Looking Backward at Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge: Mining Neural Neighborhoods and Social Networks in Postmodern Fiction

Abstract

Although in no way a direct response to Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Utopian novel, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge could almost retrospectively be placed in a lineage of dystopian responses to Bellamy’s rosy late 19th century picture of late 20th century America. Readers of Bellamy will recall that the “cable telephone” is one of the technological devices shown to the novel’s Rip van Winkle protagonist, Julian West, by the Virgilian spokesman for technological progress, Dr. Leete. Bellamy imagines the cable telephone as a medium for the transmission of pulpit oratory and secular music to a geographically distributed populace, part of the “implosion” or collapsing of geographical distance spoken of by Marshall McLuhan as a result of electronic media. This collapsing of geographical distance by electronic media is represented, in another way, by the alternation of setting in Lookout Cartridge between London and New York City, to the extent it is frequently difficult to tell where its protagonist, Cartwright, is located at any point in the narrative. Indeed, this very undecidability of location is explicitly part of the conception of the experimental film Cartwright collaborates on with his friend, Dagger DiGorro, who serves as the director of photography and camera man for the project: Scouting locations in South Wales, Cartwright remembers saying to Dagger DiGorro, “I’d said in the beginning that we ought to find visions intermingling England and America, so you wouldn’t be able to tell” (Lookout Cartridge 26).