Woe! Woe upon words and the world from the day the word ‘wojak’ wormed its way into the hallowed halls of traditionally published literature. What is our culture coming to? Perhaps God was right to blow apart Babel! Perhaps we should all sew our mouths and eyes shut and tie up our hands and never speak or write again. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Whatever course of action we take, it doesn’t change the fact that the online world has infiltrated the domain of serious literature. It is in serious books, by serious authors, with black and white photos of them looking pensive on their plastic dust jackets, where we see how internet trends and terminology have infiltrated literature.
These are the sort of authors who write precisely about the world as is, ‘wojaks’ and all. Authors such as Sally Rooney, who writes about Instagram reels; Elif Batuman, who discourses gracefully on the misery of online courtship, and Honor Levy, who surrenders to brain rot, beginning her first book with the line “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b.”
The most egregiously trend-dependent of these, Levy, writes about Neopets, Redpills, and tradwives. She compiles a dictionary on words originating from the internet. ‘Big Chungus’, that dusty historic monolith, is an entry in this. Her book has received excoriating criticism, however in spite of this, younger authors still seem to be fascinated with linguistic expressions that come from the internet, and with the words and phrases used by the desperately brain-rotted. One cannot seem to open a book published by an author under 35 without getting sucked into an overarching overwrought argument about the internet and its effect on culture, replete in a metafictional hypertextual narrative from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.
Is any of this really ‘new’? Have writers found some way of renovating the novel by adding glitzy new internet words, or is this the end of books as we know them?
Fear not, reader. Novels are not entirely a thing of the past just because they reference the internet. It is not over. Nothing has really happened. Writing has, since its inception, always accorded with the immanent and existing forms of communication and expression. It has always accorded with other writing — all writing, not just ones of a literary variety. It is neither a good or bad thing that books use language founded in less reputable or less seemingly literary terms — that is just what books do, what they are, and always have been.
Many Stale Pale Males of the blighted and boring canonical past do exactly the same thing. Hipponax, the ancient Greek poet, twisted Homeric poetic devices into condemnations of people who were rude to him at dinner to death by hailstones. Goethes’ The Sorrows of Young Werther consists entirely of letters written by a gun-toting bipolar incel who revels in the sublimity of rural Germany. Sterne borrows liberally from a medical textbook in Tristram Shandy, ruthlessly mocking its self seriousness. Joyce uses just about every single form of written expression in every single thing he wrote. No newspaper, poem, piece of erotica, journal entry or advertisement is safe from his cheeky recreations. There are literally sex jokes from the Tang Dynasty based on calligraphy.
This ‘new’ language of the internet is no different from any of this. Writing will always draw from other writing. Books do not exist as self-contained phenomena, endlessly and uselessly self-referential, only literary if they reference the literary. They are made up of an experienced totality, of which the internet is now a significant part.
Of course the language of the internet would end up in books. Perhaps a greater question is not whether or not these books are bad for incorporating this language, but more so if what they are using them to say is actually any good or true or beautiful. Often it’s not. Levy’s book certainly isn’t. But authors will get there. Just give it a little time.
