New(ish) Books
Eugene Lim's Search History and Jefferson Morley's Scorpions' Dance
EUGENE LIM’s Search History (2021)
Maybe the best pure writing I’ve come across in a while. I’ve strongly believed that there must be writers like this around - relative unknowns (Lim doesn’t, for instance, have a Wikipedia page) who are very free, very independent, bending the novel in fresh directions - and, like the discovery of some sort of dark star, Lim helps to confirm for me that there are fabulously exciting writers working now if one is willing to dig for them. It’s completely clear from the opening sentence - “The dysthymic artificial intelligent scientist who wished she’d become a poet extracts herself from the story written by the robot César Aira by putting down her glass of now diluted diet beer and rising from the couch” - that this is a special book, so peculiar, so funny, so sure of itself. That feeling never really goes away. It’s in lines like the mock-tragic “In the middle of life I found myself at various time in darkened diners or in overheated or undercooled dives” or (as part of a philosophical discussion of a character punching a hole in a wall) “You cannot punch through the same drywall twice, says Heraclitus’ contractor” or (in a character describing her artificial insemination) “I mail-ordered a kit and snagged some genetic material from one of Maude’s funnier cousins.” Given all that, I didn’t particularly care what the novel happened to be about. In broad strokes, it was about everything - grief, AI, art, identity in a postmodern age - but the sense I had was that Lim didn’t care all that much about any of his topics. For him, it was just writing, taking on a wide emotional range that he could move through virtuosically and attempting to make as many of his sentences as possible as brilliant as possible.
In terms of his themes, Lim is most sincere whenever he’s thinking about art. And there are two moments that are particularly revealing. One is a piano concert attended by Frank Exit in which the pianist is simply dazzling - “all fire and pyrotechnics,” as somebody else remembers it. And to the question of whether the virtuosity is somehow shallow, the answer is: not at all. That the piano concert represents something very much like pure art, with nothing so debased as content or meaning, just stunning beauty. And the other, similar moment comes with the meeting of the precocious teenager - Donna Winters - and the discovery of her “wicked epicurean mind.” That’s a good summation of what Lim represents - good taste, great humor, art entirely for its own sake.
But, as Lim seems secretly to be concerned about in the piano concert section, there are limits to ‘fire and pyrotechnics’ artistry. And I’m a bit struck that for all its ingenuity this isn’t a more satisfying book. We never care all that much about Frank Exit or his “Swiss Army knife” of talents - if he’s supposed to be the emotional anchor for the group of friends that fronts Search History, he remains surprisingly indistinct. And the Donna Winters sections, after a promising beginning, turn out to be schlocky shtick - “we scattered banana peels in our wake thus disabling their pursuit.” The sections in which the narrator - although we never exactly know who is speaking - discusses his father are the strongest in Search History, a fairly straightforwardly realist depiction of a remote older man attempting belatedly to connect with his teenage son - “It was as if he had been talking to himself, an inner monologue, one that had just accidentally been spoken out loud”; “He poured me a smaller drink which was an unusual enough move that I realized he was apologizing.”
But I had the sense that Lim didn’t want the reader to get too attached to the emotionally resonant sections. The idea is that he’s dipping in to different thick emotions without being overwhelmed by them. The sort of meta-narrative of Search History is that it’s tackling grief in the AI era - a new reality in which identity is deeply fluid (a point that Lim capably makes with his Russian doll-style of narrative-building, infolding narratives within narratives, constantly telling stories by having one character overhear somebody else’s conversation, etc), in which consciousness seems ever more disentangled from the physical body, and in which the death of a friend seems uncanny as much as tragic, and grief is processed in a very different way, as something like a glitch in the system. As an aesthetic effect, what seems to be happening is a kind of post-human shruggingness, a sense that grief can just as easily be mixed up with whimsicality or the ‘wicked epicurean mind’; and whole new ways of processing emotion can come into being. Or as a ‘jetsam named Onoto’ says to a ‘flotsam named César,’ very excited about discovering a new AI-generated style of music: “It’s music by cyborgs for cyborgs.” And that’s, in a way, what Lim is up to - the aesthetic garden, disconnected from actual flesh-and-blood emotion. Speaking personally, I don’t exactly love this direction - I suppose it’s fair to the world we live in now, but I don’t exactly want artists to be finding the virtues in it in the way that Lim does. The overriding feeling I get with him is of being around a very talented DJ doing mashups - the mashup of grief, the mashup of existential terror, each just one beat among many. It’s cool. It’s a place you want to be. But it’s not exactly clear what the contribution is, what Lim is saying that’s meant to be remembered after you go home for the night.
So I guess that that’s my takeaway. I’m thrilled to discover Lim. I’ll never punch drywall again without thinking of Heraclitus’ contractor. But I think I’m right to be a little skeptical of his ‘school of pure writing,’ which over the past few decades has gradually been driving out realism as the thing that the serious artists are doing. Lim himself is clearly a bit anxious about the pyrotechnics, works in these set pieces of old-fashioned emotion just to show that he can do it, but, as a whole, the narrative is just a bit overly kinetic - there’s the bravura reincarnation prologue, the experiments in AI centered on the dysthymic AI scientist, the ‘shaggy-dog story’ of the dog who is engineered to be a metonymy of grief, the reflections on the realities of a career in art (“Once it was a competition, a cheered race or a dance battle, now it is a slow war, attrition”), the dynamics of the friend circle processing grief in their different ways. And then, buried beneath all that brilliance, is poor Frank Exit, the gifted pianist and all-around talent, whom we can’t quite manage to visualize or care about. Maybe that is the point (that human singularity can’t compete with postmodern vertigo), but if so it’s not a particularly good one.
JEFFERSON MORLEY’s Scorpions’ Dance (2022)
A cut-out of a book. What Morley really wants to say doesn’t have all that much to do with Watergate. It’s the story of how the secret of the JFK assassination - carried out from within the network of the CIA - reverberated around the halls of power in the assassination’s aftermath. Even now - 60 years after the assassination and 45 years after Congress declared it a conspiracy - that point is still too toxic to say directly, so, for Morley, a doyen of assassination researchers, his central topic continues to be approached by triangulation, with the knowledge that if he talks explicitly about the CIA’s involvement in the assassination then his book will be relegated to the fringe, and so his leading revelation, about Nixon’s 1971 conversation with Director of Central Intelligence Dick Helms, is deployed as an insight on Watergate as opposed to what it really is, a critical piece of evidence on the JFK assassination.
This is the same pattern that Morley has utilized in his other work - particularly in his enthralling biography of the CIA’s counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Morley is a careful, skilled journalist, he says only what he knows - and that means to a certain extent staying within the bounds of the official record - but his choice of subject matter, Helms, Angleton, Win Scott creates, by the end of it, a ring around the pivotal event.
It’s to be understood that the kernel of this book is the conversation between Nixon and Helms that Morley unearthed in the Nixon tapes. It’s from 1971 - so separate from the ream of material that was listened to as part of the Watergate investigations.
What it proves is that Nixon was well aware of leverage he had over the CIA - and leverage that he was considering exercising in 1972 with his ‘Bay of Pigs’ remark on the ‘smoking gun’ tape. And Morley is able to prove too - and, were he a prosecutor, this would be a real connecting-of-dots - that Nixon was explicitly referring to ‘The Who Shot John angle’ when he sent Haldeman to talk to Helms, and which caused to Helms to go ballistic when the message was relayed. As Morley writes, in a crisp distillation of his argument in Politico, “The edgy conversation between Nixon and Helms eight months before the Watergate arrests confirms that Nixon did indeed have JFK’s assassination on the mind when he pressed Helms about the secrets of the Bay of Pigs.”
The book is basically gift wrapping to surround the disclosure of the 1971 conversation, and, somewhat unfortunately, its nature requires Morley, if he is to get his revelations published at all, to restrict himself to the participants in the conversation, as if he were a prosecutor forced his limit his indictment to only those members of a conspiracy specifically caught on a wiretap, as opposed to analyzing the ramifications of that disclosure as they pertain to the entire JFK case. And, unfortunately, the participants on the hot mic are two of the less glamorous characters in the whole business - Nixon, whose story has been so voluminously told and about whom Morley doesn’t have all that much to add; and Helms, as circumspect a person as there has ever been, who left barely a glimmer of truth anywhere in the public record. And the inner logic of the gift wrapping forces Morley to recount the entire story of Watergate, which is a bit tedious and distracts from the impact of his primary revelation.
Not that it’s all boring. Morley’s tale is useful as the history of the relationship between Helms and Nixon, and it does seem to be the case - as the scorpions’ dance title aptly puts it - that that relationship is the real key to understanding Watergate, that the burglary was a joint CIA/White House operation (obvious enough given that the majority of the burglars were recently ‘retired’ CIA; and that Howard Hunt had an ongoing relationship with Helms himself) and that Nixon ultimately ended up taking the fall while Helms largely succeeded in his task of damage control and kept himself and the CIA from being too badly ‘stung.’ And, for a layman, which I basically am, it’s useful as well as a survey of the dismantling of the old guard CIA in the 1970s. I’ve been mucking around - thanks to The Ghost and books like it - with the story of the CIA at its height in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the events leading to the Church Committee hearings have, for me, been a missing piece of the story, the question of how thoroughly the CIA was dismantled and what secrets remained uncovered.
But the real book - fittingly for something in this genre - exists at its own margins, quietly expanding the domain of what can be said by respectable publishers concerning the JFK assassination. And, in a way, that’s what’s most engrossing to read in Scorpions’ Dance - the story of how the narratives surrounding the assassination decisively shifted over time. The assassination itself, the ‘end of innocence,’ was no such thing - the establishment managed, through the skillful massaging of the intelligence agencies, to divert the shocking event back to familiar channels, the lone nut, Cronkite removing his eyeglasses, JFK Jr saluting, the venerable Warren Commission reaching the tidiest and tamest possible conclusion. But by the mid-’70s, the public’s perception - what the public was capable of comprehending about its own government - had rotated to a completely different angle of observation. Now the understanding was that the CIA could orchestrate a reign of terror across the developing world - with assassinations in Chile, Congo, Dominican Republic, etc- and was capable of lying brazenly about its activities. I’d grown up with the assassination of Lumumba, the overthrow of Mosaddegh, etc, baked into the collective unconscious, and so it was sort of a surprise for me reading Scorpions’ Dance to remember that each one of these stories was a revelation of the 1970s and that the CIA, before that, was understood to be a loyal arm of the president and strictly an intelligence-gathering operation. Morley, decades later, is doing the prep work for the next turn of the wheel, in which the CIA is understood differently, and in terms that the conspiracy theorists have been employing the entire time - as basically a rogue body that assumed unilateral power over a wide range of activities for its own purposes and that (as a very substantial body of evidence suggests) dealt with the challenge of a non-compliant president by whacking him and then holding his death over his successors as a form of extortion.
That’s a very unpleasant reality and, really, the end of all innocence - and especially when that’s combined with culpability for not only Vietnam but for mass slaughter in Indonesia, Cambodia, etc - and only now are Americans getting close to shedding their psychological defenses and understanding the darkness at the heart of empire. As an image of how drastically this understanding has changed, Dick Helms isn’t a bad stand-in. As Morley nicely documents, he was revered all through his career - a gentleman spy, given the white kid glove treatment always on Capitol Hill. Morley writes, “That was a story many people wanted to believe as the Watergate affair consumed Washington: the law-abiding CIA director as an innocent bystander to a lawless president.”
But by the mid-’70s and the Church hearings, Helms was suddenly close to pariah status - with the understanding that he had presided over a wide range of illicit and violent activities, that nobody knew the extent of it, and he had lied with aplomb to lawmakers throughout the entirety of his tenure. And Morley, through good writing, makes you feel bad for - of all people in the world - Dick Helms, with the sense that Helms as a part of the WASP establishment had an ironclad understanding of his professional responsibilities, which, incidentally, had nothing to do with conventional morality whatsoever; and that, with the collapse of the CIA’s old regime, Helms was hung out to dry without ever quite understanding why he had in any way violated the implicit code of conduct of his profession. As Helms put it, “The American people want you to go out and do these things, they just don’t want to be told about them, and they don’t want to have them on their conscience.” And that’s really the key point - the CIA actually could have continued in the shadow world for a long time, if not for the congressional grandstanding of Church, if not for the somewhat misguided efforts to come clean of Bill Colby - and the revelations of the old regime didn’t so much serve as a spur to needed reforms but as a debilitating blow to America’s sense of itself, an understanding that America had been operating on the dark side for a very long time and that disclosure and transparency weren’t necessarily psychologically bearable.
I was a complete believer in the JFK assassination conspiracy until I went to Dealy Plaza and saw how small it is. Standing in the street and looking up at that sixth floor window, I realized there were at least a half-dozen guys on my rez who could've hit those shots. Of course, I know the CIA, then and now, have globally engaged in countless evil actions. So it's believable they could've been part of the conspiracy—that they led the conspiracy. It wouldn't be surprising at all if they were. But to believe so would require us to also believe that JFK was somehow above and separate from the immorality of the USA government and of the elite ruling class. We'd have to believe that JFK was actually planning to make revolutionary changes—to seriously challenge the power structure. We'd have to believe he was a danger to the status quo. And we have to semi-canonize JFK in order to believe that. Is it an oxymoron to say that I'm far too cynical about the Presidency to believe in the JFK conspiracy theories? Except, well, I would've been very suspicious if Jimmy Carter had been assassinated!
If you've got an hour to absolutely kill, I used to teach Lim's previous novel, Dear Cyborgs, and have an (unlisted) pandemic-era spring 2020 lecture about it, mostly focusing on its politics, on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJOlSHob9U&ab_channel=JohnPistelli