Joseph McElroy "Plus" a Novel of Wonder

The essay analyzes Joseph McElroy's "Plus" as an experimental novel that engages scientific concepts in order to make a difference in literature. Many novels find in contemporary techno-scientific discourse - particularly in the discourse of information and second order cybernetics as they intersect in what Joseph Tabbi has called the double systems of mind and mediality - some of their main metaphorical and thematic sources. However, unlike most cybernetic novels, Plus does not devise its purpose and mode of articulation either in the critical application of scientific or informational concepts to imaginary worlds or in its ironic defacement. Instead of assuming a mimetic or applicative attitude toward science, Plus engages directly with scientific concepts, it turns them into creative nodes for thinking and/or actualising new connections between science and literature. Or, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, this novel borrows from science in order to make a difference in literature. Indeed, by working through the specialized discourses of biology, second order cybernetics, neurology, and cognitive science, the novel offers an example of what might result from severing a scientific concept from its epistemological safety in order to turn it into an object of literary recreation. As the novel seems to suggest, this act might stretch the limits of the imaginable and of the imaginary in a wonderous way, by performing a linkage that puts the process of literary fabrication in the service of the conceptually unexpected, and by opening up the patrolled vocabulary of science to the “imaginary vistas” of thought and expressions.