Stalking the Trillion-Footed Digital Beast

On Udith Dematagoda's 'Agonist'

Jackson Pollock, Ocean Greyness, 1953, Oil on canvas

Whatever your feelings about the internet and its tortuous torrential stream of information, misinformation, fragments of dialogue, rants, advertisements, etc., it is, for better or worse — good or evil — totalizing in its effects, and here to stay. Social media, as part of the online ecosystem, has made its own insidious specific contributions as part of this “world wide web” (as the internet used to be called) and users have no qualms about exposing their lives online. Tens of millions of people panic about how to share their “hot takes” or transform their little acts of daily living, no matter how banal, into posts, and then sit and desperately wait for approval, counting the “likes” they receive to tally up their sense of self-worth.

The rubric “internet novel” generally (arguably) refers to a novel that strives to present a portrait of how we live today, meaning, how we live our lives, with the understanding that too many of us spend a disproportionate amount of time online. Works of this genre often mirror or incorporate the language and format of digital technology into the narrative structure in order to portray our online behavior. Author and critic Brandon Taylor has proposed that “the internet novel is preoccupied with the degradation of society at the hands of the online. The remaking of the world into a series of psychically linked quick-twitch fibers that fire at the slightest provocation.”

The genre has been with us since at least the turn of the century. Considered by some to be the first internet novel, Jeanette Winterson’s The Power Book explores the possibilities of virtual selfhood through the protagonist’s creating digital stories for clients by email on her “PowerBook.” Chapters bear such titles as “New Document,” “Search,” “Empty Trash.” A few years later Dennis Cooper’s transgressive novel, The Sluts, appeared. Structured around online forums, message boards, and emails, it consists mostly of anonymous reviews of gay male escorts, and chronicles the complexity that arises from interactions in cyberspace.

Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life represents a landmark in the development of internet literature, mixing, as it does, memoir, fiction, cultural tropes, and incorporating screenshots of her text messages, emails, and fragments of photos of herself. While exploring power, sex, vulnerability and the complications of self-presentation, it portrays the intersection of life and art in the digitally mediated world in which we live.

Two of the most ballyhooed contemporary internet novels to date appeared in 2021. In No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood set out to understand what the change from the analog to the fully digital world meant. Her novel mimics the fragmented nature of social media timelines, and incorporates phrases, memes and pieces of text found on the “portal,” as she refers to Twitter. She recognized that this new mode of being constantly online allowed for a new mode of literary production and changed the way we wrote: “Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.” Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts, also navigates online life and its multitudinous platforms and social media feeds, imitating their formats, often with irony and cynicism: “Why would I want to make my book like Twitter? If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter.”

More recently, in her debut collection, My First Book, Honor Levy depicts online worlds that are so self-referential and hermetic that they are frequently opaque and often seem senseless. The objective correlative, which should be the character or ego, has vanished and we’re left with only voice and nattering, disembodied energy spewed across the pages. “There aren’t any particular new ideas or voices here,” noted a review in the Cleveland Review of Books. "It’s younger, it’s 'cooler,' but My First Book is functionally the same internet-inflected, twenty-something angst we’ve been reading for two decades."

Into this mix arrives Agonist by Udith Dematagoda, which claims to be “a volume of experimental prose/poetry written about, and by, the internet.” On the book jacket we read that it “speaks to the maddening anomie of the technological present, teetering on the spectral boundary between tedium and inspiration, image and text, contingent and absolute…framed by our tenuous presence against the all-encompassing void.” Which is a lot of hyperbole of uncertain meaning to wade through, but according to the publisher, Hyperidean Press, this is what Agonist is “about.”

Dematagoda is a writer and academic who specializes in modernist literature and aesthetic theory, and, it should be noted, is the editor and publisher of Hyperidean whose stated mission is “to discover and promote writing that recaptures something of the febrile vitality of the early twentieth century avant-gardes,” as well as writing that is “thematically and formally innovative, speculative, unpredictably transgressive, and attempts to explore the world as it is, or as it may become.”

Dematagoda acknowledges in a post on his Substack that he carried out research in order to write the book and “spent a regrettable amount of time on internet forums and social media for my novel Agonist.” Some of his research and distaste for the damage inflicted by the internet and social media, or at least reading that appears to have shaped his views, extends back several years. In his 2017 book review of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Dematagoda rightfully notes that the promise of online culture as a “coming utopia of networked global societies, and the emancipatory potential of the leaderless digital revolution” has faded. Instead, he claims we have a “morass of cultural, moral and ethical transgressions.” He goes on to tell us that social media and internet platforms in general represent “a world of maladjusted malcontents of diametrically opposing ideologies but seemingly analogous lives; a world of perpetual adolescence, of misattributed and misinterpreted knowledge, misdirected intellectual energy, ineffectual posturing devoid of any political content, irony without humor, and tedious transgressive behavior by peevishly dull obsessives who are prone to tantrums.”

Continuing on this same critical theme, in 2021, Dematagoda wrote about the deleterious effects of the internet. In a blogpost titled “On Infantilism” — an amalgam of thinking that combines Wyndham Lewis' ideas of an “ideological aesthetic” and René Girard's ideas on mimetic desire — Dematagoda notes that “Our infantilism is a symptom of a collective ennui produced by the complete disappearance of authentic desire from a modern life that is bereft of mystery and experience.” The blame, he says, “can be placed squarely on the quotidian technologies and platforms we use to communicate.” Chief among them is X, “a website that seemingly exists for the sole benefit of snitches and hysterics.” The piece is somewhere between a screed and a manifesto, and it concludes, “…that these technologies are designed to make children of us all, and the only way for us to grow up will be to abandon them altogether.”

While these are all legitimate observations and sharp critiques about the internet, in one form or another we have read them before (see Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr, et al). Moreover, given Dematagoda’s evident and deep disdain for digital life, it is curious that he has taken the time to write a novel that engages it — and does so mimetically by utilizing the style of writing and formats of the social platforms he deplores, which is evident in almost every chapter, ranging from X to 4Chan, from bold rhetorical fragments of dialog and non sequiturs, to the insults and random placement of lines on the page.

One could argue that this is intentional irony, but I won’t. Here’s why: though the book claims to be “Accumulations from the Void” (the book’s subtitle) it reads as mimetic, except it is missing the rich ironies that mimeses can contain, and appears (sorry) largely like vomit on the page. This sounds harsh, but in fact it is supposedly what Dematagoda is going for. He states as much, writing in his epigraph that he has “drank of [the internet’s] poison, consumed all its sins, and vomited them upon the page.” What is one to do, then, with the uncomplicated fact that one is reading exactly what one expects to read on the internet, and that one is doing so in a novel that declares itself a regurgitation of the internet? The ratio is a bit one to one. The mimesis is almost too pure. There is no real challenge, there is no real insight offered up. The cover blurb states that the novel is a “fragmented discourse” upon the internet’s “banal diabolical passions” — but in fact it is precisely this discourse that is missing.

That’s not to say that the novel is void of a voice. In fact, the voice is propulsive. The text comes at us like a full-force stream of consciousness and grabs one’s attention. It fluctuates somewhere between Travis Bickle’s violent musings in the film Taxi Driver and those of Dostoyevsky's querulous, hyperconscious Underground Man and perhaps for that reason the book is redolent of testosterone, which often makes an appearance as gratuitous misogyny (eg, “The way of the world is cunt” — the first sentence of the book — “all men want is to kill women to put them back into the dirt, into the soil, the ground…”). These observations are scattered throughout, coupled with casual but vicious racist cliches (“…the jewy fascism of these Jew kikes…these New York Jew kikes born on the Upper West Side whose parents like run Hollywood and Wall Street…”). One guesses these are the “unpredictably transgressive” parts of the book promised in the description. But while trading in misogyny, racial tropes, and clichés is vulgar, these days it can hardly be considered transgressive.

Perhaps the novel aimed to be transgressive in a more structural sense. It is divided into seven chapters. It opens with a prelude and ends with a coda, one-page expositions that show the influence of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Eliot (hints of The Waste Land) and Pound, not to mention Surrealism. These “bookends” to the text are possibly poetic but veer towards the apocalyptic and gnostic. The book chapters themselves have obscure names, such as “hetaerae,” “nullity,” “interbellum,” “hypertrophy,” “il se croit,” but the content found within each section bears no apparent relation to the heading. Sometimes it appears there is a call-and-response conversation taking place between two (or more) random interlocutors who exchange statements or make pronouncements like these:

“I am a petty man who is satisfied with worthless victories.”

“American girls are loud and expressive when they fuck, which is fun, but the script tends to be generic and predictable.”

“Classicism is health. Romanticism is sickness.”

“She’s one of those artists whose oeuvre appears to consist of pictures of themselves on the internet.”

“Western civilization is in decay, negroes fucking white women.”

“ngl I wanna be kidnapped, tied up and fucked raw. But like at least take me for brunch at a cute café the next day ffs.”

“It all boils down to aesthetics. I don't want to be around minorities because they're ugly and they smell. I'm all about the country club rules. No niggers, spics, pajeets, chinks or kikes.”

But, again, these are phrases we’ve heard before, and their seemingly random placement within the structure of the book is not enough to redeem them from being clichés of which we were already aware.

The chapter “Contact” is the longest in the book and moves away from the aleatory juxtaposition of sentences to something approaching a narrative, albeit an epistolary one conducted through email and, as John Pistelli notes, “almost approaches conventional human interest.” The protagonists appear to be two millennials — R and Alice — whose romance runs hot and cold. It’s cold when we meet them but they are still communicating and vulnerable to each other. A good portion of the correspondence is taken up by their respective analyses of Eric Rohmer’s 1972 classic comedy of erotic manners (his sixth and final film in his series of “Moral Tales”), Love in the Afternoon. Both parties claim to have seen the film several times and they each have sharp insights into it.

The final chapter, “In Order Not to Sleep,” is contextless, obscure, reminiscent of William Gaddis’ groundbreaking novel, JR, in that it is a continuum of voices in dialog with each other, many rendered without attribution. Mostly, we are subjected to the stream of consciousness of a market analyst, whose name may be Fritz, as he worries about “mitigation” strategies while going about his day. He ends up taking home a company intern, whose name may be Ella or Emma, with whom he attempts to have sex, but when he’s unable to get a hard-on, she ends up using her vibrator on herself. She brought it to work because she sensed she was going to have a boring day.

Sadly, nothing we find in Agonist appears to fulfill the promise of providing us with writing that is “thematically and formally innovative, speculative, unpredictably transgressive.” We’ve seen everything here before.

While Dematagoda’s phenomenological fidelity to “internet phenomena” and the anomie it creates is acute, representing this state of affairs on the page — no matter how “mimetic” or “real” — doesn't add anything new to the critique or ongoing debate about the brain rot it causes. We know that flotsam and jetsam have taken over online culture, as well as the narrative consciousness of so-called internet novels — and our minds as well. While Agonist may be rawer than some of the works previously discussed, it doesn’t break any new ground in any exciting way as art or fiction. As a work of cultural criticism, it presents an underwhelming attack upon the current situation, lacking, as it does, an oblique or direct attack on the political and economic structural issues that would have to change in order to alter the status quo.

Dematagoda is a skillful writer, and his propulsive, overly wrought rhetoric has a certain charm and seductiveness about it that keeps you turning the pages. I did hold out hope that the fleeting fragments of thought and random dialog would somehow coalesce in the end and reveal the figure in the carpet — but that doesn’t happen. Which, who knows, may be just fine.

GD Dess is an author, essayist, and literary critic. His work has appeared in LARB, The Millions, KGB LitMag, Serpent Club Press, and elsewhere. He publishes on Substack at gdess.substack.com. Find him on Twitter @gdess.