"Stop Asking for Life to Be a Poem": On Cybernetic Instrumentality

Abstract: The "sentimental" narrator of Hari Kunzru's Red Pill is starting to feel like a self-described "waster."1 Away on fellowship in Berlin at the interdisciplinary Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research, our writer-in-residence narrator ingests the eponymous capsule and "wakes up" to the obsolescence of literary humanism, a historical "period that was drawing to a close" ( RP 46).2 Instead of using the time afforded by the fellowship to work on his grant winning project––notunironically titled "The Lyric I," and which aims to achieve poetic transcendence through a better understanding of "the construction of the self in lyric poetry" ( RP 15)––the narrator whiles away his days on violent police procedurals and social media doom-scrolling.3 "I was like a miser, fretting about his emotional hoard," he confesses: "I frequently found myself hunched over my laptop, my eyes welling with tears … If the world changed, would I be able to protect my family?" ( RP 6-7). Alternating between sentimental musings and apocalyptic fantasies, he slides into a "mad" state of internet-fueled paranoia and begins to see signs and symbols of "red pill" and Alt-Right ideology everywhere he looks ( RP 280). The "sleepy-eyed cartoon frog" on a stranger's tee shirt slyly signals right-wing in-group belonging, while the OK sign made by the right hand of Carl Spitzweg's "Poor Poet" is reinterpreted as an allusion to contemporary fascist iconography, a cryptic communication from the not-so distant past ( RP 27; 9-10).