/newwave/ book review: 'Agonist' by Udith Dematagoda
Finally - an internet novel that isn't boring.
First, some news: I recently published a review of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection in
—a compelling but nonetheless uneven work that provoked a lot of meta-criticism around the incentives and pressures of the modern MFA system.Check it out here:
Like many modern contemporary novels, Rejection frequently aims to capture the verisimilitude of online transgression and radicalization. For various reasons—likely structural and institutional rather than talent-related—it doesn’t quite get there.
While it’s not necessarily framed as an ‘internet novel’ per se, it’s certainly adjacent to the genre. As an elder millennial, I’ve encountered a fair number of ‘internet novels,’ few of which were genuinely exciting. My sense is that they’re typically a collection of New Yorker-style talking points passed through an MFA-as-LLM style prose filter.1 They mostly consist of uninteresting characters wrapped around boring centrist takes about the harms of social media. In holding to the center line, they fail to capture the increasingly psychotic energy of being online.
After reading Udith Dematagoda’s excellent experimental novel, Agonist, I’ve arrived at a theory as to why.
Let me theorycel for a minute.
The way I think about the internet is as a high-throughput memetic distribution system. What I mean by this is that memetic or cultural evolution has historically been rate limited by transmission-speed: by the transmission-rate of oral culture, then print culture, then radio culture, then television culture, and so on.
Now, because of high speed, wireless internet, memetic distribution is gatekept only by the human brain’s capacity to intake information.
That is to say: it’s an informational superstimulus.
Indulge me with a post-hoc explanation from evolutionary psychology: you and I have no inborn cognitive defenses against adversarial memes bombarding us from the internet. The end result is that the internet is a massive particle accelerator for mental illness. It’s a giant generative algorithm for novel psychogenic illnesses for anyone who lacks a minimal degree of cognitive security AKA skepticism.
One of the more surprising (and disturbing) phenomena that we’re currently seeing is that mass shooters are becoming increasingly ideological incoherent. That is to say: their stated justifications for engaging in acts of ostensibly political violence are collapsing in real-time. The very notion of a “black white supremacist” mass shooter reads like a Dave Chapelle skit from the early 2000’s, but real people are dying because the internet is driving them insane.
That being the case, it’s no wonder that the conventional narrative continuity of the literary novel fails to capture the psychic disturbance of the internet, and that is why Dematagoda’s Agonist works: it’s an experimental novel that mirrors the mental fractures of our digital dissociation through a genuinely inventive literary structure.
I typically don’t like experimental novels because the loss of narrative continuity often masks a bunch of post-modern nonsense from an author with nothing to say. For this reason, I was surprised by how much I liked Udith’s book given my prior preferences on the subject. The reason is simple: his portrayal of the internet captures actual ideological fractures of true cultural significance.
It’s hard to imagine a better book I’ve read that seriously captures the manic contradictions of being online:
Style is substance
Here’s the opening page of Dematagoda’s book:
I’ll be frank: it’s difficult for me not to be impressed by a stylist of this caliber. Perhaps it reads like some form of neo-Romanticism—perhaps I need to coin the clade of /newwave/romanticism/ in order to adequately categorize this book.
Did I have any initial idea what this opening passage was about?
Not really—it only makes sense retrospectively, in the context of the book. Even then, I’d be engaging in post-hoc editorialization.
Still, I like this way the text makes me feel. I’m captured by the voice of it.
Agonist’s front half is composed of an inchoate, seemingly disordered stream of online discourse from a sequence of unattributed, untagged voices. There is, of course, some order to this: some of the isolated paragraphs read like tweets followed by comments. Others present an apparent back and forth exchange or even a stream-of-consciousness from a singular person.
The absence of a clear visual structure is of course the point: the effect is to mimic a feed, but in an unusually inventive and compelling manner. As you read this segment of the book, the pleasure comes in your attempts to impose structure on what appears unstructured, thereby making it legible.
It’s an entertaining, compelling approach that takes a random walk through a variety of transgressive topics without descending into a tiresome pro-or-anti-woke-style messaging. It surpasses and exceeds the trivilaties of this historical moment and establishes a meta-narrative voice from each of its individual component voices.
Embedded in this feed-like substrate is a circular firing squad: a critique of everyone and everyone by anyone. Because each of these online voices are so disembodied and detached from a legible moral didacticism, it becomes completely unclear who is even being satirized: the target of the critique of the person making the critique? Oftentimes it reads like both parties are being hit by these fusillades.
Let’s move through a couple of highlights.
Page 14: Is it a takedown of a certain type of mediocre millennial lit-girl? Or is it a meta-critique about the nastiness of intrasexual female competition?
Page 15: A running joke about about girlboss Anglo-imperialism:2
Page 17: The same running joke, that frankly, never gets tired:
Pages 36 to 38: Udith dials into the transgressive elements starting around here. Around this time, we’re really starting to accumulate multiple isms:
I could keep going with excerpts, but I’d ruin the joy of reading this pristine work unspoiled for too many of you.
(That said, I’ll keep going, lol)
Importantly, the internet isn’t merely represented as a parody of Liberal imperialism or various flavors of Manhattanite-wordcel-progressives.
Indeed, all quadrants of the ideological spectrum come under blast. One section pulls upon symmetrical threads of leftist anti-Semitism and its counterpart in the form of reactionary Jewish-American white identitarianism (note: some anti-semitic slurs are contained & redacted in this excerpt):
The obvious interpretation of this segment is a critque of leftist anti-Semitism.
But more interesting, I think, is the way it frames the ascendant wing of the dissident right.
Here Dematagoda alludes to the implicit tension contained therein—the tension between a restrictive, Anglo-coded model of white American identitarianism versus a more expansive model of white identitarianism that is inclusive of white Jewish-Americans (the latter being most obviously embodied in the figure of someone like Stephen Miller).
Years ago, when BAP was doxxed as a Slavic-American immigrant of Jewish descent, I almost couldn’t believe that such a historical contradiction was psychologically possible—it felt like a kind of joke, or internet-induced hallucination.
But to acknowledge the ascendance of the dissident right is to identify that our notions of racial identitarianism—and by extension, our notions of racial supremacy—are in fact highly mutable, historically contingent constructs.
More broadly, Agonist seems to implicitly argue—correctly, I might add—that ideologies are not logic puzzles. They don’t seem to break (or even strain) under the weight of manifold contradictions.3 They devour them wholeheartedly, as an energetic substrate that only serves to feed their memetic expansion and colonization.
Anti-LLM literature
The back half of Agonist contains a short epistolary section recounting a love affair between an artist and a writer/?authorial-self-insert?, followed by an extremely well executed, self-contained story about a trader seducing a woman while cognitively multitasking throughout the entire encounter (I particularly loved the latter chapter).
The closing sequence is beautifully crafted and Dematagoda’s command of style is something I’d all encourage you to read for yourself (I’ve already overloaded this piece with too many execerpts, so I’ll simply direct you to buy the book instead).
The most noteworthy thing about Agonist is that it’s almost impossible to imagine an LLM writing it. It’s sufficiently unique that it stands out not only from other human writers but from machine-produced prose in particular.
The writer Justin Murphy has argued that contemporary writers will need to stylistically differentiate themselves from the output of LLM’s, and indeed, I suspect this will increasingly become the literary standard of the future: the extent to which your work diverges from increasingly sophisticated models for next-token prediction.
We can imagine these works as offerings to the future machine god: once devoured into the corpus of the LLM’s dataset, machines will subsequently be able to reproduce works of a similar style—but the original will remain authentic sparks of suis generis.
Who the fuck is Udith Dematagoda?
I’ll close with a tangent about the publishing and the process of discovering new writers.
My intuition is that Agonist would never have been published by the traditional literary system. It’s too experimental and, more importantly, too transgressive to have been put out by the regular system.
Perhaps this is why he and his peers set up Hyperidian Press and put out the book themselves.
For this initiative, I applaud them, but I have to note something else equally important:
I would never have discovered Udith or his book if it wasn’t for Substack.
As I’ve written before, in the wake of external link-banning, Twitter has become a dead platform for literary writers. Substack has swept in to fill that void, and importantly, it has become an invaluable tool for discovering interesting outsiders. I hope Udith has the chance to appear on a wide range of alternative literary podcasts (
seems like an obvious fit, for example).All that is to say: a centralized platform (Substack) is facilitating the decentralized production of novel and interesting works like Agonist and the micro-presses that publish them. This paradox mirrors another: a similar dynamic has happened with AMAZORG KDP, which basically made phenomena like BAP and Delicious Tacos possible to begin with.
Overall, I think this reliance on centralized platforms for discovery and distribution is a mixed bag: obviously, it would be ideal if Substack wasn’t tied to a likely trajectory of Cory-Doctorow-style platform enshittification. For the time being, however, it’s doing a lot for writers at the margins who are nonetheless truly excellent.
For that, I am thankful, and I hope this trend continues for as long as it possibly can.
I imagined Baerbock when I was reading this (lol).
Interesting review, thank you, but I don't know. Just from scanning the excerpts, the prose whose style you admire so much seems to me just tiring, puzzling. Worth the work? Maybe. You have developed thoughts on, are preoccupied by, both the internet reading experience, LLMs, and the possibility of literature under these circumstances. So the book is really addressing/engaging your concerns, and I think that explains some of your enthusiasm. I suspect that the novel won't work as well for a reader less preoccupied with these questions. Anyway, good on you, and as you say, Substack, for helping something interesting find an audience. As always, keep up the good work.
How is this different from Honor Levy? It's amusing, but I'm not really sure how it's any different from her. It's like Honor Levy was a man and a few years older. Still scene takedown stuff from scenesters.