How deep exactly does Mcelroy get? I've read 2 of his books

>>9162215
Joe has given himself an impossible task here. He has attempted to write a text which describes an emerging consciousness, a Being other than Dasien, who has enough of a memory of English words for them to be used in a rational manner. However, there is a fracture between signifier and signified, and an impossibly Other experience of existence being expressed. To give one example – a brain, of course, has no eyes and no nerve endings, so cannot "feel" or "see" in the way we use those words. However, IMP PLUS is connected to a number of sensory devices (for example one measuring the photosynthesis occurring in the plant beds beneath him) and this input is "experienced" in a way which is similar to the way our brain "experiences" the input it receives from our retina. IMP PLUS calls it "seeing", as that is the only appropriate word he can find, though what it signifies is different. This can make the process of reading, for us Readers, rather confusing.

IMP PLUS also has flashes of memory, which are both beautiful and sad, and which further complicate his Being.

And so it all depends on whether you can enjoy reading in a state of uncertainty, if you can resist the urge to attempt to decipher each sentence so that it makes sense from a human perspective. My advice would just be to let it all flow and see how you feel at the end…personally I enjoyed the whole thing, and found the end rather moving…but you may think differently, of course.


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Joe writes in the same way a 3d Printer creates an object.
They create through additive processes, layering successive pieces of a component, building cross-section upon cross-section until an object is formed. Completion, and by completion in this metaphor I mean "understanding" or the state of "having-read" (synonyms in an ideal world, but often not in reality, of course), is only possible once all the layers have been laid.

If we imagine sitting on the tip of the nozzle of some impossibly huge 3d Printer what would we experience? We would, I think, feel something akin to that which occurs in Joe's novels (and this one in particular). We would leap around in seemingly random steps, we would jar and jerk, we would get sea-sick. To pause the printing after the creation of the first line would not assist in uncovering meaning. The meaning is not to be uncovered, it is to be built. There are sentences, paragraphs in this novel which, were we to refuse to move forward until they were "understood", could fix us in place forever. Joe asks for our trust, we must ride out the process until it is complete. It is not linear, but it is not confused, and it is guided by a complex and strict blueprint.

And yet, to step out of this metaphor for a moment, there are individual sentences of great beauty. The music of the prose is stunning. While we wait for meaning to emerge, we can just listen:


"Imp Plus found in all the folds whose fibers gripped each lens of

"Imp Plus found in all the folds whose fibers gripped each lens of those eyes he had held with his own lost eyes a sweet humor of sugar and blood which unfolding flowed over him.
It was a fluid ground laid down upon furrows, fissures, ridges, rolls.
It flowed over Imp Plus’s body now, except that he had no body. Flowed into folds that were his.
"


"That sight as far off now as a spring day when he'd been touched - he couldn't cast away the touch - by another laughter which moved up the grid of his back, and he had turned from the unhooded carburetor of a car that would not go and had seen first acres of sea crest skimmed by three broad-winged shearwate

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