Plus

228 Pages·1976·8.527 MB·English

by  Joseph McElroy

Joseph M cElroy
Author of
WOMEN AND MEN
“McElroy is rightly compared to Gaddis and Pynchon
Plus is a novel of beauty and originality”
- HARPER’S
“PLUS, Joseph McElroy's remarkable fifth novel...is actually
very moving.”— The New York Times Book Review
“McElroy has accomplished something truly remarkable. Relying on the
newest information from various texts on psychology and biology, he has
painted a vivid portrait of a mind.”— Columbia Daily Spectator
“PLUS is a dense yet stunning novel.. .’’—The Sunday Plain Dealer
“PLUS is a real challenge and presents a fresh approach to
science fiction writing.”— The Spectator
One of the strongest and most innovative novelists in America today and rightly
compared to William Caddis and Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy gives us a
work of intellectual science fiction, both spooky and profound: an astonishing
and moving illumination of human consciousness.
An engineer suffering from radiation agrees to have his brain removed and used
in an IMP-interplanetary monitoring platform. Orbiting the earth in a satellite,
the brain’s function is to monitor its physiological self as part of a solar energy
project. When the brain begins to go beyond simple monitoring and reflect upon
itself, it becomes more than an IMP It becomes an IMP PLUS which grows and
develops an imagination that releases images and fragments of memories from
its terrestrial life and other rich and fascinating data. Eventually it develops an
autonomous intellect and affective life and cuts itself off from ground control.
In the unraveling drama and fate of IMP Plus, the reader senses an unsettling
and disquieting allegory to the postmodern condition.
Joseph McElroy is the author of Women and Men, A Smuggler’s Bible, Lookout
Cartridge, Hinds Kidnap and Ancient History.
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$8.95 0-88184-289-3
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What others have said about Plus:
‘Plus is a dense yet stunning novel that must be read
‘
slowly and carefully. It is worth all the effort to watch
Joseph McElroy reaffirm his position as one of the
finest, most important and, indeed, most human writers
of our time.”
—The Sunday Plain Dealer
“An exhausting, disorienting work of discovery.”
—Kirkus
“Well worth reading.” —Publishers Weekly
“Plus is a real challenge and presents a fresh approach

to science fiction.”
—The Spectator
By Joseph McElroy
WOMEN AND MEN 1987
SHIP ROCK 1977
LOOKOUT CARTRIDGE 1974
ANCIENT HISTORY: A PARAPHRASE 1971
HIND’S KIDNAP: A PASTORAL ON
FAMILIAR AIRS 1969
A SMUGGLER’S BIBLE 1966
Joseph McElroy
PLUS
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Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.
New York
Copyright © 1976 by Joseph McElroy
Introduction © 1987 by Tom LeClair
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any way or by any means without the written permission of
the publisher.
The author wishes to thank the Creative Artists Public Service
Programs (CAPS) for a grant.
The author is indebted to three books in particular: Albert L.
Lehninger, Bioenergetics: The Molecular Basis of Biological
Energy Transformations (W. A. Benjamin, Menlo Park, Calif.,
2nd Ed., 1973); Charles R. Noback, The Human Nervous System,
illustrated by Robert J. Demarest (McGraw-Hill, New York,
1967); Paul Weiss, Principles of Development (Hafner, New
York, 1969).
First Carroll & Graf edition 1987
Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.
260 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
ISBN: 0-88184-289-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Introduction
Quickly now, who is the most important American novelist
working today? Forget all categories—realism, postmodernism,
science fiction, metafiction, village literature. Is it Saul Bellow,
Thomas Pynchon, Ursula LeGuin, John Barth, Toni Morrison?
Some polymath who synthesizes their observation, knowledge,
imagination, virtuosity, and feeling, their collective concern with
man and woman’s survival on this planet? My choice, long-
considered, is Joseph McElroy, our best artist of crossed
categories.
“Who?” you could irritably ask and with reason, for no novel­
ist I know has suffered the disproportion between accomplish­
ment and recognition that McElroy has. Or “What?” might be
your response, suspicious of words such as “important” and
“today,” worried about some critical trickery. “Why?” is more
engaging, but I’ll try to answer all three questions as prepara­
tion for a reading of Plus, a novel that exemplifies McElroy’s
achievement and, as a parable of his aesthetic ambitions and
risks, helps explain why you may have asked “Who?” or “What?”
McElroy’s fifth novel, Plus is his sole work of science fiction,
the story of a brain circling the earth, discovering itself, and
growing beyond itself. Since its publication in 1977, McElroy
has been engineering his reentry, the densely contemporaneous
and decidedly American Women and Men, which should be his
breakthrough book, the text that cannot be swerved, its massive
and profound treatment of its title-subjects sending readers and
critics back to the novels that preceded it. Though these books
all have the voiceprint of McElroy’s singular sensibility, they
can be briefly described by their similarities to the works of
more well-known writers. A Smuggler’s Bible, published in 1966,
is a past-recovering first novel that resembles, in its plenitude
and fracture, Gaddis’ The Recognitions. Hind’s Kidnap is a
pastoral in the Nabokovian style. Ancient History performs a
Mailer-like meditation on childhood and privacy. Lookout Car­
tridge, a cross-cultural story of detection and search, reminds
one of Gravity’s Rainbow. Plus is neurological and philosophi­
cal science fiction, beginning where 2001 left off. With this set
of relations, why, you may well ask again, is McElroy not on
most reader’s short lists of “importance”?
Launching a novel into distant readerworld is like blasting an
encapsulated brain into earth orbit. This analogy, introduced in
Plus by the brain’s radioed question “Do you read me?”, circu­
lates throughout the book, linking art and science, their mutual
requirements of knowledge and rigor, power and delicacy, their
necessary risks and uncertain returns. McElroy insists, in Plus
and his other novels, that his artistic imagination must be equal
to the scientific imagination, whose works remind us daily how
limited are the naked eye and the acute ear, the means by
which a traditional realist (say Paul Bellow or Toni Morrison)
observes and conceives the world. “Many writers,” McElroy has
said in an interview, “see science as anti-human. I don’t. Sci­
ence and technology offer forms by which we can see some
things clearly; their experimental and measuring methods, their
patterns larger than life or smaller than sight beckon us out of
ourselves.”
After McElroy received a doctorate in Renaissance literature
in 1961, he went about becoming a thoroughly contemporary
Renaissance man, a process he describes in his essay “Neural
Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts” (TriQuarterly
34, 1975), a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing. To
give his imagination microsight and global reach, McElroy bur­
rowed into cybernetics and cartography, studied coral reefs and
suspension bridges, collected facts about the inner ear and the
outer heavens, read Mayan mathematics and Marxian econom­
ics and covered Apollo and Skylab launches for periodicals. To
keep contact with the literary, he has read and reviewed avant-
garde fiction from around the world for several publications.
Thomas Pynchon knows the history of Malta and the V-2
rocket’s parts. John Barth is a whiz at eighteenth-century curses
and Greek myths. They are, in their own wonderful, postmodern
ways, historians, nostalgists. What McElroy knows and—just as
importantly—uses to give new form and voice to his fictions is
not only contemporary— it comes to seem, in those fictions,
crucial to an understanding of the present and the future. The
linguistics in Hind’s Kidnap, the field theory of Ancient His­
tory, the computer and film technologies in Lookout Cartridge,
the geology and economics in Women and Men, and, as process­
ing organ of them all, the brain in Plus—these parts of knowl­
edge stand for the innumerable, inescapable, and mysterious
wholes we live among—what McElroy calls in Lookout Cartridge
“the great multiple field of impinging informations.” Although
McElroy once thought of that novel, arguably his best, as an
analog computer, his books are not just stores of data. Because
he transforms narrative to correspond structurally and stylisti­
cally to the information it encloses, as LeGuin does in Always
Coming Home, McElroy’s fictions are seductive homologies, ways
of knowing, macroscopes to peer through.
In my initial terms, the “most important novelist” of “today”
will be a model of consciousness, his or her knowledge and
expression equivalent to the time’s most distinctive and influen­
tial systems of knowing and being. Henry James brought to an
apogee the social, sexual, and econonic codes of the late nine­
teenth century. James Joyce metamorphosed into fiction mod­
ernism’s theories of psyche, myth, and history. Samuel Beckett
is the exemplary postmodern, working with the self-cancelling
principles of language analysis and metamathematics. McElroy,
I believe, is the next stage forward, pre-eminent American artist
of the Age of Systems, our representative among Europeans
such as Doris Lessing, the late Italo Calvino, and Stanislaw
Lem.
“Systems,” is a pervasive word: we own “home information
systems,” we read the bold-face classified ads for “Systems
Analysts,” and we may even get our hair cut at “Design Sys­
tems.” In its popular and practical usage, “systems” has been
largely emptied of the original and enormously influential mean­
ing assigned to it by the early twentieth-century Austrian biolo­
gist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, whose work offered an alternative
to the then dominant scientific ideas and methods. Von Bertalanffy
proposed the idea of “open systems” to replace the entropic
closed system universe of late nineteenth-century thermody­
namics, and he initiated “systems theory” to combat the reduc­
tive specialization narrowing most scientific disciplines. Von
Bertalanffy’s systems-thinking directed scientists’ attention away
from mechanistic explanation to interdisciplinary relations, to
large and complex wholes, to the reciprocal processes of energy
and information in living systems, the looping correspondences
and simultaneities of the ecosystem. The influence of von
Bertalanffy extends through biology and the life sciences to
cybernetics, the social sciences, and the ecological studies that