she must always produce brilliant work and that she cannot make mistakes, endure failure or even success. The superego is only destructive.

  Why would anyone have such a killing machine inside them, which Nietzsche refers to as ‘bad conscience’? For Freud, one of the most fascinating and impassable enigmas was people’s self-destructiveness, their masochism and their sadism. Indeed, he called this death drive ‘mysterious’. And you only have to listen to yourself to witness it.

  The ears have no lids. It is not just the notionally mad who hear voices. Who isn’t possessed by them? The superego isn’t just an obscure psychical function, it is more like an involuntary voice of command, involving a threat which states that if you think or do a particular thing, you will be punished. And imagined punishments are usually awful.

  Not one of us didn’t spend years of our young life under the command of others, an order of adults which guaranteed our safety. It is important not to forget the sheer amount of fear all children endure. So the origins of this ever-present threat are our parents and other authorities, plus the fury we felt about their instructions, particularly since we believed they secretly enjoyed torturing and mistreating us.

  This conjunction resembles the creditor/debtor dyad, the distinctive relationship of our age. The creation of unpayable debt is a characteristic of the superego; but, as with fascism, it has to promise enjoyment as it works. You get hooked on failure since the superego is always sexualised. It is as if you are in a perverse relationship with yourself, where pleasure, as a last resort, is extracted from suffering.

  This internal social order is a narrow sharia-like zone within which disruption and unpredictability – speaking or writing freely – is continuously punished. It is hard work being an oppressed victim of your own internal savagery. Parent-like, the superego appears to provide a form of protection, a limit, a boundary to what might be experienced as a spiral of endless pleasure. But this promise of stability is of less use to the adult artist, who must work with uncertainty, clearing a path for the new. You’re in a dark forest with just a torch, stumbling about. If you know what you’re doing, it isn’t art.

  The superego is always busy, working where and how it can. Not only concerned with prohibition, it is, Janusfaced, also a devil of temptation, pushing us to go further, to enjoy wildly, while telling us that we can never have enough pleasure. Like capitalism, it wants us to consume continuously and remain unsatisfied. Excess can never be excessive enough. Whichever way it looks at us, and whatever it says, we always fail.

  Liberating oneself from self-slavery and self-reproach can never be a permanent achievement. But good things do get done: terrors are overcome, guilt is borne and these vindictive ‘persecutors’, or self-created phantoms, are chased away, at least for a while. If we have some intimacy with ourselves, it is possible to track these harassers and wrestle with them. Insults are not truths; intelligent resistance can trump the addictive enjoyment of self-persecution.

  The return will be a clear channel of good communication between instinct and judiciousness. This is where the work is achieved, not in discipline, but in enjoyment, passion and desire – art made in pleasure as a gift for others.

  Read My Mind

  I was surprised to read recently that the three most desirable occupations in Britain are considered to be those of author, librarian and academic, all of which involve books and writing. Yet writing is such an old-fashioned idea. Are people still doing it? And even reading? Do they still bother?

  Although many of us wanted to be footballers or pilots, most of us – at least those over forty – can say that we have been altered by what we read. Books represent and change the way we think, particularly when we are adolescent, because it is in stories that we are groomed by the future, seduced away from our parents and the constrained world of our childhood to make contact with more ideas of how to be a person. It is like finding a new lover and losing your balance as the future opens up.

  For at least a generation we have pursued money for its own sake and failed to create more significant meaning, living in a materialistic medium with a limited idea of what we human beings can be or do. Now we offer our children little in terms of creative possibility. Hyper-competitive, ruthless, fast-paced, this is a cynical age of alienation where fundamental alteration seems impossible. We are shocked and disturbed when young people become idealists or revolutionaries, but it is not, after all, such an anomalous, unprecedented thing to want to make a new society. Our own ideals – to become rich, powerful, not a loser – are beyond most people, and they serve not as useful models, but as means of torment, creating a paradise of indulgence where everyone is dissatisfied.

  One of my writing students found herself in a tangle because she wanted to write ‘good, positive’ characters, people who were politically engaged, standing against the greed of the age. It was not a fatuous idea, but her virtuous and blameless people were unconvincing. They bored her too, though she didn’t know why. I said it’s strange, but audiences enjoy characters like Iago, Hannibal Lecter, Romeo, Homer Simpson, Portnoy and Hedda Gabler. They admire sharp-tongued women like Dorothy Parker or Mae West, writers like Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys, and actors like Bette Davis and Jack Nicholson. These characters are popular because the public can identify with their transgression and the amount of enjoyment they get from it.

  It isn’t as if we secretly despise good people or really want to be monstrous. But we do relish the gratification that disobedient characters enjoy. Murderers, criminals, even weaklings and sexual predators yield us entertainment in literature, theatre and the cinema because of their rebellion and their drive. And when characters lose themselves in their desire for satisfaction, and since we can all be overwhelmed and disturbed by pleasure, it is also where characters reveal themselves the most.

  We identify with their alternative morality as they cross lines we’d never dare approach. These characters aren’t undecided about things; they don’t care; they are freer than us. They are usually punished too, which contributes to our satisfaction: the world is re-balanced. We are not in a hellish, never-ending spiral of wild enjoyment.

  The contemporary version of super-fast capitalism orders us to consume continuously: eat well, not get fat, go to the gym, look like movie stars and have great sex. Yet, ultimately, this enjoyment is unavailable to us because, like the anorexic, we always fail. The ideals of our society – celebrity, power, wealth – are necessarily beyond us. Far from living in a paradise of indulgence, we are in a waiting room of deprivation, deferral and suspension, while even corrupt politicians, immigrants and religious fanatics are all, apparently, having more fun than us. There’s more of everything but less satisfaction.

  Meanwhile slavery is increasing. Many are enslaved to others; most of us in the West are slaves to a crueller, if not more vicious, part of ourselves, which seeks sovereignty over our more interesting selves. This part is politicised since in the worki
ng world you are compelled to present an assured, autonomous self which is adapted, indeed submissive, to the social order. The requirement is of sacrifice and control; to succeed you must become a puppet of the system. This applies even to the rich, who are also subjected to the system and can never achieve the security they believe wealth will bring them. They are debt-slaves too. Always waiting to be safe, their insecurity will increase. They will never stop suspecting that the lazy poor are stealing from them.

  It isn’t surprising that people have turned to mindfulness or meditation, to re-design themselves to bear repetitive, pointless activity with a regular mind. Meditation can be useful for those with anxiety, but there is no exchange of speech, limit or moral transformation involved in sitting alone.

  The work of writing is an important compromise, between work and pleasure, politics and action, and self-investigation and communication. If we are artists, we are authorities rather than slaves, using creativity to re-think ourselves. The public identifies with artists, believing they’re less likely to be dominated by power’s definition of who people are. Artists seem freer than most people because they are less respectful of the system – not that it isn’t easy to seem crazy when the rules are narrow and any radical act seems eccentric.

  It is in writing – engaging with the difficulty of matching words to experience, of finding new words for old wounds – that we learn to speak our own language rather than that only of our culture, parents or peers. Failure and play is where creativity starts; then the imagination flares, and truth is always a surprise.

  Like everyone else, the artist has to go to the market to make a living. Becoming a writer is guaranteed to reduce, if not entirely halt, your income. But however accelerated the capitalist world is, and whatever the future of digitalisation, the making of art still exists in a private, atemporal space. Today it takes the same time to write something as it did a hundred years ago. While sitting alone among your phantoms and waiting to hear what they say, the difficulties, questions and pleasure are the same. To be an artist is partly to re-make yourself as you undo the myths that have misled you. And that is, indeed, a desirable occupation.

  The Muse Gave Me a Kiss

  In the drawer of the desk I have used for decades there is a notebook wrapped in brown paper which I started in 1964, when I was ten, and had filled by 1974, when I was twenty. It contains a year-by-year list of the books I read, almost all of which I borrowed from several libraries in the area, which I’d cycle to every afternoon after school in the south London suburbs. I’m looking at it now for the first time in many years, trying to remember why I kept it. I suspect I began it for my Cub Scout reading badge and continued because I could never bear to see blank pages in a notebook.

  My eldest son was amazed when I showed it to him, and he even turned the pages for a few minutes. ‘You were eleven years old and you read eighty-six books in one year!’ Yes; I began with Biggles, Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome and the autobiographies of footballers and cricketers. In the middle I read Nevil Shute, Nicholas Monsarrat, Len Deighton and Erskine Caldwell, writers pretty much forgotten now, as most of us will be. But in 1974, I’m relieved to see that I go out on a high, with Proust, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

  I was thrilled to have impressed my son at last. Then he added, ‘But I guess there was nothing else to do in the evenings.’

  The kid was right about that. Yet out of the interminable zombie boredom and restlessness of Bromley – a commuter town placed between the city and the Kent countryside – a lot happened while nothing appeared to be happening. Much of this went into my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, which, despite the dour reality, I managed to make into a comedy about being mixed-race in Britain during the punk era.

  I’d never had the conviction I was cut out for regular work like other men in the neighbourhood. My interesting friends dressed like Jimi Hendrix and went into music. But for me words were the lifeline. One morning at school, staring out of the window, it occurred to me to become a writer. Being an artist for a living was surely the loveliest thing! Suddenly the world appeared to open up. For the first time I had an identity and future. I was going somewhere.

  All writers are readers first, and I read everything in the two newspapers we had delivered, the Guardian and the Daily Express. And when I became a paper boy I sat down on the kerb to read those papers at 6.30 in the morning. While eating, I even found myself reading the labels on ketchup jars; and most weekends my father would drag me around second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road, a habit I inherited and still can’t give up. Flipping through the book-list notebook I can see that my preoccupations then – literature, politics, sport, philosophy and, importantly, people’s passion for one another – are still my preoccupations.

  Experience is always too much when you’re young, but there were writers who knew how to pin it down and even make it enticing. I wanted to do that. I was looking for something that could be called inspiration, because words come out of other words, and writers come from other writers. Influence is essential, and if you’re lucky one day the Muse will deign to give you a kiss, making you race to your desk and stay there, mixing what you’ve read with reality, to make a new story for others.

  She Said He Said

  Sushila had been walking in the park when she saw Mateo and his male assistant sitting on a bench. As she approached them, she noticed Mateo was dishevelled in his black suit; in fact, he was very drunk, which was unusual for him at that time of day, late afternoon. She greeted him, kissing him on both cheeks, and he asked if she would sleep with him. Why hadn’t they slept together? he went on. They could do it right now, at his place, if she had time. He had always found her sexy but had been too nervous to mention it.

  They had known each other for at least eighteen years but he had never spoken to her in this way. She was surprised and tried to seem amused. She had always liked him. Clever, witty, Mateo worked with her husband, Len. His wife, Marcie, was a confidante. They had all gone to the coast together.

  The next morning, she saw Mateo again, in the supermarket. Not with his assistant, and not drunk, he came right over and repeated his remarks in almost the same words, adding that Sushila had been with Len for a long time and surely she was bored with him. Women liked variety, he said, and he was offering some. They should get together, even if it was only once; nothing more need be said.

  Sushila kept her temper. She told Mateo that she would never sleep with him. Not in a thousand and one lifetimes. Not ever. If this was his idea of seduction, she wouldn’t be surprised if he were still a virgin.

  Right away she called Len and reported what Mateo had said on both occasions. Len was pale and agitated when he got home. He asked Sushila if she was okay, then texted Mateo to say he wanted to meet. Mateo responded. He was now out of town. But he hoped Len had some new artwork to show him. Could he bring it by next week? Len had been drawing so well recently; his work had reached a new level.

  * * *

  Mateo was surprised when Len arrived empty-handed. Where were the new drawings? Four days had passed, and Len was now calm. He had discussed the matter with Sushila and could levelly report to Mateo what he had heard about his behaviour, first when drunk in the park, and then when sober in the supermarket.

  Mateo apologised without reservation and asked Len to forgive him. But Len said he didn’t think he was ready to. Forgiving, or even forgetting, wasn’t the point. He didn’t understand why Mateo – whom Len thought he knew – had behaved in this way. Mateo said that he had no idea either but that it would be best if they put it behind them. Len asked Mateo why he had repeated the offer to Sushila when he was sober and smart enough to know better, and Mateo said he hadn’t wanted Sushila to think he wasn’t serious, that she wasn’t really desired.

  Len thanked Mateo for his consideration. After their meeting he walked around the park for a long time, unable to put the conversation out of his mind. Poison develops in silence, he thought, and what had happened
pressed on him more and more, until an idea occurred. He would discuss it with Mateo’s wife, Marcie. She and Mateo were still married but no longer together, living next door to each other as friends. Marcie had been seriously ill recently, but Len was keen to know what she made of it all, whether she found her husband’s seduction attempts ugly, crazy or something else. Maybe he was having a breakdown, for instance. Or was he just an imbecile and Len had failed to notice?

  So Len went to see Marcie, who was convalescing in bed. Knowing she had grown tired of Mateo’s antics with other women when they were together, he felt it wasn’t wrong to tell her what Mateo had said to Sushila. Marcie knew Mateo; she might be objective.

  Having relayed the story, he added that during their conversations Sushila had revealed new facts to him, something important he had been unaware of, that no one had told him. It turned out that in the past two years, Mateo had approached other female friends in a similarly crude way. Susan, for instance, had mentioned her experience with Mateo to Sushila, and Zora also. Maybe there were others. Had Marcie also heard about his behaviour?

  Len wanted to emphasise that, as Marcie knew, Sushila was kind, protective and certainly no hysteric. It wasn’t like her to make too much of the exchange in the park and the supermarket. But she had been humiliated and demeaned by the encounters. What did she, Marcie, think of it all?

  Although she listened, Marcie barely said anything; she didn’t even move her head in an affirmative or negative direction. Her self-control was remarkable. Usually, when faced with a gap or silence in conversation, people babble. Not Marcie. When at last Len suggested that Mateo seek therapy and the source of his discontent – this was, these days, the generally accepted panacea for wrongdoing – Marcie said that Mateo had been in therapy for twenty years. Evidently these things took time, Len said. They can do, Marcie murmured.