Chapter III: Of Sturgeon and Other Fish, Some "Close Readings"A. SturgeonIf I had to choose but one work on which to base my claim that science fiction does indeed contain works which possess literary merit, that work would be Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human.[1] As a matter of fact, my original intention was to do a thesis dealing only with close readings of science fiction works, of which the Sturgeon novel was to have furnished roughly half my material. When the issue of the "intellectual respectability" of science fiction arose, my plans were changed; but in view of the necessity of giving examples of literary merit in science fiction in order to complete the argument for the respectability of the field, I have been able to keep the novel in the discussion, if only as a test case. To illustrate the fairness of my choice of More Than Human as representative of good science fiction--that is, to show that it belongs in the discussion for reasons other than the pun it furnishes for my title--I should like to mention what Damon Knight said about it in one of his essays, after quoting the first paragraph: "My God, it's all like that, violins and stained glass and velvet and little needles in your throat" (P. 80)-- this from a man whose difficultness to please is legendary among science fiction fans. The novel won a Hugo--awarded by science fiction fans at their annual conventions after the fashion of Hollywood's Oscars (the name Hugo is in honor of Hugo Gernsback, who introduced science fiction to the American magazines on a regular basis early in the century); it was also picked as the all-time favorite of English and American fans polled in 1956--on the basis of our Astounding poll and England's Nebula poll, taken on a weighted average.[2] So it's a pretty good work, according to people who are more serious "addicts" than Mr. Amis; and besides, I like it. Although this chapter is supposed to be dealing merely with the demonstration of the literary merit to be found in science fiction, I must admit that I shall "sneak in" some considerations not directly germane to the criteria implicitly based on Professor Beardsley's Affective and Objective Reasons. I crave the reader's indulgence in considering the digressions as further corroboration of the claims I made in Chapter I as to the content of science fiction. There are three parts to More Than Human: "The Fabulous Idiot," "Baby Is Three," and "Morality." In the first part we meet the Idiot, Lone, who is leading an aimless, drifting, idiot's existence, but who has "something" within him which is not yet functioning. An intangible "call" leads him to the home of Mr. Kew, a madman who has retreated from the world and is bringing up his two daughters in ignorance of it. The Idiot breaks through the wall surrounding the Kew place and meets Evelyn, the younger daughter; though he cannot talk and neither of them know the meaning of kissing, they sit together and are happy, until discovered by her father. The father whips the Idiot and beats his daughter to death; he then commits suicide, leaving his other daughter, Alicia, alone and terrified. A farmer, Prodd, takes the unconscious hulk of the Idiot in, and he and his wife nurse him back to health. They lavish much affection on him because the son they had expected "was never born." While Lone is recuperating, several characters are introduced in tangential episodes: Gerry, who runs away from an orphanage because all he finds is hate; Hip Barrows, a brilliant boy whose disciplinarian father forces him to go to medical school although he is a talented engineer even without schooling; Janie, who is able to move objects telekinetically (by mental power) and hates her mother, Wilma, who is committing numerous adulteries while her husband is in World War II; and a pair of Negro twins who live in Janie's apartment house, and who are teleports (able to move from place to place by mental energy). Some time after Lone is cured and has developed limited telepathic powers so that he learns to speak with the Prodds, the Prodds are expecting a child and so Lone leaves them and builds a hut in the woods. To the hut eventually come Janie and the twins, and Lone takes them in. He also takes in the Prodds' child, a mongoloid in appearance, but able to communicate telepathically with Janie. Baby, as they call him, is akin to a computer which gathers and correlates information. In the course of questioning Baby, Lone discovers that he, Baby, Janie, and the twins comprise a gestalt organism which has far greater powers than the normal human individual. In the second part, we encounter Gerry again. He is in the office of Dr. Stern, a psychiatrist. After a long interview, Gerry discloses the history of the gestalt organism during the intervening time: Lone had taken him in, and had eventually died. The gestalt, with Gerry as its new "head" went to live with Alicia Kew, who owed them a favor according to Lone. Gerry subsequently kills her because she was ruining the rapport of the gestalt by giving it too easy an environment and trying to mother it. Because of the killing he has gone to Stern, and through Stern's questioning recalls Alicia's memories of her meeting with Lone, at which time he had ordered her to read many books, the contents of which he extracted from her telepathically; in return for her help. Lone had had intercourse with her, which was her unconscious wish to compensate for the horror in which her father had taught her to hold men. When Gerry had told her that "Baby is three" she began thinking wildly that her baby would have been three if she had conceived, and as Stern explained to him, so overloaded Gerry's latent telepathic faculties with her psychic blast that he suffered an "occlusion" and did not develop the faculties further, until he had overcome the occlusion through recounting it. He goes off to rejoin the kids, and to develop as best he can, though Stern warns him that without a sense of morality the gestalt will be as lonely as Lone was as an idiot. Gerry leaves, uncomprehending. In the third part, Hip is found in jail by Janie. She bails him out, and ministers to him during his apparent insanity, characterized by a compulsion to get sick and die. Through a working backward process, he eventually recalls that Gerry (whom he remembers as "Thompson," the Air Force psychiatrist who had treated him) had induced the compulsion in him seven years before, when he had come across Prodd's old truck which was buried in an antiaircraft range, and which he discovered because an antigravity device with which Lone had fitted it was causing the proximity fuses of the shells to go haywire. Janie tells Hip that Gerry has become deranged, and takes him to Gerry in the hope of making Gerry ashamed. Hip, thinking it an intellectual exercise for himself, devises a code of ethics for the "superman" which Gerry extracts from his mind and accepts. Hip is incorporated into the gestalt as its conscience, and then the gestalt is accepted by the community of already existing gestalts for it has finally grown up. 1. "Objective Reasons"The most striking characteristic of More Than Human is the series of "incompletenesses" which run through it, not only of characters, but of philosophies, organisms, revelations, and other factors. The most obvious overt references to incompleteness are found in the descriptions of the Idiot, Lone, although we shall see that there are so many other instances that Incompleteness must be looked upon as a theme of the book. Lone is introduced as being something less than human, an idiot--a man manque, an incomplete person and personality. Further, "Like a stone in a peach, a yolk in an egg, he carried another thing" (pp 4-5), a thing which was useless to him, though: an "inner ear" receptive to "murmuring, sending, speaking, sharing, from hundreds, from thousands of voices." Lone had a potentiality, but it is bottled up inside his idiot self and useless--his functioning is incomplete. Aside from the numerous instances of Lone's lacks and shortcomings (he enters the Prodds' diningroom nude for he has none of the social graces; he can neither read nor drive a truck), perhaps the most effective means of suggesting his incompleteness is that of not attaching to him a name until he has been the prominent figure of the novel for some twenty-seven pages; then, through the Prodd's ministrations and his own ability to sense what they want of him in a crude fashion at least, he overcomes his lack of speech to the extent of giving himself a name. Nor are the other characters presented in the first part complete. Mr. Kew has no sense of good; Alicia has no knowledge of the outside world, nor of what outsiders would call Truth; Evelyn "knows no evil at all"; neither daughter has what might be called a complete education for life. The Prodds are parents without a child. Gerry is a child without parents, a child with only hate and no love. Hip has talents but no goals, no aspirations. Janie has power but no control; her mother has no husband, in essence and later in fact. The twins cannot speak. And so on. The second and third parts follow the pattern. Gerry goes to the psychiatrist because his memories are incomplete, and because his knowledge is incomplete in that he wants to know why he killed Alicia. In Alicia's memories as related by Gerry, Lone says that he is waiting in the woods because he (as gestalt organism) isn't finished, but "I don't mean 'finished' like you're thinking. I mean I ain't--completed yet." (p. 134) Stern tells Gerry he still lacks something--morality. In the third part, it is Hip's memory which is incomplete, and he himself is initially no longer functioning as a human being. Finally it is revealed that the Gerry-gestalt has been incomplete throughout, and only after it had incorporated Hip (as "the small still voice") could it become individually complete and join the community of other gestalts (perhaps a good phrase would be "über-gestalt"), and achieve "spiritual" completeness ... there runs throughout the note sounded most overtly at the end of the first part: "'Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are and what they belong to.' 'He says, every kind.'" "So it was that Lone came to know himself, and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain." (p. 76) The theme of incompleteness exists quite clearly in the work on the foregoing "overt" level, then. The first open test of Sturgeon's artistry is contained in the answer to a question which is a logical consequence of the theory of Chapter II: Does the "form" (the technique, the structure) of the work unify in the same way as the "content" (the plot, the action)? Or alternatively, is there unity of content and form? I believe the answer is yes. There are several different complexes of images and incidents quite directly related to the theme of incompleteness. Probably the most important of them is the complex of barriers. Two kinds of barriers occur in the book: physical and mental. The first is the barrier around Mr. Kew's retreat; it is with this that Lone struggles to penetrate, and through the struggle he achieves what amounts to his first "rational" thought: "The fact that the barrier would not yield came to him slowly ... His mouth opened and a scratching sound emerged. He had never tried to speak before and could not now; the gesture was an end, not a means, like the starting of tears at a crescendo of music." (p. 10) Note that through the struggle with the physical barrier, he encounters, and partially overcomes, a mental barrier. Later, Lone is perplexed by the lack of a barrier between himself and Evelyn: His bench-mark, his goal-point, had for years been that thing which happened to him on the bank of the pool. He had to understand that. If he could understand that, he was sure he could understand everything. Because for a second there was this other, and himself, and a flow between them without guards or screens or barriers--no language to stumble over, no ideas to misunderstand, nothing at all but a merging. (pp. 74-5) The final synthesis with the über-gestalt and the lesser triumph of "bleshing" (the blending and meshing process which is what the individuals in the gestalt do) are anticipated in the rather poetic merging of the idiot and the innocent--which is achieved by the dissolving of their interpersonal (and co-incidently, intra-personal) barriers.
©2003 Michael A. Padlipsky. All rights reserved. |