Published: The Woke Iliad

Dear Readers,

I’m sending this special-edition newsletter on the day of the publication of my debut novel, The Woke Iliad. The book turns Homer’s famous epic into a humorous satire that relates the events of a fictional war between a woke coalition and a “based” stronghold.

I will write here about some of the inspiration behind the novel. Those of you who have read the book, or are interested in reading it, I would like to ask for the favour of reviewing it on the online bookstore of your choice. You can find the book on Amazon and other major online book retailers. You can find the book description and some reviews in the “Books” tab of this website. There’s no print edition of the book for now.

A few years ago, I discovered a new way to waste time on YouTube. I discovered a whole genre of video blogs of Westerners travelling across Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union countries. The bloggers sought out exotic locations and people to show to audiences back home. Many of the posts had millions of views, and thousands of comments, so my newfound pastime wasn’t fringe by any stretch.

The genre’s bread-and-butter was a peculiar culture shock that included a somewhat dark fascination with what today seems an almost dreamlike phenomenon of the Soviet Union and its collapse. The bloggers were like archeologists investigating a vast skeleton of a dead Leviathan that had stretched from Japan to Berlin and that had left such a deep mark on the people living under its shadow.

Binging on the content gave Western viewers a sense of appreciation for living in wealthier economies, but it also gave them a feeling running in the opposite direction, so to speak. Watching the down-to-earth locals preoccupied with what appeared to be simpler and therefore more meaningful problems of life than their own, the viewers developed a sense for the superficiality and nonsense that burdened their own Western existence. They started to wonder about the scars that their Western Leviathan may have inflicted on their own lives. Such impressions are, perhaps, what we’re supposed to get out of travel in general.

Then, in the summer of 2021, I don’t remember how, but I stumbled into some YouTube interviews of some of the region’s more colourful political leaders (who shall remain unnamed). I was immediately blown away by their lack of filter. To be sure, they were prudent not to say anything amiss within the local cultural context, but from the Western perspective, they were running roughshod over everything that is holy. It was at first shocking, and then – and I’m not proud to say this – it was hilarious. The only way to process what I was watching from my comfortable distance was through laughter. (I will admit that this was not much different from how I processed the phenomenon of Donald Trump, at least at the beginning.)

That summer I was in a good place and writing quite a lot. An idea for a short story popped up in my head: what would happen if the most politically correct, the wokest Western liberal clashed head-on against an “authoritarian dictator” such as the ones I discovered on YouTube. The juxtaposition of these two severely opposed egos was very promising. I could see their clash producing a giant, entertaining explosion.

What I was envisioning was not Borat. For all its irreverence, Borat is squarely a satire of Western right and non-Western (post-Soviet-union) backwardness. So it’s a double satire on the enemies of Western-defined progress. Neither was it South Park, which, though it lampoons progressive aspects of American culture, would never be mistaken for a conservative show. I was a millennial who was going to take the woke culture, that latest and most virulent mutation of American progressivism, load it into a clown cannon and fire it into a funny version of North Korea. (Or a pariah state of your choosing. For the book, the role of the pariah state is played by an entirely fictional Moldova.)

“Still, Western liberalism clashes against traditionalist cultures all the time,” you may respond, “Just look at all the US-led wars in the last thirty years.” Yes, but the clash I had in mind was not a conventional military one. War is a lack of confrontation in as much as it is open and violent confrontation: in as much as we want to defeat or destroy our enemy, we don’t want to talk to them and get to know them. The recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine have done the exact opposite of creating a conversation between the conflicting cultures. I wanted to create a situation in which, rather than the traditional route of bloodshed and destruction, the woke and the based had to deal with each other face to face. I wanted them out of their respective social-media echo chambers and dumped into a single chamber.

So I began writing a short story, planning to spend the usual two or three afternoons on it and then post it on my blog. However, I found myself tempted to insert so many new elements that at first, I extended the story into two parts, then into three, then into four. After the fourth part, I realized that this is becoming a “novella.” Two months later, I had finished the first draft of a forty-nine-thousand-word satirical comedy. In its final form, The Woke Iliad has 51,500 words and fifteen chapters.

The storyline of The Woke Iliad is jam-packed with contemporary topics, all of which are set up only to be violently punted. I took that stream of depressing news that has become a permanent facet of our existence and channelled it into my funny little book. Every time I got stuck on the plot, a social issue from my Twitter feed offered itself as a hilarious solution. After I completed what I swore was the final draft, some latest piece of news would either tempt me to incorporate it into the story somewhere or force me to do so to keep the story from becoming outdated. Or, it would make me think, “Well, I just wrote about this!” It still happens on an almost daily basis, I swear.

The insights and the courage (according to more than one reviewer) to write my “savage critique” come, at least in part, from my background. As a Canadian who was born and spent a big part of his childhood in an eastern country – not exactly Soviet space, but close – I’m an insider to both sides of this cultural divide, and that gave me a justification, a right if you will, to lampoon both.

My boxing hobby probably also deserves credit for the brash style that I pulled off in the book. It taught me how to be scrappy, how to throw good punches. It taught me that there’s no avoiding taking punches, either. And it taught me the great pleasure of hanging out with friends after a good sparring session. Win or lose, a beer never tastes better.

The savage critique in The Woke Iliad contains no in-depth philosophical nor sociological analysis. The work is decidedly a novel and not an essay. Characters are rather caricatural (a common criticism of the work), their decisions are impulsive, and their observations are deadpan. The countless, relentless jabs and one-liners are mostly placed in the mouths of the characters. The narrator for his part attempts to be disinterested and detached from the action, but he is too ignorant and often stumbles into offending one or the other side. The book tries hard to lose all friends by the end, lest it be accused of taking sides. Yet, I hoped that reading the book would inspire the reader with an in-depth contemplation of their own.

The last, but not least inspiration that I would like to bring up is the mimetic theory of René Girard. This will come as no surprise to those who’ve read my previous newsletters or visited my blog or my Twitter feed. To me, Girard’s work came as a revelation. I discovered it a year or two ago, probably through my interest in Silicon Valley. One of the big founders over there, Peter Thiel, was Girard’s undergrad student at Stanford. It was probably while reading an article or an interview with Thiel that I first heard Girard’s name.

One aspect of mimetic theory that appears in The Woke Iliad is the idea that the more two opponents fight, the more alike they become. Underneath bitter rivalries and hateful conflicts, between individuals as between groups, burns devouring envy of the rival and a desire to acquire what he has – which means, if you think about it, to become what he is. And when two enemies strive to become opposites of each other, it is as though they are trying to prove to themselves and the whole world that no, they don’t envy each other, they are nothing alike!

Our twenty-first-century Western existence is marked by countless, though largely non-violent rivalries. We have removed so many social boundaries, for better or for worse, and thus expanded everyone’s field of competition to an unprecedented extent. In older, sacrificial societies, rivalries were diffused through the victimary mechanism: everyone would unite against a designated victim and reconcile with each other through unanimous violence against it. But in our society, this scapegoating mechanism has lost a lot of its power. We are now experiencing a strange new form of persecution in which victims are celebrated and persecutors are persecuted. The comedy of “victim Olympics” and cancel culture figures heavily in The Woke Iliad. The comedy is that this strange new form of persecution operates on the exact same logic as all the old forms.

Another Girard-inspired idea is that politics and war are some of the last remaining forms of sacrificial ritual. And yes, we’re talking about human sacrifice. All the widely peddled theories about utilitarian objectives of politics or war are that many modern mythologies. The more you subscribe to any of these self-described “rational” ideologies, the more likely you are to become just another hothead ready to sacrifice himself for a cause that sooner or later will reveal itself to be a lie. Our descendants will see our politics as we see the bloody rituals of our ancient ancestors: forgivable perhaps, given the violent and ignorant times, but ultimately senseless and barbaric. That’s not to say I don’t believe in progress. I do: our sacrificial rituals tend to be less violent than those of the past ages. But the trickle of violence remains.

The Woke Iliad, despite its humour, depicts politics and war as heathen rituals. And is that not in the spirit of the original Iliad? Here are its famous opening lines:

Sing, O Goddess, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus,
That brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

Scholars often debate what is the main theme of Homer’s Iliad. Given the historic and cultural distance, we may never be able to appreciate the original depth and meaning of the work as could those contemporaries whose culture it presented. But, from what I’ve read, perhaps the biggest consensus is gathered around the idea that the Iliad condemns hubris, the arrogance of believing that we are above our adversaries and that we can destroy them without destroying ourselves. To classical Greek audiences, the story of the Trojan War, with its idiotic cause and rampaging egos, may have served as a fabulous poetic farewell to a surpassed dark age.

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If you’ve read this far – or scrolled – you must have some interest in The Woke Iliad. So please, once again, if you’ve already read an advance copy of the book, log in to Amazon, Apple Books, or wherever you buy your e-books and write a review You can also drop a review on BookBub, Goodreads, Reedsy Discovery, or look for the book on other reader communities. The longer, the more in-depth the review, the better. Please indicate in your review that you have read an advanced copy, otherwise the platform may remove the reviews that come up right after publication from readers who have not purchased the book.

If you haven’t read the book yet, you can buy it for US$5.99 or equivalent in your local currency (and then write your review). Reviews are essential to buyers making a purchase. As a self-published, debuting author without industry connections, reader support is all I got (besides paid online ads). Spread the word and recommend the book to your friends. I really need to make some money off this book, not because I need it to make a living off it, though it would be nice if I could. I need it because my wife won’t let me write anymore unless I got something to show for it. And I may start having my own doubts.

Thank you.

Best regards,

George Boreas