gestalt |gə sh tält; -ˑ sh tôlt| : A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.
Theodore Sturgeon’s novel, More Than Human, tracks the formation of “a gestalt life-form” (105), a “new kind of human being [called] Homo Gestalt” (168). This life-form is comprised of five separate individuals, all of whom have their own paranormal power. First, there’s Lone, a twenty-five-year-old “idiot [who] lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and flickering of fear” (1), a man who is “purely animal…without humor and without joy,” but also a man who possesses the gift of extra-sensory perception (halfway through the novel, Lone is replaced by Gerry, who also has the power of ESP, but who is less mature, as a human adolescent is less mature than a lion). Then there is Janie, a telekinetic and telepathic five-year-old girl, and her two young friends, the twins, Bonnie and Beanie, who cannot speak but who can teleport their bodies wherever they like. Finally, there is Baby, an infant who, despite never growing older or bigger than an infant, is capable of inventing an anti-gravity machine out of common electrical equipment. Janie describes his power:
“[Baby is] like a adding machine…[Y]ou tell Baby something, and then you tell him something else. He will put the somethings together and tell what they come out to, just like the adding machine does with ones and two [except Baby does it with] anything.” (54-55)
Individually, Lone (and Gerry), Janie, the twins, and baby are all just humans with mystical powers, but together, Sturgeon wants the reader to believe that they form Homo Gestalt:
“[Baby] says he is a figure-outer brain and I [Janie] am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you [Lone] are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.” [Lone] looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and—the head to direct it. (60)
Unfortunately, the concept of a Homo Gestalt is easier to explain in theoretical terms than it is to capture in expressive ones. There is no single, purposive sentence, paragraph, and/or section that quite expresses the experience of Homo Gestalt. The closest, perhaps, is this one:
“Listen,” [Janie] said passionately, “we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? A single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up…Homo Gestalt is something new, something different, something superior. But the parts—the arms, the guts of it, the memory banks, just like the bones in those skeletons—they’re the same as the step lower, or very little different. I’m me, I’m Janie…” (168) … But she wanted her Gestalt to thrive as well; she was a part of it. My hand wants me to survive, my tongue, my belly wants me to survive. (175)
But that doesn’t express what it feels like to be Homo Gestalt. It expresses what it feels like to be a part of a Homo Gestalt. At the end of the novel, when Homo Gestalt (the Gerry part of it, anyway) finally acquires a sense of morality, the feeling of loneliness is washed away and the gestalt that is Gerry, Janie, the twins, and Baby is welcomed into a universe of other gestalts, who all formed one massive gestalt:
[H]ere was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew—not an exterior force, nor an awesome watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and reverence for its human origins…[Gerry] saw himself as an atom and his gestalt as a molecule. He saw these others as a cell among cells, and he saw in the whole the design of what, with joy, humanity would become. He felt a rising, choking sense of worship, and recognized it for what it has always been for mankind—self-respect. (186)
Part of that gets paragraph at the feeling Sturgeon is driving for (”he saw himself as an atom…”), but despite the beauty of the concept, the reader is never really grounded in the gestalt; the reader merely floats through its myriad parts (thanks to two of his main characters possessing the gift of mind-reading, Sturgeon handles this process deftly, allowing each section in the narrative to focus on one character while simultaneous providing access to the internal workings of the others).
It could be that asking for Sturgeon to deliver the experience of a gestalt life-form is too much. As he makes it clear in his analogy, it would be like asking to read a novel in which the hands, legs, and brain of a single creature are all unique characters and, at the same time, the creature itself is a unique character. In More Than Human, Sturgeon doesn’t take his novel that one extra step. He ends with the welcoming of the Gestalt into the universe of Gestalts and into the formation of the Universal Gestalt, but it seems he made the last leap much too quickly. His novel would have been more successful1 if it lasted one more chapter where the narrative perspective was on the Homo Gestalt, and not on a “simple summation of its parts.”
Of course, given what Sturgeon envisions (”he design of what, with joy, humans would become”), asking him to write from the narrative perspective of the Homo Gestalt is like asking him to write from the perspective of God. To accomplish that, he’d have to be more than human.
Notes
“Successful” in the experiential sense. It should be noted that More Than Human won the International Fantasy Award and, according to the novel’s jacket, was called “One of the best science fiction novels of the year,” by the New York Times.
