ANDROGENIC LITERATURE REVIEW Vol. 2: Dragon Day by Matthew Pegas
the incel as the endlessly generative literary subject
Matthew Pegas, along with his co-host
, is one half of the excellent New Write podcast, which, like Mag, are two of my favorite alt-lit podcasts. is the author of a debut novel, Dragon Day, which released in 2021 via Terror House Press. I decided to review it after listening to the New Write podcast for some time and because of my general interest in androgenic literature. Like me, Pegas has recently debuted as a new writer in the androgenic sphere, and I found the contrast between his approach and mine to be very interesting. It’s a small niche, and I like to be aware of all the various players.In short: I enjoyed Dragon Day, and if there is one way that I would capture the core of this novel, it’s to say that it was surprisingly affecting.
Pegas and I are, I think, very different, and very similar, and I learned something about being a writer in the experience of reading his novel.
Let me explain.
In my own debut, I chose to lean heavily on a very distinct stylistic approach in my first novel—creating a certain type of “computerized” psychological interiority that came out of my previous readings in cognitive science and psychology. As a debut writer who’s been boxed out of the typical MFA-style programs for developing talent, I’ve been very concerned with the crafting of dense, complex, and inventive sentences as a marker of literary quality. I was, frankly, obsessed with this element of craftsmanship, probably because I wanted to establish my reputation in alt-lit circles as a “good writer” (“You only get to debut once,” as they say).
In hindsight, this is a kind of approach is something I’ve absorbed osmotically from reading contemporary fiction produced by various MFA-produced contemporaries, writers like Tony Tulathimutte, who are at least in some sense lineally descended from David Foster Wallace and his habit of imposing a great deal of granular detail on the structure of his prose.
The tradeoff with this type of style is that it takes a tremendous amount of focus to get through because of its density and fixation on detail, and this will turn some readers off. I also think that an over-reliance on cleverness and literary maximalism can detract from the emotional resonance of a text and that is always going to be a danger with this type of style.
Thus, when I read Pegas’s take on the “incelcore” micro-genre, I read it with great interest.
I noted immediately that Pegas does not concern himself with impressing the reader with his prose. His style is simple, clear, and written well. It conveys a depth of emotion that belies its apparent structural simplicity. The character of Toby, a young undergraduate boy—I would not call him a man—comes through as eminently believable and tragic. I will say that this character stayed with me beyond the end of the novel. He is deeply sad in a way that can only be felt, not read.
And so, in the same way that someone like Houellebecq doesn’t rely on the stylistic complexity in his prose, there is an emergent property to Dragon Day that grabs hold of the reader. This emergence, is, in my view, a kind of “metastructure” that is the essence of good writing. Elegance isn’t necessarily contingent on syntatic complexity.
SPOILER ALERT BEGINS
Dragon Day opens with a violent sexual assault in a college locker room. The protagonist, Toby, is brutally raped by a more powerful male, who is later revealed to be his professor and machiavellian mentor, programming him into attempting an act of terrorism (and later, seeing the bombing through to completion when Toby abandons the plan altogether after finding self-actualization through other, less destructive means). The rapist is named Wallingford.
My initial reading of the assault was that it was meant to be taken literally. This was my first major break with the text in that I did not find the account of the assault to be believable for a variety of basic factual reasons (isn’t a college change-room in a gym too public of a location for one man to rape another without being noticed? if Wallingford is a serial rapist, as it is implied, wouldn’t this pattern of criminality pose a great risk of being caught over time?).
The rape, as depicted in the text, is such an extreme, unusual event, that it looms over the entire novel with a feeling of absurdity. And yet, as I continued through the novel, it became (a) more intuitively believable over time, as evinced by Toby’s utter brokennesss, and (b), simultaneously, I came to view it more semi-literally, which I suspect was the intention of the author. As you progress through Dragon Day, the initiating event of the rape becomes an extreme metaphor for ideological indoctrination as a non-consensual memetic invasion of the victim’s brain.
My sense was that it’s not meant to be read as a completely literal account of male-on-male sexual assault. As a kind of literary device, it is deeply horrifying, grabbing hold of the reader and draging you forward through the remainder of the text.
SPOILER ALERT ENDS
Dragon Day is nominally a story about male radicalization, but I found the account of political radicalization here to be unpersuasive as a realistic account of the process. The ideological and political justification is not really contemporaneous with our current cultural climate, but I don’t think this was an error. I suspect that Pegas wasn’t trying to present something altogether that spicy in this respect (‘The Turner Diaries’ this is not). Rather, the element of radicalization is more of a narrative engine that makes the portrait of young Toby more interesting and engaging because it acts as a gravitational force that holds throughout the length of the story.
For me, Dragon Day was a story about sadness. There is a lot that is unremarkable about Toby—his sexual insecurities, his inability to process or understand the extent of his (semi-literal) trauma, his attempts to self-actualize through male-on-male fighting, his social alienation, his compensatory racism, his inability to accept a subordinate socioeconomic position in a racial hierarchy that no longer exists in the way that he wants it to, and so on. These are all character beats that we are familiar with, but they are executed well, and Toby emerges as a convincing character painted in full.
Rather, this is a novel about a feeling, a very particular feeling of what it is like to be a certain kind of young man, and for me, it was a moving one.
Although the back of the book describes it as “a tragicomic glimpse at America’s culture war and social atomization,” I found it much more tragic than funny, save for one (very inventive) joke. The following excerpt is narrated by another side character, a graduate student who works under Wallingford:
"On literary phalology."
[...]
My thesis had had the long and prosaic title "Everything in literature Signifies the Penis, Except for the Penis, Which Signifies War." It had argued that the phallus was the cryptic key to understanding Western literature and aesthetics and that the penis size of any male author could be precisely determined by carrying out a method of close reading I'd cleverly titled "the phalgorithm."
I was able to offer them $100 for their penis measurements and an additional dollar per page of writing-sample thanks to Wallingford, who had managed to procure a $5,000 research endowment from the university.
[…]
"All literary criticism up to this point has failed to name the biological foundation of Western language and Western thought."
[…]
... a man's every word bares the distinct mark of this insemination—the distinct mark of his penis.
The idea of the penis as the center of the male artist’s psyche reminds me of the story about F. Scott Fitzgerald meeting Ernest Hemingway, and, despondent with the notion that his penis was insufficient for the act of satisfactory intercourse, confiding this shame to Ernest. Hemingway, ever the good friend, pulls him into a private space so as to reassure the other writer that he in fact perfectly adequate in that dimension.
There are minor quibbles with the book. The first instance of a chapter using anaphora as a literary technique, where Wallingford is indoctrinating Toby, comes off as very powerful, but the second instance of this technique comes off as repetitive. The symbolism of the dragon as a sculpture was largely lost to me.
These minor defects don’t matter very much. If you enjoyed Dan Baltic’s Nutcrankr, you will enjoy this novel as well.
I’ll close with one final note.
As was the case with Baltic’s novel, I could not help but find many interesting narrative parallels between Pegas’s book and mine: the protagonist’s crippling sexual insecurity, his racism, his receptiveness as a memetic vessel, martial violence as a self-actualization mechanism that paradoxically de-radicalizes him away from the locus of terrorism (i.e. the opposite trajectory of Fight Club), and so on.
And yet his book is completely different than mine in every other respect.
For me, the incel is a portal into an extremely mechanistic understanding of the human being, and the meaning collapse that follows. For Pegas, the incel is portal into something else entirely, and I recommend his novel to any reader with an androgenic disposition without hesitation.
Having not yet read the book I can only say with 100% confidence that the dragon must be a phallic symbol