Discover Top Posts Tagged with #eugene lim

I saw on social media that Eugene Lim has a new novel out. I don’t think I’ll read it. I’m mostly at home with dead writers today, and as for living ones, I’ve internalized the idea that the ones who matter probably aren’t being disseminated by the major publishers, even if I’m lazy about reading my peers in the True Mainstream in Exile. For our audiovisual Monday, above is an unlisted early-pandemic-era video lecture from May 2020 on Lim’s 2017 novel, Dear Cyborgs, which I taught several times in two different introductory lit courses as an example of the most contemporary of contemporary fictions.

Once I taught it alongside Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, and a passel of modern poets in a class called Literature and Public Life. I fumblingly tried to explain the layered hipster irony of the moment in the book when a character sings an Eagles song in a karaoke bar. As I was presumptuously telling them who The Eagles even were, I realized that these Zoomers knew, that the majority of students who never spoke—Midwestern young white women, decidedly not English majors, most from the suburbs—were in fact all Eagles fans. “What’s your favorite song?” they demanded, suddenly enthused. Not seeking any points for originality, I offered “New York Minute,” though as a child of the Hell Freezes Over era, I also appreciate the anti-religious ballad, “Learn to Be Still.” Normie aesthetics! So much for experimental fiction! Yet I’m from the suburbs too, and I do like The Eagles.

The above lecture, a year and a half old, feels much older, as if the last two years encompassed a decade. It’s one of my favorites among my video lectures: a brief but thorough account of radical politics from motive to outcome. I was very frank when I taught these giant classes, before I was informed with maximal and insulting rudeness that my services were no longer required, nor even especially appreciated. But enough of my resentments! When I first read Lim’s novel I admired its candid admission that radical politics are an aesthetic disposition, but now I think that to indulge or excuse this fact is repugnant in ways I didn’t see then; I hadn’t yet grasped the post-left insight, that this aesthetic pseudo-politics is the legitimating rhetoric of one class in power, not the cry of a powerless and oppressed underclass.

As for the novel qua novel, it barely exists, which is why in the lecture I can’t remember who says or does what among the characters; stylistically, the narrative formally mimics the web browser experience as an occasion for witty political sententiae.

Novels about the Internet are too literal. My last three novels are at least in part about the Internet, but I don’t make a nuisance of it. Nobody who actually manages to tear their bleeding eyes away from the scroll to pick up a book wants the screen experience straightforwardly replicated; if they’re going to read about it, surely they want it circumscribed by the unique intelligence of the form that preceded it—and will probably succeed it too, on that day when all the screens go dark and we’re left with our libraries again.

#eugene lim #socialism #fiction #contemporary fiction #novels #pedagogy