The Haunting Presence of a Network: On Eugene Lim
Eugene Lim | Search History | Coffee House Press | 2021 | 208 Pages
Eugene Lim | Dear Cyborgs | FSG Originals | 2017 | 176 Pages
Eugene Lim | The Strangers | Black Square Editions | 2013 | 213 Pages
Eugene Lim | Fog and Car | Ellipsis Press | 2008 | 268 Pages (Coffee House Press, 2024)
How do you know that this is a narrative? Is it not, for instance, a sequence of images, an interaction within a measure of time, measure of space, an association upright for juxtaposition, intense pain, cunning solitude, a bland memory, a contrived denouement, the expression of disaster, dismissal? And so, architecture, movement, feeling? In Dear Cyborgs, Eugene Lim’s third novel, a character says: “It’s actually impossible—did you know? I Wikipedia’d it—for an algorithm, for a machine like our computers to, by themselves, generate a truly random order… The machines have pseudorandomness; the world has actual randomness.”
Soon, another character responds. “Well, what I want to know… is whether an internet search has a plot.”
Across Eugene Lim’s body of work—the four novels Fog and Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History; chapbooks, short stories, and other published prose—runs (he says) “a series of monologues,” a ruthless and economical parataxis of figures and forms. The sections and subsections appear random, but they’re also dense, abstract, figurative, reiterating. Conceptual density and intertextuality force stops and starts in the chronological time of the story; series begets series, creating a kind of “sudden verticality” [1] to the otherwise horizontal flow of text. Somewhere else, Renee Gladman might be compelled to call each of these works a “prose architecture.” A literature that sprawls. Characters transform from one post to another, simultaneously enabling movements from one genre to another; the figures repeat themselves—a Lim character says, snidely, “a disguised picaresque gesturing towards an infinite ongoingness”—as if the novel never closes to form a coherent totality. If at all the semblances begin to fit in, a character jumps in to dissemble it with tongue-in-cheek irony. Are you sure of what you see?
It’s a lot like an “objective novel” that isn’t an objective novel—as far as Alain Robbe-Grillet says—if it’s the scientific eye, it’s the one gazing at the imagination, it’s the kind that is constituting not realism but reality. At the very least, the reader has to scale to the top to get a brief glimpse of the view. How do you know that this is a narrative? Do you know?
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In hindsight it is obvious, but when I started reading Lim’s oeuvre I did not expect to encounter the internet as the exemplary formal conceit throughout. At the time of writing this essay, I read and reread his novels, like digitized psychogeography in analog. I remembered, years prior, that the novels contained narratives about video games, the gyrations of the financial speculative market, viruses, robots, machines for writing, cyborgs, riots, screen journeys, phone calls, radio messages, but not the haunting presence of a network.
Nicholas Bouriarrd, writing at the peak of post-internet art, called the artist who moves through history and geography the “semionaut.” The semionaut is a figure that traipses, links, and navigates symbols and signs in a saturated world; a successful semionaut may look like “coolhunter” Cayce Pollard from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, but an unsuccessful one might look like the poet Juan Garcia Madero from Robert Bolano’s Savage Detectives. In Eugene Lim’s work, every character is a semionaut with varying degrees of success—one’s a detective, another a poet, another an artist who revises their own work, another a programmed daughter comprehending her creation; Lim’s art brings them together through a staccato musical score.
Narrative structure is often conceptualized using binaristic and complimentary (if opposing) formal elements—the individual note versus the totality of chords, the character’s temporality versus the narrative movement, what Victor Sholvsky calls the fabula and the sjuzhet. In Lim’s work, these variables are the hyperlink and the hypertext. Etymologically from ancient Greek, the term “hyper” contains space: meaning “over” or “above,” the “beyond” or “exceptional.” The computational sensibility to the term arrives later, with the birth of software, as “extension.” In Lim’s work, the “trick,” as he himself calls it, is coming up with unique reasons to prolong with these links together.
It is easier to say this: a hypertext is a text of hyperlinks.
Hypertextuality is also an intertextual style, a formal mode of writing done on—note the archaic construction—“Apple Macintosh Computers” in the last century, often using the Storyspace application. Examples include Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden which uses Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths as a mapped framework; additionally, a rich text with footnotes and indexes is also often called a hypertext. Our books—a hypertext. Our social media timelines—hypertext. Our articulated lives—“do I contradict myself?”—also hypertext.
Lest we forget, the hypertext is a significant historical artifact. The form exists prior to the internet. In 1989, Tim Bern created a language overlay for CERN, calling it the mesh, which included protocols, servers, and a client app for editing that later became the World Wide Web. The hypertext was a linguistic framework, an accumulation of links between verbal and visual information, as Claire Bishop says, through a public and distributed source. The internet is managed by mega-corporations now, but the hypertext belongs to us. Perhaps just as literature does. Call this emphasis on the publicly available, free to use, free to transform web a 1.0 nostalgia, but it isn’t about foregone conclusions. Lim is nostalgic (memorializing isn’t escaping the present) so as to keep connectedness alive.
While hypertextuality does imply accumulation, curation, even the perpetual amassing of the hobbyist’s trade, it also signals movement both internal and external to itself. It folds into itself, while it also characteristically sneaks out, leaves gaps, creates disassociation. The hyperlink (as Wikipedia, itself a great example of a perpetuating hypertext, explains) provides many kinds of movement: “hyperlinks can be bidirectional: they can be followed in two directions, so both ends act as anchors and as targets. More complex arrangements exist, such as many-to-many links.” The hypertext’s contained spatial odyssey is realized with acute sensibility in Lim’s Search History. The roving movement feels like a blighted tendency, and the novel itself is also the search for a lost object, where the loss and the object are accounted for in multiple directions. In Fog and Car and Dear Cyborg too, the subject/objects continue percolating in variations. Their connections and links stretch over material, so taut that one encounters one hyperlink, then another, and then a webbing structure in endless space.
Holding and bringing these together, the battle of hardware and software, materiality and virtuality, reality and representation, is what forms Lim’s amphitheatre. “[A]rchitecture involves seeing whether ideas can withstand the attack of building,” says Henri Lefevre in The Production of Space. [2] The public safety response arrives promptly: this is not only meta-fiction, but meta-fictional bleed. [3]
Lim’s novels and published stories extend: its characters (Dave, Muriel, Frank Exit, Ms. Mistletoe, Detective Car and others) occupy different positions across the novels, sometimes as detectives or vigilantes or protestors or friends or puns or extended metaphors; these characters are categories and generalizations. Through their very generalization, they become characters staunchly proclaimed by their genres.
In Search History, a novel that hedges on the problem of identity, the child robot Donna Winters asks:
I mean how do we derive our sense of self and, despite every indication of its contingent and influx and temporary nature, why do we insist so fundamentally on its integrity and durability and independence? What’s more, why do we think that this illusory self has any agency whatsoever?
The narrator responds by asserting faith in flux, somewhat condescendingly, before both of them spin out two winding personal histories—one a chronological bildungsroman; the other a personal memoir about the narrator’s relationship with their dead friend (who might have been reincarnated as a dog) Frank Exit.
It is safe to assume that these characters all live in what Lim calls the transactional and tokenistic space of Diaspora City, a setting that reoccurs through his novels, signaling toward a migrant heterogeneity that is soon subsumed into a tokenisitic diversity. I’ve never been, and so I’m loath to call it “New York City,” but it probably is similar—at least the landmark bars (a cinematic mention of “KGB”) are. The characters’ lives are marred by the precarity and loss of temporary jobs, capricious hustle, political downturn, and dangerous social attritions of the twenty-first century; they’re trapped in austerities but constantly reformulated from aggregate parts, often through conversation. They keep making art, more conversation, protest, and soon enough, each act is rendered toothless by its other parts. It is perhaps why all of these narratives tease an inevitable loss and opine on topical failures of true socio-political transformation. It is also perhaps why Lim’s public Instagram account handle is Frank Exit, an allusive persona underscored through the middle.
As such, Dear Cyborgs, the distinctly Occupy, distinctly protest novel, dwells on the political act:
“And that act may on some other level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.”
So speaking, these characters swim through their texts as one swims through the market, grasping at straws. The history of the hypertext is also the history of its co-optation into the internet—architecture rendered into a financial structure.
“Oh, the omnipotent digestive juices of the market’s gut—it eats it all!”
There are other proverbial recourses: the text is Gaussian noise! the text is axiomatically open-ended! it is rhizomatically branching!
“Then I think: Fellows! Sisters! Cousins!”
The question isn’t imperative: why does Lim leave the text open? The question is where?
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Keep them guessing. The “trick,” as Lim calls it, is finding “a coherent reason for this series to happen and to continue to happen… to harmonize or reverberate” and to avoid its dissolution into anthology. The trick is to create dislocation through a series of conjunctions to reveal the present—and, but, still—with a deferral.
In Search History, Lim doesn’t beat about the bush: he comes straight out and calls it a MacGuffin. “I’ll throw the stick and you chase it,” the narrator says towards the end. “Yes Master. Okay dog.” The chase is a reoccurring MacGuffin: in Fog and Car, the characters chase each other; in Dear Cyborgs, they chase vigilantes and protestors; in Search History, the narrator chases a dog that he believes is his lost and dead friend Frank Exit. The dog, backwards, is also god, is also hope and some semblance of a future. The dog is technology, a programmed robot that makes people believe it is a dead beloved, and equally an illusion. It produces an ontological anxiety. This dogged chase keeps occurring in chapters broadly titled “Shaggy Dog,” explaining the narrative style of providing a long drawn-out joke without an anti-climax. The figures repeat themselves to offer an answer; the figures repeat themselves again and again to offer another answer.
Here’s an example:
The first iteration of Search History’s “narrative” is a section about a “dysthymic artificial intelligence scientist” and paragraphs written by an AI called “Cesar Aira, the robot”; the second is Cesar Aira and his wife at a gallery opening where yellowface is being showcased as transgressive conceptual art, done by an artist allusively called “McArthur Grant.” A situated discourse of the art world is reproduced: Aira meets Kenny Goldigger (a pseudonym for conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith) and introduces himself as Vanity Place (a pseudonym for Vanessa Place). These original artists, and American conceptual art at large, came under fire for blackface in 2015—more specifically, for appropriating the grief of others. Lim’s fictional conversation allusively goes on to remark on the appropriation of labor, as in, “equestrian sports” (Edward Muybridge’s defining photos of a black jockey), “Laughlin’s fortune” (funding the first museum of modern art, The Phillips Collection), then to oil money funding “climate fiction exclusively by indigenous artists” to facetiously introduce modern art’s contentious relationship with money, as in, its inescapable foundations.
The scene shifts and Cesar Aira and his wife are transformed: they’re two women standing in an assembly line in a cell phone factory in China, talking about creating art and its relationship to suicides due to low pay and worsening working conditions. The last two transformations involve the figures’ reincarnation as detritus, and finally, as low-level employees who ignore their jobs by slipping into the “self-hypnosis” of the internet. Then they disappear. The “tricks” that link these series in Search History replicate and reoccur over the course of the novel. They are common resolutions of events that mark crisis and loss: rediscovery, appropriation, psychosis, reincarnation, transubstantiation, and transmigration. Lim allows precious annotation, but to draw attention to stasis.
This repetition (through the suggestive symmetry of inter- and metatextual elements) of crisis is not recovery, a calm settling after a storm, but an impasse. Sometimes, repetition can feel like paralysis. [4] Metonymy collapses into aphasia, an inability to continue; and as Lim writes for Brooklyn Rail, he does this intentionally. The mission or attempt is to “break the words” or the formal constraints of sequential novel writing, messing with the connotative and denotative aspects of language, reaching for the “abstraction” of visual art instead of the “figuration” of writing. Beyond the structural principle, so to speak.
But if this were simply about wreckage—the end of the world, the end of capitalism—it would be about guilt and revenge and high modernism. It is enjoyable to think through Eugene Lim’s work because he continues after the impasse. The Cesar Aira chapter is only the first in Search History. The narrative begins with entropy, then transformation, and induces a dizzying clarity over the span of its pages. In the same piece (and elsewhere), Lim calls this act, following Audre Lorde, “to give name to the nameless so that it can be thought,” likening it to piercing through the veil of ideologies.
The master’s house is burning, the dog is running into the burning building. Cue a meme of a cartoon dog sitting in a cartoon fire, drinking coffee as cartoonish sweat pools on its nervously caricatured face. This is fine. It’s fine, seriously. Nothing’s wrong. There’s nothing but a swelling crescendo of despair. Let the disembodied dog speak.
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The other “trick” is to build upon genre. Here is a drama of cognition, misrecognition, and familiarity. In Lim’s novels, the purity of teleological plot is flattened through rough sketches of generic events: a spy chase, a buddy cop sequence, a robot invasion, a detective gambol, a domestic scene, a road trip, a heist, each rendered to recognizable parts. Lim uses our familiarity with these genre contraptions to gloss over them, flatten their usual exposition and worldbuilding through connected gestures of a scene. The reader knows these set pieces and the theatre becomes disassembled vehicles of movement; a contraption functioning as conflict, rhythm, shift, and intervention. He generalizes towards genre.
For example, halfway through Dear Cyborgs, after an aside titled “Meanwhile,” where a disciplined method versus a dilettantish method is debated, Muriel and Dave feel the impetus to act:
“What’ll it be?”
“Court chaos,” Dave said. And I nodded.
And so Muriel then cut the bright blue wire on the console. Fortunately for us this stopped the countdown to the lethal explosion and the city was saved.
Lim, following the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), calls these genre elements “hyperstitions,” which use genre toward disordering the future. Lim’s generic mode pulls the rug out from the contained arc and act of the singular centralizing narrative. The hyperstition can be better understood as a novel manner of ordering informational flows and networks within techno-capitalism. The text is interactive, necessitating the intervention of the reader for categorization of its entropic structures. Genre inflects, demands, and manages expectations anew: it’s a goddamned virus.
Lim is a seductive writer; he courts the apostrophe—the absentee, the subject who has “turned away” (from the Greek apostrephein). Like most seductive writers, the charm of his prose often also relies on its bluntness; his is a provocation that throws the thing you’ve turned away from into relief. Lim, of course, calls this ideology. It’s cringe to be told, but the truth is that we like the familiarity of the formula, the generality of the generic, the smooth ease of reading and acting through convention. It’s machine learning. It’s following the canon. It’s working to pass at every institution you encounter. Like digging into ice-cream after a break-up. It’s all rom-com-y, perfect main character energy.
In Lim’s novels, the familiarity of the genre or MacGuffin element intervenes to lull the reader into a space of comic relief amidst a pervading lack of agency. Its flatness comforts until you hit the experiential limit of language. The flatness eases the alienation and isolation of living in techno-capitalism, but with a possessive hook. Am I relatable? There is a calculated emotional distance in Lim’s prose, and a lack of affective content occupies much of the intimate public spaces in its pages. In fact, in Seach History, the narrator becomes close to Frank Exit because of their shared Korean-Americanness, and after playing increasingly allegorical videogames together they begin to silently “inhabit objects together,” holding each other in the dense material thicket without grasping or reaching for control. Their intimacy is opaque. This studied inscrutability is also a reclamation of otherness, of not-knowing, against the weaponization of the emotions of a assumed universal subjectivity. As Martin F. Manalasan writes, “disaffectation” or emotional distance “center[s] this word’s other connotation of disloyalty to regimes of power.” [5]
The zigzagging, unstable, multiplying nodes of the narrative destabilize the experience of reading into overwhelming excess. How do you know that this is a narrative? Amidst the familiar and conventional forms are forms familiar in other ways: protests, riots, suicides, creative expression, emotional intimacy. Is authenticity familiar? There’s also horror and tension. Is the machine more interestingly authentic? The lull and jolt of Lim’s prose, from comfort to destabilization, identifies dislocation and alienation. Following Bollas, Lauren Berlant mentions modes of knowledge that are unidiomatic in form: an “unthought,” or a certain admittance into the impasse—and Lim’s naming of the unnameable, through formal experimentation, bends and breaks towards such unthought thought. The place of fantasy, of genre and conventional desires, then lies in between emotional distance and intimacy. This is how I protect myself from the world. Frank Exit, who kills himself in most of the narratives (Fog and Car and Search History), haunts the text and keeps the others guessing and grieving. Who the fuck is running this machine or… ?
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How does anyone follow this? No one is writing like Lim. If anything, Lim forces us to articulate how we ask questions of the world—inside and outside literature. How does anyone act in retaliation or defense? How does anyone appraise and evaluate anything at all? How does one live inside this impasse?
Does anyone do it?
So you do it.
You chase after the dog.
[1] Michael Buton referenced in Brian Dillion’s Essayism. (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
[2] Henre Lefebvre, Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publications, 1991).
[3] Aaron Jaffe, “Gestures of Control”, symploke, Volume 28, no 1-2 (2020): 17-28.
[4] Lauren Berlant, “Four Two Girls, Fat and Thin” in Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[5] Martin F. Manalansan, “Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life”, Political Emotions, Taylor and Francis (2010): 215-228