Blow It All Up, ARX-Han

An Essay on Incel by ARX-Han

In 1927, Victor Shklovsky wrote in his Technique of Writing Craft: “every work of art is only written once, and all great ones—such as Dead Souls, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov—are written ‘incorrectly,’ not the way people wrote before them, because their mission was different from the mission of previous writers.”¹ Indeed, Incel by

ARX-Han

is a work “incorrectly” written both in its content and form.

Much has already been said about the work’s “politically incorrect” content, as one can infer from its title. The main character and narrator, who is a graduate student and addressed as Anon throughout the work, decides that he will commit suicide if he cannot engage in sex before his twenty-third birthday. Anon’s vigorous endeavor to lose his virginity is a process of trial and error with over two hundred women he approaches, through which he seeks the optimized algorithm of social interactions that will lead to sexual intercourse. It would also be worth noting that he often rates a woman on a scale of one to ten according to her physical beauty and that the way he evaluates it is not unrelated to the physiological traits deemed inherent in the Germanic race.

However, only a relatively small number of readers seem to have paid particular attention to Incel’s structure and stylistics, if there has been any. The pre-existing reviews, when mentioning the formal aspects of Incel, are content to make no more than passing references that are exploited to comment on Anon’s psychology or ARX-Han’s competence as a writer who can swiftly deliver inner harangues of a troubled character. Such approaches are fair enough, but they are all without exception reduced to assessments that do not fall in the domain of formalistic criticism.

---

Although it is against my wish to imply that my approach is somehow superior to those of others, I cannot help but assert that the aforementioned indifference towards the literary form of Incel resulted in the absence of a highly valuable question among its readers: the question of genre. As soon as I open the paperback edition of Incel, its title page claims that Incel is “A NOVEL” (p. 1), and it says the same once again two pages later. Nevertheless, one must ask: is Incel truly a novel? Even if one considers it to be so, should it not be regarded as an “incorrectly” written novel?

In the same year Shklovsky wrote Technique of Writing Craft, E. M. Forester published Aspects of the Novel. When Forester discusses the plot as an aspect of the novel, the reader is confronted with one of the most famous quotes from his literary criticism:

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died," is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. (emphasis added)²

Forester goes on to write that the “plot, then, is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect: it requires mystery, but the mysteries are solved later on”. (ibid., p. 144) If we are to validate his definition of plot and that a plot is necessary for a textual work of art to be a novel, Incel’s self-categorization will soon appear problematic. The work in question, to give credit where it’s due, does have a mystery that is solved later on: Anon’s apparent white supremacism and Elizabeth’s identity. Nonetheless, the unfolding of this mystery cannot be equated with the plot of ARX-Han’s work. Racism per se is not what drives Anon to chase after his potential sexual partners. While he likens Asian students flooding his American campus to “invasive species” (p. 71) and mentions “reproduction” many times until the end, his sexual urge is never presented as an actual desire to reproduce and counter the Yellow Peril in a populational manner—in other words, he always brings condoms and never intends to breed white offspring.

Examining the macroscopic structure of Incel deepens the problem. In each of its chapters, we are generally faced with a situation in which Anon finds himself and his reactions to it, which often amounts to lengthy inner monologues or dialogues. What happens in a chapter—whether it be what Anon encounters, does, or thinks—tends not to directly affect what happens in the succeeding chapters. For instance, in Chapter 17, Anon browses Reddit and gets involved in an online argument. Then we see him in the following chapter debating over free will and determinism with his friend Jason, who later tells Anon that his mother killed herself. The next two chapters depict the scenes where Anon’s research proposal is rejected by Professor Williams and his penis fails to get an erection at the apartment of a “six-point-five out of ten” (p. 240) girl, respectively. The chapters or scenes of Incel are thus loosely connected in their time sequence but not by causality.

The structure of Incel may allow it to be classified as a story (or skaz, as Shklovsky would express it in Russian), or a collection of related stories; yet it is not so manifest that Incel has a unified plot, which will let it be acknowledged as a novel. Despite that critics like Shklovsky or Mikhail Bakhtin might be dumbfounded at such a rigid formal definition of the novel, an amorphous division of genres consequentially culminates in a non-division from the way I see it. Without even having to discuss the content of the novel as a genre à la Lukács, “the modern bourgeois epic”, I do not feel ashamed to admit that I am unironically a conservative fundamentalist when it comes to novels, who believes there can be no new novel under the sun after Jane Austen unless one risks either writing an “incorrect” novel or a work that is anything but a novel. The works of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky that Shklovsky mentioned are no exceptions.

Still, someone may find it plausible to argue that Incel does have a plot, hidden away in its deep structure. In the end, doesn’t Anon discover what happened to his neighbor Thomas and feel empathy with his wife? Is it not the collective effect of everything that Anon goes through, albeit not so explicit? Incel ends with the following passage, which is seemingly a befitting denouement of a novel:

[…] Drawing her knees in close, [Thomas’ wife] hugs them like another person. A line of smoke fades into an apparition. I do not know how to pass her without exchanging words. I am incapable of speaking. This alone does not prevent a conversation. In my head, I can hear her anyway.

What’s that, anon? You thought you were the only one in hell?

She closes her face into her hands, as if to say—you are not alone.

I am right here with you. (p. 314)

My rebuttal to the objection above will begin with two questions: is the presumed deep structure of a literary body discovered or reconstructed? If it is reconstructed, can it be free from a cognitive attempt to reach a prescribed conclusion on what a novel should look like? After narrating the violent character of Jason, the murder of his father, and the emotional abuse by his stepfather, Anon abruptly challenges the reader:

Ignore the fact that, moments ago, you found yourself nodding at the plausibility of Jason’s centralizing trauma—no man is reducible to the mere things that happened to him. The impulse to collapse into a narrative framework is your brain’s attempt to solve for action in the face of uncertainty. Evolution doesn’t care about what is true or not—it just wants you to pick a side. Thus, for the man of science, the anecdata of stories are of little evidentiary utility; weak correlations that do not equate to a definitive account of causation. One simply has no way of knowing if a particular series of events—say, being relentlessly beaten by his stepfather from the ages of eleven to fourteen—had any real influence on Jason’s neurological development breaking into the open psychic fracture that constitutes his present state of mind.

[…] Sometimes the answers are more legible, more binary and Mendelian. […] criminals convicted of violent assaults are more likely to have a defective gene for Monoamine Oxidase A […] altering the directional flows of neural circuits implicated in the control of aggressive behavior.

[…] One fine summer day, [Jason] came across a research flyer stapled to a notice board and decided to seek out testing for the sake of pure curiosity. A swab of the check confirmed what he had known about himself ever since he was a small child.

[…] In court, his social worker said that he came from a broken home. (pp. 50-51, emphasis added, italics by the author)

According to the very narrator of Incel, neither is Jason’s personality “reducible to the mere things that happened to him”, nor is the causality between his story and his character ascertained. One will be able to see with ease here how Anon’s rhetoric rooted in evolutionary psychology can be translated into that which is suitable for the question of literary genre and plot. When someone believes that Incel has a deep structure centered around Anon’s discovery of empathy, it is not so unlikely that he or she is “collapse[ing] into a narrative framework” so as to plea to the inner judge of literariness who demands a plot.

Many times, the truth is what is seen as it is. ARX-Han’s work has no plot of which the emphasis falls on causality. Its ending is not a well-suited denouement for a novel in its proper sense either. Besides that no actual conversation between Thomas’ wife and Anon takes place, it seems the events of Incel have not caused a significant effect even on his thoughts. One may be inclined to feel that Anon’s projection onto Thomas’ wife, where he thinks that he can hear her saying “You thought you were the only one in hell? […] you are not alone. I am right here with you”, is a sign of change in him. It is not. Even when he was browsing Reddit, he already thought: “we are in hell […] among the suffering of others. The best thing about hell is that it contains other people.” (p. 200, italics by the author) When a reader argues that Incel has a plot, what he or she perceives is his or her mental construct, not the substance innate to the text.

Before reading Incel and well into its first few chapters, I was expecting Anon to be a Dostevskian anti-hero like the Underground Man. The expectation turned out to be wrong. I later found myself thinking more of Dead Souls, the opus ultimum by Gogol which notably claims itself to be a poema, not a roman, the Russian word for “novel”. Dead Souls and Incel are not only alike in that their structures are not ruled by a strong, centering plot; there is also an eerie similarity between Anon who haunts the shops of a mall to go after women and Chichikov who visits a row of estates to collect the right to dead serfs.

Ever since Aleksandr Veselovsky, many readers have compared Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dante’s Inferno. This naturally leads to placing Incel next to those timeless works as another work of literature from hell. After all, hell does not exist inside of time, and “neither does time exist without change”³. Incel is a work set in none other than hell, where there can be no causation to let its souls escape their status quo.

---

Curiously, Jason, a hero from Greek mythology who shares his name with Anon’s friend, is placed in the eighth circle of hell for seducing Hypsipyle through deceiving words in Inferno but still keeps his “royal aspect” (Canto XVIII). Similar traits can be observed from Jason from Incel. Jason is the character in whom Anon’s description of “a power fantasy” where “you always win the most important fights and you always fuck the most important girls” (p. 43) is realized as much as it is possible.

However, Jason’s seductive words cannot be treated without caution in that they reflect the fuel of hellfire which burns the world of Incel.

Postliberal Book Reviews

makes a correct assessment that “the sources of authority in Incel are almost exclusively scientific or material”, while the author ARX-Han himself boldly asserts that “one of the theses of the novel, is that, in some sense, science is psychopathy.” (emphasis by the author) The tendency of scientism or scientific reductionism which comes under criticism here becomes evident when Jason says “there is no real analysis of human autonomy that is not subject to a regress that terminates in particle physics”. (p. 222)

Anon does not necessarily accept the particular reduction above as meaningful: “It’s true in the trivial sense, but it’s a completely vacuous statement.” (p. 223) Still, he shows a close enough tendency when even his rebuttal to Jason’s strong physical reductionism is manifested as a version of restricted genetic reductionism that “our purpose is literally hard-coded into our DNA: it is to survive and reproduce, to push back against entropy (in the local sense), to replicate the order of our genome and, in doing so, to valiantly resist the ultimate heat death of the universe.” (p. 225)

One of the many other occasions where Anon shows such a mindset is when he says: “[t]o the unsophisticated observer, martial entanglements are strictly reducible to basic matters of Newtonian physics”. (p. 39)⁴ At this point, it is worth recalling that Auguste Comte, inspired by Newton’s law of gravity, used the term “social physics” to denote his studies in society for some time and he in turn inspired Émile Zola to initiate his Naturalistic project, the Experimental Novel. In his essay with the same name, Zola wrote:

The experimental novelist is therefore the one who accepts proven facts, who points out in man and in society the mechanism of the phenomena over which science is mistress, […] and who tries to test, as much as he can, this personal sentiment, this idea a priori, by observation and experiment. (emphasis added)⁵

What Zola proposed was the idea of the novel “not limited to the expression of sentiments […] because it is essential also to exhibit the working of these sentiments […] not only in their phenomena, but in the causes of these phenomena.”(ibid., p. 49, emphasis added) In a sense, he aimed to devise a scientific program of narrative literature that would reveal what causes certain human reactions or social interactions under controlled environments. This, I believe, was one of the most ambitious literary projects of the High Modernity.

Despite Zola’s strenuous effort—he wrote an absurdly gargantuan series of experimental novels, consisting of twenty volumes, Les Rougon-Macquart, which depicts two families across five generations—Naturalism eventually died away. There may be other ways that could explain why Zola and his comrades’ project failed, but I regard the main reason to be its internal contradiction. When pushed to the farthest limit, the scientific principle adopted by an experimental novelist will force him or her to regress until reaching the movement of particles, ending up in the impossibility of the plot’s existence, the heat death of the novel.

This is where I find the brilliance of Incel. Combined with its characters, themes, and contents, its literary form as a non-novel or an “incorrect” novel discloses the impossibility, or absurdity of writing a novel in this age filled with the spirit of scientism or modernity itself.⁶

I doubt ARX-Han could have been intentional about it, especially since he put his work in the third position which rejects both “Based/anti-woke” and “Woke” camps of literary fiction. In contrast, my assessment is that, from a bird’s-eye view, there is one big fortress on the plain of literature where people still cling to modernity and argue with each other over minor disputes. Meanwhile, there are others yet to build their own camp(s) outside of it. When talking solely about my writing practice, I have chosen a Gramscian tactic (albeit less pious than calling it a literary Benedictine Option) of pitching a tent where I embrace elements of Romanticism, or “mysticism” as Zola would put it.

Nevertheless, Incel has shown a whole new possibility. ARX-Han never leaves the fortress; he simply shows how it can be blown up from the inside, without requiring any camp outside that will provide him with the materials necessary for the terrorist maneuver. The materials for the literary dynamite⁷, Incel, are already all in there.

I want to read more from him since I see a mission in his “incorrect” form of writing.

Blow it all up, ARX-Han.

If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.

1. Quoted from Victor Shklovsky: A Reader, ed. & tr. Alexandra Berlina, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, p. 187.

2. E. M. Forester, Aspects of the Novel, Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York, 1927, p. 130.

3. Aristotle, Physics, Book IV, Part 11, tr. R. P. Hardie & R. K. Gaye.

4. I will elaborate no further on scientism within Incel since much has already been said of it as I wrote above, and I expect that much more will follow.

5. Quoted from The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, tr. Belle M. Sherman, Haskell House, 1964, pp. 53-54.

6. The correlation between the forms of literature and the ages is a subject that requires another lengthy essay, and I cannot stray from here to write about it.

7. From Arbogast, Get Laid or Die Trying, The Carousel. “Incel is a complicated dynamite.”