[Semiotext(e); 2024]
“A ‘Hello, World!’ program,” we learn early on in Anna Poletti’s new novel of the same name is: “a computer program that outputs or displays ‘Hello, World!’ to a user. Being a very simple program in most programming languages, it is often used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language for a working program, and as such is often the very first program people write.”
In hello, world?, a humanities scholar named Seasonal attempts to understand their own programming, and then to rewrite it. Poletti’s first work of fiction, hello, world? builds on ideas in earlier academic projects like Graphic Medicine, edited with Erin La Cour, a 2022 collection bringing together illustrated representations of illness and disability; and Stories of the Self, a 2020 monograph that examines works of artistic autobiography performed in non-textual media. Like their novel’s protagonist, Poletti is an academic working in Utrecht, and, like their earlier books, hello, world? is interested in the potential of new forms, new kinds of storytelling, to alter human life.
The novel begins with an excerpt from Plato’s Republic—the famous one, about expelling protean poets who threaten the social order. The novel might have also begun with a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, animated as it is by processes of transformation. In the very first chapter, Seasonal, at this stage using she/her pronouns, is informed by the partner for whom she moved from Australia to the Netherlands that he is no longer interested in physical intimacy with her, or anyone. “I guess this means we should open our relationship,” he tells her. “So you can have sex with other people.” When Seasonal hears this, she is heartbroken. But by the time the next chapter begins, two years have passed. Seasonal has shifted to the use of they/them identifiers, their partner has moved out, and they have begun exploring the wide-open world of BDSM.
Seasonal’s main partner in this erotic new venture is László, a Hungarian man who has exiled himself from his home country after Viktor Orbán’s rise to power. The two meet on a dating app “renowned for its algorithm,” and, almost immediately, begin exchanging their views on the liberatory potential of sexual submission and domination. “Is your interest in kink,” asks Seasonal, “an interest in exploring or engaging power as a political sexual force, or do you tend to think of it as (purely) erotic?” “There is no such thing as purely erotic,” László answers them, “at least not in sex.” He goes on: “Playing with power, releasing it from its ossified state, liquidating it, so it can be communicated, exchanged, played, experimented with, is what I do in kink. It gives me great pleasure to be free.” Freedom is also what drives Seasonal’s interest in sadomasochistic sexual practice. They message László: “i am particularly interested in how dominance/submission can work as a crosscurrent in gendered forms of power.” Domination compels Seasonal as a strategy of rewiring the conciliatory, self-abnegating codes of behavior they learned as someone “socialized as a woman.” And later, when Seasonal and László discuss the possibility of their pegging him, they reflect on their desire to penetrate the man, to “queer him.”
Is this inversion of gendered sexual positions truly an act of queering? The notion of swapping as subversion is something about which hello, world? is smartly ambivalent. Even in the supposedly autonomous space of kink, Seasonal discovers that they run up against the same patterns of inequality that characterize life elsewhere. László claims to be in an open relationship with the woman he lives with, with whom he’s raising a son. In order to schedule dates with Seasonal, he must juggle all three calendars. Seasonal is sympathetic to László’s logistical difficulties, as they are to the commitments of their other partnered male lovers. But, even so, they are forced to conclude: “Imagine how much harder this must be for the woman.”
On a visit to their hometown in Australia, Seasonal confronts an unsettling epiphany about their relationship with László. In an effort to convince a friend to leave a domineering boyfriend, Seasonal argues that abusers feel pleasure when they abuse. “I know this,” they tell their friend, “because I have experienced this pleasure. When I deny, when I outsmart, when I corner László, I get high from it. Nothing else is like the high I get from it, and I can become quite fixated on pursuing it.” Speaking this out loud, they are stunned, and suddenly afraid. Their father was an abuser, too. They “struggle with their similarity” to him, to all violent men, and they wonder, the novel implies, if they are simply reenacting the patriarchal patterns that have caused the women in their life, have caused them, to suffer.
Seasonal also fears their similarity to Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, whose far-right policies spurred László’s flight from the country. Like Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism,” the 1975 essay in which the critic attributed the prevalence of Nazi imagery in sadomasochism to the desire of a too-liberal society for greater restriction, hello, world? is interested in the affinity between political domination and erotic domination. In these passages, where Seasonal explores the implications of László’s development in a repressive post-Soviet regime, and their own, as the product of the antipodean British Empire, the novel’s theorization of BDSM is the most textured. Both Seasonal and László left their home countries behind, but they can’t truly leave their pasts; Seasonal carries in them the cruelty of their father, and László finds himself attracted to the same circumscription of choice that caused him to flee Hungary. There is no utopia outside of power, a truth further ironized by both characters’ decision to settle in the Netherlands. Looking at László one morning, Seasonal reflects, “Each of them knows the intimate workings of Empire, and each chose to leave.” The Netherlands is hardly a zone discrete from empire; Poletti surely knows this, but their character does not seem to.
Unlike the nationalist Hungarian leader, Seasonal is, at least, searching for a new method of practicing power. As their domination over László grows stronger, they think:
Seasonal knows that taking, that ignoring the fear of the other and overwhelming the other with that need, will not free power from its ossified state. To overwhelm László in this way is merely to stage the same old practices of domination. . . . Defeat would be a pleasure of surrender, of giving over without damage or violence. This submission and its corresponding domination would involve sharing, joyful complicity and cooperation, not a reification of polarization.
This idealistic vision of “sharing, joyful complicity and cooperation” is something more difficult to realize, hello, world? suggests, than Seasonal may have wished to believe. In the end, they fail to achieve it. During a week-long tryst in a Berlin hotel, Seasonal violently sodomizes László—the term that they prefer. Seasonal leads László to the bed, where he presents himself, without being instructed, and they fuck him, “without consideration or care.” When the encounter is over, László thanks Seasonal sincerely for his “annihilation,” and tries to pay them a compliment: They’ve come a long way from where they started, as a dom; they’ve mastered “rape, sexual assault, disregard for the other, disinterest in consent.” Admiringly, he says, Seasonal has finally embodied male sexuality. Seasonal is shaken to their core.
One morning, not long after the act he called a rape, László discards all the trappings of the couple’s sub/dom relationship. He makes love to Seasonal like any man would; as he tops them, his eyes are dead, his gestures robotic. “Like a well-trained gymnast, working from muscle memory rather than expression,” he is “silent, joyless, determined. A simulacra of passion.” It is as if, the book implies, having been made so definitively the object of male sexuality, László is, consciously or unconsciously, attempting to reclaim his status as the subject of it. After finishing, he abruptly takes off, and Seasonal thinks to themself: “Here is the story they have been trying to avoid from the beginning: a married man rushing out of their apartment to collect his son from school.” The new story they were attempting to write has been undone. They feel themself constrained again by the old forms. Pages later, the relationship between Seasonal and László ends for good.
Perhaps there is no escape from what Seasonal calls the “Republic of Gender.” In the final section of hello, world?, both Seasonal and László reckon with their release back into their former lives. And although these passages are narrated poignantly, rather lyrically—Seasonal accepts László’s departure from their life while watching autumn leaves fall from a line of Utretcht plane trees—they are tinged, too, with something ominous. Watching the passage of the seasons, Seasonal realizes they must also accept “what László has made of them”—that is to say, a rapist. “They must face their fate and be the person he has helped them become.” Seasonal’s worst fears about the corrupting properties of domination have come true. They have moved through this particular crosscurrent of power and emerged someone they never wanted to be.
László, too, has been transformed by his experience with submission. The very last pages of hello, world? are the first and only time the narrative departs from Seasonal’s perspective. László, at home with his family, has been partitioned to the world of the feminine. He is doing laundry, folding T-shirts for his son, and daydreaming about the first time he and Seasonal “made love.” He has given up his experiment with true desire in exchange for the kind of life that is compulsory for many women, filled with housework and punctuated by pricks of nostalgia for a more passionate time. Earlier in the book, László teases Seasonal for their abdication of this kind of bourgeois, wifely existence. Now, he is the one who has succumbed to it. The final image we receive of László, the final image of the entire novel, is one of unfulfillment. He enters the bathroom to “furiously masturbate, recalling the bliss of giving himself to Seasonal. He will try to give himself that bliss and peace with his own hand, and he will fail.”
Not all BDSM relationships are doomed to failure, of course. hello, world? seems to suggest, rather, that if two people enter a sub/dom exchange intent on an outcome, and, in the case of Seasonal and László, the specific outcome of gender liberation, they close themselves off to the true revelatory power of the practice. BDSM incarnates the potential consequence of sex that is both its terror and its seduction: that the self will be annihilated, that the individual will abandon itself to being changed by another. Near the end of Anna Poletti’s fascinating new work, Seasonal muses, “If you say Hello, World? and the world says Hello back, then what?” The tragedy of the novel’s two main characters is not that they asked the question, but that they failed to hear the answer.
Griffin Reed is a writer originally from St. Louis and currently living in Chicago. She’s the Managing Editor of Boulevard.
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