Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy

First published: 1974

Type of plot: Epistemological intrigue

Time of work: 1971, with occasional flashbacks

Locale: London, Corsica, Stonehenge, the Hebrides, and New York City

Principal Characters:

• Cartwright, the narrator and protagonist, a man of many occupations who is engaged in seeking out those who have destroyed his experimental film
• Daggar DiGorro, along with Cartwright (who serves as sound man), the maker of the lost film
• Incremona, apparently a hit man for organized crime who may be the ringleader of a large political conspiracy involving Cartwright and the production of his film
• Jenny, Cartwright’s daughter, who may be dangerously and unwittingly implicated in Incremona’s conspiracy
• Sub, Cartwright’s childhood friend and the representative of all the novel’s innocent bystanders
• Lorna, Cartwright’s wife
• Monty Graf, a crooked businessman who is interested in Cartwright’s film
• Claire, Jenny’s double and secretary to Phil Aut, the president of Outer Film
• Tessa Allot, Cartwright’s former lover
• Paul,
• Jack, and
• Gene, the Flint brothers, who are vitally interested in Cartwright’s film and involved in Incremona’s conspiracy

The Novel

Lookout Cartridge begins on Halloween, 1971, with Cartwright’s description of a ride in a damaged helicopter above New York City, where he observes below the sudden flash of an explosion. From these mysterious beginnings, Cartwright’s story of his experiences in the previous months as he searches for those who have destroyed his film unfolds. Through flashbacks and montage (indeed, Lookout Cartridge might be “read” as a film), Cartwright recounts the making of the film with his coauthor, Daggar DiGorro, speculates on the reasons for its destruction, and describes the labyrinthine entanglements of plots and personalities which have led him to the discovery of, possibly, an international political conspiracy that endangers his own life and that of his daughter. McElroy’s novel contains dozens of characters, scenes, and stories which seem to have been “cut together” by the narrator in a frustrating search for the logic and order behind seemingly unconnected appearances and events. Cartwright might be seen as a contemporary detective, except that his quest for the solution to the mystery is thwarted by the nature of the clues themselves, which are so multiple and ambiguous as to defy interpretation. As Thomas LeClair has suggested, Lookout Cartridge is a novel of excess. Readers of the novel (like the protagonist) are exposed to such a barrage of unassimilated information (one learns, for example, about the Mayan calendar, the origins of Stonehenge, Frederick Catherwood’s explorations in Central America, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s engineering feats, the structure of liquid crystals) that they are hard-pressed to discover the nature of the mystery, much less what its solutions might be. More than simply a parody of the detective novel, Lookout Cartridge questions the value and purpose of knowledge in a technological universe overexposed to information. Understanding the mystery behind Lookout Cartridge might well involve understanding the Daggar-Cartwright film, purportedly an avant-garde attempt to capture “English life” from an American point of view. Daggar insists on envisioning the film as a series of mises en scène: a softball game involving American expatriates in an English park, a meeting of druids at Stonehenge, the activities of inhabitants and visitors at a circular English country house, a conversation between an American draft-dodger and his friend in a room stripped bare of furnishings, the doings of vacationers on Corsica. As Cartwright recounts the filming of each sequence, he realizes that Daggar has managed the casting and production in such a way that the same characters appear in widely scattered shots, seemingly meeting for some dark purpose or to exchange secret messages. Cartwright begins to suspect that Daggar is using the film as a pretext for his complicity in some revolutionary plot which may involve anything from the hiding of American war resisters to a terrorist explosion that may kill a room full of singing children.

The political causes and effects of this dimly perceived conspiracy are never made clear, but, in his attempt to find out why the film has been destroyed, Cartwright crisscrosses the Atlantic and encounters numerous characters who, in the end, all seem to bear a relation to one another in terms of the conspiracy. Even Cartwright’s daughter Jenny may be implicated in the plot and, for unknown reasons, threatened by it (her double, Claire, is mistakenly and brutally killed by parties looking for Jenny), though whether she is an agent or a victim of the plot is unclear. It is clear that Cartwright’s friend Daggar has betrayed his fellow filmmaker by involving him in whatever secret activities are at hand to the extent that Cartwright is hounded and physically threatened by those who want his diary, a verbal transcription of what Daggar has filmed, containing information harmful to those who are supposedly controlling these events. Even Cartwright’s own wife and his friend and former lover, Tessa, may somehow be part of the mosaic of conspiracy. Other characters also become mysteriously involved: Who are the Flint brothers (bearing resemblances to the Marx Brothers and the brothers Kennedy) and what is their interest in the film? Why should a hustler such as Monty Graf have any interest in an obscure experimental film? At times, like a paranoid, Cartwright believes that everything is connected, but the flow of information in McElroy’s novel is so vast and dispersed that any single solution to “the mystery” is undermined. Almost by accident, at the novel’s end, Cartwright kills the mysterious Incremona, who haunts the novel as the brains behind the plot; yet the meaning of this tragicomic action (Cartwright and Sub drop a television from Sub’s flat onto a passing taxicab, which proceeds to run over Incremona) is never made clear. Cartwright’s last words reveal the obscurity that shadows the novel’s conclusion: “Everyone was looking up at me and Sub, and I was not sure what I had seen but I knew what we had done.” Similarly, the actuality of the novel’s fragmented events is apparent, though their purposes are ever-hidden.

The Characters

Depending upon one’s view, there may be dozens of characters in Lookout Cartridge or only one, that represented by the voice of Cartwright. As the purposes behind events are ambiguous, so are the motives usually associated with the activities and personalities of traditionally defined characters. Why, for example, should so many people be interested in a cheaply made, seemingly disorganized film shot by two completely unknown amateur filmmakers? Characters in Lookout Cartridge bear names (sometimes, confusingly, two characters share the same name) and engage in activities but never emerge from the matrix of plot and cross-purpose to become Forsterian “rounded characters.” Cartwright himself often questions his own status as an actor in an unseen plot or a discrete self in an overcomplicated world; at times, he compares his being to a crystal in an LED display, a stray signal in a noisy system of communication, or a “lookout cartridge”—a device which merely records, rather than sorts out, whatever information is fed into it.

It is precisely what he decides his function to be within a novel which is an assemblage of scattered facts and actions that defines Cartwright’s “character” and his position as protagonist. Like the familiar hero of an Alfred Hitchcock film, the innocent “who knows too much,” dragged into a mystery not of his making and beyond his powers of comprehension, Cartwright is often simply the victim of a world that has gone out of control, as he vainly attempts to organize and make logical that which is impossibly contradictory, disconnected, and irrational. Yet there are times when he believes that his privileged position in the plot as uninformed witness confers upon him a special kind of power:

And at this instant, hearing Sub come out of the kitchen and stand on the threshold of the littered living room and not speak, I found that though my power to prove my feeling about computers—about miles of memory, or abstract numbers switched out of the blue into the real angular turns of a machine or the actual relation of two electric currents—stirred inchoate though contained inside a circle of broken connections that could get long or short or acquire right angles and stern diagonals while being still this circle of known emotions and words and people, my power to turn that inchoate into a statement was, as if half unwilled, finding itself in the new movements after the ruin of the film that my pulses from moment to moment were deciding to make.

The power that Cartwright believes he has is that of the detective in McElroy’s epistemological wonderland: As recorder of all the novel’s scattered information, he has the opportunity to understand, in new and creative (if partial) ways, the connection between “emotions and words and people”—though these ways will defy the logic and expectations that usually inform the detective novel or the novel of character.

Critical Context

Without exaggeration, it is fair to say that Joseph McElroy has been one of the most ignored of major contemporary American novelists. While his novels have been generally well reviewed, he has not acquired a large reading public despite the range and intelligence of his work. This is partially attributable to the difficulty of his writing: His novels make considerable demands on the reader’s knowledge and purposefully fracture traditional expectations regarding plot, sense, and meaning. In his first novel, A Smuggler’s Bible (1966), McElroy portrayed a protagonist in the process of revising the eight sections of his memoirs; hence, the novel is replete with “unedited” and unassimilated materials which the reader must assemble in order to understand the patterns of David Brooke’s life. In Hind’s Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs (1969), as in Lookout Cartridge, a detective-protagonist enters a complicated verbal universe and attempts, like a lexicographer, to sort out its etymologies and allusions in order to understand its significances. In the “science fiction” novel Plus (1977), McElroy created the image of a human brain floating in space, self-supporting, becoming conscious of itself, its past, and the earth. Each of these novels, like McElroy’s others, is an experiment in form as well as an encylopedic incursion into the languages of information and technology; each, in its way, attempts to represent processes of perception and knowledge as they unfold in the present and future. Like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), William Gaddis in JR (1975), or John Barth in Letters (1979), McElroy is concerned with how communication operates in contemporary America, and in what ways the contemporary novel is a form of communication. While his work has not been as widely recognized as the work of these others, McElroy has continued, perhaps in ways more boldly experimental than their approaches, to probe the limitations of our capacity to understand the world we have made.

Bibliography

Buckeye, Robert. “Lookout Cartridge: Plans, Maps, Programs, Designs, Outlines.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 119-126.

Campbell, Gregor. “Processing Lookout Cartridge.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 112-118.

Hantke, Steffen. “God Save Us from Bourgeois Adventure: The Figure of the Terrorist in Contemporary Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 28 (Summer, 1996): 219-243. An analysis of terrorists as portrayed in McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge and Don DeLillo’s Players and Mao II. Hantke notes that the image of the terrorist in the novel since World War II has shifted from Communist conspirator to religious fanatic, and the traits of the terrorist are not as monolithic as when Communism reigned.

Johnston, John. “ The Dimensionless Space Between’: Narrative Immanence in Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 95-111. A discussion of the narrative technique in the novel.

O’Donnell, Patrick. “Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative.” Boundary 2 19 (Spring, 1992): 181-204. Examines a number of novels since the 1960s including Lookout Cartridge which share the common theme of paranoia.

Siemion, Piotr. “Chasing the Cartridge: On Translating McElroy.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 133-139.

Stonehill, Brian. “Intimations of Human Divinity in Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 127-132.