The Incel

On a Universal Category

Le Feu Follet (1963; Louis Malle)

‘It was there, under your bed, the gaping suitcase in which, in the end, you could only put one thing, the most precious thing a man has: his death…I am happy that you killed yourself. That proves that you stayed a man and that you knew well that to die is the strongest weapon a man has.’

-       Adieu á Gonzague, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

This essay is bound to draw ire from all quarters. I’m sure that there have been many others who have written on this topic with far more deference, apparent or actual concern, vested interest, ethnographic evidence or sociological zeal. I won’t attempt to dissect manifestos or screeds, the motivations of ‘Supreme Gentlemen’', or dwell on shibboleths, turns of phrase, or common tropes in the service of some cheap psychological portrait. My purpose, as ever, is quite different; a set of impressions, possibly inaccurate, but earnest and considered nonetheless. Make of them what you will.

At the risk of diluting the intended theme, I will also attempt to reflect on some recent discussions I’ve read about the absence of affect in ‘male literature’, if such a thing exists, which I have bolstered by some personal reflections. Men and contemporary literature, after many years of studied indifference, seem to be a concern for cultural journalists again. They seem puzzled by why men don’t seem to read fiction anymore, but it’s hardly worth noting that the reasons are self-evident. The literature of affect has never been a central part of a specifically masculine literary tradition, which has historically produced works of profound emotion and pathos - but which were, in my view, unconscious ancillary effects, sometimes not intended at all. Contemporary literature’s frank, confessional emotional content¹, its over-reliance on an over-wrought therapeutic language, reflect the demands of its readers. We are necessarily speaking in terms of stereotypes - but anyone who insists that those terms are not useful in gaining an initial understanding of a complex problem is being disingenuous. Any putative concern on the part of cultural critics is likely a disguised attempt, bound to failure, to re-engage the male reader as a consumer of a contemporary literary culture fundamentally (and historically) at odds with their temperaments as readers. For these readers, pathos must been arrived at through circumlocution, indirectly, through work that is ‘well and truly made’, that poses challenges both stylistically and aesthetically. In other words, works that are indirectly affective but not explicit in their emotional intent.

If we are to speak of the ‘incel’, even in abstract terms, it seems necessary to speak also about masculinity and literature, which (along with its relationship to technology an ideology) has been the focus of an academic study of fascist modernist writers I wrote over four years, and finished two years ago. It hasn’t been published yet, though I sincerely hope it will. The figure of the incel is given to be a by-product of the contemporary crisis in masculinity, so although it will be useful to use as a point of entry, for reasons that will hopefully become apparent, the figure of the incel – not completely disregarding its libidinal entanglements - embodies a universal defect in contemporary culture.

In Anton Chekhov’s The Kiss (1887), the officers of an artillery brigade on manoeuvres in the countryside are invited to an evening tea party at the estate of the local Lieutenant General. At first, the men are a little hesitant; they don’t have fond memories of the last time they attended such a party, where they were forced to stay up all night listening to the tedious stories of their gregarious host and missing an entire night of sleep. Upon arriving, however, the soldiers quickly realise that their hosts – though extremely polite and well-mannered – have only invited them as a matter of form, and seem indifferent and even unenthusiastic about their company. Nonetheless, most of the men are warmed by the presence of several beautiful and charming young women, some of whom the officers are glad to flirt and dance with. Except for Lieutenant Ryabovitch; a shy, bespectacled and diminutive officer with ‘sloping shoulders’ and ‘whiskers like a lynx’, who feels ill at ease at the party. Ryabovitch feels an odd mix of admiration, bewilderment and muted antipathy towards the easy insincerity of other people’s social interactions. Too shy to dance or flirt, along with a couple of other men he is invited by his host to a game of billiards, but soon grows bored since he does not know how to play, and sullenly and quietly takes his leave. On returning to the drawing room, he mistakenly enters another, darkened, room:

‘At that moment, to his surprise, he heard hurried footsteps and the rustling of a dress, a breathless feminine voice whispered “At Last!” And two soft, fragrant, unmistakably feminine arms were clasped about his neck; a warm cheek was pressed to his cheek, and simultaneously there was the sound of a kiss. But at once the bestower of the kiss uttered a faint shriek and skipped back from him, as it seemed to Ryabovitch, with aversion.’

Ryabovich is under no illusions that this kiss was not intended for him. And yet he can’t help but view this incident as anything other than a divine benediction, one which has made his neck feel as if ‘anointed with oil’:

‘…all over, from head to foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger…He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud…He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an “undistinguished appearance”’

He tries to imagine who the mysterious woman could be, but on studying the looks of each potential candidate he finds only faults; the lady in lilac with beautiful and delicate shoulders laughs too artificially and wrinkles her nose in such a way as to make her seem old; the fair girl in the black dress, though simple, dainty and genuine, has a flat face. He finally arrives at a composite portrait of his benefactress made up from the selected features of all those other (now imperfect) women, and holds onto that image for many blissful days filled with agreeable thoughts of things which had never occurred to him before; of a future with his new mysterious ideal woman: ‘In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned on her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife and children…’

The incident of the kiss has bestowed upon Ryabovich the gift of creative imagination, of individuation, a will to act against the miserable circumstances of his lot - to fill his life with unearthly dreams. But he is incapable of sustaining this reverie, choosing instead to believe in the prosaic nature of his new ‘ordinary’ desires, which are merely the same as others. This thought gives him comfort, the idea that he is – after all – just an ordinary person and that his story will eventually be very much like everyone else’s. One night he confides the incident of the kiss to his comrades but is surprised at how little time it takes to recount it, and that his comrades either laugh, like the caddish Lieutenant Lobytko, or simply dismiss the mysterious girl as a neurotic. He is, nonetheless, unfazed and continues for the rest of the summer to act as if he is in love. Sometime later they return to the Lieutenant-General’s region. Ryabovitch, filled with longing and anticipation, awaits an invitation to that house, where he is sure to meet his love once more. But as evening advances, and the prospect of the invitation becomes remote, he grows bitter and despaired:

“…the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest…And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, impoverished, poverty-stricken, and colourless…”

When the invitation eventually comes, Ryabovitch declines. In this renunciation, this denial, there is, I feel, something of relevance to our present topic.

Part of my study looks at the French novelist, poet and polemicist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, one of the Generation of 1914. Drieu was an erstwhile friend/collaborator of both Louis Aragon and André Breton, and many others within the French Dada and later Surrealist movements, before he embraced Fascist politics, became a Vichy collaborator, and took his own life upon the liberation of France. My chapter on Drieu concerns his novel Le Feu Follet (1931), which is in my opinion one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of the 20^th Century. The real-life event which inspired the novel was the suicide of Drieu La Rochelle’s friend, the Dadaist poet Jacques Rigaut, a heroin addict who committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart at the age of 30. This violent self-murder – foreshadowing his own many years later – had a palpable effect on Drieu. Previous to writing the novel, he wrote a testimonial in the form of an unsent letter to his departed friend, a quote from which can be found at the beginning of this essay.

‘Portraits d’André Breton et de Pierre Drieu La Rochelle dos à dos’ (1922) by Man Ray

Like many of his generation Drieu was a man that couldn’t seem to get out the trenches, long after the actual war had ended. He was wounded and decorated at the Battle of Charleroi, where he led a bayonet charge against a machine gun position and captured it. This act of reckless courage should have assuaged a deep-set psychological doubt about his own insufficiency and inadequacy as a man. Yet despite his heroism, his good looks, the critical success of his first poetry collection Interrogation (1917), his various cultured friends, and his marriages to wealthy women that provided him with a life of ease and material comfort, until the bitter end of his dramatic and eventful life - he remained fixated by a psychosexual sense of his spiritual impotence. The initial success of Drieu’s poetry collection was reflected in the comparable success of certain other War poets and writers such as Henri Barbusse, Henry de Montherlant, Ernest Hemingway, Ernst Jünger, Wilfried Owen, Siegfried Sassoon et al. It is worthwhile for us to note, that despite dealing with one of the most cataclysmic wars in human history which wiped out almost an entire generation of young men, much of the pathos in this writing - popular with male readers - lies in their mastery of emotional restraint.

Drieu La Rochelle recognised his friend’s untimely violent death as, in some way, a prescient forewarning of his own. But despite the mournful tone of Drieu’s ode to Rigaut’s inconsequential and tragic life, what remains is a rather grotesque and macabre envy:

“I saw you making love once...I think it was the greatest wound I received in my life. Such an easy erection, quite undaunted, and you ejaculated nothingness”

This abject insufficiency, intensified by a hysterical vertigo-inducing technological progress, informed Drieu’s emergent ideological (qua aesthetic) fixations. A not dissimilar pattern, and similar motivations, can be ascribed to many of the other aberrant and disreputable writers in my study. Clearly, my work isn’t specifically about the ‘incel’, but the texture of that historical moment – and its personages - will be familiar to many living in the present, and for this reason, I think my modest scholarly efforts have something of interest to say. The work is necessarily dense and somewhat dry, and proceeds with the requisite deference, rigour and caution. It has become apparent that my enthusiasm isn’t shared by some in academia, despite the broad initial support my project received, who view suspiciously any attempt at an immanent critique of men and masculinity that is not in some way an arriére garde of other discourses. It is a reaction that I will have to accept and reconcile myself to, but one which I find some difficulty in comprehending.

I came to discover the novel Le Feu Follet through the 1963 film by Louis Malle. Both were recommended to me when I was living in the south of France in 2014, by a friend who knew me to be in the midst of a severe personal crisis. In retrospect, given the subject matter, it was an odd recommendation, but this now close friend – scarcely more than an acquaintance at the time – seemed to know something about the nature of my predicament that I didn’t. Though I knew nothing of Malle’s film, the synchronicities that often permeate life made sure that I was already familiar with the story through a modern retelling in Joachim Trier’s film Oslo 31^st August, which I had, for want of something to do, distractedly watched online one evening a couple of years before. I thus had the uncanny feeling of re-discovery, re-reading, which perhaps exaggerated its pathos.

Malle’s film begins with the protagonist Alain, on day release from a rehab clinic, attempting to make love to his mistress but failing due to either exhaustion or impotence. A charming, handsome, feckless, and parasitic playboy, the film – like the novel – follows Alain around Paris as he attempts to find a reason to live among the fragments of his past. On finding nothing but more questions, he eventually returns to the clinic and commits suicide. A recurring motif is the initial failure of Alain to ‘posses’ a woman, which mirrors his failure in everything else, and ultimately his failure to grasp and hold onto life. In the end, his only ‘success’ is to possess death.

I can’t claim to have ever been an incel, and yet the categorical territory which that maligned figure occupies, that of aesthetic dissonance and delusion, is one familiar to me, as it should be to everyone. Artistic ambitions seem to inculcate a notion that promiscuity, being a womaniser, is an admirable state of being; one which provides the necessary turmoil, intensity, and inevitable tragedy, through which inspiration would inevitably follow. Like many young men, I internalised this notion, and was somewhat successful in pursuing it, despite it being at odds with an overly introspective disposition. In reality, I found the quality of the inspiration, coupled with the attendant chaos, to be more of a distraction and hindrance to any potential artistic activities. I vacillated between two essentially contradictory conceptions of life, depending on my circumstances. The first centred on abandoning oneself to the negative virtue of easy sensuality without thought of consequences, and the second on constancy and romantic devotion. It was expected that, as a man, one should eventually aim to achieve the second state – but only through a mandatory detour through the first. That this amorphous worldview is informed by several calcified layers of incoherent and incompatible cultural and counter-cultural constructs should be clear to most at this point, but it was difficult to grasp in media res, and the inevitable result for me was a debilitating psychological paralysis, an unshakeable feeling of impending doom, and an inability to create or finish anything of value.

Around the time I discovered Drieu La Rochelle’s novel, I also became obsessed with Wyndham Lewis’s first novel Tarr (1918) which I re-read numerous times, and would also eventually find its way into my study. Tarr is a work written in the trenches by a thirty-year-old artist convinced he was unlikely to survive the war. Lewis wrote about the pre-war Parisian bourgeois bohemia which he had experienced as a young painter. Set in the borrowed time between the fin de siècle and the cataclysm of the First World War, the novel is peopled by cynical artists in thrall to new ideas and forms, all attempting (and failing) to escape the constraints of their nation and national expectation through attaining some measure of aesthetic authenticity. It was the distillation of the fundamental questions of humanity that bestowed upon works of High Modernism their riches - not the material wealth and decadence of its gilded age, and certainly not its book industry, its literary agents, publicists or ‘reading public.’ I’ve consulted the letters, the ledgers, and the royalty statements. The authors we rightly regard as writers of genius mostly counted their initial readers in the hundreds, but those readers mattered because they were real readers. In Lewis’s novel, the auto-biographical protagonist Frederick Tarr attempts to parse two modes of existence personified by his two mistresses (one a conventional romantic, the other a modern, cynical and liberated one) against his overriding commitment to art above all else. Tarr, like Lewis at the time and many men of his generation, is in thrall to the Nietzschean weltanschauung, and thus takes pride in his ability to view his predicament from above:

‘All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.’

Tarr’s antagonist, and love rival, is the mediocre German painter Otto Kreisler; a hulking, spiteful and pitiful contrivance of a shop-worn romantic national tradition long since become stale and sordid. He holds in violent contempt all manifestations of the new ‘degenerate’ art that his contemporaries (and countrymen) are in thrall to. But unlike Tarr, he seems to find his inspiration primarily in women:

‘The one great optimism of Otto Kreisler was a belief in the efficacity of women. You did not deliberately go there – at least he usually did not – unless you were in dire straits, no: but there they were all the time – vast dumping ground for sorrow and affliction – a world dimensional Pawn-shop, in which you could deposit not your dress suit or garments, but yourself, temporarily, in exchange for the gold of the human heart […] Womenkind were Kreisler’s Theatre, they were for him art and expression: the tragedies played there purged you periodically of the too violent accumulations of desperate life.’

In this particular vein, love for Kreisler (in the familiar Sturm und Drang manner) ‘always meant unhappy love, with its misunderstandings and wistful separations.’ For Tarr, Kreisler is an artist of ‘the general run’, and

‘The nearest the general run get to art is Action: sex is their form of art: the battle for existence is their picture. The moment they think or dream they develop an immense weight of cheap stagnating passion. Art, in the hands of the second rate, is a curse, it is on a par with “freedom”’

Lewis’s implicit judgement of Kreisler’s fatal philistinism, though tinged with sympathy, felt at the time like a damning indictment of my own failures, for which I had no adequate response. But instead of accepting the inevitable comfort that comes from embracing pessimism, I felt energised. Hadn’t Lewis intended this book also to be a testament to his failure to achieve his vaunted ambitions, and some attempt to give account of himself? Thinking that I too was unlikely to survive my own miserable and solipsistic predicament, and wishing at the very least to give some meagre expression to the forms I had honed, and the disparate philosophical insights I had garnered – I began to write a novel, Horizontal Rain (2020), which would attempt to address both the issue of ‘possession’ and its corollary, but also how this could be other than mere evidence of ‘stagnant passion.’  I submitted it to a literary agent who appeared enthusiastic, but I sensed more so by my background, which despite being a man, seemed to hold some currency within an emergent ‘representational’ cultural paradigm. In the end, I declined to implement her suggestions and ‘improvements’, principally that readers would appreciate elements more in line with my ‘lived experience’, which I rightly took to be a euphemism. In the end, those suggestions would not have been merely silly and pointless impositions, or necessary compromises I had to make for the sake of expediency: they would have interfered considerably with the aesthetic integrity of the work.

I intended to explore uncomfortable territory in the relations between men and women; the discord between stated expectations and the visceral and predictable repulsion which follows their expression. This conventional theme was, however, subordinate to its intended expression, and spurred by the response I had in mind not precisely to the questions of my own time, but to those posed by artists such as Lewis – questions which now seemed to me both perennial and urgent. They were questions, it must be admitted, set by other men, men of unwieldy and uncommon genius, who I felt an overwhelming urge to commune with, to challenge. Though I wrote fast, I worked long and hard on that response, which is cloaked in several valences of artful dissimulation and misdirection, but also filled with the fraught and sublime images of my youth. I’m loathed to elucidate or dwell on it too much, because I no longer fully understand my then state of mind, nor can I attest to its exact quality. I recall the anecdote about Scott Walker listening to the final mix of his album Tilt on full blast on the studio monitors, high in the balcony of a cathedral-like recording studio when the engineer suggested switching to smaller speakers to hear how it sounds. Walker politely declined: he preferred to listen to it as loud as possible only once, because after that - he never wanted to hear it again. I am therefore grateful to the anonymous reviewer on Goodreads (writing a few years ago, but which I only saw the other day) who wryly suggested ‘The Sorrows of Young Fuckboy’ as an alternative title for my novel. No doubt intended to be disparaging, it has nevertheless confirmed for me that some remnant of my intended purpose was at least apprehended, if not appreciated.

Much like Kreisler, women are the Incel’s theatre, his attempted art and expression – but Kreisler could at least lay claim to Action, to a morbid will, and a subjective attempt at an individual artistic expression, however derivative and contrived it ultimately was. Further, if we are speaking strictly of sex, then the very term Incel becomes a misnomer, rendering the condition entirely one of volition. In the present, we are constantly made to understand that sex is a matter of supply and demand, a transaction, a service to be purchased and distributed, provided by workers to consumers. But the incel understands the distinction between cost and value, and in this respect, is a model of renunciation…and renunciation is invariably a voluntary act. It should be clear, however, that the incel is not celibate in the cause of sex, but impoverished by the cause of desire. And all desire, as René Girard maintained, is a desire for being.

There is a John Berger quote that the internet has given new life, displayed on the above meme; more touching and artful than others I’ve seen, but wearing its pretensions heavily. It is certainly a boutique meme, as far as it goes. Berger, as was his wont, often spoke and wrote in TV soundbites, and is therefore perfect for our meme-tic age. Perhaps internet memes are the democratic visual language of popular sentiment par excellence, vectors for the collective consciousness. But they’re also evidence of a collective refusal of individuation, evidence of our inability to distinguish between virtuality and actuality, the cause of our collective derangement: the madness of a billion faces in darkened rooms, bathed in bilious blue light, gazing upon the same image, and recognising only themselves.

In previous ages, the only people inclined to withdraw from the realm of desire, and thus from society, was the monastic, who on finding themselves impoverished, could devote their lives to dutiful contemplation. Those vows too were ones of volition, but such a vocation is no longer considered viable since, it is claimed, the possibility of meaningful withdrawal is negligible. In any case, the monastic was not entirely impoverished by desire; he merely deferred and dismissed his own as inconsequential, replacing it with an immortality of the first order. In this sense, perhaps Berger was mistaken – the closest one can come to reaching immortality is not through reciprocal desire, but in recognising that all desire becomes inconsequential when confronted by the Absolute. The incel’s desire is indeed reflected in Berger’s secular humanist theology, his desire to be desired. In this sense, I feel, it attains the status of a universal category - one equally applicable to a growing cohort of women. The problem of the incel is the problem of culture; our knowing what things cost, our seeing that they have no value and wishing that they did – but categorically refusing to pay the price. This cannot be other than an aesthetic deficiency, even if we may grant that it is also often ideological. It is the malfunctioning of imaginations and tastes that have been too long condescended to, infantilised, and are thus denatured by being unchallenged - a problem perhaps as old as the novel itself. The primary affliction of that diminutive knight errant of La Mancha, lest we forget, was a self-inflicted madness caused by reading too many terrible and predictable books.

The incel’s crie de coeur cannot be approached in terms of success or failure. It is rather a fear of failure so debilitating, that it leads to never trying at all. The incel is not one who fails, or is failed; but one who elects to sullenly await the intervention of fate instead of attempting to force its hand. The incel that becomes the mass murderer/suicide is, like Alain in Le Feu Follet, at least successful in possessing death…at which point he has (it must be admitted) partially transcended the condition of incel, but will have died an ignoble coward, because even in death was unable to surmount his inauthentic and second-rate solipsism. I’m told that within the online community of incels, those who cease to be incels are thought to have ‘ascended.’ But the internet forum is a poor substitute for the monastery, which despite being filled with men who also thought their lives meagre and impoverished, gifted to the outside world countless works of genius; books, languages, philosophies, music and art.

I can’t claim to have been an incel, but like many others, I have at times known what it’s like to not be desired. I’m also familiar with the pangs of overwhelming longing that come from absence, or the corporeal lack that supersedes and vulgarises all elevated sentiments, capable of quickly unravelling the carefully sutured wounds afflicting even the brashest ego. But ultimately I cannot claim to have been an incel, because I’ve never been comfortable within the realm of deterministic narratives.  Because even if I have often failed, I have at least tried - unlike Chekhov’s Ryabovitch, whose self-pity eventually transmutes into spite at his inability to situate himself within a story that has a pre-determined and ‘ordinary’ outcome. He has forgotten all too soon the promise held by that world of imaginary richness, opened up by a single, mistaken, yet divine kiss - gifted to him by the darkness:

For an instant there was a flash of joy in Ryabovitch’s heart, but he quenched it at once, got into bed, and in his wrath with his fate, as though to spite it, did not go to General’s.

1. An admirable recent exception to this is Hannah Regels’s novel ‘The Last Sane Woman’, which I reviewed here, which seems to communicate a certain artful emotional content without being over-wrought or extravagant.