The Love Song of J. Alfred Incel

daring to disturb the universe

Justin Smith-Ruiu once wrote that all great literature is about incels. This was, obviously, calculated to rile people up (in a fruitful way). It’s not entirely true, but it is true enough that it’s worth contemplating at length.

Don Quixote? Incel. Robinson Crusoe? Incel. Young Werther? Incel to the hilt. Raskolnikov? Incel. Rochester? No, he was probably sneaking up to that attic now and then. Huck Finn? Do you have to ask?? Boo Radley??? You know it.

Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises is an incel, albeit only because he sustained nerve damage during World War I, which rendered him impotent. But he still has the courage to kiss—and to kiss the most dangerous of all women, Lady Brett Ashley, the quintessential archetype of the “e-girl” and a ready subject for another Substack post. So, spiritually speaking, he was no incel. But I digress.

Yet, which literary figure most purely distills the qualities of the incel? Who puts you in the incel’s shoes, in the incel’s mind, and shows you just what it’s like to be one?

There is famously nothing new under the sun, and a search for incels even in the annals of ancient Sumeria would not prove in vain. But we don’t have to look that far afield for the archetypal incel. He would have to be T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, subject of the finest dramatic monologue of the 20^th Century, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

They say that Zoomers can’t choose. When they’re at a restaurant, they stare at the QR code menu for an hour, as the exasperated waiter is forced to—well—wait. The Zoomer is beset by reflection. The critical, analytical faculty has overwhelmed the passionate and instinctual.

Laurence Olivier once said of Hamlet, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” That’s the average Zoomer, afflicted with terminal Hamletitis. J. Alfred Prufrock is essentially Hamlet, but, unlike the actual Hamlet and like the actual Zoomer, his indecisiveness is applied to the sexual and romantic realm:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

That is pure Zoomer incel male.

Prufrock cannot act. He is imprisoned in word and thought, unable to translate himself into the realm of the deed. The women he might engage, to whom he might launch entreaties, “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Were he to express himself, were he to bare his heart, he is threatened by the possibility that “one, settling a pillow by her head / Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.’”

The incel is the exact same way. But his imprisonment is more severe because he is terminally online. He lives in a world that is purely comprised of thought and word, in which action is effectively impossible, doomed to mire. Only simulated action exists as a possibility—unless he were boldly to slide into someone’s DMs. And even if he did, would he “after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

No. He wouldn’t. He would remain inert, “a patient etherized upon a table.”

This condition of indecisiveness gives rise to the trademark Eliotic melancholia, the sense that one “should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” He inhabits a world of “Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent.” The world has nothing but deception in mind for him, a series of blind alleys.

Thus, he is forced into a realm of fantasy, a realm where he can hear “the mermaids singing, each to each.” But he knows that they will not sing to him. The poem’s final words speak for all such young men, unmanned:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

We have addressed the commonalities, but we should note that the species of inceldom detailed by Eliot does differ from the contemporary version in certain particulars. Eliot wasn’t living in a sexual economy in which the amount of sex you were having equated to your sense of personal worth. People back then still looked down on the inveterate womanizer to some extent. (The curious reader is advised to consult Michel Houellebecq’s prophetic Whatever if he or she wishes to better understand how things have changed). In his letters, Eliot presents his own loss of virginity—at the age of 26—as a conscious decision, though (he says) one which he perhaps would’ve done well to make earlier. So Prufrock’s creator was volcel rather than incel, and there was no shame in his game. But, being a poet and hence a “mirror of futurity,” Eliot reached forward to grasp what yet would be.

A further difference: the modern incel’s world is even more claustrophobic and hermetically sealed than that of Prufrock. His choice is no choice. He lives in a stream of ever proliferating words, buoyed onwards by verbal currents that he can’t control, that are fed into him from the outside. He can’t orient himself in the world, and he knows it. He lacks Prufrock’s own sense of potential, if thwarted agency. Perhaps you—the sex-haver reading this—see a certain portion of your own being reflected in him?

Finally, it’s important to note that Prufrock’s song is, in fact, a love song—albeit one which he seems doomed to never sing to a woman. Is the song the incel wants to sing, in fact, a love song? Or is it merely a song of sex? Is it no more than “Baby Got Back”? Or is it, more soullessly, a song about the status conferred by sex? Does the incel retain the possibility of singing a classic “torch song”?

I think the incel, unfortunately, hovers somewhere between all these possibilities. He is like an electron. The better he knows his position, the less he knows his velocity. He exists in a cloud of potential attitudes around the center of the atom, unable to take a final stance towards it, to throw himself into a timeless passion.

His condition being as dire as it is, his only hope lies in the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the Great Books, which reflect ourselves back to ourselves, but “more truly and more strange.” This encounter, the encounter with one’s stranger self is, if not an ultimate solution, a necessary balm. Prufrock still walks these 21^st Century streets. Meet him—if you dare disturb your own complacency.