Literary fiction as racial power fantasy
Thoughts and commentary on Arbogast's review of 'INCEL: A Novel' in Isaac Simpson's 'The Carousel'
There’s a certain type of PoC novel—a subcategory of high-brow literary fiction—that I like to call “The Racial Power Fantasy.”
When you are writing a novel, you are simulating a miniaturized “virtual” reality in your imagination. This is why the “self-insert” is such an annoying and prevalent trope in fiction. The easiest type of simulation to create is one in which you, the writer, are the protagonist.
Naturally, people love to simulate things that make them feel good.
Thus, because a story is merely the ‘textual transcription’ of a narrative simulation taking place in the writer’s head, many writers will drift into the temptation to act out (and write) the equivalent of a power fantasy.
There is also a similar type of inverted power fantasy where there is one additional layer of simulation, and the protagonist is the writer’s real-life nemesis, and the writer exists as another character in the form of the protagonist’s superior. I call this the racial nemesis fantasy.
For a good example of this, you can look at Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface—a book that is deeply interesting on a number of different levels, including its depiction of intrasexual competition between Asian women and white women in elite cultural spheres. (I might write an article about this later on, but I am wary of a mob coming after me).
Because it takes time to build up the skills to write a good work of literary fiction, most highbrow PoC fiction writers are millennials or older. What this means is that this generation of writer came of age in a “pre-woke” childhood where many of them felt dis-empowered and a significant degree of internalized racial shame rooted in some mild degree of childhood racial bullying which they subsequently retconned as PTSD-tier traumatic.
Hence this pathetic fixation on being bullied for having “stinky lunches” and so on.
In our current era, this emerges as the empowering ‘racial power fantasy’ novel or the ‘weepy PoC trauma novel’ (often, it’s a fusion of both). Thus, the novel, which is meant to be a work of art, is instrumentalized by the writer as a therapeutic process of self-soothing and mental masturbation.
This, of course, debases its artistic value, limits is universality, and constrains it to being an act of compensatory fantasy-driven karmic re-balancing. Often the “highbrow” PoC form of this story will take place in some PMC-based setting where they need to ascend some kind of status hierarchy in the elite cultural sphere like fine art or publishing.
Reality, of course, is much more cruel than our imagination.
That said, generalizing more broadly, the racial power fantasy is one of the most fundamental narrative archetypes that exists. Because human beings are cognizant of their race, these power fantasies are necessarily racially delineated, and every ethnic group produces them—not just minorities. In an earlier era, these would often consist of action films that symbolically retcon a Euro-American victory onto an historical defeat (Die Another Day replacing the unexpected stalemate of the Korean war, We Were Soldiers replacing the total loss of the Vietnam war, etc.).
Again, I must emphasize that everybody, everywhere, in every culture, does this. It is fundamental to human psychology. The Wolf Warrior series is almost maximally overt in its depiction of racial struggle. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, which gleefully depicts a war crime with a baseball bat as an act of cosmic justice, is another notable example. There are many more. People love to enact violence against the outgroup, onscreen or otherwise. It just needs to feel justified.
I have never enjoyed this genre. It is a form of pornography.
I find it incredibly tiresome.
I greatly enjoyed Arbogast’s review of my debut novel in
, which provoked all kinds of thoughts on my end. It’s a tightly written, beautifully executed piece, invoking a number of points that I could easily branch off from, but I want to zoom in on its analysis of the racial subtext of my book, which I found very interesting.The interior text is more subtle, and yet the evidence is all there too. Anon is a white weirdo in a world where all the villains are white men (for example, Jason’s white stepfather is so abusive that he drives his wife to suicide). On top of this, white American men are uniformly weak, and if they are not trying to jump Jason, they are thinking about black cocks on the internet. An argument could be made that Incel is reflective of the sub-culture’s fantasy world, i.e., Han has a novel in which the incel dystopia is true. White women are not loyal, Asians have more or less taken over California, the white man is on the bottom of the food chain. Conversely, these could express some of Han’s true feelings.
In writing my novel, I expected to encounter these sorts of criticisms. Frankly, I am surprised that they have not come up more. People are surprisingly generous when they read a work of art.
Nonetheless, as a matter of personal principle, it is important for me to underline that one of the things I wanted to do was to ensure that INCEL did not degrade into a racial nemesis fantasy.
Let me explain how I avoided this, and expand on some pet psychological and political theories of mine.
SPOILERS BELOW
Anon is weak in some ways, but strong in others. He is white, but his whiteness is a contextual element of his character, and is not actually essential to him. Thus, his character is built in a universalist manner. As much as he decries the deracination of his fellow white-Americans, his knowledge of the European canon and history is shallow and he lacks any true form of deeply rooted identity. He is not in any sense, a caricature. There is a wide range of white male characters, but only one is actually substantive—Andrew, a successful normie.
One of the core themes of the novel is reductionism. Notably, anon frames geopolitics as an emergent struggle that comes out of regular psychosexual dynamics that exist in day-to-day life between people, which are naturally racially delineated. To wit, there is a quote by Houellebecq from his book Platform which has stayed with me for many years. It’s crass, but potent in memory:
‘What is really at stake in racial struggles […] is competition for the cunts of young women’
- Michel Houellebecq, Platform
A pattern I have always found interesting about Reddit is (a) it’s strong anti-CCP political orientation and (b) the enormous quantity of Asian pornography subreddits available on the website. This confluence does not feel coincidental, and many commentators have pointed it also. I think there’s an interesting signal here, but it’s clearly not exhaustive in its explanatory capacity as the only salient driver of world history.
To expand: one of anon’s ideas in the novel is that geopolitical conflict, in our current era, is actually a sublimated expression of racial struggle projected from the subconscious mind of the individual person and onto the world stage—in effect, military conflicts are the last remaining “acceptable zone” of racial conflict, even if they cannot typically be openly framed as such in the setting of polite discourse. In this setting, “CCP” usually transliterates to “ethnic Chinese,” at least on the subconscious level. However, in everyday discourse, any such conflict “between us and the CCP” can only overtly framed as a battle between “democracy” and “autocracy,” simply because that is the only acceptable conscious framing. If we were looking to support Houellebecq’s thesis, we might note that much of the East-Asian/SEA sex trade was actually built to service US military personnel in the region. Houellebecq may be crass on the subject, but one cannot find him entirely wrong.
While much of the e-right is very focused on discussions about wokeism or DEI in the domestic racial politics United States, and while they perceive absolute institutional uniformity in terms of supporting the values of racial equality, one can argue for a very interesting counter-trend to be pointed out—a contradiction.
The book posits that an interesting racial contradiction exists between domestic and geopolitical spheres—let’s call this the “central racial contradiction” of the American empire. In the historical/geopolitical arena, the (primarily) white US military has historically killed (primarily) non-white minorities in various imperial control conflicts that took place in other countries (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.).
Conversely, domestically, the insatiable jaws of technocapital demand the brain draining of elite human capital from a diverse group of PoC’s in foreign countries who come here to build out the Silicon-Valley + Military-Industrial technology stack. Under the aegis of capital, racism at home is mere friction; it is anathema to the liquidity of intelligence and to the optimal progression of technocapital acceleration at home. Hence, the politics of racial equality organicaly emerge in service of the ascending power of capital, which does not care about the color of its constituent brains or bodies, only their utility.
Circling back, internationally, it is hard to discern the substantive difference between armadas of Euro-American navies menacing the South China sea in 2023 versus them doing roughly the same thing over a century ago. To a certain extent, we just have different words that we use to justify this now (it’s called “FONOPS” instead of “imperialism”).
Given this framing, the older white characters in the book—Jason’s stepfather, for instance, or anon’s uncle—are actually geopolitical symbols that point toward the lineal predecessors of Asian-American identity, the parameters of which have always been bounded by military conflicts abroad. They are not crafted as villains as such, which is why they are minor characters only. In fact, this is a novel entirely without villains altogether. To the extent that it has a geopolitical subtext, it is decidedly anti-war in the generic sense. Thus, to respond to Arbogast, the two older white characters are symbols of the Korean war and the Vietnam war, respectively.
Jason, the “Korean Gigachad,” is presented as a subversion of pure masculinity as a “solution” to the difficulties of the East Asian male. His triumph over his adversaries in a brawl outside a bar—meant to invert the baseball-bat-mediated death of Vincent Chin, in the style of American History X—does not produce any kind of ultimate victory for the character other than survival. His sexual virility is mitigated by his auto-castration in the form of a vascectomy driven by childhood trauma. Like anon, he too is thoroughly deracinated by modernity and only able to engage in a pantomime display of racial identity. His attempt to reconnect with his Korean heritage leads nowhere. He renounces violence and anger in favor of neo-materialist buddhism but it does not bring him any solace. He, too, is not a masturbatory character, in spite of the novel being full of masturbation.
There is one reading of the text that most have not yet discerned. The novel hints that anon and Jason are the same person—even though they are canonically written as literally separate. The moment where Jason sides with anon, a white male, over the half-Asian bully who is tormenting him, leads to a decisive conclusion: anon crushes the jaw of his half-Asian nemesis. It is a symoblic act—shattering a “racial fulcrum” of the hapa—a psychic schism between Eastern and Western identitarian modes of thinking. The underlying thrust is one of a kind of “racial dissociation” or “racial psychosis” experienced by the Asian male in Western society. This is what I mean by anon’s universality, which could apply to any male of any race in modern American society.
SPOILERS END
Once again, thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed my novel.
I couldn’t make it without you.
Please write your Yellowface critique! I wrote mine here and so far, nobody's come after me, haha: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/yellowface-saving.
Surprisingly, the Asian American women I know in my life who've read this book almost all hate it, even though it panders to their demographic. It's probably for the same reason I dislike so much of Asian American male literature: it's all fake and so image-conscious, trying so hard to earn non-Asian approval regarding our most embarrassing racialized behavioral tendencies.
This was a great write up. The anon-Jason synthesis reading is something that flew right over my head, to be sure. Very intriguing.
This added a lot more to my understanding and enjoyment of the novel. Still, the further I get away from finishing your novel, the more I come back to the theme of suffering. That sticks with me still—does suffering offer up anything other than pain? Do you people actually grow from grief, or do they just sink and then level out?