INCEL by ARX-Han

A Conversation with the Author

INCEL by ARX-Han is a well-wrought and engaging journey into the mind and life of a young man, known only as anon, without any other name. Set in an unnamed large city circa 2012, anon seeks female love and companionship. He treats this as a technical problem, with his potential female partners as puzzles to be solved using social Darwinian analysis. He sets himself a seemingly unobtainable goal: To engage in penetrative sexual intercourse before his birthday. Failing that, he has committed himself to suicide. His purely material theories run afoul of his inner pain and feelings of loss. The book has a distinct atmosphere and meticulous, distinctive style. It is a mature work from a first-time novelist. I was struck by the book, and I recommend it.

Since the appearance of INCEL, ARX-Han has written many insightful reviews and thoughtful posts on Substack.

ARX-Han kindly agreed to an interview about INCEL, his own background, his thoughts on writing, and future projects.

CA: You have preserved your anonymity, and my questions will try to avoid any risk of doxxing. Can you tell us where you grew up, your early interests in books, movies, or anything else that influenced your writing?

ARX-Han: I’m a middle-aged millennial who grew up in a major multiracial American metropolitan city—a fairly mixed environment in terms of class, race, and so on. In terms of cultural touchpoints, my formative immersion in 90’s culture and aesthetics certainly had a significant influence on me, but because my memory is generally very poor, it’s more of an impressionistic influence than it is something anchored to very particular films or shows that I can recall with any specificity. As a young boy I read science fiction—Animorphs, Star Wars—but I lost interest in books by the time I was in high school, partly since this was the peak era of 16-bit and 32-bit video games.

Given how much I love literary fiction now, as an adult, I think the way we teach literature in high schools is tremendously broken. I remember being extremely bored by having to read Shakespeare or write literary analysis essays about his work. That shit just absolutely put me to sleep. Writing was something that hardly interested me.

What changed for me was my time in college, when I more or less stumbled upon the two staples of Gen-X androgenic fiction: Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. I still remember making my way through American Psycho on the bus to class and being absolutely drawn in. Ellis’ narrative voice was so shockingly strong to me, and I felt the medium click for me for the first time. Apart from the thematic resonance, Fight Club made me feel like I was at least latently capable of writing a good minimalist novel. A couple of years later, I discovered Houellebecq (based on someone’s Twitter recommendation, I think).

All in all, I’d say it was a pretty typical trajectory for a writer in my category, with one exception: in my early twenties, I read a fair amount of academic philosophy, and this has really bled into my work. Most of the reading was around theories of consciousness (e.g. panpsychism), free will and moral responsibility, and also philosophy of religion (the problem of evil, arguments for and against the existence of God, and so on).

Although I certainly wouldn’t say that it’s an absolute requirement for greatness, I think many novels can really be deepened with the right injection of philosophy (e.g. Noah Kumin’s Stop All The Clocks has some very interesting ideas).

CA: When did you first begin writing?

ARX-Han: I started in my early twenties. When I first released my debut, INCEL, I included an Afterword that provides a fairly detailed account of transitioning from philosophy essays into literary fiction, and how that trajectory was ultimately a means of coping with the unexpected death of my friend and the nihilism this engendered in me personally.

There’s some added context there around the over-securitization of the young American male—which is why I ultimately cut the Afterword from the novel—but the essential account of my entry into fiction remains unchanged.

CA: What was the original inspiration for INCEL? When did you get the idea to write it?

ARX-Han: I’ve been asked this question a number of times and I always give a relatively vague, non-specific answer, because I don’t remember the exact moment it came into my mind with any real fidelity, so my answers tend to be all over the place.

The short answer is that this book came from spending time reading various anonymous Manosphere forums on the internet.

The character of anon is a distillation, a congealed mass of voices from the internet. Forums, by virtue of their anonymity, are like direct, unfiltered channels into human consciousness and what people really think. For that reason they are not only sociologically useful, but useful insofar as they have the power to directly window into psychological reality by reducing social desirability bias in self-presentation.

I simply felt that this character demanded to be written.

CA: In INCEL we have a troubled and at best partially sympathetic protagonist. This is a risky move, since readers generally want to like and identify with the main character. The two books that came to mind as I read it were Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Camus’s The Stranger. What earlier books, if any, influenced how you imagined and wrote about anon?

ARX-Han: American Psycho, Fight Club, and The Elementary Particles were the primary influences on the book and form the base of the style.

In the beginning, I sort of alternated between aping Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, respectively, but as time went on, the manuscript evolved in a more maximalist and pseudo-scientific direction. I wanted to create a character profoundly alienated from his veridical experience—a person who needlessly used computational metaphors to distance himself from his own feelings as a sort of coping device for the turbulence of actually experiencing his emotions.

Thus, the style evolved into a more aggressive maximalist style through which I leaned into the “brain as computer” metaphor as strongly as I could, drawing upon abstractions from cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology, which use “modules” as constructs for functionally-specialized regions of the brain.

CA: Did anon come to you as a seemingly real person? Did he stay generally the same in the writing or did he evolve? How much autobiography is there? Tell us about your relationship to your protagonist.

ARX-Han: Anon was always a fully formed person to me, largely because his pain and his humiliation are totally real to him even though they’re wildly divergent from the experiences of most people. This is always apparent when you read confessional text from other people online—even people who may or may not hate you. The subjectivity of suffering is absolute in that sense.

I’m not one of those people who writes autofiction and to the extent that autofiction has become a macro-trend in the alt-lit or online-lit space, it trends toward boredom because writers tend to start “doing a bit” and it becomes tiresome and repetitive.

Thus, rather than being some kind of thinly-veiled autobiography, for me, the character of anon is merely a vessel for a white-hot existential question that I have pondered for years—how to find meaning in a world that has been disenchanted, naturalized, and reduced to the motion of elementary particles.

Partly this is why I was so interested in theories of consciousness: it seemed to me that if the mind could not be reduced to particles—if there was something irreducible about it—that some form of meaning could be retained.

CA: I’d like to ask about nuts and bolts of how you wrote INCEL. Once you had the basic idea in mind, what was the process of writing? Did you make an outline? Did you write according a schedule? Did the characters come to you or did you construct them? Did you find inspiration coming at odd times? Did you make notes? Where were you physically located? How long did it take? Did you write it straight through, or in segments out of order? I assume you wrote in on a computer? How did you keep track of drafts and revisions and inserts? Did you do any writing on paper? That’s a lot of questions: TL/DR: Take us inside ARX-Han’s workshop.

ARX-Han: There’s a ton of process here that I could get into but I’ll try and summarize the experience for me. The first thing to flag is that I basically learned to write a novel as I was writing this novel. INCEL is in fact my first fully finished work—an abandoned science fiction novel aside—and it’s something I almost entirely gave up on around 2018.

I started with a notebook and a basic outline in 2011. I’d sketch ideas into the book, and, following the general outline, I’d free-write each individual chapter based on that. Perhaps 1 or 2 years into the process, I got a content editor/mentor who provided line-by-line feedback, which really pushed my learning rate tremendously. I had a hybrid system where I’d write some things in paper notebooks and filled up a couple of them with scattered ideas and outlines before switching to a 100% digital system. For a couple of years I used Scrivener until I got to the point where the draft was much more mature. I got some beta readers to take a look at the manuscript in 2014 who had some good things to say about it, but I felt the ending wasn’t ready at that time. After some period of struggle the ending came to me in a single burst of writing in 2015 and at that point the basic skeleton of the book was done.

The characters came to me in increments where they progressively clarified themselves. So much of a novel is a mental map formed by the writer and discovering adjacent nodes of possibility. The character of Jason evolved considerably both in terms of his ideological content and his arc, which was dictated by the narrative trajectory of anon himself.

Inspiration came to me all the time. For awhile I had a small notebook for this, I think, but eventually I started writing new ideas into Apple notes, which is a great minimalist note-taking app. I mostly wrote the novel straight through, but added some new chapters in 2022 or 2023 when I had some very interesting ideas come into view—anon’s debate with his professor was one of these newer scenes, along with his meltdown over the internet. Those final-stretch new scenes were perhaps the most fun to write because they required less re-working since my skills had matured as a writer.

The main thing I did, which, in retrospect, is somewhat insane, was spend eight years rewriting the prose to make it as interesting, maximalist, and dynamic that it could be.

Now, it wasn’t eight continuous years (from 2015 to 2023) that I spent doing it, since I took various breaks from the manuscript (e.g. abandoning it from 2018 to 2020 or so, if memory serves me correctly), but it’s still a ridiculous amount of time.

Once the draft was mature there weren’t any copies of it on paper, and I only kept track of the most up to date version with reverting to any previous versions.

CA: The book clearly contains research, which lends plausibility to anon’s thinking and behavior. Tell us about the research process. How did you it, how did you record and then incorporate your findings in the novel?

ARX-Han: The research process didn’t need to be formalized at all since my practice has always been to collect links to interesting papers, abstracts, or articles. To a limited extent I did refer to certain notes I’d written from various philosophy books I’d read over the years, but that wasn’t particularly important in the course of the book’s development.

CA: (SPOILER ALERT ON THIS Q&A) INCEL is a “downer” of a book, which makes it a tough sell for many readers. Without doing any spoilers, I can say that there is no conventional happy ending. Nonetheless, there are rays of sunlight. The friendship between anon and Jason is convincing, and adds a necessary comic and non-cerebral element. And his lingering and hopeless love for Elizabeth is genuinely moving. Please tell us something about the role of these figures in the book.

ARX-Han: I actually disagree with this response—for me, the ending is very hopeful, because anon (spoiler alert!) comes to understand the universality of suffering, and this is a very profound discovery for him, because up until that point, he mostly can understand and conceptualize his own suffering.

This is something beyond just the inflection point of “learning empathy” per se, and points in the direction of a kind of neo-Buddhist understanding of compassion.

Jason, disimilarly, does not find the same kind of redemption, and chooses to sort of dissociate into a fully depersonalized account of human agency’s non-existence and the evacuation of meaning from all freely-willed choices.

Elizabeth, I think, comes around sometime after the ending of the book.

At least, that’s my canonical epilogue for the readers of the novel!

CA: How did you know when the book was finished?

ARX-Han: In summer of 2023 I realized I was being hyper-obsessive and perfectionistic about polishing the prose, and I felt it was good enough on a line-by-line level to lock.

It was a purely intuitive call based on how well I felt the book was written on a line-by-line basis.

Hilariously, I kept editing it in one last round of minor revisions I released about 3 months after it was finished!

I polished one big block of text and modified the ending into something more understated.

I do not recommend being this obsessive about your work.

CA: Back to practical issues. Once you had the novel thought-up and drafted, what was the process of editing and proofreading? How did you get into clean, publishable form?

ARX-Han: Apart from my perfectionistic multi-year process of drafting and re-drafting (perhaps 15 total significant rewrites on a line-by-line basis), I paid a copy-editor for feedback.

He was very good and helped tighten things up a lot in terms of grammar, with some good feedback on style here and there as well.

CA: Once Incel was finished, tell us about the process you followed to publish it. Did you consider submitting it to a publisher, or were you always committed to self-publishing?

ARX-Han: The closer I got to finishing it, the more obvious it was that I would never find a publisher (much less a literary agent). There were perhaps 1 or 2 potentially viable options for unagented direct submissions like Terror House and Expat Press, but they weren’t taking submissions when I finished the novel.

Thus, my plan to treat the release artisanally and put a lot of effort into the design process, which included making a cool manga cover (which I since completely abandoned, lol) and put a ton of work into paying a designer and providing art direction. I later cut the anime visual influence due to marketing-related reasons and updated the cover to something more literary.

CA: Did you have a plan for promoting INCEL? Or did you make it up as you went along? What was your process here, if any?

ARX-Han: The short story here is that I designed the launch to rely almost exclusively on an advertising campaign on the /lit/erature board on 4chan.

This was a massive, somewhat embarrassing failure which I wrote about here.

The thing that actually worked was just (a) consistently blogging on Substack and (b) trying to connect with other writers on Substack, Twitter, and even Discord. The guys over at Tooky's Mag were nice enough to give me some advice about book marketing and later reviewed the novel in their Sidebar literary podcast, which kicked off a virtuous cycle where it got more and more positive critical attention.

CA: Taking on a project like this, which is controversial and counter-cultural, and which has virtually no prospect of paying any cash, is a huge undertaking. For what it’s worth, I have the greatest respect for the effort, and the artistic success of the book. What were your goals, your hopes, when you wrote INCEL? What was your “combat motivation” to stick with this project?

ARX-Han: I’d say my external goal—if I’m being truthful—was to write a work of androgenic fiction that would reach a massively successful, cult-classic status and become a literary peer to American Psycho, Fight Club, or The Elementary Particles. In this respect I was very much looking for recognition.

With the benefit of hindsight and knowledge, I now understand how ridiculous this dream was, but I still view the book as a success because I was ultimately able to reach my internal goal and to achieve a reasonable level of critical success in niche literary circles online.

At the end of the day, my internal goal was simpler. I wanted to write the best possible novel that I was capable of writing—a strong, dense debut that would reach a level of literary quality that I could be proud of even years after publication. And I more or less reached that goal in that there are very few things, if any, that I’d change about the book now—even in spite of my perfectionism.

So in the final analysis, I’m basically pleased with the result.

Motivation was rarely a problem because I so deeply enjoy the process of writing fiction, which for me, is a flow-state activity that I find deeply connected to music (I would often listen to the same song on repeat when editing or writing a first draft).

CA: INCEL has been deservedly well received. Do you feel like people understand the book, and what you were trying to do? What do you think about the idea that the author of a book does not have a privileged opinion about his own work, once it is created, the book is out in the world, and everyone will find their own meaning in it?

ARX-Han: I think most people understand the main idea of the novel if not all of its core philosophical themes. I think that insofar as the novel presents a very specific critique of scientism and neuroscientific reductionism in particular, this is sometimes lost on people, but people like Scott Litts have more recently been picking up on it.

I don’t have a strong view about objective meaning vs. subjective meaning as it pertains to the novel. I think, insofar as everyone has a personal experience of a work of art, then definitionally they will find their own meaning in it (since meaning is veridically experienced through a subjective experience of the reader’s own consciousness).

I have to say I am sometimes surprised by how much of a downer people find it to be—especially the ending.

For me, the ending is transformative for the character, redemptive.

It’s almost a Christian story in that sense.

CA: You have been scrupulous about maintaining your anonymity, your “OpSec.” This means you cannot go to IRL events, for example. The book certainly does not submit to current norms, it is not remotely “woke.” You are taking some personal and professional risks by writing it and promoting it. There has been a weakening of those forces lately, but I do not think they are gone or that they won’t return. Tell us about your thinking on these issues, and the personal cost you have paid, and if the tradeoffs are worth it.

ARX-Han: Broadly speaking I wildly over-calibrated for this. I’m not actually analogous to some dissident journalist in an Eastern bloc country in the 80’s or whatever. Frankly, I had a little too much fun with the pseudonymity aspect and was basically LARPing—partly because of how self-important it made me feel (lol). The effort wasn’t anywhere near worth it and essentially nobody cares who I am. I plan to be much looser on this front because ultimately my work just isn’t very spicy at all and I’m more or less broke anyway—so who really cares?

That being said, the sole caveat here—what makes any kind of judgment perhaps somewhat tricky—is how rapidly political conditions are changing in the US.

For example, there are some fiction writers who write online and who are politically active and may therefore alternately become regime targets for the red or blue factions of the US government, depending on who currently holds the reins of power.

I am not anywhere near being one of these people. To the extent that I (sometimes) write about politics, they’re constrained discussions around largely macro-level geopolitical issues rather than anything controversial.

That said, I do think the political environment and freedom of speech in the United States are about to massively deteriorate.

My advice is to use your own judgment about what makes sense for your personal situation.

CA: Do you have new writing projects under way? Are you going to write another book? What can you tell us about your current work?

ARX-Han: I have some very rough outline notes for a new project, which I more or less feel compelled to put out at this point. I was kind of burnt out of fiction after a very intensive 3.5 year final stretch of redrafting and needed 2023 to 2025 to kind of recuperate, but I think the itch has returned.

My next novel, broadly speaking, will probably be about transhumanism: one part William Gibson mixed with one part Houellebecq, thrown into a blender with a mixed style. Likely not as stylistically maximalist, but we’ll see!

CA: Let’s shift gears and talk about some of the things you have been doing since INCEL came out. You have been active on Substack, and you have had a few themes in your posts and notes. You have used the phrase “literary maximalism.” What does that term mean to you, and why is it important?

ARX-Han: “Maximalism” in this context just means long, complex sentences that are imprinted with a particular style. It stands in opposition to the more restrained literary minimalist realism that is in vogue among contemporary writers and (apparently) most MFA-fiction writers as well.

CA: You have also been critical of the traditional publishing industry, and encouraged independent writing and publishing. Where do you see things going in the next few years? What is the best achievable case?

ARX-Han: Best case is (a) Amazon and other book distributors don’t start censoring fiction (or even non-fiction) at the behest of the NGO-academic-MSM complex or the federal government, and (b) small, innovative new presses spring up, reach the point of financial viability, and cultivate an IRL scene with good parties and good people.

I believe in the optimistic case—or at least I choose to.

CA: You wrote about the importance of books as physical objects. Tell us briefly what you think about that, and what price should writers be willing to pay to ensure that their books are well presented?

ARX-Han: You cannot understate the value of this.

The packaging and design of a novel is extremely important.

A novel should be a beautiful physical object. It should not be devalued as worthless digital ephemera. It should be corporeal and physically substantive.

For the love of god, respect the form, and don’t give up on the dimensional beauty of a physical object.

CA: You wrote about Christianity as an “exhausted memeplex.” I respectfully disagree, and I stole the word memeplex for my own use. Can you tell us about your personal philosophy and faith? Are things works in progress, or do you have it all figured out? You will have to imagine a winking emoji.

ARX-Han: I’m tempted to respond at length here, but theism will be a major theme in my next work.

To summarize, I’ve thought about philosophy of religion a great deal. As part of this intellectual exercise, I have also read through various arguments for and against Christianity and considered them.

My personal belief is that Christianity is false and that most people understand this, which is why it is a spent force in cultural, moral, and civilizational terms. Very few American elites are, in my view, genuine Christians (Thiel doesn’t count), and that trickles down to the base population-level: most of the Western world is in some kind of metaphysical meaning-spiral as a result of the death of God.

I’m persuaded that the evidential problem of evil is insoluble for theism in general and that something like cosmo-psychism might best capture reality (a good book on this is Philip Goff’s Why? The Purpose of the Universe).

CA: You have called for a new literary movement. That provoked a — hopefully — humorous response from me. But I find the idea hopeful. Do you see that happening? What does it look like?

ARX-Han: It’s already happening in various forms here. Ross Barkan’s New Romanticism is one cohort—his novel Glass Century has done very well. New York also has Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers, another novel which I also enjoyed. Lastly, there’s Dan Baltic and Mattp969’s New Ritual Press, which was just featured in Rolling Stone magazine. I’ve written about all of these books and writers on my blog, and enjoyed the novels they’ve released.

CA: Please name some of your favorite books or other artistic works, and tell us what they meant to you, including any current works that strike you as especially good or important.

ARX-Han: Aside from those I’ve already mentioned, I’d like to briefly mention two books I rarely mention: Stoner, by John Williams and Territory of Light, by Yuko Tsushima.

I found Stoner quite moving—a perfect novel, basically—but Territory of Light was, for me, an aesthetic experience on par with John Williams. There’s just something magical about the voice in this book, which is about a young single mother struggling after being abandoned by her husband. It’s a beautiful, evocative translation that just felt like it perfectly captured the bittersweet elements of life.

CA: Do you have any thoughts, advice, warnings, admonitions, for other writers?

ARX-Han: The craft and the love for process is the most important thing above all else. Writing literary fiction remains a source of great meaning.

Marketing your novel is a largely orthogonal skillset but can be learned, but the sales figures are ultimately not up to you.

CA: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to mention?

ARX-Han: If you enjoyed this interview, read my book!

CA: Here’s the link to buy INCEL. And ARX-Han’s Substack page is here.