Sam Kriss's Jason Arday Fantasy
Who was a real life equivalent of the impostor the British fantasy writer wishes Arday was?
Sam Kriss is a British writer who tends to start off writings his essays, often travel writing and/or general depictions of other cultures, as nonfiction. For example, from his Substack column on India:
Imagine if every air-traffic controller had to come from one of the secretive families of air-traffic controllers implanted in every city, and instead of passing an exam they simply performed their mysterious rites before a tiny black idol of God in his form as a cosmic air-traffic controller, directing the movements of stars and galaxies from his terminal in the great control tower beyond the physical universe, and then the airports had to hire them. Now imagine the air-traffic controllers all refuse to eat in the presence of pilots, who are their social inferiors, and if the daughter of an air-traffic controller tries to marry a pilot, her parents might try to kill her. Also, one person can ‘be’ a pilot and another an air traffic controller, even though neither of them have been anywhere near an airport and they’re actually both just millet farmers. That’s a jati.
But then at some point in his pieces he often switches from imaginative analogies to sheer making-stuff-up in the manner of Kafka’s or Borges’s high-brow fantasies. In The Metropolitan Review, a Kriss fan with the unlikely (but apparently genuine) name of Thomas Peermohamed Lambert notes:
At the heart of the disagreement is a new technique that Kriss seems to be using more and more frequently in his writing. Rather than sifting through the morass of human culture for a few apposite examples to back up his point — a task that seems pretty unimpressive in the age of LLMs, which can eagerly bring up pearl after pearl from the depths of the internet without ever tiring — Kriss is increasingly resorting to outright fictions.
Kriss uses a somewhat interesting shtick, both impressive and annoying. For example, in his piece “Against Truth,” Kriss writes:
While we’re at it, I may as well clear up any other lingering misunderstandings. If you were unsure, I can confirm that it’s also absolutely true that in the last season of Married at First Sight: Australia one of the contestants entered the Dreaming after slipping into the memories of his murderous ancestor, that I went to an ashram in the fictional Indian state of Parpakainilam after being arrested and jailed for the murder of the Maharashtra state politician Baba Siddique, that I have accurately quoted the Greek philosopher Scroto of Rhodes, that Santa Claus is a Kwakiutl cannibal-god, that I once went mad and started scrawling Aramaic incantations after discovering the Biblical name of Taylor Swift, that I encountered the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the Levant during a march for Gaza, that I found a wormhole between continents in Shanghai and the fox-spirits that control the Chinese housing market in Guangzhou, that the empire of Qin Shi Huang spread over three galaxies, that I had sex with half the Tory front benches after the 2023 Spectator summer party, that AI was preceded by the golem cacophony in early modern Europe, and that a reanimated BF Skinner is secretly operating the Dimes Square scene as his prototype for a society of total control.
Not surprisingly, this week Kriss imagines the late Jason Arday to be … Sam Kriss:
What we did to Jason Arday
Sam Kriss
Aug 17, 2026
It’ll probably never happen to you. Maybe I should pretend it will: try to grab you by the self-interest and say, look, consider that this weapon you’re playing around with might one day be pointed at you—but it won’t. You will never be Ardayed. You will never have to sit helplessly while your entire life is systematically disassembled in front of you. You will never be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. There will never be huge crowds delightedly rummaging around in your entrails, the chirp and titter of a million sparrows pecking at the flesh of a dead elephant: you’re safe from all that. Not because you’re innocent. You’re every bit as guilty as he is. Nobody makes it through life without swaddling themselves in a thick coating of lies. You lie about yourself so often and so automatically that you almost start to believe it.
Obviously, in this case, “you” doesn’t mean you, it means “Sam Kriss,” confabulator extraordinary.
The only difference is that when Jason Arday lied he went big. Huge, rough-hewn, monumental fictions, like ‘I couldn’t read or write until I was 18’ and ‘I ran nine marathons with a broken leg’ and ‘I had a brain tumour removed two weeks before my viva and had to relearn everything I’d written in my dissertation’ and ‘a mysterious South American shaman woman prophesied that I was destined for great deeds.’ You don’t lie like that. All your delusions are tiny, minuscule things. ‘I’m a good person.’ ‘I am satisfactory in bed.’ ‘The people who dislike me are just jealous.’ It takes a greatness of soul to build fabulations the way Jason Arday did. You need a Promethean spirit to decide to create yourself again out of nothing, and real courage to bet your entire being on lies that can so easily be disproven. But you are small and cowardly and you will spend all your life scurrying around in the undergrowth of the world, never poking out your head to look at the sky, and the thing that happened to Professor Jason Arday will never, ever happen to you.
Of course, everything the carrion-eaters said about Arday was true. Since his death, some of the people who think they’re on his side have tried to rewrite history. He was really just an ordinary academic, hounded to death by the right-wing media, because they couldn’t accept that a black man might deserve a professorship at Cambridge. Or, in the more condescending version, he was the hapless victim of all the smug white liberals, who kept promoting him way above his abilities to burnish their diversity quotas. No: this is an insult. He was brilliant at what he did.
Actually, he wasn’t. He wasn’t Axel Foley or Fletch or Saul Goodman, he was just a dimwit who claimed whatever came to mind and then weaseled his way out of his lies by being boring.
He blagged his way through the world with nothing but brio and good looks. One of the great British chancers, a wide boy from a council estate who managed to insinuate himself into one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He conned them all; all it took was some South London street smarts and he had them eating right out of his hand. He could ramble about Australian soap operas and convince everyone they were listening to a genius. They were! But now, in death, you want to shrink him down again. Domesticate him, turn him into another passive victim, distinguished by nothing more than the colour of his skin. …
It’s an insult to blacks to hint that Arday was the best they could do at lying.
It was more that Arday was the kind of pathetic black child that white people want to help.
Arday clearly deserved it more. For all the ways he was exactly the same as everyone else in academia, he was also unfathomably different. Imagine you’ve spent your life digging around in the airless burrows of some shabby third-tier department, when suddenly a person like Jason Arday appears. You’re in an institution that no longer really knows what it is or what it’s for, but here is the living embodiment of radical freedom, a man who invents his own history every day. You’re trying to massage a p-value into significance; he’s heroically overcoming every disease known to man. He must have seemed like a titanic, mythic, glowing figure, a hero out of a distant age. Arday’s enemies see a department willing to put its entire reputation on the line for this guy, and they assume that it must have all been cynical and condescending. That’s because his enemies are shrunken little creatures, incapable of understanding grandeur. Arday’s colleagues were clearly in awe of him. The world is full of illiterates, but only one of them became one of the youngest professors in Cambridge’s history. He did that. He was an Olympic torchbearer: he took up the flame that had been lit at the Temple of Hera in Olympia and carried it from Sutton to Merton. He edited the Today programme. For a while he was, genuinely, one of the most influential people in the country. Some of his achievements were real and some of them weren’t, but all of them were aimed at making this brief existence bigger and stranger and fuller with potential. He lived an extraordinary life, and he was made to suffer for it. He lacked the cold knot of fear and suspicion most of us carry: we know that everything conspicuous and vulnerable gets torn down in the end, and the best way to get along in life is to be as small and petty as everyone else. But he loved largeness. He loved it more than he feared the danger. He gave us a more richly embellished world, and he must have thought we might appreciate the gift. Look at what we did to him instead.
Ehhhhh …
In reality, Professor Arday was closer to Chauncey Gardiner in the 1979 movie Being There than to Kriss’s self-conception.
But there really was once a titanic literary impostor (or was he? Nobody yet seems sure) worthy of Kriss’s idolization who lived large until he got worn down by all the accusations of plagiarism and took his own life.
Who was this?
The bestselling author/plagiarist/villain/hero who was deserving of Kriss’s fantasies about Jason Arday was the author of the …
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