Art Against the Algorithm: Vauhini Vara’s THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
Photo: Karan Madhok
In Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, the story of the eponymous King Rao is part of larger questions of human creativity and meaning in a transhumanist world, where life is data-fied, and sentience, thought, emotion and ethics are mere products of automated and arbitrary calculations.
In Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, the protagonist designs an innovation intended to perpetuate a kind of disembodied (human) immortality in the face of multiple extinctions in an overheated planet. Named “Harmonica”, this ultimate life-enhancing prosthesis works like a digital fingerprint, not unlike contemporary consumer culture’s rapidly expanding carbon footprint. It allows the user to connect her neural hardware to the digital stratosphere and upload the contents of her memory to cloud storage, from where another individual can access these mnemonic contents—not as narrative information consumed off a screen, but as actual sensory experiences.
This form of self-perpetuation via voyeuristic parasitism, however, is not without dangers, since it entails the manipulation of an individual’s biochemistry through the implantation of another person’s genetic matter. As the human guinea-pigs of this perverse impregnation succumb to neurological disorders and death, the inventor escapes from public scrutiny to a remote private location in Puget Sound, choosing to transform his daughter (aptly named after the parthenogenetically produced Goddess of Greek mythology) into a VR machine for preserving and transcribing her father’s life-as-code.
Thus originates the narrative of The Immortal King Rao (Fourth Estate, 2022) as a form of vicarious inhabitation, rendered in stunning sensory detail, by the posthuman Athena of her God-like tech mogul father’s memories as she learns to access and transcribe them. Athena’s narration is at one level a version of AI writing: her neural circuits are connected to a digital autobiographical archive created by her father, virtually reanimating his past. But Athena is also a human being with a mind of her own, one that becomes in the course of the novel a battle ground between its potential colonization by paternal inheritance and a desire to take possession of narrative authority to tell her own story.
This is of course a trope as old as Greek mythology itself; when transposed to the novel’s futuristic context, it raises crucial questions about biomedical ethics, sovereign personhood, and the increasingly contentious issue of privacy and autonomy: bodily, experiential, and cognitive. In a world, both contemporaneous and projected, where the line between humans and machines is all but eroded, and experience itself be it in the form of habits and capacities, or ways of perceiving, interacting and paying attention, life exists no longer without technological mediation.
Athena is also a human being with a mind of her own, one that becomes in the course of the novel a battle ground between its potential colonization by paternal inheritance and a desire to take possession of narrative authority to tell her own story.
As Athena’s narrative moves between ventriloquizing her father’s life and providing a first-person account of her own, ironically and disturbingly, for an assessment by Algo—the omniscient metaverse that has taken over the governance of the planet by turning persons into fully articulated and surveilled profiles on a new digital regime called Socials—the reader is asked to weigh-in on the fraught role of language itself—including literary narrative—as an archival medium that preserves as well as generates realities.
The speculative dystopia foregrounded by The Immortal King Rao is laced with an almost prophetic credibility. The novel’s worldbuilding, though imaginary, strikes as disturbingly reflective of contemporary neoliberal societies. Vara’s narrative is a sprawling triptych that spans multiple places and histories: an Indian village at the crossroads of post-independence modernity and rigid conventions of caste, class, and gender; American corporate culture during the post-war tech boom, and an apocalyptic future beset by environmental decline and technological ascendency, the morally-ambiguous and socially-divisive culmination of which is the replacement of human agency by an omniscient algorithm. The story of the eponymous King Rao is thus part of a larger question about the role of narrative—and by extension, of human creative and cognitive processes—of meaning-making in a transhumanist world, where life is data-fied, and sentience, thought, emotion and ethics are mere products of automated and arbitrary calculations.
The narratives plants and plucks a number of thorny questions about technology and humanity. Is code absolutely impersonal? Are the operations of AI entirely devoid of connection with human social and political structures? How does technology, intended as a solution to human finitude and the limits of human subjectivity, end up eliminating complex forms of agency, interdependence, and freedom embedded in the capacity for choice, ingenuity, and resistance? Where does the purported universality of technology intersect with the nuances of particular histories? How are these junctures—between the local and global, past and future, memory and data—controlled and commodified by corporate structures for generating specific kinds of realities and profits? At what point do our autobiographical and storytelling impulses become colonizing gestures, making them vulnerable to forms of corporate commodification and turning them into instruments of corporate interests? How does a culture that reorganizes itself around cults of self-spectacularizing and public archiving of personal experiences generate new kinds of “distribution of the sensible” (as noted by Jacques Ranciere): ways of seeing and perceiving that impose certain privileged models of what constitutes valid reality at the cost of making multiple others invisible?
The Immortal King Rao explores these concerns by setting up a fluid and open-ended dialogue, recalled in the book’s contrapuntal narrative style, between modernity and tradition, individual and community, desire and ethics, rebellion and conformity, illustrating in turn the instability and porosity of these apparently oppositional constructs. As one of the novel’s characters points out, the alluring transcendence of identity and inheritance promised by the myth of neoliberal self-determination and open access to resources on the digital freeway, in fact, obfuscates the precise ways in which technology remains tethered to established social and economic hierarchies, rather than being subversive to them.
In Vara’s world, these hierarchies are reproduced instead of being dismantled:
The truth, of course, was that the system was set up specifically so that most people couldn’t make it. The truth was that a person’s Social Capital depended almost entirely on the privilege they were born with, not any effort of their own. The prior richness of the rich and the poorness of the poor had been grandfathered into the shareholding system. While the biggest Shareholders sat in air-conditioned houses not far from here, feasting on endangered fish and designer root vegetables, the smallest ones remained captive in the global south—Myanmar, Honduras, the Congo—living on manufacturing campuses where they clocked in for sixteen hours at a time, subsisted on meal and cola…Unless you had created and sold some valuable piece of IP, your best bet on this continent, that is, if you were good-looking and charismatic enough, was to try to make it as an influencer. Otherwise, you were left to look after those who had made it—to nurse their children, scrub their toilets, trim their hedges, stencil their toenails. It’s the same as what happened at the end of the ancient régime, slavery, apartheid, but this time the Algo is responsible, and who’s going to argue with an all-knowing algorithm? How conceited would that be?
The novel is an attempt at deconstructing the notion that institutions—social, familial, political or economic—are ossified formations immune to alternative possibilities. Both freedom and constraint, as the novel sees them, are primarily modes of organizing resource and knowledge, and not mere concepts with intrinsic value.
King Rao himself serves as an embodiment of this ambiguity and fluidity of social existence: he is born into a Dalit household, but one that rises up the caste hierarchy through economic prosperity, till the family becomes the owner of a formerly caste exclusive plantation and adopts an upper caste patronymic. ‘King’ is christened to signify this very rags-to-riches narrative embodied, as his aunt sees it, by his will to survival.
In the United States, his impoverished immigrant status places him in other orders of discrimination, and the dynamics of caste exclusion shifts into the politics of race.
Vara’s insight into the ways in which different registers of power and marginality intersect and diverge, and her engagement with how multiple idioms and iterations of identity with their attendant social privileges and disadvantages come to cohere in a single individual, make the novel’s moral cartography complex and undogmatic. Victimized by a white security personnel and his Vietnamese cohort, King discovers the fragmented terrain of intersectional solidarity, while his alliance with Margaret, the daughter of his white professor. While romantically inclined, this alliance is also profoundly informed by Margaret’s ambitions in the burgeoning field of information technology, which she can only legitimately navigate within the heavily gendered milieu of the 70s by leveraging the support of a male colleague. Coconut, their computing brainchild might be the product of intersectional solidarity between a disenfranchised woman and a Dalit immigrant, but its first breakthrough success stems from an act of intellectual theft, a corrupt and cany distortion of facts.
At the heart of these contradictions, however, remains a lingering, unanswered conjecture: how far is King's technological imagination mediated by his lived experience of caste, and an acute consciousness of social inferiority that he harbours, complicated further by racial marginality?
Likewise, the protest of the analog apologists, the Exes, against the algorithmic restructuring of culture while militating for the value of human life, is itself culpable of using violent methods that lead to the death of innocent civilians. At the Blanklands—autonomous zones outside the purview of Algo where a community of dissenters set up a cooperative commune—the attempt to resurrect a planetary commonhold and live beneath the radar of digital surveillance does not iron out divisions and factions. Rifts of opinion, differences of cultural background, and competing loyalties are further echoed in the central quarrel between Elemen and Otis, regarding the legitimacy of violence and ethical obligations of social justice mobilizations. Confrontational protest and militant activism have racially embedded implications for the black subject that place the Exes’ radicalism on a different spectrum of meaning for a deeply triggered Otis.
The Immortal King Rao teems with such contradictions, which impart upon the narrative a richness and rigour. At the heart of these contradictions, however, remains a lingering, unanswered conjecture: how far is King's technological imagination mediated by his lived experience of caste, and an acute consciousness of social inferiority that he harbours, complicated further by racial marginality?
The narrative avoids enforcing a direct and didactic link between the nature of Algo—King’s apex invention—and a history of Dalit/immigrant trauma. However, the novel more than hints at King’s aspiration for power and the desire to surpass the limits of a socially-imposed identity, through the intervention of machine intelligence, as well as the restructuring of human value along the lines of algorithmic profiling and digital labour and performativity. These themes remain modes of addressing various psychic wounds and crises of subjectivity.
While Vara’s unsentimental and expository prose does not offer a sustained view of King's interiority, foundational traumas are registered with a measured elegance: be it Athena’s discovery of the alien consciousness imprinted in her brain and activated against her will, or the decisive encounter between an adolescent King and the village pariah narrated with a feverish, almost Dickensian intensity. We are tempted to wonder if the “cripple’s” exhortation to King in a moment of macabre intimacy and strange solidarity is resurrected as Algo’s social unconscious. “If you’re a person like us—a cripple, an untouchable—you’ve got to make them afraid of you. You’ve got to place yourself above them however you can”. This is a force field of caste and racialized inheritances, from which King cannot be liberated, but which enter into the seemingly transhuman technological universe, and become reconfigured as parts of a new blueprint of power.
The novel’s most incisive moments are made of expositions of those creative, unpredictable, and emergent insurrectionary forces that can implode an oppressive system or modes of hegemonic continuity from within, compelling us to in turn reflect on the ambiguous and paradoxical thresholds where progress segues into new kinds of power asymmetries, where utopian promises culminate in totalitarian dystopias, and liberal individualism comes burdened with micro-fascist tendencies. Any form of narrative endeavour, Vara seems to suggest, needs to locate itself in the interstitial moments and spaces animating social and ideological monoliths—liminal vantages from where questions about subaltern resistance, intersectional solidarities, and transformative possibilities can be more critically posed.
Against the invasion of surfaces that characterizes dominant modes of perception in the digital age… Vara’s disjointed, multilayered, and densely-woven narrative inserts a textured textual aesthetics, a kind of analog noise seeking to glitch and disrupt the smoothness of digital epistemes.
This is also the reason why Vara refuses to depict caste as a uniform system of oppression, and instead delineates it as a dynamic and shifting set of relations being continually modified in relation to other power structures, including patriarchy, ableism, and the modern nation-state. Dalit marginality and disenfranchisement are framed at both ends of the book by instances of women’s incarceration, exploitation, and suffering that foreground questions about bodily (and psychological) autonomy and reproductive labour, and map the continuities of gendered violence across time and cultural expanse.
The novel opens with a depiction of sexual assault rapidly escalating into a forced marriage, marital rape, nonconsensual pregnancy, and death of King Rao’s mother from a traumatic and gory childbirth. This primal scene is repeated in the wrongful incarceration and systematic digital profiling of Athena’s being through a series of biotechnological interventions. This latter instance is itself a culmination of King Rao’s appropriation of his daughter’s embodied personhood as a site for storing his own memories, effectively turning her into a living database through which he wishes to secure the novel’s titular immortality.
In ambitious swoops, Vara establishes points of resonance and convergence between the male-dominated kinship structure of King’s family of origin in rural India of the 1950s—where decisions about women’s bodies, mobilities and relationships are arbitrated by misogynistic norms—and the post-gender universe of future America, where normalized sex-work and valorized surrogacy are undercut by forms of toxic masculinist predatoriness and phobic anxiety around women’s authority.
The Immortal King Rao’s narrative structure, with its temporal jumps and interrupted storylines. demands a certain kind of readerly labour. It invites us to participate in its speculative worldbuilding by engaging in a form of interpretive forensics, where meaning accrues from joining the dots of a seemingly disconnected and fragmented historiography. Such modes of reading generate forms of attention and inquiry, in turn orienting us towards reconceptualizing and receiving stories as having deep structures that articulate those connections, links, and relationships between social phenomena, cultural artifacts, economic formations and ecological processes—much of which that neoliberal knowledge systems have attempted to erase.
Against the invasion of surfaces that characterizes dominant modes of perception in the digital age—the hegemony of screens and interfaces that threaten to flatten all interaction to forms of surface reading—Vara’s disjointed, multilayered, and densely-woven narrative inserts a textured textual aesthetics, a kind of analog noise seeking to glitch and disrupt the smoothness of digital epistemes. Could Athena’s creative act be a form of last resistance against Algo’s appropriation and quantification of the complexity of human experience, for the generation of marketable data? And in which case is King Rao’s invention a gesture of resistance against corporate surveillance, one in which the human mind serves as a medium of encryption?
The full implications of the title’s immortality are thus twofold, a hybrid production much like King Rao’s archival system—the life of big data that ensures perpetuity through the conversion of history, memory, and experience into abstract code—and the contingent, unpredictable, ambiguous domain of storytelling, where the subject’s immortality is only as good as the survival of the collective.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
