The Algorithm in the House

Joshua Corey on the Modernist Novel and the Grammar of Empathy

Dear Republic,

We are honored and delighted to welcome Joshua Corey to our pages.

-ROL

THE ALGORITHM IN THE HOUSE

On or about December 2010 human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into the street, and noticed that the flow of traffic had reorganized itself so that it was all traveling one way. But a change there was, nevertheless. In that year Facebook introduced its EdgeRank algorithm, which selected which articles a user would encounter in their feed based upon three factors: user affinity (the relationship and proximity of the content of the user), content weight (whether or not the user hit the like button), and a time-based decay parameter (new posts rise, older posts sink). This simplified algorithm would soon be replaced by more sophisticated algorithms powered by machine learning, capable of weighting tens of thousands of factors. “The algorithm” is now ubiquitous, whether you’re shopping for a lamp or for a date, deciding which song to listen to next or which TikTok video to watch. The algorithm is the universal prosthesis of our mediated modernity, as newspapers and the telegraph were for the nineteenth century and movies, radio, and television were for the twentieth.

One hundred years earlier, December 1910, human character changed, at least according to Virginia Woolf. She was fresh from the exhibition of post-impressionist paintings curated by her friend Roger Fry, startled by the paintings of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh into conceiving an entirely new path for the representation of consciousness in fiction. “All human relations have shifted,” she wrote in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: “those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.” The inner lives of people subordinated by hierarchical relationships were of fresh interest to writers like Woolf. Blinkered as she could be about class and her own anti-Semitism, her novels are nonetheless brilliant with insight as they rebalance the study of interpersonal relations that has long been the novelist’s beat with fresh interrogations of what I can only call the soul.

Human character didn’t really change in 1910, and it isn’t changing now. What has changed—what we are losing—is human appearing, in Hannah Arendt’s sense. In Woolf’s time, it still seemed possible for the individual to slip out of the murky realm that Arendt calls simply “the social,” that “curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance”—and vice-versa. Mrs. Dalloway appears—“the perfect hostess” and helpmeet to her Tory MP husband—but she also preserves a privacy that enables her to connect deeply with others. Her doppelganger, the traumatized war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, is unable to escape “the social”—Woolf calls it “human nature” and associates it with the tyranny of doctors eager to Make Britain Healthy Again. Suicide is his only escape. Can we in the 21^st century do better? The reign of the algorithm is the reign of an ever-accelerating and more ruthless conformity; it is the triumph of “the social,” in which both public and private disappear in the tide of slop. Can the old-fashioned technology of the novel guard a space for the inner life, and thus a space for the reader’s appearing to herself, the hero of her own life at last?

“Mrs. Brown is eternal,” writes Woolf. “Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface.” It is the writer who changes as new social relations emerge. As Gertrude Stein put it in “Composition as Explanation,” “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” But writing only changes when readers, the essential part of the “everybody [who] is doing everything” demand the truth about Mrs. Brown. Addressing such readers directly, Woolf writes, “You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.”

How can readers, today, ask creative writers to tell them the truth about human nature when not only our social relations but our inner lives are pummeled into fragments in the service of algorithmic narcissism? We are all Calibans mocked by the black mirrors of our phones; Prospero has drowned his book. Today’s Mrs. Brown walks in a cloud composed of infinite splinters of selfhood; what instrument can writers muster capable of detecting the magnetic field holding them together? We have tried to resolve the contradiction by elevating one splinter above all the others, the splinter that seems least eradicable: that of personal (ethnic or religious or national) identity. We are fearfully reductive about ourselves. If we can scarcely find empathy for the splinters of our disavowed selves—splinters of desire—how can we muster empathy for other human beings? If fiction and poetry cannot sustain a grammar of empathy, it will be of little use or interest to anyone; it will only flatter one splinter or another, never grasping or even trying to grasp the whole.

Accelerating technological change takes a wrecking ball to forms of life that tariffs and walls can’t recuperate; Elon Musk and his acolytes take advantage of plummeting trust in institutions to destroy the bases of civilized life; the younger generation senses uneasily that it’s been sacrificed on the altar of unexamined pieties. “You are all a lost generation,” Stein told Hemingway, who knew a good brand when he saw one; he scribbled her remark onto the epigraph page of The Sun Also Rises, alongside a verse from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.” But does it? It’s 2026, one hundred years after The Sun Also Rises was first published, and the extent of sense of fragmentation now extends to the earth itself as global warming intensifies and the post-World War II settlement disintegrates. The winter of our discontent breaks up what the modernists, reacting inventively to the shocks of technological acceleration and industrialized warfare, took for granted as eternal.

A few writers try to respond to the polycrisis sociologically; many more retreat to chronicling the folkways of anxious Berliners and Brooklynites, people with elite educations bewildered by the nakedness of post-ideological power. The initiative still seems to belong to writers from marginalized backgrounds, carving out a place for representation in spaces from which they were historically excluded. That this space, the space of literature, has at the same time withered and shrunk is a matter of correlation, not causation. But the contraction has left some writers, notably younger white men, feeling bitter and betrayed and edging unhappily to the right.

I am older, and luckier. I was born in the twentieth century, and though I grew up playing Donkey Kong in the arcade, my style of thought remains analog. My mind and heart are untimely in Nietzsche’s sense, misaligned with the frenetic tempo of our present. This can leave me feeling sometimes scattered and irrelevant, adrift in a hostile world in which people watch vertical videos in public with the sound turned all the way up. But untimeliness can be a choice. More and more I feel my whole way of being—reading rather than scrolling, seeing rather than watching—offers something different than a mere retreat from the dismal present. Or as Ian Hamilton Finlay once put it, “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”

The novel is one such garden, an untimely hybrid of lyric and epic impulses. The “loose, baggy monster” disparagingly described by Henry James becomes the strange lithe beast that Woolf unleashed in her heroic period, the loose trilogy that makes up Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, In Mrs. Dalloway she anticipates the splinter in consciousness, dividing the novel’s subjectivity between a society hostess and a shell-shocked veteran, only one of whom can survive the novel’s central realization: “Communication is health.” The Waves turns the friendship of its five central characters into a gorgeous fugue of consciousness and unconsciousness, borne rhythmically toward the reader in a series of monologues like the waves themselves. In the middle novel, To the Lighthouse, she literally brackets birth, death, and World War I in the “Time Passes” section, refocusing our attention on the strange adventures of time and weather as they wear down the Ramsay’s summer house to the brink of ruin. Only the painful efforts of a pair of Scots working women, Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast, can reverse time’s flow toward destruction, restoring the basecamp from which James Ramsay will finally be able to complete his ambiguous quest for the titular lighthouse. In the meantime he loses mother, brother, and sister; he goes from six to sixteen; he and his sister Cam ally against their self-pitying father in an unspoken pact to “resist tyranny to the death.” And Lily Briscoe once again sets up her easel to try to resolve her feelings for the late Mrs. Ramsay, as inimical to Lily’s art as she was loving to Lily in person. Woolf had to kill the angel in the house, the idealized image of Victorian womanhood in order to preserve her own life as an artist. Mrs. Ramsay’s death makes it possible for Lily to achieve her artistic “vision” of her: “the triangular purple shape” that Mr. Bankes had once observed on Lily’s canvas. This image—a non-representational symbol of “Mrs. Ramsay reading to James”—is morphologically identical to the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” that Mrs. Ramsay identifies as her essential, impersonal self.

The angel in the house takes new forms today. She, or it, is no longer merely the image of woman’s oppression, but of the oppressive qualities of any social identity that makes itself paramount, smothering the moving multiple shards of identity that compose the human being. Our ideas of ourselves flatten as they flatter; they smooth and dehumanize. And if we have dehumanizing ideas about ourselves, how much more dehumanizing are we likely to be to those we’ve designated as other, beyond the pale? We are hostage to the algorithm that radicalizes even the normies among us, bringing us more and more of what we’ve already read, heard, seen. Everything is new under the sun, but we can’t look away from our phones. Doomscrolling eats the world. It eats our heart for the world.

It is the writer’s task to see. After 1910, Woolf and the other great modernists—Joyce, Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Faulkner, et al—looked beyond the sociologizing tendencies of the realist novel and rediscovered the individual consciousness under pressure. In 2026, sixteen years into the reign of the algorithm, our task is more difficult, as consciousness itself, like the garden in which Woolf’s characters stroll in her story “Kew Gardens,” is colonized. Casting about for a way forward, like the snail in that story, I move slowly and deliberately, quaking at the disproportionate scale between my puny self and the giants of my world: “Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal.” Yet the massive implacability of these objects is only an illusion. If I look up from my phone at my friends and neighbors, the people I live with, the people near and far, they shrink and disappear. They were only images on my phone.

I read—I look up: the world.

Joshua Corey is a poet, critic, translator, and novelist. His new novel, The Last Words of Jack Ruby, will be published by Tortoise Books on November 24, 2026. He blogs about sonnets, movies, and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels at his personal Substack, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fortnightly Review, teaches English at Lake Forest College, and lives just outside Chicago.