by Will Self
‘“Well, in outline, yes, but I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any of you ever do any of these things at all.”
‘“No. Quite right, jolly good, jolly good. That’s the ticket, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. Of course we don’t actually do any of these things.”
‘“But why? Surely you’re frightened of all the gods and spirits?”
‘“Well, we don’t really believe in them in quite that way you know. We believe in their validity as er … examples, metaphors if you will, of the way that things are, but we don’t actually believe in tree spirits, good Lord no!”
‘The shaman chuckled for quite a while at the thought such excessive religious zeal, and then offered me a cup of coya. Coya is a lukewarm drink made from the powdered root of the coya tree, it looks alarmingly like instant coffee, but the taste is a lot blander. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with this absurd figure. Unlike other tribes who have shamen, the status of the shaman in Ur-Bororo society is ambiguous and somewhat irrelevant. The shaman often sketched out the form of some of the rigorous rituals the Ur-Bororo nominally believe in, but hardly anyone even bothered to attend these mock performances. On the whole he was regarded with a kind of amused disdain. Although it was still thought important to have pale versions of the ceremonies performed for births, marriages and deaths.
‘I saw the shaman a couple more times before our marriage. He went through the tired motions of instructing me in the Ur-Bororo faith and also retailed me a lot of useless advice on how to make marriage work. Stuff about counting to ten when I got angry, giving Jane the opportunity to state her case when we had a disagreement, and all this kind of twaddle, the sort of thing you’d expect from an advice column in a fourth-rate women’s magazine.
‘The ceremony itself was held to be a great success. Twenty or thirty of us gathered outside the shaman’s shed and Jane and I joined hands while we all listened to him irritate us by wittering inanities in a high fluting voice. I can quite honestly say that I’ve never seen a drabber social occasion than that Ur-Bororo wedding ceremony. All of us in our grey tunics, standing in the gloomy clearing being comprehensively bored.
‘After the actual ceremony, the guests disported themselves around the clearing, talking nineteen to the dozen. Jane led me among them and introduced me to aunts, cousins and friends. All of whom I knew too well already. The aunts pinched my cheek and made fatuous comments. There was much ingestion of rather watery manioc beer, which was followed, inevitably, by the kind of turgid flatulence which passes for high spirits among the Ur-Bororo.
‘Jane has a brother, David, and the Ur-Bororo knew that I intended to take both of them back to England with me after the wedding, but they showed little surprise or emotion about it. They also knew that I was convinced that their society was doomed to extinction, but this too failed to exercise them. They had no particular feelings about the coming of civilisation and I found it impossible to rouse them out of their torpor. To be honest, I had long since given up trying.
‘Our departure was an unemotional experience. There were slight hugs, pecks on the cheek and handclasps all round. Jane seemed mildly piqued. As our canoe slid off down river, one of the younger men cried out, “Come back soon, if you can stand the pace!” And then we were gone. In two days we were at the town of Mentzos where we boarded a launch that took us to the mouth of the Amazon. Two days after that we were in Buenos Aires and a day later we arrived in Purley, where we have remained ever since.’
‘And that’s it? That’s the story?’
‘Yes. Like I said, I live in Purley now and I do a little teaching at Croydon Polytechnic. If you like to put it this way: I’m cured of my obsession with the Ur-Bororo.’
‘But what about the Lurie Foundation? Don’t you have to publish your work? Won’t it be popularised in the Sunday supplements?’
‘No, no, there’s no necessity for that. All Lurie wanted was for some other poor idiot to suffer the unbelievable tedium he experienced when staying with the Ur-Bororo in the Thirties.’
‘And what about Jane and David? You can’t tell me that you’ve managed to integrate them into English society with no difficulty at all. You said that the Ur-Bororo are racially distinct, what does that mean?’
‘Yes that’s true, and I suppose in a way intriguing; the Ur-Bororo don’t really have any defining characteristics as a people. They aren’t Mongoloid or Negro or Caucasian or anything for that matter. But their appearance as a people is so unremarkable that one – how can I put it – doesn’t feel inclined to remark upon it. As for Jane, I’m very much in love with her. I must confess that although we can’t be said to have a great rapport, I still find her maddeningly erotic; it’s something about her complete inertia when she’s in bed, it makes me feel so … so like a man. We have a child now, Derek, and he’s all that you could want. And David still lives with us. Why don’t you and your wife come over next week and meet them, you’ll be able to see how well they’ve assimilated.’
After Janner had gone I sat staring at the twin elements of the electric fire. It was high summer and they were cold and lifeless and covered with a fine furring of dust which I knew would singe with a metallic smell when winter came. Funny how no one ever thinks of dusting the elements of electric fires. Perhaps there was room on the market for some kind of specialised product.
Exactly a week later my wife and I stood outside 47 Fernwood Crescent. The house was lit up in a cheery sort of way, the curtains were pulled back from the windows and inside everything looked spic and span. Number 47 was a more or less typical Purley residence, semi-detached with a corrugated car port to the side of the house in lieu of the garage. Like the other residents of Fernwood Crescent Janner had taken the trouble to paint the exterior woodwork and drainpipes in an individual colour, in his case bright green. The bell ding-donged under my finger and the green door swung open.
‘You must be Jane?’
‘That’s right, come in. I’ve heard such a lot about you.’
What I first noticed about her was her accent, remarkably flat and colourless – it was pure South London, right down to the slightly nasal character. I can’t say that I paid any attention at all to what she looked like; in this respect Janner’s description of her was entirely accurate. She was like someone that you pass in a crowd, a face that you momentarily focus on and then forget for ever. As for her brother David, who got up from the sofa to greet us, there was an obvious family resemblance.
We hung up our coats and sat down in a rough semi-circle around the redundant fireplace, and exchanged the conversational inanities which signify ‘getting-to-know-one-another’. After a while Janner came in. ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you arrive. I’ve just been in the garden doing a little pottering. Would anyone like a drink?’ He took orders and repaired to the kitchen. By the time he returned I was deeply embroiled with David in a discussion of the relative merits of the Dewey decimal system, as against other methods of cataloguing. Janner caught the tail-end of something we were saying. ‘I see David’s caught you already,’ he laughed. ‘He won’t let up now, he’s a demon for classification since he started work at the library. Why, he’s even colour-coded the spice jars in the kitchen.’ We all laughed at this.
What Janner said was true. David wouldn’t let go of me all evening. He was an irritating conversationalist who had the habit of not only repeating everything that you said, but also ending your sentences for you, so that a typical exchange went something like this:
‘Yes, we try and maintain a microfiche …’
‘Catalogue at the school for the older students – maintain a microfiche catalogue for the older students, hmn …’
I would have felt like hitting David if it wasn’t for the fact that he was so affable and ingratiating. Dinner was unremarkable. We had some kind of casseroled meat with vegetables, but I couldn’t say what kind of meat it was.
David’s pressing interest in taxonomy cast a deep sense of enervation over me. I n
early slumped down on my chair during the dessert course and once or twice the vinyl did give off a squawk. My wife and Jane were deep in conversation about the Local Education Authority and Janner had disappeared upstairs to change the baby’s nappy. I excused myself from David and tiptoed after him.
I found him in a little room under the eaves which had been tricked out as a nursery. He was deftly manipulating the Wet Ones, as a man born to it. The baby was a nondescript little thing with putty-coloured skin and a whorl of indeterminate mousey hair on its little scalp.
‘Takes after its mother,’ said Janner grasping two tiny feet in his one bony hand. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry. Wouldn’t wish my face on any child.’
‘Janner, what are you going to do?’
‘Do? Do about what?’
‘About Jane, about David, about the Ur-Bororo.’
‘Why, nothing, nothing at all.’ He fastened the sticky-backed tapes and plunked the baby back in its cot. It stared up at us with blank, unfocused, incurious eyes.
‘But Janner, you’re a scientist, you have a duty to tell. Is it the Lurie Foundation, have they got some kind of a hold on you?’
‘Nothing of the sort. Of course I could publish if I wanted to, but for some reason the whole subject of the Ur-Bororo leaves me cold, I just can’t get worked up about it. I don’t think the world would be any the wiser for my insights.’
Soon afterwards we took our leave. All the way home my wife talked about Jane. They seemed to have really hit it off together. I was silent, entirely preoccupied by my thoughts about Janner and the Ur-Bororo.
Our two families became quite close during that autumn. I should say that we saw each other at least once a fortnight, sometimes more. I even grew to appreciate David. There was something admirable about his dogged adherence to the most simple categories he could latch on to. As for Janner, I raised the subject of the Ur-Bororo with him several more times but he was completely unconcerned. He was in the process of becoming quite a minor celebrity – the sort of pop academic the general public takes up from time to time and turns into a television personality. His book linking the observation of swirling laundry to traditional Buddhist meditation surprisingly had become a hit and he was in the process of negotiating serialisation with the colour supplements.
As for me, I went on teaching, playing volleyball and asking recalcitrant pupils the names of power stations. The lagging which had for a brief period been removed from my mind came back – together with new, improved, cavity-wall insulation.
The Quantity Theory
of Insanity
Denver, Colorado
A depressing day here at the special interdisciplinary conference. I suppose that as the author of the theory that has generated so much academic activity I should feel a certain proprietorial glee at the sight of hundreds of psychologists, sociologists, social scientists and other less mainstream academics running hither and thither, talking, disputing, gesturing, debating and conferring. Instead I feel only depressed and alienated from the great industry of thought I myself have engineered. And added to that I think the low quality pf the celluloid they’ve used for the name badges betrays the fact that the department simply hasn’t allocated a big enough budget.
I spent the morning in the main auditorium of the university giving my address to the assembled conferees. Dagglebert, against my expressed wishes, had put together some kind of video display or slide show to accompany my introductory lecture, ‘Some Aspects of the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Sadly, even though Dagglebert has irrepressible faith in visual aids, he has absolutely no spatial awareness whatsoever. I kept looking up and realising that flow charts were running over my face, and at one stage I looked down to discover that my stomach was neatly encompassed by a Venn diagram section tagged ‘Manic Depressives in Coventry 1977–79’.
Despite these and other drawbacks, it went well. Several hundred hirsute men and women sat on the edge of their seats for a full three hours while I went over the principal aspects of the theory. If the truth be told I could have gargled and they would have been just as attentive. I’ve now reached that rarefied position in academia where I have the cachet of a lecturing Miles Davis. I could have allowed Dagglebert to project slides for three hours and then sauntered on for five minutes of disjointed and facile muttering – and still I would have been vigorously applauded.
As it was I declined to cash in on the credulousness of my audience. For once I would attempt the truth. I would take a serious stab at stopping the feverish growth of an industry I myself was responsible for helping to create. I would demystify the Quantity Theory myth, and in the process take a few clay idols down with me.
Accordingly, I dealt with the subject personally as well as historically. As with all great theories I felt that it was especially important for an academic audience to understand the personal dimension, the essential humanity of the origin of such an idea. But it didn’t work. Once one has a certain kind of academic status, any statement that you make, if it is couched in the language of your discipline, no matter how critical, how searching, is seen only as an embellishment, another layer of crystalline accretion to the stalactite. To break it off at the root, one’s language would have to be brutal, uncompromising, emotional, non-technical.
So I began by telling them of the grey cold afternoon in suburban Birmingham, when, labouring to complete the index to an American college press’s edition of my doctoral thesis, ‘Some Social Aspects of Academic Grant Application in 1970’s Britain’, I was visited in one pure thought bite with the main constituents of the theory as we know it today.
At least that would be one way of looking at the experience. Seen from another angle the Quantity Theory was merely the logical conclusion of years of frustrated thinking, the butter that eventually formed after the long rhythm of churning. I have often had occasion to observe – and indeed Stacking has recently and belatedly stated the observation as a tentative syndrome which he expresses: (Á → Å). Where Å = a subsequent state of affairs – that events are reconstructed more than they are ever constructed.
Once you have published, grown old and then died, the events surrounding the original theoretical discovery with which you have been associated take on an impossible causal direction and momentum. One which certainly wasn’t apparent at the time. Scientists are particularly prone to this syndrome. For example, take Gödel and his Incompleteness. Once he had made the proposition, everything in his life had necessarily led up to that moment, that piece of work. Thus, when the infant Gödel cried in his cot, the particular twist of phlegm striations, wafted in his gullet by his bawling, implied that no logical symbolic system can construct full grounds for its own proof. Poor Gödel, his breakdowns, his anorexia, all of them inextricably bound up with his fifteen minutes of academic fame. Why?
Well, put simply, when aberrant events occur they become subject to the same principle – at the level of human, social observation – as particles do to instrumental observation at the sub-atomic level. The effect of observation has a direct impact on the nature of the event, altering its coordinates as it were, although not in any simple dimension. I mean, if an aberrant event occurs it doesn’t then occur in another place or time because of the attention it subsequently attracts. It doesn’t retroactively take up that other position or time, or even rate of occurrence before it has in fact taken place. That would be absurd.
Rather all of these: the effect of observation on aberrant events tends to be the reversal of their causality, their causal direction. However, there is no reversal of necessity as far as the occurrence of P is concerned – and I think this is something that has been ignored.
So when I ‘thought up’ the Quantity Theory of Insanity, I was in fact being caused to think it up by the subsequent fact of the general reaction that occurred: public commotion, academic furore, even a front-page paragraph in the quality press. Let me make this clearer by means of an example: with murders, to take a commonplace aberrant event, this syn
drome is so obvious that it hardly arouses any comment. X commits a murder, or he apparently commits a murder. Perhaps it was a very unfortunate accident? Maybe he was arguing with Y and pushed her rather too vigorously and she tripped on the lino and dashed her brains out on the edge of the gas cooker, just like that. Furthermore, perhaps X, crazed with grief, went mad, cut up Y and buried her in the garden. Subsequently caught, X was then retrospectively branded ‘psychopathic’, by anyone and everyone who had any connection with him. ‘Oooh, yairs,’ says a neighbour, ‘the way he rattled those empty milk bottles together when he put them out on the front step, there was something demonic about it.’ X, once upstanding, loyal, prone, perhaps, to the same slight eccentricities as anyone – G, for example, although let us not bandy capitals – has been ruined, now and in the past, by the observation factor.
None of this, you can now appreciate (and perhaps always have) is by way of digression. If we are to talk meaningfully of my life, and of the part that I played in the origination of Quantity Theory, we must be able to account for observational factors – and then be able to ignore them. Ironically, given the tendency to subordinate the individual consciousness to some creative zeitgeist, I turn out to be the best possible Quantity Theory historian. After all, I was there. Which is more than can be said for Musselborough, Nantwich and the rest of those twerps.
Well, then. My own early life was fraught with neurotic illness. The debacle surrounding my analysis by Alkan is well known to the public, so there’s no point in trying to hide it. The received understanding about my background, my early life, my schooling, and indeed my undergraduate studies with Müeller, is that they were all spectacularly mundane. My circumstances and character – if you listen to these biographers – had the absolute banality of a Hitler. They were so ordinary, that reading the facts on paper one could only conclude that they had been recorded as the prelude to some cautionary tale.
