ANDROGENIC LITERATURE REVIEW Vol. 5: The Black Album by Matt Pegas

White masculinity and the seemingly inexorable escalator toward identitarian meltdown

The minimalist cover of The Black Album, which you can buy here.

One of the funny things about writing androgenic fiction as an Asian-American male is that you have very few reference points from your own diaspora to draw from.

Outside of genre works, literary fiction in this space trends toward stolid, flat, and boring. There’s nothing of an edge to these books; form and craft drained of vital energy.

The reason for this is that the type of Asian-American male who gets institutional permission to write literary fiction is typically molded to the PMC-striver archetype: in short, he’s a guy with the right political and aesthetic orientation to fit into elite American colleges.

If he engages on any type of international political axis, he’s more likely than not a weaponized immigrant whose role is to reify the moral rectitude of universalist secular purity culture and its values and undermine the legitimacy of his state of origin.

He is, in a word, conquered.

In this regard, assimilation has a political dimension that constitutes a sophisticated form of defection. The homeland is backward, oppressive, retrograde; the imperial core and its moral edifices are shining, golden, and totalizing. I don’t judge people for this (everyone has to eat) but losses like this are not borne without psychic damage, whether conscious or not.

In sum, there’s a very clear incentive structure and developmental funnel that tends to ensure that Asian-American literary fiction is boring, and it’s downstream from the same factors that make high culture in the wordcel domain boring in general—psychodemographic class capture, the professionalization of the MFA & creative writing networks, and so on.

Misfits, losers, lunatics, weirdos—the people who are more likely to produce interesting work—get filtered out. The over-professionalization of art exchanges chaos for the order of craft and homogenization, but chaos is the engine of textual recombination. The optimum amount of crazy isn’t found in box-tickers and resume-builders and the on-rails trajectory of academic creative writing.

Thus, the kind of Asian-American male who gets through elite systems like top-tier MFA usually thinks something like this:

(This is religious language)

Now, you have the odd special case and the odd outlier who approaches (but does not enter) the realm of genuine subversion—say, Tony Tulathimutte—but he is the exception that proves the rule. In my view, Tony is the smartest and most sophisticated Asian-American tradpub novelist by a longshot, and some of his work (like the infamous story “The Feminist”) admits a certain Straussian reading.

Once a minority male writer makes it through the purity filter, what’s left is of little resemblance to actual life and is several layers removed from the grit of IRL.

This is all to say that, when it comes to American fiction, I more often than not find myself reading and enjoying the work of white males more than the work of my own diaspora.

If I being extra critical, I would say that I’ve read much more realistic and fulsome accounts of the Asian-American male experience from anonymous Reddit posts than I have from literary fiction written by elite Asian-American male culturati.

What I am describing here is merely the continuity of trans-racial psychological similarity. A straight male above a certain threshold of psychological and/or physical masculinity is often going to find more in common with a similarly-wired male of a different race than a more-distant male of his own race.

Representation in literature isn’t purely a variable of race; but also a variable of mindset, of psychological disposition. Alex Perez has written about this at length, but I can tell you he’s not the only one who feels this way. Universality of experience is indeed a thing.

This is why a certain type of white guy loves Mishima even though he was, if we are to borrow some terms from the internet, a “gay manlet.”

Liberalism presents: the nuclear reactor model of white identitarianism

When liberalism frames the question of white ethnic identity, it’s presented less as a set of cultural practices or beliefs but rather as a force moving in a certain direction.

If we take survey of the institutional response function to indicators of it's re-emergence, we can conclude that liberalism’s approach to collective white identity is to suppress it at all costs.

The implicit logic here is that Western countries needs to treat white identity as something akin to a nuclear reactor that might melt down and cause a catastrophe at any moment. The prescriptive solution is to continuously penetrate the core reactor of latent white identitarianism with various “control rods” of a social, institutional, and legal nature.

The stated (and often unstated) reason for this continuous suppression essentially boils down to the superseding moral framework of liberalism. In the 20th century, the post-WW2 liberal order justification narrative evolved into a sort of retcon about imperial America preventing “another Holocaust” and positing a kind of eternal conflict between Liberalism and Fascism. In this conflict, the guardians of democracy and human rights need to aggressively vanquish in both the domestic and foreign spheres and white identitarianism in particular.

If I were to try to steelman the argument against white identitarianism in the West, it would look something like this:

1. If you permit white identity at the individual/micro-level, it will naturally progress to collective identity formation.

2. At the level of collective identity formation, the presence of ethnic identitarianism for a majority group creates a natural psychological gradient that automatically escalates toward ethnosupremacism which eventually translates into zero-sum military expansionary conflict over time.

3. White identitarian ethnosupremacism & its resultant zero-sum military expansionary character are enormously destructive and must be avoided at all costs. These forces destroyed Europe on two occasions (WW1 & WW2), with the first World War being more obviously tragic and pointless: a completely meaningless industrial slaughter that irrevocably altered the trajectory of European civilization into one of permanent decline.¹

4. Therefore, given (1) to (3) there’s no “stable modus vivendi” where you can have “a controlled amount” of white identitarianism, since it’s a naturally self-escalating phenomenon.

Note the logic here.

If you imagine a “sliding scale” of preference for ethnocentrism, the underlying argument is that the scale is literally sliding: if you permit white identity beyond some minimal threshold, the theory is that this will inevitably slide toward formations of men goose-stepping and massacring minorities.

Everybody’s seen this diagram. Everybody loves (or hates) this diagram. This graph isn’t an argument, it’s an axiom. You can’t debate axioms, you just feel them; you apprehend them directly on an intuitive level.

The countervailing problem with this solution, in practice, is that aforementioned “control rods” themselves seem to be driving the reactor closer and closer to meltdown in that they also guarantee a psychological reaction function.

I’m not a politics genius by any means but it doesn’t require a galaxy-sized brain to realize that if you start telling adolescent boys in schools that “whiteness” is ontologically evil then some non-trivial percentage of them are going to say “fuck you.” Of course, that doesn’t mean that this is a solely reactionary phenomenon, only that it might be amplified by that kind of reaction function.

Now, rather than wade into object-level debates about electrified topics like mass immigration, I’d prefer to stay at the level of describing the existing system because that’s what’s salient to any book that engages with white maleness in particular.

This is the nuclear question at the center of all these discussions, the subtext that elevates itself to the level of the meta and hangs over everything like the Sword of Damocles.

Think about this purely at the systems-level.

How many—if any—control rods do you actually need to avert catastrophe? Is it zero, or one? Do we exist in some historical stasis where every Western country is perpetually Germany in the 1930’s?

Even if that’s not quite the case, how deep into the core should these rods go? Is there some optimum level of suppression from the viewpoint of domestic and international geopolitical stability? Do you sublimate white identity into generalized, nominally color-blind American exceptionalism?

What’s the right architecture here morally, politically, socially, and so on?

Most contemporary literary fiction about white males sidesteps or ignores this central question.

And it is the question; the one question to rule them all.

The nuclear reactor and its interface with fiction by white males

So—we have now, thesis and antithesis.

We have our framing of these two poles.

We have the argument against the extremes of secular purity culture and the opposing argument against permissioning the emergence of ethnic identitarianism in a multiracial polity by referencing inter-imperial European wars.

If the choice is between clown world and Passchendaele, most people are going to choose clown world every single time.

The question, of course, is whether or not that’s true.

Here’s the part where I ought to position myself as an “enlightened centrist” and claim that there’s some stable configuration between these two extremes that achieves a more reasonable balance, a balance which might be generative for male novelists and white male novelists in particular.

The problem, dear reader, is that I don’t know where that line is, nor do I feel adequately positioned to formulate an argument as to where it should be.

I don’t know what a “stable” or “optimal” configuration of white identity is supposed to look like in a heavily multiracial societal or if such a thing is even possible except in the most superficial manner possible (i.e. being “Italian” or “Irish” and so on).

To this end, if I had to guess, I’d speculate that perhaps a Singaporean-style model might be the most politically stable configuration for a multiracial polity in the long-run.

That is not to say that this alternative model is “morally” optimal or ideal from a cultural perspective (however those things might be construed), or that it could be successfully transplanted into the US context.

You could summarize the Singaporean approach as a sort of systematic de-emphasization of ethnos for all groups in a society, an approach that doesn’t spur quite the same counter-reactionary sentiment in the dominant grouping, i.e. a softer and more evenly applied form of identity suppression to create a truly post-national state.

Ultimately, the ethnocentrism escalator argument isn’t just about white people: all people have the capacity for violence and genocide in them: that is the history of the human race in general.

To bring this all back to literature, I have to say that I have not at all enjoyed the tradpub takes on white masculinity from various highbrow, in vogue writers. Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School felt like an entire book pulling its punches. As much as it was advertised as a novel about “confronting” white masculinity or whatever, it didn’t touch the nuclear reactor of its core even one little bit. I say that as a guy who liked 10:04 a lot and am a fan of Lerner’s style and prose; I don’t blame him for not writing about it, but I do blame him for pretending to write about it (lmao).

Come on, bro. You are not touching the spicy stuff.

Thus, the first reason I enjoyed Matt Pegas’ book by way of comparison is because of its honesty.

The Black Album is an interesting hybrid work that combines fiction pieces with non-fiction, and, in my view, presents a more honest account of white maleness than Lerner’s. The second reason I enjoyed his book is because it achieves that honesty without being angry in that way that I typically associate with identitarian-inflected writers. That’s the thing that’s notably absent: the anger. It’s more of an existential malaise.

Rather than interpret the book from within the context of Matt’s broader political positioning—which would require a very thorough analysis of everything he’s ever said or done—I’ll focus my review on the book alone.

High-level, here’s my impression of this interesting hybrid work: the book starts with the following fictional sections on “Side A”:

• A back-and-forth fictional discussion between ?autofictional Matt? and a fan/stalker (liked it), with a second-part called (De)possession ( liked it)

• A 2021 narrativized ?autofictional? narrative account of Matt’s personal journey as a writer, artist, and young man (enjoyed this the most).

• Some other shorter pieces.

Then, there are various essays in “Side B,” including:

• “Renaissance of the Ritual” - a piece about Mike Ma’s Gothic Violence and various forms of right-wing, BAP-adjacent mysticism/occultism (didn’t think this was well-argued).

• “…And Golden Sunshine All Along the Way”: David Lynch, Bronze Age Pervert, and the possibility of inner freedom (don’t remember this one in detail)

• 15 Hours in Paradise (2022): A layover in Vegas (enjoyed it, more of a narrative)

• Addendum To Dragon Day (2021) [his first novel]: liked it, the best essay of the bunch.

In which I actually get to the book review part

The first thing I do when I encounter a dissident-right/dissident-right-adjacent, or “New Wave” writer is I ask myself: how much does this person hate Chinese people or Asians more broadly?²

If the answer is “not at all,” then their work enters into the arena of neutral consideration on my blog.³ If they hate Chinese people or Asians more broadly, I may still read the book, provided it is interesting, but I’ll do so with a critical eye and I won’t do anything to promote it.⁴ The primary reason behind this simple standard is that the mirror-image of complaining about secular purity culture is an equal and opposite form of self-debasement: it’s elevating people who have contempt for you on the basis of your ethnicity.

In practice, there’s little material harm that comes from this other than the sin of debasement, a habit which I try to avoid engaging in.

In any event, as far as I can tell, Pegas’s book rarely if ever comments on Asian people at all.

Having passed my personal threshold for publicly-mediated critical engagement, the best part of this book is, in my view, very clear: it’s the 2021 narrativized account of Matt’s personal journey as a writer and artist.

Here’s an excerpt that I quite liked:

What was I trying to achieve with Dragon Day? Walking around my college campus I’d had visions of myself as a young Bret Easton Ellis, on the verge of publishing some kind of brief, youthful masterpiece. Not so much an answer to the question of “what are the kids up to” like Less Than Zero, but a more specific look into the headspace of the type of 2010s young man people now call “incels.” It was a lashing out of my own pent-up sexuality in the form of a novel. To this I later applied all kinds of sociological and political ground, but now at 28, I think I was after something much simpler. Something I want to get down on paper now as simply as possible, like maybe if I’m able to express the truth straightforwardly here it will redeem the whole abortive process of taking way to omany years to write a 120 page novella and releasing it to negligible sales.

With Dragon Day I wanted to capture the feeling of being pummeled in a mosh pit, wall-to-wall with other boys. Any mosh pit would do so long as there was impact and fast motion. The delivery of that deeply craved male-on-male impact and violence, missed in a society absent the need to go to war, or join a gang, or whatever else men and boys in societies and social mileaus with a good use for male energy do.

I’d intuited that I’d grown up in a society—or at least a suburban social mileau within a society—in which male energy was not allowed to flourish and instead was treated as an obstacle to be dealt with like hazardous waste. I had an uneasy feeling my school shooters intuited the same thing and forged their own horrid path. Should I redact that? At least in the 90s and the 2000s there was an implicit understanding that mosh pits, metal, and violent video games could serve as a worthwhile valve for this energy, but now even these things were regarded with suspicion.

This is the kind of writing that interests me: it’s honest, plain-spoken, and rings true because it’s not passed through a complex filter. It’s a straightforward account of masculinity for a certain male of a certain era, and I find it interesting and salient for the same reasons described above.

I did feel “Side B” was weaker and less strong than his narrative work. His prescriptive account of how things might be improved is less political than it is aesthetic and spiritual. By nature, these sorts of arguments trend toward being vague and more discursive than something substantively articulated via more formalized premises and conclusions.

He’s more interested in aesthetics, vibes, the occult, mysticism and so on. My interpretation from reading the book is a meta-narrative about a young man searching for meaning and finding only small drops of it in the well of ethnos (hence the turn to the realm of magick). After giving it some thought, he’s concluded that there’s some kind of stable modus vivendi centered around some relatively general affirmations of masculinity, esoteric spirituality, and virtue.

Because this energy isn’t particularly directed in any one direction other than the identitarian shredder of liberalism itself, there’s no identifiable target for him to attack, and the whole work is missing the kind of intense anger that I typically find in works like this. All in all, it reads more Houellebecquian than BAPist.

The limitation with Matt’s provisional, vibe-based answers in Side B is that they are not ultimately substantive. That’s likely an unfair critique to level against what are largely aesthetically-oriented essays, but I can’t help but activate the logician part of my brain whenever I read a non-fiction essay of any kind.

In order to argue why mysticism or tarot or neo-pagan spirituality can function as the non-catastrophic answer to our modern malaise, you have to argue why they are true, and the reason these arguments ultimately fail to meet that threshold is because it is obvious that none of these things are real. LARPing doesn’t work in the age of technocapital and machine intelligence; it’s no longer credible. And what’s left after you get to the frontier of right-wing new age-ism? While I’m sympathetic to Christianity at an aesthetic level, it’s a culturally exhausted, devolved memeplex. In fact, its civilizational failure explains the necessity of turning to these insufficient metaphysical alternatives, options which most people are going to find silly and lacking.

In this regard, Pegas is almost the mirror image of the androgenic diaspora male minority writer: lamenting the loss of a stable foundation of meaning, and exhausted by the superficial markings of permissioned modern identity, which, as

Katherine Dee

writes, naturally devolves into a Marvel-esque, deracinated fandom.

So—which way, Western man?

The wide-mouthed soyjak or the trenches of Europe?

While I am ultimately not persuaded by Pegas’ attempt to find a third way, neither am I able to offer my own.

I will not pretend to have any answers.

1. Lest we forget, it was also a conflict that everyone was seemingly itching to start.

2. A lot of guys on the internet fantasize about Chinese genocide or nuking the Three Gorges Dam. I do my best to avoid interacting with these people.

3. Another reason for this my policy? I don’t like getting into shit-slinging contests with crazy people on the internet. It doesn’t accomplish anything and I am too old to get into arguments online.

4. If you think that’s odd, I used to read a lot about terrorism and extremism even when I was a teenager and I wasn’t a security studies or even a natsec-adjacent major.