Martin Amis interview in Prospect Magazine–excerpt—
MA: The comic novel is dying, because comedy is anti-democratic. Comedy is a smear.
TC: Inviting you to laugh at.
MA: Yes. But that may be turning around a bit. People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones—but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?
TC: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German writer.
MA: Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.
TC: Do you admire his books at all?
MA: No. I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. The denial of the pleasure principle has a lot of followers. But I am completely committed to it, to pleasure.
TC: Why have people felt the need to do this to the novel: is this puritanical?
MA: Dryden said, literature is instruction and delight, and there are people who think that if they’re not getting delight then they are getting a lot of instruction, when in fact they’re not getting that either. But it has a sort of of gloomy constituency. If there is no pleasure transmitted then I’m not interested. I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they’re all funny. All the good ones are funny. Richardson isn’t, and he’s no good. Dostoyevsky is funny: The Double is a scream. Tolstoy is funny by being just so wonderfully true and pure. Gogol, funny. Flaubert, funny. Dickens. All the good ones are funny.
TC: Who do you really enjoy of the younger generation of writers?
MA: I don’t read them. I read my friends: Will Self and Zadie Smith. But it’s a fantastically uneconomical way of reading, to read your youngers. No-one knows if they are any good. Only time knows that.
TC: You say that in your Preface to the War Against Cliché, one of the most distilled articulations of your literary philosophy. I’ve always had a nagging question about that, the argument that cliché can be very powerful in the short term but that in the long term it inevitably looks ridiculous…
MA: I don’t think it has any say in the short term either. These are two quotes from Coetzee. How does it go. Oh, yes. A woman is watching him closely. “She watched me like a…”
TC: “…hawk.”
MA: Next sentence. He had said these words in a “voice loud enough to wake…”
TC: “…the dead.”
MA: Consecutive sentences.
TC: Which novel is that from?
MA: Waiting for the Barbarians. You will get these people who are felt to be educational, even though, as Clive James said, a sense of humour is common sense dancing. Those who haven’t got it, a sense of humour, shouldn’t be trusted with anything. You’re amazed they can get across the road. But proclaimed humourlessness has a constituency, I don’t know why.
TC: One of the things you’ve often said is that the classic humourless form is pornography: it’s a recurring theme of your work, this idea that the pornographic is a state where irony, wit and self-knowledge are entirely absented, and this is a cultural force that can be extremely dangerous.
MA: Let’s not pretend. This is how young people get their sex education, from pornography. I don’t think a liking for pornography obliterates your sense of humour, but it probably does in the sack. This is from talking to my grown-up daughter, who was very frank with me about the mores of her peer group. It dominates the style of the whole encounter. I don’t understand that. I have had the dissociations of my generation but I don’t have this, which I think is much more radical than we think, with unknowable consequences socially between men and women.
