Superabundance - Heinz Helle

Translated by Kari Driscoll

'Perhaps one day they will figure out what it means to be 'here' and see 'this' and feel 'that'... they will discover a specific neuronal pattern that is so unique in it its complexity and ferocity, so divine, so incredibly beautiful, that the explication of its structure will automatically explain its content'.

The narrator of Heinz Helle’s Superabundance is plagued by consciousness. His life is an unending sequence of events, in which he searches for meaning. Like the protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s debut film Pi, he is trying to find a pattern behind the chaos of everyday life. This constant questioning, 'some kind of analytic Tourette's syndrome' as he describes it, leaves him bewildered, crushed by the sheer weight of external symbols.

The events of the book are simple: a German philosophy postgrad travels to New York, where he will deliver a lecture. At some point, his girlfriend will fly out to meet him. He goes to bars, watches football matches, meets women at parties, and attends meetings with other academics. The real action is internal, as he questions the role of consciousness, and whether a thing can be said to have a purpose even if there is no a scientific rationale behind it?

The opening sections of the narrative show the overwhelming effect of the weight of signals we receive on a daily basis. Soon after landing in New York, the narrator finds that he is losing the ability to interpret the stimuli that surrounds him: 'I stare at the letters printed on the newspaper'. His instincts are neutered by his need to understand: meeting a woman in a bar, he wonders 'if, having carefully evaluated my phenotypical characteristics, she would be interested in a transfer of some of my genetic material'. He is seeking to understand the relationship between external stimuli and internal reaction, but is hung up on investigating the micro in order to explain the macro. Or, in less academic terms, he can’t see the wood for the trees.

The antithesis of this overtly analytical existence is found in occasional moments of shared purpose and identity. In Superabundance, these largely occur when the narrator is lost in a crowd, watching football matches. Studies have shown that, during matches, footballers largely rely on conditioned responses, rather than consciously deciding what their actions will do. Fans, likewise, respond to certain stimuli without stopping to analyse what is happening: 'We hear the whistle and we see the movements of the players we know. We know their movements, even when they haven't got the ball, and when they have got the ball, we shout'.

Early in Superabundance, the narrator describes playing football as a child. Although normally a defender, he was placed in goal, separated from his teammates and performing in a role where he was forced to think rather than rely on conditioned responses. He was constantly aware of being watched, and his performance suffered, to the point where his team lost 8-0. The role of the philosopher in society is, for Helle, similar to the role of the goalkeeper in a football team. He is separate from the other actors, able to analyse what is going on from his unique vantage point. The link between goalies and philosophers isn’t new – Camus, Nabokov and Kierkegaard all played in goal, and it’s no coincidence that Jonathan Wilson called his history of goalkeeping The Outsider. As Wilson says, ‘no sportsman, surely, so regularly confronts the arbitrariness of the fates as the goalkeeper. A deflection, a bad bounce, a gust of wind, a momentary misjudgement, a brilliant strike, and everything for which he has striven in the rest of the game is wiped out’.

Helle’s narrator must strive for some form of synthesis, balancing his analytical thought patterns with an appreciation of the physical world around him: over the course of the novel, prompted by his girlfriend and tutors, he experiences a gradual letting go, allowing himself to be free, unburdened by words like ‘qualia’ and ‘metarepresentation’, finally concentrating on experience rather than turning reality into abstraction.

Within a stripped down narrative, Superabundance highlights the overwhelming effect of modern urban living.  Our senses are not designed to process so much information at such pace, hence the need to analyse and explain our responses to the flow of stimuli. Halle proposes an existentialist response, focussing on our immediate reactions, and privileging our relationships with the people closest to us ahead of the spectacle which makes up our wider culture. Halle writes with a dry humour, and if his pared down style, with its bursts of short sentences light on description can get a little wearying at times, he generally keeps things engaging.

Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle is becoming increasingly relevant as a means of understanding digital culture in the Twenty First Century, and has been revisited by novelists such as Rob Doyle in Here Are the Young Men; while its format means that Superabundance doesn’t go deeply into the subject, it is definitely a worthwhile investigation into a timely subject.