There is a scene in Donizetti’s 1832 romantic opera L'elisir d'Amore wherein the leading couple finally admit that they’re in love with each other. The female lead launches into a sickeningly complex melisma as she declares that she has finally taken the time to look inwards, and launches into a coloratura made up of no less than four roulades and two trills across three words to declare her sudden indulgence into romantic introspection. The male lead, who by this point has essentially upended his and his peers' lives in order to gain this woman’s affection, patiently waits for her to finish and responds in restricted tessitura, repeating “you love me” as neither a question nor a declaration. This man has upended several military, economic and social hierarchies to achieve what took his female counterpart half a day of drinking champagne with her other boyfriend to realise, and gets to express it in a single-count cadence. It’s so good.
Until a few months ago, this had been to me the ultimate cultural expression of the masculine/feminine divide: in this single exchange lay Goethe’s sickness and health, Pirsig’s classic and romantic, Blake’s Urizen and Los, Paracelsus’s earth and metal. There was not a distichous piece of media, I believed, that so accurately captured the eternal polarity of the sexes and their approaches to life, love and culture – until, that is, I read Udith Dematagoda’s novels Agonist (2024) and Horizontal Rain (2020), published by Hyperidean Press.
I had been introduced to Dematagoda’s writings earlier this year by a mutual acquaintance who was reading Agonist and took great pleasure in sending me shots of phrases like ‘talmudic faggot’ and ‘I prefer the Virgin Remarque to the Chad Jünger’. Through these extracts I had surmised, incorrectly, that this was another vacuous bit of edgelord media and thought no more about it until November, when I received an invitation to Hyperidean Press’s reading evening in London. I was expecting to sit through a post-internet peregrination of bad autofiction and “ironically” Kaur-tinted poetry, but it was halfway through Frieze week so the idea of dissociating to the comforting monotone of male voices for an hour was not entirely unappealing.
I was deeply and pleasantly surprised. These were writers who, unlike even some of the best authors at literary events, knew how to read: inflection, projection, timing, character accents (including a particularly sultry mid-American vixen from Kieran Saint Leonard), all the good stuff. They were shepherded by the impeccably French (and well-read) Maud Bougerol who treated them to some excellent questions, and I was struck by what a difference it makes to hear writers speak with genuine knowledge of and enthusiasm for their own line of work. This was clearly a press house worth attention to.
Udith was kind enough to offer an interview once I finished the books I had been sent. Agonist is a fragmented exploration of abyssal post-internet culture that warps the cold, traditional format of chatrooms and internet forums into a sumptuously affective anatomisation of romantic relationships and the function of language within them. Horizontal Rain follows a more traditional narrative, a reverse bildungsroman that follows the decline and fall of a young man in Glasgow in 2015 who falls for a woman after breakup and grapples with the newfound role she starts to play in his life. Both works are, to an extent, about gender: how do men deal with despair? How do (or even can) they use language, image and text in a gender landscape so heavily marked by concepts of crisis? These were questions and themes that ran ostensibly but not obsessively through both novels, and ones I was keen to explore further.
Photography courtesy of Hyperidean Press
VCK: The tension between classic and romantic modes of thinking comes up a lot in both works, but it’s never really resolved: there’s praise and condemnation of both approaches but never a suggestion that they be somehow combined. Is this a deliberate assertion that these two modes are incompatible, or rather a discrete preference for one over the other?
UD: In retrospect the romanticism/classicism dyad does run through both works, but I’m unsure whether I consciously thought about it at the time. I deployed the quote by Goethe that romanticism is a sickness, and classicism is health, rather ironically in relation to the internet subject material in Agonist, however I realise it is important in Horizontal Rain as well. Both works resulted from a very peculiar process. I often decide to work on things as a way of expunging ideas I found troubling, or felt were preventing me from pursuing what I ‘should’ do. Both works are by-products, diversions from abandoned projects which seemed more important at the time but clearly weren’t. I think ‘necessity’ is the type of artistic drive which I find the most compelling, and which I admire most in the work of others – that there is an overwhelming ‘need’ to create something.
This is, of course, a very romantic drive. I think I’m temperamentally very romantic in character, which was always pointed out to me, usually when people were exasperated by me. I began to hate it quite intensely in my late twenties, and saw it as the cause of my own ‘sickness.’ I was always described by family, teachers, and girlfriends as off in my own world, a day-dreamer. I’m quite short-sighted but I never wear my glasses, because I find it too distracting to see everything, to notice everything and everyone, too clearly when walking around. It pulls me out of my reveries. However, I’ve come to realise that the classical mode is equally present in my thinking, and always has been, and that it’s useless to suppress it. The two modes are not incompatible. The process of individuation, which is an intrinsically aesthetic process, allows one to absorb these contradictions within one’s personality (which may otherwise lead to some debilitating crisis) in the service of creation.
Horizontal Rain was written in 2020, so nearly half a decade ago - are there things about the novel you think about going back and changing, or do you generally leave your writing alone once it’s published?
It’s difficult to say what my motivations were exactly when I wrote Horizontal Rain. Although it was published in 2020, I actually started writing it in 2014, when I was 29, and finished a first draft in 2015. I shelved it until we started Hyperidean Press in 2019 and we needed something to publish. When I wrote it I’d just returned from living in Nice, in the South of France, where I worked as a lecteur d’anglais at the University whilst finishing my PhD. Despite it being permanently sunny, with the beach only a ten-minute walk from my apartment, I was incredibly depressed – more so than I’d ever been anywhere else – drinking a lot, and addicted to Xanax, which they prescribed very easily in France, and which I now realise I took in dangerously high quantities. In the end I managed to kick the habit relatively easily, probably because the reality of addiction doesn’t fully register when it’s just ‘medication.’
For this reason, most of my memories of Nice are a little hazy. When I was in France, I was painfully nostalgic for Glasgow, its music, its pubs, and all of the friends I’d left behind. When I moved back in 2014 it had changed substantially – and I found it difficult to readjust to my old mode of life. There seemed to be a very palpable sense of impending rupture, and everything was very frenzied. This was when I first got a smartphone, something which I had purposefully avoided for a long time. Everything was in an advanced sense of flux, and now mediated through this new way of (mis) perception.
It’s a novel about romantic misadventure, but it’s also an attempt to capture the texture of the city where I spent all of my adult life, its peculiarly sublime rain-soaked miserabalism (forever sound-tracked in my mind by my favourite band, The Jesus and Mary Chain). I took a lot of inspiration from various sources, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s The Fire Within. But in particular I wanted to channel the Scottish demotic cadences of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh (and their source material, Louis Ferdinand Céline), but attempt to construct something peculiar to my generation, the code-switching split-personality of millennial men who came from the schemes and stayed (often too long) in universities. It’s a very distinct image of the city, one which seems to be receding further from memory each time I return. I don’t really recognise it anymore, and almost everyone I knew then has moved away. But it was, and maybe still is, one of the best cities in the world. When I was still in Nice, I bought a shite wee guitar amp for 20 euros, a tiny midi keyboard and terrible condenser mic and recorded a short album of bleak songs which I now find impossible to listen to.
I don’t fully understand my state of mind then, but like Horizontal Rain I wouldn’t ever think of changing anything, or disavowing it – simply because it’s filled with the fraught disparate images of my youth. Scott Walker is perhaps the artist who has had the most profound and enduring effect on all of my work. There is this anecdote of him listening to the final mix of his album Tilt on full blast high in the balcony of a cathedral-like recording studio, when the engineer came in and suggested switching to smaller speakers to more closely 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.
The protagonist of Horizontal Rain is marked by an 'obsession with the theoretical, which hindered an astute and intuitive aesthetic feeling'. Is this something you face in the creation of your own work?
The obsession with the theoretical goes back to this unconscious duality of romanticism vs. classicism, and is probably inspired by my work as an academic. Formal education is often a hindrance because it crowds out the development of a unique subjective vision with unwelcome intrusions. I’ve always been aware that my instincts are primarily artistic, and it was only to preserve and nurture them that I’ve lackadaisically pursued an academic career. I was inspired by a throw-away comment by Vladimir Nabokov that academia is the ideal occupation for a writer since it provides access to libraries, intellectual conversation and lots of free time to write. He was, of course, wrong in this as he was in much else. Being an academic is a job like any other, and generally speaking a much more bureaucratic occupation than an intellectual one. I don’t think Nabokov truly believed it himself. Like him I would have much preferred the life of inspired indolence – the aristocratic ‘do nothing’ mode of artistic activity - but I grew up in a working class environment and in modest circumstances. I also graduated into the 2008 crash, and like most people my age I’ve internalised a permanent sense of crisis in relation to the world of work.
It seems that all of my friends – even the ‘successful’ ones - work day jobs slightly removed from their artistic fields. Musicians who work writing pop songs in production line like settings, TV jingles for adverts or soundtracks for minor films, painters who make decorative murals, who paint houses or work in restoration; sculptors who work as plasterers and carpenters; electronic musicians and sound artists who work as computer programmers; writers working as copy writers. They often find these jobs tedious and difficult, as all jobs are. Nevertheless most, like myself, feel that having to work for a living re-affirms for them the essential artistic drive as being an over-powering ‘necessity’ to create.
Artistic activity has always been for me this necessity, the main thing that preoccupies me. For a long time this took the shape of music, and at some point words superseded music as my primary means of expression. My ambitions are very big, but at the same time quite modest since they are exclusively artistic. My goal is to render as accurately and dutifully as possible a certain aesthetic vision that exists in my mind, that relates to a certain theme or image. The closest I can come to this image is the only criteria I used to judge success: whether or not it gives me a complete sense of possession. Other than this, the only hope I have for my work is that some like minded people might appreciate the nature of my attempt, and that it resonates with them in some way.
My friends share this temperament and it’s what drives Hyperidean Press – which we all work for on a voluntary basis. We strive for some measure of cultural impact over any sort of commercial one, and we consider ourselves lucky to be able to continue doing this for as long as possible.
Both works are, to a degree, about gender. Has becoming a father to a son affected the way you approach masculinity?
I think that becoming a father is perhaps the most consequential event of my entire life. I’ve come to realise that it is probably the only ‘real’ ambition I’ve consistently held, and that I’ve always had an unconscious sense that everything I did previously was in preparation for it. In many ways, it has re-affirmed many of the suspicions I’ve had with regards to the role of the father and masculinity. With regards to the latter, I’ve been pre-occupied with this topic in my academic work. What I’ve discovered is that there’s very little will to understand masculinity as a category on its own terms, as worthy of serious philosophical or intellectual consideration. It’s only acceptable to approach it from a position that begins with the basic notion that it is something to be mitigated, suppressed and dismantled etc. The resultant knowledge gap is filled by an endless array of online mountebanks, coaches, and self-help gurus peddling questionable advice for those who seek some deeper level of understanding.
On the fundamental level I think any understanding of masculinity – and its palpable and cyclical crises – must be predicated on some degree of acceptance of what constitutes its symbolic power, which is violence. The difficulty comes in accepting the fact that it’s impossible to regard violence with anything other than ambivalence, and that neither repression, suppression nor prohibition will lead to a deeper level of understanding of something that has constituted one the most potent historical drives in existence. The only solution, to my mind, is to acknowledge and sublimate this drive towards productive ends.
The idea of sentimentality gets brought up in, I found, in almost opposing ways through both works. In Horizontal Rain there is simultaneously the (mainstream, accepted) idea that men are not sentimental enough being both countered by the protagonists very endearing bouts of sentiment (worrying about texts, feeling ill on the way to the date, etc) and Robert’s almost Diogenean monologues about the distractions that emotions cause men. Meanwhile, in Agonist, we kind of get to see the underbelly of the iceberg, especially in the email exchange between R and Alice versus the conversation the sender has with his friend. If the restrictions on sentimentality are not innately self-imposed, what conclusions does your work come to in regards to its place in modern and traditional masculinity?
I can only say that, contrary to popular belief, the most sentimental and nostalgic people I’ve ever encountered in real life have been men, and it has been quite rare for me to meet women who are genuinely sentimental deep down. It seems to me to be a very masculine quality, which seems counter-intuitive, but makes sense somehow.
At the press night you spoke a bit about how you began thinking in internet terms, which resulted in the formal novelty of Agonist. Can you speak a bit more on how you find the internet and her denizens influence the way you write?
In 2022, I was living and working in Japan, and undergoing a period of difficulty which was intensified by the long and dense academic book I’d been working on for a long time. I was incredibly frustrated by the internet and the diabolical hold that technology seems to have on quotidian consciousness. I yearned to avoid the internet which I felt was inhibiting my artistic impulses by filling my mind with its tedious language and its banal humour. One day I was walking near my office at Waseda University in Tokyo at lunchtime. I read Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, set in the 1960s when he was a student at Waesda, when I was 16 - and remember trying to imagine what the campus looked like, and the neighbourhoods where Watanabe would take his endless silent walks with the troubled Naoko. The strange thing is that the actual (very beautiful) campus was quite similar to what I’d envisioned back then. On my walk I came across a small stationary shop, and I bought a notebook which had the name of the brand on the cover in English: Mnemosyne.
My immediate thought was the original title of Nabokov’s autobiography, which he intended to call Speak, Mnemosyne. After I finished Agonist I was speaking with the artist Nate Boyce about a still from one of his images I came across which I thought might be good for the cover, opting in the end to go with the Wyndham Lewis painting. He told me that his main inspiration for it was the poem Mnemosyne by the German romantic poet Friedrich Hoelderlin. In this Mnemosyne notebook, I began to write down and record all of the fragments of text and strange turns of phrase, comments, tweets, poisoned invectives, delusions, insults and expressions of pure hatred that I saw on the internet, from various diverse places, over the course of a year or so. It helped me to reconcile myself to the time I was wasting ‘online’, but I soon began to view the vast intricate palimpsest of The Internet as something worthy of artistic attention. Instead of merely collecting, eventually I began to channel some of the texture of these fragments, to channel these thoughts, into some sort of structure. At some point I could no longer distinguish which of them belonged to me and those which had come from this void, this monstrous poetic text of communal authorship and collective culpability. It was an act of exorcism, and it has been the only time the internet has given me any sort of inspiration, and it was on the whole an incredibly unpleasant experience – and not one I intend to repeat. I would prefer to live without the internet, but it sadly doesn’t seem possible.
Agonist in particular speaks quite strongly to the supposed return of the Dimes Square crowd (I’m thinking about the pages of insults in relation to the infamous Crumps humiliation ritual). You’ve outlined your thoughts on the scene in your Kissick piece but I’m wondering if you feel like the timing of works like Agonist also speak to a broad shift in the way we’re approaching post-internet art. Where do you think the scene is heading, and how do you think writers and journalists can avoid falling into the trap of cultural kleptocracy/narcissism?
The Meanings of Dean Kissick was a straight piece I wrote in 2022 that someone requested, but who decided not to publish it because it was a little mean. I read his Harper’s essay, and I thought it would be amusing to re-imagine it as a piece of speculative ‘fan fiction’, much like Beethoven’s admiring ode to Napoleon, the title of which he derisively changed to ‘The Memory of a Great Man’ after he crowned himself Emperor. Perhaps ‘Dimes Square’ is a confected PR artwork by the artist/publicist Dean Kissick, perhaps it’s an organic cultural phenomenon which will in time produce some vital and compelling work. I honestly don’t have any animosity towards that scene, nor towards the artists and personages who inhabit it – some of whom I’m friendly with. I would say the opposite, I find them to be quite sincere, interesting, and humorous. In Agonist, I tried to dispassionately use the entire field of contemporary culture and the internet in order to outline a peculiar – and to me self-evident - mythic quality and texture. There is little judgement, on my part, about its specific ideological/aesthetic qualities, or conflicts, which aren’t at all interesting to me in themselves.
There are some really exciting works coming out next year via Hyperidean Press. Can you tell me about your selection and editing process? Is there a general ethos that you try to follow when choosing works, or do you let the overarching form of the house be defined by the collective of the individual works?
In the Spring 2025 we have two works forthcoming. The first is musician Kieran Saint Leonard’s fictional pseudo-memoir based on his experience in the underworld of occult California, a theme which is both perennial and timely. The second is a poignant and darkly comic debut of love and anguish by a young writer, Henry McGuire. I can’t go into more details yet, but we hopefully have another couple of poetry collections in the pipeline, both by female poets. Our submissions are always open. We read everything. Our criteria is that a work presents something novel in terms of form or theme, or is simply compelling or affecting. So far our ideal selection criteria has been to look for people who are perhaps visual artists or musicians who have turned to writing – those who have a refined aesthetic awareness, but don’t attempt to mindlessly replicate the staid and tedious conventions of the ‘creative’, or ‘expository’, writing class so prevalent across this moribund literary landscape. In my view, it’s the most deleterious aspect of American cultural imperialism, this idea that writing can be taught, and one should seek to emulate the prose style of a handful of mid-century mediocrities whose work wasn’t particularly interesting in the first place. Work by those who don’t see themselves as ‘writers’ is more vital precisely because it is untutored in these forgettable lessons. Ultimately it’s more interesting for us as editors, because it allows us to deal with the most interesting and fundamental questions of literary and aesthetic production when trying to shape the work for publication.
Do you have any further literary projects in the works?
I’m working on a very conventional realist novella, almost a 19th century novel of ideas, on the theme of ‘Race.’ It’s surprising to me that no one has noticed how absurd and utopian race is as a concept. I will hopefully finish writing it in the middle of next year.
Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based critic and contemporary arts writer.
