Mr Lazy
Greg Rowland writes in praise of the great Idler, sleeper and revolutionary inactivist
It is long overdue, but let us now celebrate the most famous narcoleptic in all of children’s literature - the astonishingly slack Mr Lazy.
Mr Lazy is a Mr Man. The Mr Men are a group of simply drawn entities, each of whom are dominated by one over-riding character trait. Thus Mr Strong is strong, Mr Greedy is greedy and Mr Fussy is fussy. Each character seeks to make his own unique signifier palpable in actual experience (or the ‘lifeworld’ as Jorgen Habermas or some other German refers to it, except he employs a long German word to describe it. For further information on the lifeworld and other long German words please refer to The Journal of Long Pretentious Academic German Compound Nouns.)
Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men world (or weltgeshunggshtickdreckherrzimmer) is often a reactionary place. Those born with a monomaniacal fixation on a single issue (like a living embodiment of the Schopenhaurian ‘Will’) tend to be forced towards the bourgeois norm by the close of the narrative. For example, the powerfully-lunged Mr Noisy is studiously ignored by local shopkeepers until he modifies his decibilic register. Mr Nosey, a subverter of bourgeois notions of propriety and the private Self is similarly ostracised for his own transgressions until he learns to modify his behaviour. Most startlingly of all, in an unpublished manuscript, Mr Radical is subjected to torture by means of electrodes inserted into his oversized red brain, while being anally raped by Mr Conformity.
However Mr Lazy is different. Mr Lazy is unconscious for over 85% of the story. Hence, because the narrative exists outside of the restrictive consciousness of the bourgeois Self, even the conservative Hargreaves seems unable to pull the character back from his self-expression in the form of sleep.
Moreover, Mr Lazy lives in Sleepyland - a place which, like some post-revolutionary utopia, essentially denies the need not only for work, but for activity of almost any kind.
Hence in Sleepyland, the birds often fall from the sky because they don’t flap their wings fast enough and everybody get up in the afternoon. Modified by some quantum disturbance in the reactionary notion of linear time, even the conventional rules of physics do not apply to Sleepyland - a kettle takes four hours to boil. Sleepyland is a place ruled by the unconscious.
However, the forces of consciousness and puritanical work ethic are strongly represented here too. The arrival of the besuited Mr Busy and Mr Bustle conspires to deform the idyllic somnabulance of Sleepyland and, more specifically, the indolent life of Mr Lazy.They arrive with a set of instructions designed specifically to make Mr Lazy work really hard. Their inhumane demands on Mr Lazy - a he list of energetic and practical tasks he must undertake - cause some form of synaptic rupture within Mr Lazy’s neural pathways by way of response:
“Oh dear,” groaned Mr Lazy in a daze. “The wood to clean and the beds to get and the floors to cut and the coal to cook and the windows to make and the plates to mend and the furniture to chop and the grass to wash and the hedges to dust and the clothes to clip?”
Nevertheless Mr Lazy is forced to undergo some kind of transformation into a patriarchal Charles Ingles figure as he, with increasing personal sorrow, sets about his allotted chores. Were that not enough, the tyrannical Mr Busy and Mr Bustle send Mr Lazy out on the longest walk he has ever been on:
“Now,” they said when he’d finished, “it’s time for a walk!”
And off they set on the longest walk Mr Lazy had ever been on.
Mr Lazy is one of those people who never walks when he has a chance of sitting down, and never sits down when he has a chance of lying down. But this day he had no choice. They made him walk for miles and miles, until he felt his legs must be worn right down to his body. Poor Mr Lazy!”
Poor Mr Lazy indeed. The long walk is one of the most fiendish devices of torture ever created by the crapulent behemoths of late-capitalism. And yet, Mr Busy and Bustle, on Mr Lazy’s return to Yawn Cottage, seek to outdo themselves -
“Right! Now for a run!” said Mr Busy. “Oh no, ” groaned Mr Lazy.
Yet it is the very sound of the Mr Bustle’s starting whistle that provides the means of liberation from Mr Lazy’s activity-led bondage. It is the whistle that wakes Mr Lazy from this hideous dream of crypto-Protestant ashlocharbeteinwelt. It is not, as it turns out Mr Bustle’s whistle that stirs Mr Lazy, but rather it is the whistling of the kettle that he had put on the stove before falling asleep and being plagued by these demons of effort.
In an unexpected but joyously liberating plot-twist, the whole sad affair had been a dream - “Mr Lazy heaved a sigh of relief.” Soon, while thinking about his dream, Mr Lazy falls asleep once again, at which point the text closes. The unconscious reigns supreme once more, and all activity is consigned to the dustbin of history. Mr Lazy remains undaunted by the forces of bourgeois industry and consciousness and finds elegant strategies for non-conformity by a consistent retreat into the world of the unconsciousness. We can only hope that, as the forces of late capitalism crumble around our ears, that we heed Mr Lazy’s vital revolutionary message - that the only genuinely subversive response to the horrors of the current social order is to go to sleep and try and forget about it all.
Greg Rowland writes in praise of the great Idler, sleeper and revolutionary inactivist
It is long overdue, but let us now celebrate the most famous narcoleptic in all of children’s literature - the astonishingly slack Mr Lazy.
Mr Lazy is a Mr Man. The Mr Men are a group of simply drawn entities, each of whom are dominated by one over-riding character trait. Thus Mr Strong is strong, Mr Greedy is greedy and Mr Fussy is fussy. Each character seeks to make his own unique signifier palpable in actual experience (or the ‘lifeworld’ as Jorgen Habermas or some other German refers to it, except he employs a long German word to describe it. For further information on the lifeworld and other long German words please refer to The Journal of Long Pretentious Academic German Compound Nouns.)
Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men world (or weltgeshunggshtickdreckherrzimmer) is often a reactionary place. Those born with a monomaniacal fixation on a single issue (like a living embodiment of the Schopenhaurian ‘Will’) tend to be forced towards the bourgeois norm by the close of the narrative. For example, the powerfully-lunged Mr Noisy is studiously ignored by local shopkeepers until he modifies his decibilic register. Mr Nosey, a subverter of bourgeois notions of propriety and the private Self is similarly ostracised for his own transgressions until he learns to modify his behaviour. Most startlingly of all, in an unpublished manuscript, Mr Radical is subjected to torture by means of electrodes inserted into his oversized red brain, while being anally raped by Mr Conformity.
However Mr Lazy is different. Mr Lazy is unconscious for over 85% of the story. Hence, because the narrative exists outside of the restrictive consciousness of the bourgeois Self, even the conservative Hargreaves seems unable to pull the character back from his self-expression in the form of sleep.
Moreover, Mr Lazy lives in Sleepyland - a place which, like some post-revolutionary utopia, essentially denies the need not only for work, but for activity of almost any kind.
Hence in Sleepyland, the birds often fall from the sky because they don’t flap their wings fast enough and everybody get up in the afternoon. Modified by some quantum disturbance in the reactionary notion of linear time, even the conventional rules of physics do not apply to Sleepyland - a kettle takes four hours to boil. Sleepyland is a place ruled by the unconscious.
However, the forces of consciousness and puritanical work ethic are strongly represented here too. The arrival of the besuited Mr Busy and Mr Bustle conspires to deform the idyllic somnabulance of Sleepyland and, more specifically, the indolent life of Mr Lazy.They arrive with a set of instructions designed specifically to make Mr Lazy work really hard. Their inhumane demands on Mr Lazy - a he list of energetic and practical tasks he must undertake - cause some form of synaptic rupture within Mr Lazy’s neural pathways by way of response:
“Oh dear,” groaned Mr Lazy in a daze. “The wood to clean and the beds to get and the floors to cut and the coal to cook and the windows to make and the plates to mend and the furniture to chop and the grass to wash and the hedges to dust and the clothes to clip?”
Nevertheless Mr Lazy is forced to undergo some kind of transformation into a patriarchal Charles Ingles figure as he, with increasing personal sorrow, sets about his allotted chores. Were that not enough, the tyrannical Mr Busy and Mr Bustle send Mr Lazy out on the longest walk he has ever been on:
“Now,” they said when he’d finished, “it’s time for a walk!”
And off they set on the longest walk Mr Lazy had ever been on.
Mr Lazy is one of those people who never walks when he has a chance of sitting down, and never sits down when he has a chance of lying down. But this day he had no choice. They made him walk for miles and miles, until he felt his legs must be worn right down to his body. Poor Mr Lazy!”
Poor Mr Lazy indeed. The long walk is one of the most fiendish devices of torture ever created by the crapulent behemoths of late-capitalism. And yet, Mr Busy and Bustle, on Mr Lazy’s return to Yawn Cottage, seek to outdo themselves -
“Right! Now for a run!” said Mr Busy. “Oh no, ” groaned Mr Lazy.
Yet it is the very sound of the Mr Bustle’s starting whistle that provides the means of liberation from Mr Lazy’s activity-led bondage. It is the whistle that wakes Mr Lazy from this hideous dream of crypto-Protestant ashlocharbeteinwelt. It is not, as it turns out Mr Bustle’s whistle that stirs Mr Lazy, but rather it is the whistling of the kettle that he had put on the stove before falling asleep and being plagued by these demons of effort.
In an unexpected but joyously liberating plot-twist, the whole sad affair had been a dream - “Mr Lazy heaved a sigh of relief.” Soon, while thinking about his dream, Mr Lazy falls asleep once again, at which point the text closes. The unconscious reigns supreme once more, and all activity is consigned to the dustbin of history. Mr Lazy remains undaunted by the forces of bourgeois industry and consciousness and finds elegant strategies for non-conformity by a consistent retreat into the world of the unconsciousness. We can only hope that, as the forces of late capitalism crumble around our ears, that we heed Mr Lazy’s vital revolutionary message - that the only genuinely subversive response to the horrors of the current social order is to go to sleep and try and forget about it all.
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."