I want to take up Jordan’s suggestion that I Hate the Internet is a pretty typical (and maybe particularly shallow) left critique of internet culture that, unlike most novelistic versions of this critique, refuses “to pretend any longer about the efficacy of the novel.”
I think this is probably right, but I’m not sure we should take Kobek’s disavowal of literary efficacy at his word. Or, at least, we shouldn’t write off the possibility that this disavowal is what’s most political about the novel. The question of “escape” seems to be central to the novel, and it’s worth thinking about what Kobek’s escape hatches might be. McGurl, too, is interested in this question and puts it specifically in terms of Amazon: “What does [Amazon’s role in literary production] say about the form and function of narrative fiction—about its role in symbolically managing, resisting, or perhaps simply ‘escaping’ the dominant sociopolitical and economic realities of our time?”
Kobek seems invested in escaping the exploitative digital hell he describes, even as his narrator performatively denies one’s ability ever to escape racialized/gendered/classed structures of exploitation. In a now-familiar gambit of the woker-than-thou Left, Kobek’s narrator insists that certain subject positions are all bad all the time and there’s no point trying to salvage them (i.e. “Men are the shit of the world”). This kind of denial (i.e. “I know I’m shitty and will never not be shitty”) is figured here and elsewhere as a kind of disavowal through acceptance, or maybe expiation through confession, and is now a standard escape strategy in the discursive of game of the internet left, which Kobek disparages as content farming for digital platform owners.
In a similar move, Kobek’s narrator claims to be writing a “bad novel.” Writing a bad novel is the narrator’s way of escaping the formal conventions of a literary style created by the CIA. Writing a bad novel seems like a viable means of escape precisely because it refuses to see itself as political: “The funding of good novels was based on an abandoned misapprehension that writers, being the apparent creators of culture, had some impact on contemporary international affairs. This was, of course, insane” (200). Kobek, of course, calls into question his commitment to this view by writing a novel that is not really that bad and which is clearly invested in, at a minimum, doing something in the world. Whether or not it succeeds in escaping complicity with capitalism/etc. by disavowing both literary quality and political import, the narrator’s claim to be writing a bad novel becomes metonymic for all compromised attempts to escape oppressive socio-political arrangements. If everything of aesthetic or political value is already captured, the only truly artistic or political move is to deny that one’s work is artistic or political.
It’s kind of a cheap trick, but it raises some questions: What does it mean for the refusal of legible aesthetic categories to be a symbol, or an act, of political (or maybe apolitical?) resistance? In a world where art is reduced to content, which is reduced to vehicles for advertisements, why continue to invest aesthetic production with political promise, even if this investment takes the form of a disavowal?
Ultimately, I think Kobek is solidly ambivalent about the political promise of the satirical novel. That said, the novel presents itself as having been written after the collapse of American empire, so maybe the narrator is speaking to us from a neo-Maoist agrarian collective somewhere in the post-human future. Which would be cool.
One more thing: I’m interested in how the novel asks us to think about recording and communicating history. The novel presents itself as a record of a past historical moment, intended for an imagined readership of future English speakers familiar enough with American culture to get its jokes, but not to know who, for instance, Lady Gaga was. The book, then, takes on an almost encyclopedic function — stable, definitive, true — that it implicitly opposes to digital media’s form of historical production. On the internet, content is enduring (as Ellen’s tragic story demonstrates), but perfectly incidental to the media apparatus it exists to sustain. Kobek doesn’t reflect much on the media specificity of the book, but the act of writing a book— and devoting, Rand-style, a big chunk of text to putting a super fine point on the book’s already completely unambiguous thesis — suggests some attachment to the form. It also suggests some faith in the ability of words to provoke thought, or, at the very least, do something other than make money for capitalists. McGurl, too, doesn’t totally give up on fiction, even as it he attends to the limitations of a medium that only sort of removes the reader from the time pressures of capitalist production: “If fiction promises to ‘resist’ the real-time regime, we will have to admit up front that it is for the most part a virtual resistance, more compensatory than revolutionary, although not necessarily unimportant on that score” (466).
